That's very revealing. Look at the jump from 1980 to 2000. It must be terrifying running a post route at full speed with some huge safety getting ready to blind side you. Not to mention quarterbacks. Could you imagine one of those 300+ pounders bearing down on you ready to tear your head off?
Well said. If you've got a kid with athletic ability then encourage them to take up golf or tennis. Yes, you can get injured in those sports too (back, knee, elbow) but at least you're not taking head shots every time you play.
Unfortunately, for many kids athletics is what they see as their only way out of poverty. And for many of them it is. They play these games knowing the risks. They get shoved through college programs that, in many cases, fall far short of a "quality" education. Indeed, these kids are nothing more than meal tickets for the colleges that are concerned far more about money than providing a good education for their student athletes. A small percentage of college athletes will get drafted into the pro leagues and some of them will go on to fame and fortune. But far too many don't get to live that dream. For them they face a life with bad knees and marginal job skills.
Friends off the field perhaps but on the field not so much. Sure, between whistles they might exchange some chit chat and a hug after the game but during play it's game on. Look what happened with the New Orleans Saints and the "bounty" scandal. Opposing players were targeted not only to be hit but to be taken out of the game or even intentionally injured. I find it hard to believe that the Saints were the only team that engaged in this sort of thing. They just got caught.
I'm a purist. I watch football for the nice run and the great catch and the perfect throw. It just disturbs me to see all these former players with brain injuries and hardly able to walk. What good is all that money if you can't count to ten?
I mean look at the size of these guys today. Even the wide receivers are huge. Bigger, stronger, faster...all to feed our insatiable appetite for violence disguised as sport. In hockey it's the fights. In nascar it's the crashes. In football it's the big hit. Add to that the enormous sums of money available to the stars of these sports and it's no wonder they will do whatever is necessary to win. All to the delight of the fat, shirtless drunk spewing profanities on every play.
The athletes are simply too big and strong. Could you imagine Fran Tarkenton playing in today's NFL? He would get killed. The equipment cannot protect them adequately. The NFL is stuck between giving the fans what they want on the one hand and getting sued on the other hand by crippled ex players. Cutting back on the head shots is a good start but how much can you really do to prevent permanent injury?
I'm seeing a lot on here about education vs connections. I've been in the IT world for a long time and I'm prepared to say that connections are far more important than a degree. Yes, a degree is very helpful. In the beginning. As your career advances connections become much, much more important. Knowing the hiring manager, and having them vouch for your ability, is an enormous advantage. At that point your resume goes to the top of the stack and HR's role is simply to set up the interviews and take care of the on-boarding process once you get hired.
Now all of this assumes that you can actually do the work that is required of the position. But if you can, and you know the people in charge, it's much easier to land the job. What it comes down to is that the hiring manager would rather hire you than someone they don't know. Why? Because they know you and have worked with you before. It's human nature.
If you're a certain type of individual with an aptitude for starting businesses (especially IT related businesses) then you might do just fine without college. But young people reading that story should know that the odds are heavily stacked against you being successful taking that route. People like Gates and Zuck are extremely smart. Both of their SAT scores were off the charts. Most people just don't have the tools they have. It doesn't mean you can't do it, it just means that it's going to be really hard. You need a combination of brains, luck, contacts and a bit of ruthlessness to be successful with your own business.
In the IT field I have worked with several people that did not have college degrees and were very good at what they did. Having a college degree does not mean you are smarter. It's just one measure of accomplishment that an employer can look at. As others have pointed out here, the biggest impediment to success without a college degree is the HR drones that filter the resumes. Most of them don't know their ass from a hole in the ground. But in a big company you have to get past them in order to get interviewed.
College gives you a few advantages: it gets you interviews, it allows you to advance higher up the corporate ladder, you meet people in your industry. Eventually experience counts for more than the degree but in the beginning it helps. For most people it's probably best to go the college route in my opinion.
The Surface Pro is going to be an absolute flop. Half the battery life? Complete non starter. My wife has an iPad and that sucker runs all day long on a single charge. What's the point of having a tablet if you have to run around looking for a plug? $899 for the 64GB version? I could get a Samsung Galaxy Note (very nice tablet with full annotation via the pen input) for a little over half the price. Then there is the $149 keyboard. I can buy a Bluetooth keyboard for any iPad or Android tablet for less than $50.
The only chance Microsoft had was to do what Samsung and Google have done - make a quality tablet for less than an iPad costs. Samsung has even gone a step further and offers features that the iPad doesn't have. There is a nifty application that comes with the 7 inch model that allows you to use it as a TV remote. It will control your stereo, DirecTV box..everything. Very cool app...and I picked it up for $179.
Microsoft on the other hand offers up this bloated, expensive slab. It's the modern day Edsel. Surface Pro...coming to a landfill near you.
I suppose you have a point about the BAD movie. I've wasted my share of cash on them too. Somehow I wish there were some sort of money back guarantee and I kind of feel there should be. For example, if I go to a theater and walk out of a movie within the first 30 minutes because it stinks I feel that I should get my money back. Maybe we should have the same sort of guarantee for purchased movies, if only there were some way to track at what point you stopped watching it. Some sort of time stamp that indicates beyond this point you're on the hook to pay for the movie. If you stop now you can return it and get some or all of your money back. Can't see the movie producers agreeing to that though.
is the lack of support for Active Directory, SharePoint and desktop applications like MS Project and Visio. The vast majority of big shops are running this stuff. I've got to hand it to Microsoft - they did a pretty good job of sewing up that market.
I love using Linux and I use it pretty much every day but there are some limitations to what you can do. The interface is great. You can make it look any way you want and it provides a lot more flexibility than Windows in that regard. Compared to Windows it's super fast. Network connectivity is a breeze. Printing and scanning is a pain.
If someone can figure out how to get those things above working, well, that's the last frontier. Until then, it's a bit of a hurdle.
Cripes...$30K less? That's the sort of thing you'd expect from a start up...but at least there you've got a chance to strike it big if they go public. Come join India Business Machines and get the chance to train your successor who's about to make $17K while you're out on the street. No thanks.
I have been offered jobs by IBM in the past. For my field, they don't pay market rate. When I brought this to the attention of the recruiter the only response he could muster up was "but...but...we're IBM!". Big fucking deal. Back in the 80's when they still had a pension and a no layoff policy and were committed to training their employees and not outsourcing every Tom, Dick and Harry to Bangalore maybe it meant something. Those days are long gone. Now their management spend their days scheming how to offshore some more jobs and suck another ounce of marrow from the bones of their US based employees. Fuck you Ginny.
If I'm going to spend $1500 on a laptop I'll just get a Macbook Pro and dual boot the thing with Linux. At least that way you're getting a really good screen with high resolution and good support if you need it.
"I'm just annoyed that people still keep calling a dog a cat." - Fair enough
"downloading is easier than ripping" - Ever used Handbrake? Pop in the DVD, select the file, click Start. Easy as that.
"If you produce crap, you don't deserve compensation no matter how much time or money has been invested in it." - Crap according to who? Different strokes for different folks. I'm not a big horror flick fan, for example, and to me all of it is crap. But there are lots of people that love it. To them it's entertaining and they are willing to pay for it.
How's the anger management therapy coming along?;-)
Despite your tone I admit that you're correct. Copyright infringement is not outright theft. Although I could argue (and many do) that it's still money out of someone's pocket none the less. The person that downloads the song or movie illegally is getting it without paying for it and that's wrong, in my view. The artist and/or studio has made an investment in their product and deserves to get compensated for it - every copy of it. If you think they charge too much then don't buy it and don't download it without paying for it.
"The movie studio still has their movie" - Yeah, and now so do you. The difference is that the movie studio invested a lot of money to produce that movie. What makes you think you are entitled to a free copy of it when everyone else is paying to see it?
I think that if Cook had presented it the way you suggest then the recipient of the message would have quit on the spot. People at that level are well connected. He would have had no trouble landing another gig. It seems to me that there was failure at several levels here - not just with Maps. The board at Apple failed to negotiate an extension with Google. That put them in a place where they had to scramble to find a replacement application. The guy managing Maps was put in a tough situation and for whatever reason didn't come clean on his status reports.
The problem wasn't so much that the Apple maps were terrible. With a few notable exceptions it actually wasn't bad for a first attempt. Remember, Google Maps wasn't very good at first either. The problem was promoting the Apple Maps as this awesome, fantastic piece of software. Someone in the Apple management chain needed to say "Uh Tim, maybe we should dial back the excitement a bit on this maps thing. Have you seen it? It needs work.". Evidently nobody did so Cook rolled it out thinking it was great and it wasn't.
Cook looks like an idiot, and by extension so does Apple, so something had to be done about it. He can't allow that to happen. If they lie to him about Maps then how can he trust them to tell him the truth about the next product? If I were him I would have done exactly the same thing. He needs to send a message to management that this sort of thing won't be tolerated. If the product is not ready then fine, we'll figure out something but don't bullshit me and leave me hanging out to dry in front our customers. It might seem harsh but these people are getting paid a ton of money to make the right decisions. If you screw up you're gone.
There has to be something in place to prevent people from outright stealing of music and movies. Artists deserve to be compensated for their work. But this American notion of massive awards to greedy Hollywood studios has got to stop. Is it really fair to bankrupt people because they shared some songs? I never stole any songs but I am so disgusted with the whole thing that I have basically stopped buying music all together. It's mostly internet radio for me these days. I won't give those greedy bastards a nickel.
Distracted drivers are the problem and cameras are not going to fix that. Cellphones are at the top of the distraction list. If the government wants to do something constructive here they should ban cellphone use in cars - full stop. But that's not going to happen as long as AT&T and Verizon are allowed to lobby congress and throw money at their reelection campaigns.
I'm over 40 and I honestly have not seen any age discrimination in IT. Maybe it's just the circles I travel in but often age is associated with experience and in many fields it's an asset not a liability. I have seen one or two older people get let go but honestly their skills were not up to what they should be - age had nothing to do with it. Sometimes people get some skills early in their career and make some headway and then just sort of settle in and stop learning. You can ride those skills for a while but eventually the industry moves on and, if you're not careful, you will get left behind. Sadly, by the time you figure it out it might be too late.
Age becomes a crutch, an excuse. In IT, like in many other professions, it's crucial to keep your skills relevant and up to date. Maybe your employer will train you, maybe you have to do it yourself. Either way, you've got to find a way to stay on top of the new developments.
After the first failed performance review that should have been a clear sign that it's time to step it up. If that's me I'm asking my manager what do I need to do to improve? Get a plan together and work towards it. Set some short term goals.
If it really truly is age related discrimination then that's also a clear sign - to get your ass out of there. Go work for someone that appreciates your skills. Better yet, go into contracting. You'll make more money, you'll work on stuff you enjoy, and you'll be hired for what you know and your experience is seen as a positive thing.
Yeah, eventually the motherboard becomes the bottleneck. You can't add additional memory or it becomes difficult to find older memory. I think you're only option for an SSD would be to run it on an external drive through a USB port. But then you run into bottlenecks on the USB port, especially if it's USB2. I've done it and it works reasonably well just not as fast as having the SSD drive running internally.
If I were you I'd be looking for one of those lower end i3 processor machines. Then you'll have a modern architecture to build on. Slap an SSD drive in there with 8GB of RAM and you're off to the races. Windows 7 or Linux will work just fine. Heck, you could even try to build a Hackintosh if you're so inclined:-)
Hold on there Sparky...I wouldn't call them a total fail. It wouldn't be my ideal primary laptop but I could see it as being a great travel laptop - light weight and fast. Or a great sitting-on-the-sofa laptop to look up something while you are watching TV. Or if you go to a lot of meetings at work it would be a great note taker (far better than those tablets I see people fumbling with to try to type something on).
I've seen both versions (with the SSD and with the regular HD) and personally I'd go with the SSD model. Lighter, better battery life, thinner. If I'm going to buy one of those I want one that will run pretty much all day without a charge and that's the SSD version. Yes, it's got some limitations but I can see how it could be useful. I'm tempted to get one.
Somehow I doubt that the majority of these shoppers are buying them to put Linux on them. They are buying them because they think it's a great deal for a laptop. Then they get them home and try to run Windows on them and discover that it's kinda slow...and the screen sucks...so they bring them back. Minus the restocking fee of course. The smart thing to do is put Linux on it and get many years of happy computing. But I suspect that most of the "returners" will just upgrade to a newer Windows 8 laptop.
Gamers and Graphic Artists aside, the CPU is becoming increasingly irrelevant. I think that for many people the most important components are memory and disk drive. I'm running Linux on my 5 year old iMac that I upgraded to a 120GB SSD drive and it flies. I've only got 4GB of memory because that's all it will take, but it doesn't seem to matter. I'm rarely ever using more than 50% of the available memory. It's got a Core2Duo processor, much slower than the i7 or even i5 processors, and it doesn't matter. The current CPU load is 3% on Core 1 and Core 2 is sleeping. On occasion it might spike up to 40% but it's only momentary.
If you are into gaming then sure, you'll want a really good graphics card and a fast CPU. But for the everyday user an i7 is not only unnecessary it's a waste of money. Yes, the ARM processors are woefully slow compared to an i7 but it's good enough for everyday use and it consumes a lot less power which is critical for mobile devices.
For my development work I'm most often connected to a powerful server via Remote Desktop so my CPU is not important - it's the CPU(s) on the server that matter.
How about making it mandatory to mute everyone on a conference call? It never fails...you get on some big call with maybe 100 people and there are kids screaming or dogs barking in the background. The moderator asks people to mute their lines (#6 or some such) and most people do...except for the idiot with the screaming kids and barking dogs. Then we all sit around waiting until finally the moderator puts everyone on mute. Huge waste of everyone's time.
At the beginning of the call just mute all the lines. Tell people how to un-mute the line if they have a question or comment. Problem solved, time saved, happy day.
Thanks for the tips. I don't use Facebook, Twitter or Bing and when I use LinkedIn it's only for a quick check and then I log off. One other thing I forgot to mention was that I went into my Google profile and turned off web search history. Javascript is disabled and only enabled for sites that I choose and trust. Cookies get tossed every time I close the browser and I don't accept any from 3rd parties. Without going full tinfoil-hat mode that's about as safe as I can get it:-)
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That's very revealing. Look at the jump from 1980 to 2000. It must be terrifying running a post route at full speed with some huge safety getting ready to blind side you. Not to mention quarterbacks. Could you imagine one of those 300+ pounders bearing down on you ready to tear your head off?
Well said. If you've got a kid with athletic ability then encourage them to take up golf or tennis. Yes, you can get injured in those sports too (back, knee, elbow) but at least you're not taking head shots every time you play.
Unfortunately, for many kids athletics is what they see as their only way out of poverty. And for many of them it is. They play these games knowing the risks. They get shoved through college programs that, in many cases, fall far short of a "quality" education. Indeed, these kids are nothing more than meal tickets for the colleges that are concerned far more about money than providing a good education for their student athletes. A small percentage of college athletes will get drafted into the pro leagues and some of them will go on to fame and fortune. But far too many don't get to live that dream. For them they face a life with bad knees and marginal job skills.
Friends off the field perhaps but on the field not so much. Sure, between whistles they might exchange some chit chat and a hug after the game but during play it's game on. Look what happened with the New Orleans Saints and the "bounty" scandal. Opposing players were targeted not only to be hit but to be taken out of the game or even intentionally injured. I find it hard to believe that the Saints were the only team that engaged in this sort of thing. They just got caught.
I'm a purist. I watch football for the nice run and the great catch and the perfect throw. It just disturbs me to see all these former players with brain injuries and hardly able to walk. What good is all that money if you can't count to ten?
I mean look at the size of these guys today. Even the wide receivers are huge. Bigger, stronger, faster...all to feed our insatiable appetite for violence disguised as sport. In hockey it's the fights. In nascar it's the crashes. In football it's the big hit. Add to that the enormous sums of money available to the stars of these sports and it's no wonder they will do whatever is necessary to win. All to the delight of the fat, shirtless drunk spewing profanities on every play.
The athletes are simply too big and strong. Could you imagine Fran Tarkenton playing in today's NFL? He would get killed. The equipment cannot protect them adequately. The NFL is stuck between giving the fans what they want on the one hand and getting sued on the other hand by crippled ex players. Cutting back on the head shots is a good start but how much can you really do to prevent permanent injury?
I'm seeing a lot on here about education vs connections. I've been in the IT world for a long time and I'm prepared to say that connections are far more important than a degree. Yes, a degree is very helpful. In the beginning. As your career advances connections become much, much more important. Knowing the hiring manager, and having them vouch for your ability, is an enormous advantage. At that point your resume goes to the top of the stack and HR's role is simply to set up the interviews and take care of the on-boarding process once you get hired.
Now all of this assumes that you can actually do the work that is required of the position. But if you can, and you know the people in charge, it's much easier to land the job. What it comes down to is that the hiring manager would rather hire you than someone they don't know. Why? Because they know you and have worked with you before. It's human nature.
If you're a certain type of individual with an aptitude for starting businesses (especially IT related businesses) then you might do just fine without college. But young people reading that story should know that the odds are heavily stacked against you being successful taking that route. People like Gates and Zuck are extremely smart. Both of their SAT scores were off the charts. Most people just don't have the tools they have. It doesn't mean you can't do it, it just means that it's going to be really hard. You need a combination of brains, luck, contacts and a bit of ruthlessness to be successful with your own business.
In the IT field I have worked with several people that did not have college degrees and were very good at what they did. Having a college degree does not mean you are smarter. It's just one measure of accomplishment that an employer can look at. As others have pointed out here, the biggest impediment to success without a college degree is the HR drones that filter the resumes. Most of them don't know their ass from a hole in the ground. But in a big company you have to get past them in order to get interviewed.
College gives you a few advantages: it gets you interviews, it allows you to advance higher up the corporate ladder, you meet people in your industry. Eventually experience counts for more than the degree but in the beginning it helps. For most people it's probably best to go the college route in my opinion.
The Surface Pro is going to be an absolute flop. Half the battery life? Complete non starter. My wife has an iPad and that sucker runs all day long on a single charge. What's the point of having a tablet if you have to run around looking for a plug? $899 for the 64GB version? I could get a Samsung Galaxy Note (very nice tablet with full annotation via the pen input) for a little over half the price. Then there is the $149 keyboard. I can buy a Bluetooth keyboard for any iPad or Android tablet for less than $50.
The only chance Microsoft had was to do what Samsung and Google have done - make a quality tablet for less than an iPad costs. Samsung has even gone a step further and offers features that the iPad doesn't have. There is a nifty application that comes with the 7 inch model that allows you to use it as a TV remote. It will control your stereo, DirecTV box..everything. Very cool app...and I picked it up for $179.
Microsoft on the other hand offers up this bloated, expensive slab. It's the modern day Edsel. Surface Pro...coming to a landfill near you.
I suppose you have a point about the BAD movie. I've wasted my share of cash on them too. Somehow I wish there were some sort of money back guarantee and I kind of feel there should be. For example, if I go to a theater and walk out of a movie within the first 30 minutes because it stinks I feel that I should get my money back. Maybe we should have the same sort of guarantee for purchased movies, if only there were some way to track at what point you stopped watching it. Some sort of time stamp that indicates beyond this point you're on the hook to pay for the movie. If you stop now you can return it and get some or all of your money back. Can't see the movie producers agreeing to that though.
is the lack of support for Active Directory, SharePoint and desktop applications like MS Project and Visio. The vast majority of big shops are running this stuff. I've got to hand it to Microsoft - they did a pretty good job of sewing up that market.
I love using Linux and I use it pretty much every day but there are some limitations to what you can do. The interface is great. You can make it look any way you want and it provides a lot more flexibility than Windows in that regard. Compared to Windows it's super fast. Network connectivity is a breeze. Printing and scanning is a pain.
If someone can figure out how to get those things above working, well, that's the last frontier. Until then, it's a bit of a hurdle.
Cripes...$30K less? That's the sort of thing you'd expect from a start up...but at least there you've got a chance to strike it big if they go public. Come join India Business Machines and get the chance to train your successor who's about to make $17K while you're out on the street. No thanks.
I have been offered jobs by IBM in the past. For my field, they don't pay market rate. When I brought this to the attention of the recruiter the only response he could muster up was "but...but...we're IBM!". Big fucking deal. Back in the 80's when they still had a pension and a no layoff policy and were committed to training their employees and not outsourcing every Tom, Dick and Harry to Bangalore maybe it meant something. Those days are long gone. Now their management spend their days scheming how to offshore some more jobs and suck another ounce of marrow from the bones of their US based employees. Fuck you Ginny.
If I'm going to spend $1500 on a laptop I'll just get a Macbook Pro and dual boot the thing with Linux. At least that way you're getting a really good screen with high resolution and good support if you need it.
"I'm just annoyed that people still keep calling a dog a cat." - Fair enough
"downloading is easier than ripping" - Ever used Handbrake? Pop in the DVD, select the file, click Start. Easy as that.
"If you produce crap, you don't deserve compensation no matter how much time or money has been invested in it." - Crap according to who? Different strokes for different folks. I'm not a big horror flick fan, for example, and to me all of it is crap. But there are lots of people that love it. To them it's entertaining and they are willing to pay for it.
How's the anger management therapy coming along? ;-)
Despite your tone I admit that you're correct. Copyright infringement is not outright theft. Although I could argue (and many do) that it's still money out of someone's pocket none the less. The person that downloads the song or movie illegally is getting it without paying for it and that's wrong, in my view. The artist and/or studio has made an investment in their product and deserves to get compensated for it - every copy of it. If you think they charge too much then don't buy it and don't download it without paying for it.
"The movie studio still has their movie" - Yeah, and now so do you. The difference is that the movie studio invested a lot of money to produce that movie. What makes you think you are entitled to a free copy of it when everyone else is paying to see it?
I think that if Cook had presented it the way you suggest then the recipient of the message would have quit on the spot. People at that level are well connected. He would have had no trouble landing another gig. It seems to me that there was failure at several levels here - not just with Maps. The board at Apple failed to negotiate an extension with Google. That put them in a place where they had to scramble to find a replacement application. The guy managing Maps was put in a tough situation and for whatever reason didn't come clean on his status reports.
The problem wasn't so much that the Apple maps were terrible. With a few notable exceptions it actually wasn't bad for a first attempt. Remember, Google Maps wasn't very good at first either. The problem was promoting the Apple Maps as this awesome, fantastic piece of software. Someone in the Apple management chain needed to say "Uh Tim, maybe we should dial back the excitement a bit on this maps thing. Have you seen it? It needs work.". Evidently nobody did so Cook rolled it out thinking it was great and it wasn't.
Cook looks like an idiot, and by extension so does Apple, so something had to be done about it. He can't allow that to happen. If they lie to him about Maps then how can he trust them to tell him the truth about the next product? If I were him I would have done exactly the same thing. He needs to send a message to management that this sort of thing won't be tolerated. If the product is not ready then fine, we'll figure out something but don't bullshit me and leave me hanging out to dry in front our customers. It might seem harsh but these people are getting paid a ton of money to make the right decisions. If you screw up you're gone.
There has to be something in place to prevent people from outright stealing of music and movies. Artists deserve to be compensated for their work. But this American notion of massive awards to greedy Hollywood studios has got to stop. Is it really fair to bankrupt people because they shared some songs? I never stole any songs but I am so disgusted with the whole thing that I have basically stopped buying music all together. It's mostly internet radio for me these days. I won't give those greedy bastards a nickel.
Distracted drivers are the problem and cameras are not going to fix that. Cellphones are at the top of the distraction list. If the government wants to do something constructive here they should ban cellphone use in cars - full stop. But that's not going to happen as long as AT&T and Verizon are allowed to lobby congress and throw money at their reelection campaigns.
I'm over 40 and I honestly have not seen any age discrimination in IT. Maybe it's just the circles I travel in but often age is associated with experience and in many fields it's an asset not a liability. I have seen one or two older people get let go but honestly their skills were not up to what they should be - age had nothing to do with it. Sometimes people get some skills early in their career and make some headway and then just sort of settle in and stop learning. You can ride those skills for a while but eventually the industry moves on and, if you're not careful, you will get left behind. Sadly, by the time you figure it out it might be too late.
Age becomes a crutch, an excuse. In IT, like in many other professions, it's crucial to keep your skills relevant and up to date. Maybe your employer will train you, maybe you have to do it yourself. Either way, you've got to find a way to stay on top of the new developments.
After the first failed performance review that should have been a clear sign that it's time to step it up. If that's me I'm asking my manager what do I need to do to improve? Get a plan together and work towards it. Set some short term goals.
If it really truly is age related discrimination then that's also a clear sign - to get your ass out of there. Go work for someone that appreciates your skills. Better yet, go into contracting. You'll make more money, you'll work on stuff you enjoy, and you'll be hired for what you know and your experience is seen as a positive thing.
Yeah, eventually the motherboard becomes the bottleneck. You can't add additional memory or it becomes difficult to find older memory. I think you're only option for an SSD would be to run it on an external drive through a USB port. But then you run into bottlenecks on the USB port, especially if it's USB2. I've done it and it works reasonably well just not as fast as having the SSD drive running internally.
If I were you I'd be looking for one of those lower end i3 processor machines. Then you'll have a modern architecture to build on. Slap an SSD drive in there with 8GB of RAM and you're off to the races. Windows 7 or Linux will work just fine. Heck, you could even try to build a Hackintosh if you're so inclined :-)
Hold on there Sparky...I wouldn't call them a total fail. It wouldn't be my ideal primary laptop but I could see it as being a great travel laptop - light weight and fast. Or a great sitting-on-the-sofa laptop to look up something while you are watching TV. Or if you go to a lot of meetings at work it would be a great note taker (far better than those tablets I see people fumbling with to try to type something on).
I've seen both versions (with the SSD and with the regular HD) and personally I'd go with the SSD model. Lighter, better battery life, thinner. If I'm going to buy one of those I want one that will run pretty much all day without a charge and that's the SSD version. Yes, it's got some limitations but I can see how it could be useful. I'm tempted to get one.
Somehow I doubt that the majority of these shoppers are buying them to put Linux on them. They are buying them because they think it's a great deal for a laptop. Then they get them home and try to run Windows on them and discover that it's kinda slow...and the screen sucks...so they bring them back. Minus the restocking fee of course. The smart thing to do is put Linux on it and get many years of happy computing. But I suspect that most of the "returners" will just upgrade to a newer Windows 8 laptop.
Gamers and Graphic Artists aside, the CPU is becoming increasingly irrelevant. I think that for many people the most important components are memory and disk drive. I'm running Linux on my 5 year old iMac that I upgraded to a 120GB SSD drive and it flies. I've only got 4GB of memory because that's all it will take, but it doesn't seem to matter. I'm rarely ever using more than 50% of the available memory. It's got a Core2Duo processor, much slower than the i7 or even i5 processors, and it doesn't matter. The current CPU load is 3% on Core 1 and Core 2 is sleeping. On occasion it might spike up to 40% but it's only momentary.
If you are into gaming then sure, you'll want a really good graphics card and a fast CPU. But for the everyday user an i7 is not only unnecessary it's a waste of money. Yes, the ARM processors are woefully slow compared to an i7 but it's good enough for everyday use and it consumes a lot less power which is critical for mobile devices.
For my development work I'm most often connected to a powerful server via Remote Desktop so my CPU is not important - it's the CPU(s) on the server that matter.
How about making it mandatory to mute everyone on a conference call? It never fails...you get on some big call with maybe 100 people and there are kids screaming or dogs barking in the background. The moderator asks people to mute their lines (#6 or some such) and most people do...except for the idiot with the screaming kids and barking dogs. Then we all sit around waiting until finally the moderator puts everyone on mute. Huge waste of everyone's time.
At the beginning of the call just mute all the lines. Tell people how to un-mute the line if they have a question or comment. Problem solved, time saved, happy day.
Thanks for the tips. I don't use Facebook, Twitter or Bing and when I use LinkedIn it's only for a quick check and then I log off. One other thing I forgot to mention was that I went into my Google profile and turned off web search history. Javascript is disabled and only enabled for sites that I choose and trust. Cookies get tossed every time I close the browser and I don't accept any from 3rd parties. Without going full tinfoil-hat mode that's about as safe as I can get it :-)