Posts like the one I am replying to always amuse me. Who are you to decide how _I_ spend my time and money? I am sick of hearing how Americans should use less foreign oil, drive less of foreign made cars, buy less Chinese made goods, save more and spend less, etc, etc. However, people act and will always continue acting in a way to maximize the bang for their buck. Americans consume so much oil simply because it's so damn cheap. It's stupid not to consume lots of it at the current prices. It's sold for like $2.7 a gallon. There are places where a jug of water could fetch something close to that. Likewise, a $10 pair of Chinese made jeans is far more attractive than a hypothetical $50 pair of American made jeans. This is being dictated by simply laws of economics. A "low wage"/"low skill" worker in China makes, what, like one dollar an hour? A low wage worker in US makes $8-$10 dollars an hour. I'd love to see more stuff built in America, but as long as this disparity exists, jobs and investment will flow into China and goods will flow into US. There is no way around this. Wait for a few decades, and as China and rest of world get richer, this flow will stop.
If we want to have quality jobs in the US, we should be investing money and our time into science and education. There is simply too many poor and uneducated would be workers in places like India, China, or Vietnam for us to compete with. I will never shed a tear over some low wage/low skill/no skill jobs being outsourced elsewhere. Let the Chinese and others have low quality, pow pay, and borderline dangerous blue collar jobs, but we can do better. Software, electronics, pharmacy, nanotech, biotech, and other new high skill industries are the thing to be in. A good payoff can't be obtained without hard work, education, and continuous improvement of one's skills, IMHO.
3M sounds about right. And many of them was probably corporate developer or engineer machines. The number of desktop users who use the OS for non-development purposes is even smaller.
I have seen many single core PCs that are perfectly adequate for running applications that their owners need (web, business apps, etc). This is for course, under Windows XP. Yet, they're not good enough to run Windows 7. I know that I can go into Windows 7 appearance settings and turn off all of the eye candy to make it reasonably responsive. But then, it looks and functions about the same as XP, so why bother? Why create headaches, pay license feels, etc? XP just works on those machines already.
So, there are some experts who believe that high speed rail is too expensive to build or operate. Others think that it can be feasible economically. Did I miss something? Did the article say anything really new? Why is it Slashdot-worthy?
High speed rail line like NorCal-SoCal in California would certainly target both, cars and air travel. There are plenty of people traveling by each mean over there, the most obvious volume is along the LA-SF Bay route.
Like I said, you can't compare the maximum throughput to a bag of chips (sorry, salary is the same). What do you guys come up with these stupid analogies? You can't read? You can't understand? Networks and other shared resources are different. Point. It's more like a highway. The government wouldn't let me drive faster than 70mph on the interstate I commute on, but there is plenty of times when my car is crawling at 20mph, because there is plenty of other people trying to use the road at the time time? One hour later the road clears up again. Understood?
Since when "up to" either mean or median? As others had pointed out, "up to" more likely means the theoretical maximum, and I don't see what's wrong with that. Network bandwidth is not like a bag of chips. If internet was like a bunch of PCs are on the same LAN then indeed, 100Mbps would mean.. exactly that much. But as soon you connect to a WAN or any other network, then it's pretty much impossible to guarantee anything. During the peak hours, you sure bandwidth with others, and there may be indeed network bottlenecks somewhere where you could get the "up to" speed during the off hours, but during the peak hours network speeds likely will drop. This is the reality of the networks. So, how do they propose that ISPs advertise the network service capacity? Should they quote mean or the median? How is it going to be measured? Seems like a big can of worms. Just leave it alone. If you don't like your service, regardless of the advertized "up to bandwidth" you can always opt for a better or more expensive option or if you're lucky find an alternative provider. Pretty much everywhere I have lived, I had at least two options, cable and DSL, (sometimes FIOS), with various levels of performance.
I don't understand why there is so much whinning about Lucas milking the Star Wars franchise. Blueray is the new format that's meant to replace DVD. Pretty much every old movie that's worth watching will be re-released on Blueray, just like 70s and 80s movies were rereleased on DVD. If you don't like it, then just move on and don't buy it.
Or, even better, just don't use cars at all. Rail, after all, works splendidly with electricity.
This would work only for people who confine themselves to staying forever in cities and suburbs, but it certainly won't work for me. Train will not take me from Bat Area to Lake Tahoe, Yosemite, Central Coast, Redwood Forest, Point Reyes, Monterey, Death Valley, Mojave Desert, Grand Canyon (both rims), Mount Shasta, and tons of other places in California and Oregon I enjoy going to on weekends the day and time I like. Neither could train bring bags full of groceries to my doorstep. Let's get real. Cars have their uses. What we need to get rid of is the lifestyles and city designs that induce long daily car commutes, build better public transport systems, and build high speed rail where it does make sense.
A Prius has approximately the same MSRP as a midrange Honda Accord or Camry, so it is not even clearly more expensive than the nonhybrid cars. (sure it's smaller, but it's still bigger than the compacts like Corolla). I personally really like the Prius, and not just because of fuel economy. First, this is one of the slickest and futuristic looking cars on the road. Second, hatchback design. Finally, this is one of the most technologically advanced cars on the road. You can switch cars throttle between several modes (sports, economy, etc), monitor fuel economy in many ways, use the navigation system. All for a price in the mid-20s. On top of that, you get 50mpg in city. It's absolutely worth its price if you ask me. It's the Apple of cars as of now IMHO.
I think it will be interesting if/when linux starts appearing in ore school labs (as tech budgets keep shrinking it is not a stretch to imagine the possibility) that perhaps we'll see linux distros appear.
This was being predicted at least since the last dot com crash - that tight budgets will force some to use Linux. That Windows is too expensive for $300 PCs. Actually both arguments are a myth. The cost of Windows license is like $20-$40 when sold though OEMs, hardly a big deal. Clearly, the usability of Windows is so much better compared to Linux, that most consumers still swallow that cost. And university labs generally go for something better than a $300 PC. Actually, Linux is used in some labs, specially though in the departments of engineering, and indeed engineering and science students at any level often run Linux on their PCs. Clearly, they are a good target market for Linux. But Liberal Arts or Business majors are a whole different story..
In my humble opinion, the strategy of using Apple's iPod and iPhone products to draw them into Apple's stores and hook up people on their premium but expensive hardware is working. Some posters also mentioned that Apple hardware on average is much better than Windows hardware, and I agree. Most of stuff sold in Best Buy is so cheap (not just pricewise) but most people are willing to just pay twice as much for something that's almost guaranteed not to be a lemon, instead of sorting though dozens of models to find a good one. I agree with this explanation too, but IMHO iPod and iPhone are the primary reason. Another problem is the Windows Vista cluster fsck. A lot of people had become disappointed with Microsoft back then. Even those who never used Apple stuff before.
$450 Toshiba is probably not comparable to the macbook, but there are many PC laptops in $800-900 range that make macbook specs look like garbage. 2GB of memory? Is this a joke? No i5 or at least i3? Go to BestBuy and check the $800 Samssung Q430 and tell me in which ways it is worse than a macbook pro sold the same place for $500 more, check everything including keyboard, sturdiness, surface, etc. And it certainly is better than the $1000 macbook. Check the Sony Vaios. The E series, the F series, and a few others. Some other ASUS and Samsung models are pretty good too. The problem is that those "good" models drown in a sea of crap. And to someone who needs a lot of computing power (a grad student or an engineering undergrad) Apple simply has no answer. Sometimes, I need to pay Apple $1500 to do what a $750 PC laptop can do. Simply stated Apple stuff is ridiculously overpriced right now. The fact that you can't get something with at least 4GB memory or i5 or at least i3 CPU for say $999 is simply ridiculous.
After this, I pretty much stopped reading your rant. Although Apple does a quiet a few things that piss me off and show poor consumer response, they are NOT A MONOPOLY.
And why should we read your stuff? Check out somewhere the definitions of monopolistic competition and monopoly. They're different things, and the former had been around since at least the 70s, was part of Krugman's most famous work in international trade, and should not be confused with the other by now.
Seriously.. the laptops available for Windows fucking suck. They're shit. They're all shit since IBM sold Thinkpad to Lenovo.
You have a good point. I remember when I worked at university's IT department we treated Apples and Thinkpads as equals. When an affluent professor asked for a laptop recommendation, we recommended one of those, depending on OS choice. When a poor postdoc or a graduate student needed a laptop with the most computing bang for buck, we offered to setup a Dell Inspiron (price/performance was good, but design was horrible, flimsy, unprofessional, etc). Most Dells, HPs, etc, felt inferior. Things haven't changed much since then except that, as you say, Thinkpad might have gone downhill as well after it has become Lenovo.
However, I wouldn't say that all PC laptops are shit. But finding an equal to Apple hardware is like finding a diamond in the rough. Yes, some excellent models exist, but you have to sort though 25 crap ones to find one good system. That's why their market share is going down. However, when you find such a good PC laptop, its price performance beats shit out of Apple while still offering good, stylish, solid designs. I am not bragging here. For example go check out the new Samssung Q430 in any Best Buy store. Sturdy, slick and stylish aluminum build, chiclet keyboard, 14 inch screen, i5 processor, 4GB memory, Windows 7, and discrete graphics among other things. Yours for about $820. Everyone ohs and ahs when they see mine. Another excellent system is Vaio E series. You get all of these things with 15.5 inch HD screen, BD combo drive, and slick design for about $900. You can have it for $650 if you take off the HD screen, BD combo, and the gaming graphics. I got one for $820 for myself. The cheapest Apple is a macbook for $1000 and when I was shopping for PC Macbook's specs were simply garbage (2GB memory, old CPU, smaller, lower resolution screen) compared to either of these two systems sold at the same time. If you like these same specs but in a more high end premium package then check the VAIO F series which you can have for around $1200-$1400 straight from Best Buy, and at this price it will be comparable to apple's best and most expensive laptop. Some ASUS, Samsung, and Sony laptops are pretty good. But as I said, you have to sort through lots of crap and gimmicks to find a good PC laptop. But it's worth it, because you will save about $500 compared to Apple's stuff. Maybe the $500 will not matter much when you have a real job, but that's a lot of money for a graduate student.
I went to college and hold undergraduate and graduate degrees in economics and applied math. Most of what I have learned, I learned on my own, from books and homework sets. The professor's lecture is there only to guide you towards a good source of information. As for learning from other classmates, maybe there had been a half dozen times where I had to ask my classmates a question AND they actually knew the answer, no more than that. But I agree that you learn way more in a good (non-online) college. Online education, whether a single course or a whole degree, is just a gimmick that allows educational institutions to make a quick buck and people who don't want to put a whole lot of work effort to have an easy degree or certificate. I have seen my brother an other people take college level courses online (like US history) and it's a joke compared to the work I had to do at a flagship state university for a similar course. Only for a US history course, as an example, I had to read a course textbook, eight other books, (novels, etc) write a research paper, listen to professor's _awesome_ lectures and take notes, met with TA twice a week AND take a midterm and a final test, and meet some awesome peers. Go find an online course that gives you this. The online course my friends took was weaker than even community college level course.
It's true, but people who are interested in cars, say someone who reads autoblog as often as you read slashdot, I much better prepared to deal with car comparisons.
Performance oriented geeks would probably look at
Engine displacement Number of cylinders Whether it's naturally aspirated Number of transmission gears Auto/DSG/manual transmission horsepower 0-60 time torque mpg
That's a lot of things to consider, but remember that these things had been around for decades, and they haven't been changing. So geeks end up learning these. In computer industry, everything we knew about measuring performance 10 years ago, is borderline useless. Now I am presented with options like i3-330 and i3-550 and I am forced to head over to places like wikipedia to figure out what that means and spend hours hunting for relevant benchmarks, and I used to be sysadmin a decade ago!
Yes, it may be true that you're not flying cheaper than you used to before. However, who said that the price you paid before was a normal, fair (to the airlines) price? As of right now most airlines are just managing to break even or turn a relatively small profit. Compare this to the mid-2000s when most airlines, except low-cost carriers, struggled. The 2007-2008 gas price hikes nearly bankrupted the industry (Southwest did well because of hedging, not its business model), and only the additional fees, like the bag fees helped the airlines to start breathing comfortably right now, and it's still being argued that they're not charging their passengers enough!
Southwest has some flaws. I agree with most of your points except for the ones below. In the past 10 years, I almost always preferred to fly with either America West or American Airlines to SWA if flying around southwest, and something like Northwest to go to Midwest.
* Southwest also doesn't fly many of the places I need to travel, especially longer routes and smaller airports. They've cherry picked their routes (and I don't blame them for it) but they often aren't an option. They only fly to 69 destinations in just 35 states.
Their coverage in the Southwest is pretty good (e.g. I can fly from pretty much anywhere of the same size to San Antonio (El Paso, Vegas, LA, Phoenix, etc) instead of making the obligatory stop in either Dallas or Houston practiced by most other airlines. Once outside of the Southwest, their coverage is indeed pretty rough unless you're flying coast to coast.
* Southwest's ability to make a profit has at times had more to do with their fuel hedging program than with their operational prowess. This bit them in 2008 when they lost money due oil prices moving the wrong way on them.
SWA used aggressive hedging around 2007 and on, but they made impressive profits throughout much of the 2000s, which was a time of big trouble for pretty much all non-low cost carriers, resulting for them in numerous bankruptcies, mergers, takeovers, and strikes. None of that was happening to SWA.
* Not related to actual travel on SWA but SWA has lobbied against development of high speed rail in Texas (not shocking but not behavior I respect either)
This behavior is expected. (Like airlines lobbying against rail, car companies against CAFE rules, etc). But I'd also place some blame for the Texas rail flop on Texas politicians and also average CITIZENS who allowed a run-out-of-mill corporation (back then) to easily derail an important public transportation project like that. Unfortunately, most politicians come and go, but the same airline stays and gets all the blame.
* SWA only operates the Boeing 737. A fine aircraft but without question not my favorite to fly in.
I haven't flown enough to tell any (comfort) difference between A320 and the newer 737. I do prefer the 737 to smaller aircraft like CRJ or Embraer. Finally, those winglets do look pretty cool on the SWA's B737s.
As its name suggests, Southwest Airlines has the best coverage in the American Southwest. Try to fly from an average airport in Midwest (something that's not a ginormous hub), like say Indianapolis, to a similar airport in Texas or say Florida with Southwest Airlines, you will see see that your options are far more limited, if they exist at all, compared to other carriers.
XP does have a darn low hardware requirements relative to what's available today. I Dualboot Fedora and XP on a 9 year old PC (Pentium 3 900MHZ/512MB RAM) and I feel like XP is more responsive under high load or at least is about the same. Linux + Gnome with Firefox combo has gotten pretty bloated lately if you ask me.
I use Fedora 12 right now. Every time I shutdown the system from command line in a terminal or console as root, the next time my computer boots, the GDM starts in 800x600 resolution or something like that. Restarting GDM once again fixes this. What's going on here? Is there a way to disable this nanny GDM behavior? Looked in a lot of obvious places, like it's configuration files, and I couldn't find the solution.
Another issue, is there a way to initiate a proper shutdown by pressing the power button of your PC? In this past pressing the power button would initiate the shutdown. In Fedora 12, instead a dialog posts out asking me to type a root password because more than one users is logged in (I often su to other accounts in terminals). Is there a way to change this behavior in 12 or 13? Thanks.
Being a big fan of Indian cuisine I can't but start wondering what kind of meals the Indian space agency will package and send with cosmonauts. Has there any research been done on how to package naan and curries for extended periods of time?
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Posts like the one I am replying to always amuse me. Who are you to decide how _I_ spend my time and money? I am sick of hearing how Americans should use less foreign oil, drive less of foreign made cars, buy less Chinese made goods, save more and spend less, etc, etc. However, people act and will always continue acting in a way to maximize the bang for their buck. Americans consume so much oil simply because it's so damn cheap. It's stupid not to consume lots of it at the current prices. It's sold for like $2.7 a gallon. There are places where a jug of water could fetch something close to that. Likewise, a $10 pair of Chinese made jeans is far more attractive than a hypothetical $50 pair of American made jeans. This is being dictated by simply laws of economics. A "low wage"/"low skill" worker in China makes, what, like one dollar an hour? A low wage worker in US makes $8-$10 dollars an hour. I'd love to see more stuff built in America, but as long as this disparity exists, jobs and investment will flow into China and goods will flow into US. There is no way around this. Wait for a few decades, and as China and rest of world get richer, this flow will stop.
If we want to have quality jobs in the US, we should be investing money and our time into science and education. There is simply too many poor and uneducated would be workers in places like India, China, or Vietnam for us to compete with. I will never shed a tear over some low wage/low skill/no skill jobs being outsourced elsewhere. Let the Chinese and others have low quality, pow pay, and borderline dangerous blue collar jobs, but we can do better. Software, electronics, pharmacy, nanotech, biotech, and other new high skill industries are the thing to be in. A good payoff can't be obtained without hard work, education, and continuous improvement of one's skills, IMHO.
3M sounds about right. And many of them was probably corporate developer or engineer machines. The number of desktop users who use the OS for non-development purposes is even smaller.
I have seen many single core PCs that are perfectly adequate for running applications that their owners need (web, business apps, etc). This is for course, under Windows XP. Yet, they're not good enough to run Windows 7. I know that I can go into Windows 7 appearance settings and turn off all of the eye candy to make it reasonably responsive. But then, it looks and functions about the same as XP, so why bother? Why create headaches, pay license feels, etc? XP just works on those machines already.
Is this X server you're talking about?
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/disaster.html
So, there are some experts who believe that high speed rail is too expensive to build or operate. Others think that it can be feasible economically. Did I miss something? Did the article say anything really new? Why is it Slashdot-worthy?
High speed rail line like NorCal-SoCal in California would certainly target both, cars and air travel. There are plenty of people traveling by each mean over there, the most obvious volume is along the LA-SF Bay route.
Like I said, you can't compare the maximum throughput to a bag of chips (sorry, salary is the same). What do you guys come up with these stupid analogies? You can't read? You can't understand? Networks and other shared resources are different. Point. It's more like a highway. The government wouldn't let me drive faster than 70mph on the interstate I commute on, but there is plenty of times when my car is crawling at 20mph, because there is plenty of other people trying to use the road at the time time? One hour later the road clears up again. Understood?
Since when "up to" either mean or median? As others had pointed out, "up to" more likely means the theoretical maximum, and I don't see what's wrong with that. Network bandwidth is not like a bag of chips. If internet was like a bunch of PCs are on the same LAN then indeed, 100Mbps would mean.. exactly that much. But as soon you connect to a WAN or any other network, then it's pretty much impossible to guarantee anything. During the peak hours, you sure bandwidth with others, and there may be indeed network bottlenecks somewhere where you could get the "up to" speed during the off hours, but during the peak hours network speeds likely will drop. This is the reality of the networks. So, how do they propose that ISPs advertise the network service capacity? Should they quote mean or the median? How is it going to be measured? Seems like a big can of worms. Just leave it alone. If you don't like your service, regardless of the advertized "up to bandwidth" you can always opt for a better or more expensive option or if you're lucky find an alternative provider. Pretty much everywhere I have lived, I had at least two options, cable and DSL, (sometimes FIOS), with various levels of performance.
I don't understand why there is so much whinning about Lucas milking the Star Wars franchise. Blueray is the new format that's meant to replace DVD. Pretty much every old movie that's worth watching will be re-released on Blueray, just like 70s and 80s movies were rereleased on DVD. If you don't like it, then just move on and don't buy it.
Or, even better, just don't use cars at all. Rail, after all, works splendidly with electricity.
This would work only for people who confine themselves to staying forever in cities and suburbs, but it certainly won't work for me. Train will not take me from Bat Area to Lake Tahoe, Yosemite, Central Coast, Redwood Forest, Point Reyes, Monterey, Death Valley, Mojave Desert, Grand Canyon (both rims), Mount Shasta, and tons of other places in California and Oregon I enjoy going to on weekends the day and time I like. Neither could train bring bags full of groceries to my doorstep. Let's get real. Cars have their uses. What we need to get rid of is the lifestyles and city designs that induce long daily car commutes, build better public transport systems, and build high speed rail where it does make sense.
A Prius has approximately the same MSRP as a midrange Honda Accord or Camry, so it is not even clearly more expensive than the nonhybrid cars. (sure it's smaller, but it's still bigger than the compacts like Corolla). I personally really like the Prius, and not just because of fuel economy. First, this is one of the slickest and futuristic looking cars on the road. Second, hatchback design. Finally, this is one of the most technologically advanced cars on the road. You can switch cars throttle between several modes (sports, economy, etc), monitor fuel economy in many ways, use the navigation system. All for a price in the mid-20s. On top of that, you get 50mpg in city. It's absolutely worth its price if you ask me. It's the Apple of cars as of now IMHO.
I think it will be interesting if/when linux starts appearing in ore school labs (as tech budgets keep shrinking it is not a stretch to imagine the possibility) that perhaps we'll see linux distros appear.
This was being predicted at least since the last dot com crash - that tight budgets will force some to use Linux. That Windows is too expensive for $300 PCs. Actually both arguments are a myth. The cost of Windows license is like $20-$40 when sold though OEMs, hardly a big deal. Clearly, the usability of Windows is so much better compared to Linux, that most consumers still swallow that cost. And university labs generally go for something better than a $300 PC. Actually, Linux is used in some labs, specially though in the departments of engineering, and indeed engineering and science students at any level often run Linux on their PCs. Clearly, they are a good target market for Linux. But Liberal Arts or Business majors are a whole different story..
In my humble opinion, the strategy of using Apple's iPod and iPhone products to draw them into Apple's stores and hook up people on their premium but expensive hardware is working. Some posters also mentioned that Apple hardware on average is much better than Windows hardware, and I agree. Most of stuff sold in Best Buy is so cheap (not just pricewise) but most people are willing to just pay twice as much for something that's almost guaranteed not to be a lemon, instead of sorting though dozens of models to find a good one. I agree with this explanation too, but IMHO iPod and iPhone are the primary reason. Another problem is the Windows Vista cluster fsck. A lot of people had become disappointed with Microsoft back then. Even those who never used Apple stuff before.
$450 Toshiba is probably not comparable to the macbook, but there are many PC laptops in $800-900 range that make macbook specs look like garbage. 2GB of memory? Is this a joke? No i5 or at least i3? Go to BestBuy and check the $800 Samssung Q430 and tell me in which ways it is worse than a macbook pro sold the same place for $500 more, check everything including keyboard, sturdiness, surface, etc. And it certainly is better than the $1000 macbook. Check the Sony Vaios. The E series, the F series, and a few others. Some other ASUS and Samsung models are pretty good too. The problem is that those "good" models drown in a sea of crap. And to someone who needs a lot of computing power (a grad student or an engineering undergrad) Apple simply has no answer. Sometimes, I need to pay Apple $1500 to do what a $750 PC laptop can do. Simply stated Apple stuff is ridiculously overpriced right now. The fact that you can't get something with at least 4GB memory or i5 or at least i3 CPU for say $999 is simply ridiculous.
After this, I pretty much stopped reading your rant. Although Apple does a quiet a few things that piss me off and show poor consumer response, they are NOT A MONOPOLY.
And why should we read your stuff? Check out somewhere the definitions of monopolistic competition and monopoly. They're different things, and the former had been around since at least the 70s, was part of Krugman's most famous work in international trade, and should not be confused with the other by now.
Seriously.. the laptops available for Windows fucking suck. They're shit. They're all shit since IBM sold Thinkpad to Lenovo.
You have a good point. I remember when I worked at university's IT department we treated Apples and Thinkpads as equals. When an affluent professor asked for a laptop recommendation, we recommended one of those, depending on OS choice. When a poor postdoc or a graduate student needed a laptop with the most computing bang for buck, we offered to setup a Dell Inspiron (price/performance was good, but design was horrible, flimsy, unprofessional, etc). Most Dells, HPs, etc, felt inferior. Things haven't changed much since then except that, as you say, Thinkpad might have gone downhill as well after it has become Lenovo.
However, I wouldn't say that all PC laptops are shit. But finding an equal to Apple hardware is like finding a diamond in the rough. Yes, some excellent models exist, but you have to sort though 25 crap ones to find one good system. That's why their market share is going down. However, when you find such a good PC laptop, its price performance beats shit out of Apple while still offering good, stylish, solid designs. I am not bragging here. For example go check out the new Samssung Q430 in any Best Buy store. Sturdy, slick and stylish aluminum build, chiclet keyboard, 14 inch screen, i5 processor, 4GB memory, Windows 7, and discrete graphics among other things. Yours for about $820. Everyone ohs and ahs when they see mine. Another excellent system is Vaio E series. You get all of these things with 15.5 inch HD screen, BD combo drive, and slick design for about $900. You can have it for $650 if you take off the HD screen, BD combo, and the gaming graphics. I got one for $820 for myself. The cheapest Apple is a macbook for $1000 and when I was shopping for PC Macbook's specs were simply garbage (2GB memory, old CPU, smaller, lower resolution screen) compared to either of these two systems sold at the same time. If you like these same specs but in a more high end premium package then check the VAIO F series which you can have for around $1200-$1400 straight from Best Buy, and at this price it will be comparable to apple's best and most expensive laptop. Some ASUS, Samsung, and Sony laptops are pretty good. But as I said, you have to sort through lots of crap and gimmicks to find a good PC laptop. But it's worth it, because you will save about $500 compared to Apple's stuff. Maybe the $500 will not matter much when you have a real job, but that's a lot of money for a graduate student.
I went to college and hold undergraduate and graduate degrees in economics and applied math. Most of what I have learned, I learned on my own, from books and homework sets. The professor's lecture is there only to guide you towards a good source of information. As for learning from other classmates, maybe there had been a half dozen times where I had to ask my classmates a question AND they actually knew the answer, no more than that. But I agree that you learn way more in a good (non-online) college. Online education, whether a single course or a whole degree, is just a gimmick that allows educational institutions to make a quick buck and people who don't want to put a whole lot of work effort to have an easy degree or certificate. I have seen my brother an other people take college level courses online (like US history) and it's a joke compared to the work I had to do at a flagship state university for a similar course. Only for a US history course, as an example, I had to read a course textbook, eight other books, (novels, etc) write a research paper, listen to professor's _awesome_ lectures and take notes, met with TA twice a week AND take a midterm and a final test, and meet some awesome peers. Go find an online course that gives you this. The online course my friends took was weaker than even community college level course.
I'd play idtche3 games, such as Urban Terror or Tremolous, on it.
It's true, but people who are interested in cars, say someone who reads autoblog as often as you read slashdot, I much better prepared to deal with car comparisons.
Performance oriented geeks would probably look at
Engine displacement
Number of cylinders
Whether it's naturally aspirated
Number of transmission gears
Auto/DSG/manual transmission
horsepower
0-60 time
torque
mpg
That's a lot of things to consider, but remember that these things had been around for decades, and they haven't been changing. So geeks end up learning these. In computer industry, everything we knew about measuring performance 10 years ago, is borderline useless. Now I am presented with options like i3-330 and i3-550 and I am forced to head over to places like wikipedia to figure out what that means and spend hours hunting for relevant benchmarks, and I used to be sysadmin a decade ago!
Yes, it may be true that you're not flying cheaper than you used to before. However, who said that the price you paid before was a normal, fair (to the airlines) price? As of right now most airlines are just managing to break even or turn a relatively small profit. Compare this to the mid-2000s when most airlines, except low-cost carriers, struggled. The 2007-2008 gas price hikes nearly bankrupted the industry (Southwest did well because of hedging, not its business model), and only the additional fees, like the bag fees helped the airlines to start breathing comfortably right now, and it's still being argued that they're not charging their passengers enough!
Southwest has some flaws. I agree with most of your points except for the ones below. In the past 10 years, I almost always preferred to fly with either America West or American Airlines to SWA if flying around southwest, and something like Northwest to go to Midwest.
* Southwest also doesn't fly many of the places I need to travel, especially longer routes and smaller airports. They've cherry picked their routes (and I don't blame them for it) but they often aren't an option. They only fly to 69 destinations in just 35 states.
Their coverage in the Southwest is pretty good (e.g. I can fly from pretty much anywhere of the same size to San Antonio (El Paso, Vegas, LA, Phoenix, etc) instead of making the obligatory stop in either Dallas or Houston practiced by most other airlines. Once outside of the Southwest, their coverage is indeed pretty rough unless you're flying coast to coast.
* Southwest's ability to make a profit has at times had more to do with their fuel hedging program than with their operational prowess. This bit them in 2008 when they lost money due oil prices moving the wrong way on them.
SWA used aggressive hedging around 2007 and on, but they made impressive profits throughout much of the 2000s, which was a time of big trouble for pretty much all non-low cost carriers, resulting for them in numerous bankruptcies, mergers, takeovers, and strikes. None of that was happening to SWA.
* Not related to actual travel on SWA but SWA has lobbied against development of high speed rail in Texas (not shocking but not behavior I respect either)
This behavior is expected. (Like airlines lobbying against rail, car companies against CAFE rules, etc). But I'd also place some blame for the Texas rail flop on Texas politicians and also average CITIZENS who allowed a run-out-of-mill corporation (back then) to easily derail an important public transportation project like that. Unfortunately, most politicians come and go, but the same airline stays and gets all the blame.
* SWA only operates the Boeing 737. A fine aircraft but without question not my favorite to fly in.
I haven't flown enough to tell any (comfort) difference between A320 and the newer 737. I do prefer the 737 to smaller aircraft like CRJ or Embraer. Finally, those winglets do look pretty cool on the SWA's B737s.
As its name suggests, Southwest Airlines has the best coverage in the American Southwest. Try to fly from an average airport in Midwest (something that's not a ginormous hub), like say Indianapolis, to a similar airport in Texas or say Florida with Southwest Airlines, you will see see that your options are far more limited, if they exist at all, compared to other carriers.
XP does have a darn low hardware requirements relative to what's available today. I Dualboot Fedora and XP on a 9 year old PC (Pentium 3 900MHZ/512MB RAM) and I feel like XP is more responsive under high load or at least is about the same. Linux + Gnome with Firefox combo has gotten pretty bloated lately if you ask me.
I use Fedora 12 right now. Every time I shutdown the system from command line in a terminal or console as root, the next time my computer boots, the GDM starts in 800x600 resolution or something like that. Restarting GDM once again fixes this. What's going on here? Is there a way to disable this nanny GDM behavior? Looked in a lot of obvious places, like it's configuration files, and I couldn't find the solution.
Another issue, is there a way to initiate a proper shutdown by pressing the power button of your PC? In this past pressing the power button would initiate the shutdown. In Fedora 12, instead a dialog posts out asking me to type a root password because more than one users is logged in (I often su to other accounts in terminals). Is there a way to change this behavior in 12 or 13? Thanks.
Being a big fan of Indian cuisine I can't but start wondering what kind of meals the Indian space agency will package and send with cosmonauts. Has there any research been done on how to package naan and curries for extended periods of time?