it's never made sense to me why they would try to sell me copies of songs/albums that I already own
Probably because they know the hard truth that most people don't actually own (as in, have paid for) the mp3s they have in their libraries. As they get older, they might want and be willing to pay for the whole album (or better quality copies). And if the store works at all in a decent way, it will have a good recommender system for "stuff you might like".
They are non-measurable because you can't put a specific value on them. At best, you can put a range of possible values depending on what happens.
The value of a stable food supply can only be measured when it's needed and not present. When you have a famine, it's easy to measure the cost in lives that not having that food supply incurs. When you have plenty of food and no emergencies, then on the books, it appears to be a cost with no benefit.
The fire extinguisher cost me $20. But if I never have a fire, then it's a "loss". I can only truly measure its value when I do have a fire and can measure the true value of what was saved by having it, or what was lost by not having it.
From a risk management point of view, it's probably worth the extra cost of building a flexible food supply system because the potential costs of not having it when we need it is very high. But until we have that famine, it only shows up as a cost.
My only real DB experience is with MS SQL, and I've used it for several years now. I'd love to learn to use PG, but since most of my work is writing stored procedures and such, I really like having an IDE of some kind. Can you recommend a good equivalent to MS SQL's Management Studio? Something that provides a way to browse the structure, and when writing code/queries, provides auto-complete and syntax highlighting, etc?
No one said he was smart. Assault of a police officer takes real brains...
Actually, it doesn't take much to be charged with assault of a police officer. Say you're being arrested and they twirl you around to put the cuffs on you and you stumble into one of them. You've now committed assault if the officer feels like charging you with it.
Want to take it to court? It will be you, a scumbag defendant, vs. that upstanding officer and defender of the public in his sharp uniform, with a jury that's been purged of anyone capable of critical thought.
The "About" tabs of most websites often have this kind of information. This one here seems to describe its purpose pretty well: http://www.linuxmint.com/about.php
Wikipedia says: "Linux Mint is a computer operating system based on the Linux distribution Ubuntu. Linux Mint adds many features that baseline Ubuntu does not have, one of which is providing a more complete out of the box experience by including proprietary and patented software[1] including Java and the Adobe Flash web browser plugin, which are features that are needed to play certain online games, watch YouTube, and certain applications..."
Boss: Let's see, you shipped our high-end mice with drivers that can't be activated without an internet connection and now all I see on the internet is outrage that our mice are defective because they require the internet to work.
We are heading toward just in time manufacturing. Where you it won't be built until you order it.
You're right. JIT's an ideal for supply chain efficiency, but the problem is that many purchases are impulse buys. The customer goes into a store to buy toilet paper and suddenly decides to buy the tablet computer they've been thinking about.
Plus, you can't do direct-to-the-consumer sales from China. Consumers have been made accustomed to getting the product they want right when the want it, which often means "now". When I finally decided to buy a tablet, I waited for the 32GB Nexus, then scoured around and finally bought from the company who could get it in my hands the fastest (turned out to be Staples). If I had to wait 2 weeks for it to come from China, I might just decide to cancel the order and wait for the next version - "I really don't NEED it". And that's the last thing you want your customers thinking.
JIT's great for efficiency, especially for commodity products that have a steady demand flow, but it's not very great for resilience/robustness of supply chains, particularly for products that have short lifecycles and "spikey" demand.
The hard part is getting organizations to consider the overall lifecycle costs of a product rather than looking only at the margin from the factory or landed cost. Sure, China will make and ship my widget for 50% of the cost of doing it locally, and that's what goes on the balance sheet of the P&L of part of the org that has the sourcing managers. But the 20% of lost sales due to an inability to meet demand doesn't get tallied at all, and while the discounted prices and lowered margins from the discount channel might show up on that P&L, the fact that you lost sales of your newer "full-price" products because customers bought the older cheaper older model don't. If you reward your sourcing managers for getting the lowest cost from the factory, and then reward factory store managers for being "profitable" selling discounted products, you've set up a perverse system of rewards that hurts your overall productivity.
When JIT will really work at the consumer facing part of the supply chain is when they can get the product "while they wait" (print-on-demand books) or within 2 days - before they've had too much time to consider canceling their order.
I suspect a significant part of this decision comes from supply chain considerations. Consider that the US is still one of the largest markets for the electronic gadgets they make. If they ship their products on the ocean from China to the US, it will probably take 4 to 5 weeks to arrive in the US warehouses. Even if they go by air, it may take up to 14 days by the time it clears customs.
Now think about the volatile nature of the markets for these products - they are difficult to forecast accurately, and small things can cause large swings in demand... rushes on product that empty store shelves, or a popular review that points out some flaw in the product. Plus these products have a relatively short "shelf life" of being "hot". As an example, the Nexus 32 GB came out 6 months after the Nexus 8GB.
4 weeks of slack in your supply chain represents 4 weeks of tied up capital that is not doing anything but costing money. Additionally, it makes you 4 weeks further from being able to respond to changes in the market. Let's say your product has a fatal (in terms of the market... you have to hold it "just so" to get reception) flaw and sales tank sortly after launch. You already have 4 weeks of product sitting on the water. On the other hand, let's say the product takes off far more than forecasted. Store shelves are empty and it's going to be 4 weeks before you can stock them up again.
At the other end of it, because your supply chain is less responsive to the market changes, you have a greater risk of having more obsolete product at the end of its lifecycle. You can destroy it and write off the costs, or you can try to liquidate to make more revenue - but then you have old products competing against your new ones.
You can mitigate some of these issues by moving some of your manufacturing capacity to "near shore" or "on shore" with respect to the market you're selling in. You can still use "cheaper" Chinese production to manufacture some large percentage of your product line at cheaper cost, then use the nearby manufacturing to be able to quickly respond to market changes.
For a car analogy, 1 mile of train takes a long time to start and stop, but carries weight efficiently. 1 mile of trucks can start and stop much more quickly, but at greater cost. A combination of both probably gives you an optimal transportation mix - minimizing cost balanced with maximizing responsiveness.
This isn't something I'm too worried about because Google doesn't have a natural monopoly. The old carriers had exclusive ownership/rights to the lines you connected to. If you wanted a phone, it had to connect to their line - and for a while, it had to be their phone that you rented.
With these Google devices, there's a lot of diversity in the marketplace and if a consumer doesn't like what Google does, they can buy from one of their competitors.
The one thing I like about this development is that it may start to re-establish the idea that the devices belong to the consumers and the network providers are just providing pipes and connections.
Correction - I have the AO756 (Intel version, where the 725 seems to be AMD)...
All that said, I'm looking forward to getting the Nexus 7 as another option in my portable computing. I might consider a chrome book as long as it was easy to put some other OS on it (which appears to be the case).
I also have one of the AO725 with Linux (Mint) and for the most part, I love the thing. It's the perfect portable little computer for taking to work and school since I started bike-commuting this year.
I have one question, though... have you tried to use a plug-in headset with it (like with Skype)? I've had no luck getting the internal mic to switch to the mic input of the "combo jack". I finally got a little USB dongle that provide a separate headphone and mic output and that works. But I'd love to be able to use the built-in connection without using up a usb port.
That, and the SD Card slot doesn't seem to be supported yet in any of the Linux variants I've tried.
One great improvement was to replace the harddisk with an SSD - it's much faster now.
I'm in a partial management role. I suck at it. I've bought books on the topic and I'm trying to learn from my mistakes. But as much as I enjoy teaching other developers and learning from them - and I genuinely do - I like designing and writing code more.
Managing people is one of those areas where books can be somewhat helpful, but what I highly recommend is seeking out a mentor. Hopefully you can find one within your organization, but even outside is good too. Find someone who leads/manages in the way you want to and see if they can coach and help you along. If you find a good mentor, they will be able to help you figure out what makes you suck at it and then figure out ways to fix/work-around those issues.
Depending on your company, your HR department may also have manager training programs to help train you in some of the basics of how your company likes its managers to work. That might help, but I think a personal mentor you can take problems to and get personal advice from is invaluable. Plus, this mentor/mentee relationship can help build your networking opportunities. As you try to improve in your current role, your mentor may have visibility to other roles that may suit you better.
You're right. I meant to write Celeron... that it didn't have the Atom processor but the Celeron, which is actually capable enough to run Virtualbox. I was especially surprised that Virtualbox shows it as having the vt-d extensions.
I work like this as well. I'm biking to work and school and need a lightweight computer that will do the basic things I need while I'm not at home. I want something light and cheap so that if it gets broken or stolen, I'm not going to be terribly upset. So for that, a $300 Acer Netbook fills the bill quite nicely. With a Centrino processor, it's actually able run a virtual session with Virtualbox adequately.
For my home computer, I want something with more power and don't mind it being larger. I still got a laptop for this work, but even having an i7 processor, it was under $800. It spends most of its time plugged into my 25" monitor, but it's still portable that if I need to take it somewhere to do more serious work, I can.
I just have trouble imagining taking a $1200 (or even $800) computer and leaving it on a desk at the library or in a classroom while I go to the bathroom (even with a security cable), yet I don't really want to tear-down what I'm doing and carry it into the bathroom either.
But then again, I use my computers for getting things done and I don't really see them as a fashion accessory.
There's two problems with this. If something requires a lot of up-front investment to invent for the first time, then who will have an incentive to make this investment when someone else can take their finished product, reverse engineer it? They can then sell it at a lower price because they don't have to recoup the costs of the initial inventing process?
Plus, unless you have complete vertical integration of your supply chain, there's no such thing as a trade secret. Patents are the only thing that protects the inventor when they try to go into production. Let's say you invent some cool widget but don't own your own manufacturing facility to produce it. So you go to a factory and pay them to make your widgets. Oops... they have a "production problem" and your product will be delayed. In the mean time, taking your plans, they run their own production and get their own version out into the marketplace before they even ship your product. What do you do then?
I'm not saying the patent system is even close to perfect but it exists for a reason - to protect inventors so they are economically safe to invent things. Just ask Robert Kearns: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kearns.
That is indeed the book. Oddly enough, the teacher who last taught the course used the newer book you mention, so I got it earlier this summer when I saw it cheap on Amazon. I assumed the teacher this fall would use the same book. I don't mind having the newer book... again another gamble - maybe I should have taken the game theory class I dropped last spring term.
For this term, looking at the syllabus he's put out, I don't think there will be an urgent need for the older book in the first couple weeks.
As for AI itself, I'm fascinated by the subject and am diving in. I'm starting a 2nd masters degree in Systems Science and intend to make a big part of my work related to AI, Machine Learning, and applying those methods to supply chain decision making (I'm a supply chain analyst in my professional work). I've been working through Andrew Ng's ML class on Coursera and have been having fun with it so far.
Gone are the days of waiting 6 weeks in a 12 week course for the textbook you ordered from amazon.
It's not as great as you say... yet. My AI class starts next week and we only found out yesterday what the book would be. Amazon has the book for quite a bit cheaper than the school bookstore, but says, "this title usually ships in 2 to 3 weeks".... "usually"? Even all the used sellers say it will take a 2 or more weeks to ship; and this for a book published in 2005. I'm taking the gamble with Amazon, but mostly because I found a website that summarizes the contents of the book.
True, but fixing the screen is a "fixed cost" on a computer. The SSD has whatever work I've done and data I've generated since I last backed it up - and who knows how much that is worth at any given time. Even if the screen is toast, I can take the drive out and get my data off it.
As someone who's had hard drives crash, but never lost a screen, I see it as a form of insurance for my work. Plus there's the other benefits of speed and lower power consumption.
Indeed - I did the same thing. I recently started bike-commuting to work and school so I got a netbook for my mobile commuting needs. The netbook worked fine, even using Virtualbox to run a virtualized windows instance I need for work.
I was worried about a drive failure with all the riding around and possibly getting dropped in class so decided to install an SSD. I also wanted longer battery life.
So far, so good. The battery lasts about 20% longer and it is so much faster! It boots in a fraction of the time and extended read/writes take about 1/5th the time. I used dd with 4 GB reads and writes to test the difference.
The downside, of course, is that the drive is much smaller than the one that came with it. But I have a NAS at home, so I can easily keep just what I need for my current work on the netbook. I've started using unify to keep the folders in sync.
Slashdot Mirror
then why doesn't anyone backtrack that thinking to the keyboards?
Simply because they don't have to see through their keyboards.
it's never made sense to me why they would try to sell me copies of songs/albums that I already own
Probably because they know the hard truth that most people don't actually own (as in, have paid for) the mp3s they have in their libraries. As they get older, they might want and be willing to pay for the whole album (or better quality copies). And if the store works at all in a decent way, it will have a good recommender system for "stuff you might like".
They are non-measurable because you can't put a specific value on them. At best, you can put a range of possible values depending on what happens.
The value of a stable food supply can only be measured when it's needed and not present. When you have a famine, it's easy to measure the cost in lives that not having that food supply incurs. When you have plenty of food and no emergencies, then on the books, it appears to be a cost with no benefit.
The fire extinguisher cost me $20. But if I never have a fire, then it's a "loss". I can only truly measure its value when I do have a fire and can measure the true value of what was saved by having it, or what was lost by not having it.
From a risk management point of view, it's probably worth the extra cost of building a flexible food supply system because the potential costs of not having it when we need it is very high. But until we have that famine, it only shows up as a cost.
I can run Octave on my Nexus 7 with this app:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.octave&hl=en
Though you'll want to install "Hacker's Keyboard" if you want to effective with it:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.pocketworkstation.pckeyboard&hl=en
It's a lot better for any kind of technical typing than the stock keyboard.
My only real DB experience is with MS SQL, and I've used it for several years now. I'd love to learn to use PG, but since most of my work is writing stored procedures and such, I really like having an IDE of some kind. Can you recommend a good equivalent to MS SQL's Management Studio? Something that provides a way to browse the structure, and when writing code/queries, provides auto-complete and syntax highlighting, etc?
No one said he was smart. Assault of a police officer takes real brains...
Actually, it doesn't take much to be charged with assault of a police officer. Say you're being arrested and they twirl you around to put the cuffs on you and you stumble into one of them. You've now committed assault if the officer feels like charging you with it.
Want to take it to court? It will be you, a scumbag defendant, vs. that upstanding officer and defender of the public in his sharp uniform, with a jury that's been purged of anyone capable of critical thought.
The "About" tabs of most websites often have this kind of information. This one here seems to describe its purpose pretty well: http://www.linuxmint.com/about.php
Wikipedia says:
"Linux Mint is a computer operating system based on the Linux distribution Ubuntu. Linux Mint adds many features that baseline Ubuntu does not have, one of which is providing a more complete out of the box experience by including proprietary and patented software[1] including Java and the Adobe Flash web browser plugin, which are features that are needed to play certain online games, watch YouTube, and certain applications..."
Here you go... all you might want to know and more:
http://linuxmint.com/
Not much need to copy and paste stuff about the distro when you can just follow the link there and read all about its philsophy, advantages, etc.
Cheers.
Boss: Let's see, you shipped our high-end mice with drivers that can't be activated without an internet connection and now all I see on the internet is outrage that our mice are defective because they require the internet to work.
Boss: You're fired.
I wish our industry worked like that. You're either spectacularly good at forecasting or really lucky.
We are heading toward just in time manufacturing. Where you it won't be built until you order it.
You're right. JIT's an ideal for supply chain efficiency, but the problem is that many purchases are impulse buys. The customer goes into a store to buy toilet paper and suddenly decides to buy the tablet computer they've been thinking about.
Plus, you can't do direct-to-the-consumer sales from China. Consumers have been made accustomed to getting the product they want right when the want it, which often means "now". When I finally decided to buy a tablet, I waited for the 32GB Nexus, then scoured around and finally bought from the company who could get it in my hands the fastest (turned out to be Staples). If I had to wait 2 weeks for it to come from China, I might just decide to cancel the order and wait for the next version - "I really don't NEED it". And that's the last thing you want your customers thinking.
JIT's great for efficiency, especially for commodity products that have a steady demand flow, but it's not very great for resilience/robustness of supply chains, particularly for products that have short lifecycles and "spikey" demand.
The hard part is getting organizations to consider the overall lifecycle costs of a product rather than looking only at the margin from the factory or landed cost. Sure, China will make and ship my widget for 50% of the cost of doing it locally, and that's what goes on the balance sheet of the P&L of part of the org that has the sourcing managers. But the 20% of lost sales due to an inability to meet demand doesn't get tallied at all, and while the discounted prices and lowered margins from the discount channel might show up on that P&L, the fact that you lost sales of your newer "full-price" products because customers bought the older cheaper older model don't. If you reward your sourcing managers for getting the lowest cost from the factory, and then reward factory store managers for being "profitable" selling discounted products, you've set up a perverse system of rewards that hurts your overall productivity.
When JIT will really work at the consumer facing part of the supply chain is when they can get the product "while they wait" (print-on-demand books) or within 2 days - before they've had too much time to consider canceling their order.
I suspect a significant part of this decision comes from supply chain considerations. Consider that the US is still one of the largest markets for the electronic gadgets they make. If they ship their products on the ocean from China to the US, it will probably take 4 to 5 weeks to arrive in the US warehouses. Even if they go by air, it may take up to 14 days by the time it clears customs.
Now think about the volatile nature of the markets for these products - they are difficult to forecast accurately, and small things can cause large swings in demand... rushes on product that empty store shelves, or a popular review that points out some flaw in the product. Plus these products have a relatively short "shelf life" of being "hot". As an example, the Nexus 32 GB came out 6 months after the Nexus 8GB.
4 weeks of slack in your supply chain represents 4 weeks of tied up capital that is not doing anything but costing money. Additionally, it makes you 4 weeks further from being able to respond to changes in the market. Let's say your product has a fatal (in terms of the market... you have to hold it "just so" to get reception) flaw and sales tank sortly after launch. You already have 4 weeks of product sitting on the water. On the other hand, let's say the product takes off far more than forecasted. Store shelves are empty and it's going to be 4 weeks before you can stock them up again.
At the other end of it, because your supply chain is less responsive to the market changes, you have a greater risk of having more obsolete product at the end of its lifecycle. You can destroy it and write off the costs, or you can try to liquidate to make more revenue - but then you have old products competing against your new ones.
You can mitigate some of these issues by moving some of your manufacturing capacity to "near shore" or "on shore" with respect to the market you're selling in. You can still use "cheaper" Chinese production to manufacture some large percentage of your product line at cheaper cost, then use the nearby manufacturing to be able to quickly respond to market changes.
For a car analogy, 1 mile of train takes a long time to start and stop, but carries weight efficiently. 1 mile of trucks can start and stop much more quickly, but at greater cost. A combination of both probably gives you an optimal transportation mix - minimizing cost balanced with maximizing responsiveness.
This isn't something I'm too worried about because Google doesn't have a natural monopoly. The old carriers had exclusive ownership/rights to the lines you connected to. If you wanted a phone, it had to connect to their line - and for a while, it had to be their phone that you rented.
With these Google devices, there's a lot of diversity in the marketplace and if a consumer doesn't like what Google does, they can buy from one of their competitors.
The one thing I like about this development is that it may start to re-establish the idea that the devices belong to the consumers and the network providers are just providing pipes and connections.
Correction - I have the AO756 (Intel version, where the 725 seems to be AMD)...
All that said, I'm looking forward to getting the Nexus 7 as another option in my portable computing. I might consider a chrome book as long as it was easy to put some other OS on it (which appears to be the case).
I also have one of the AO725 with Linux (Mint) and for the most part, I love the thing. It's the perfect portable little computer for taking to work and school since I started bike-commuting this year.
I have one question, though... have you tried to use a plug-in headset with it (like with Skype)? I've had no luck getting the internal mic to switch to the mic input of the "combo jack". I finally got a little USB dongle that provide a separate headphone and mic output and that works. But I'd love to be able to use the built-in connection without using up a usb port.
That, and the SD Card slot doesn't seem to be supported yet in any of the Linux variants I've tried.
One great improvement was to replace the harddisk with an SSD - it's much faster now.
I'm in a partial management role. I suck at it. I've bought books on the topic and I'm trying to learn from my mistakes. But as much as I enjoy teaching other developers and learning from them - and I genuinely do - I like designing and writing code more.
Managing people is one of those areas where books can be somewhat helpful, but what I highly recommend is seeking out a mentor. Hopefully you can find one within your organization, but even outside is good too. Find someone who leads/manages in the way you want to and see if they can coach and help you along. If you find a good mentor, they will be able to help you figure out what makes you suck at it and then figure out ways to fix/work-around those issues.
Depending on your company, your HR department may also have manager training programs to help train you in some of the basics of how your company likes its managers to work. That might help, but I think a personal mentor you can take problems to and get personal advice from is invaluable. Plus, this mentor/mentee relationship can help build your networking opportunities. As you try to improve in your current role, your mentor may have visibility to other roles that may suit you better.
You're right. I meant to write Celeron... that it didn't have the Atom processor but the Celeron, which is actually capable enough to run Virtualbox. I was especially surprised that Virtualbox shows it as having the vt-d extensions.
I work like this as well. I'm biking to work and school and need a lightweight computer that will do the basic things I need while I'm not at home. I want something light and cheap so that if it gets broken or stolen, I'm not going to be terribly upset. So for that, a $300 Acer Netbook fills the bill quite nicely. With a Centrino processor, it's actually able run a virtual session with Virtualbox adequately.
For my home computer, I want something with more power and don't mind it being larger. I still got a laptop for this work, but even having an i7 processor, it was under $800. It spends most of its time plugged into my 25" monitor, but it's still portable that if I need to take it somewhere to do more serious work, I can.
I just have trouble imagining taking a $1200 (or even $800) computer and leaving it on a desk at the library or in a classroom while I go to the bathroom (even with a security cable), yet I don't really want to tear-down what I'm doing and carry it into the bathroom either.
But then again, I use my computers for getting things done and I don't really see them as a fashion accessory.
There's two problems with this. If something requires a lot of up-front investment to invent for the first time, then who will have an incentive to make this investment when someone else can take their finished product, reverse engineer it? They can then sell it at a lower price because they don't have to recoup the costs of the initial inventing process?
Plus, unless you have complete vertical integration of your supply chain, there's no such thing as a trade secret. Patents are the only thing that protects the inventor when they try to go into production. Let's say you invent some cool widget but don't own your own manufacturing facility to produce it. So you go to a factory and pay them to make your widgets. Oops... they have a "production problem" and your product will be delayed. In the mean time, taking your plans, they run their own production and get their own version out into the marketplace before they even ship your product. What do you do then?
I'm not saying the patent system is even close to perfect but it exists for a reason - to protect inventors so they are economically safe to invent things. Just ask Robert Kearns:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kearns.
That is indeed the book. Oddly enough, the teacher who last taught the course used the newer book you mention, so I got it earlier this summer when I saw it cheap on Amazon. I assumed the teacher this fall would use the same book. I don't mind having the newer book... again another gamble - maybe I should have taken the game theory class I dropped last spring term.
For this term, looking at the syllabus he's put out, I don't think there will be an urgent need for the older book in the first couple weeks.
As for AI itself, I'm fascinated by the subject and am diving in. I'm starting a 2nd masters degree in Systems Science and intend to make a big part of my work related to AI, Machine Learning, and applying those methods to supply chain decision making (I'm a supply chain analyst in my professional work). I've been working through Andrew Ng's ML class on Coursera and have been having fun with it so far.
Gone are the days of waiting 6 weeks in a 12 week course for the textbook you ordered from amazon.
It's not as great as you say... yet. My AI class starts next week and we only found out yesterday what the book would be. Amazon has the book for quite a bit cheaper than the school bookstore, but says, "this title usually ships in 2 to 3 weeks".... "usually"? Even all the used sellers say it will take a 2 or more weeks to ship; and this for a book published in 2005. I'm taking the gamble with Amazon, but mostly because I found a website that summarizes the contents of the book.
Because they've oversold their network capacity and would be in real trouble if everyone actually used as much data and bandwidth as they paid for.
That's a good call-out. But in my specific case, I replaced the harddrive myself with an SSD, so I know that at least that much is user-serviceable.
And even with a sealed device, if you need the harddrive out of it, I'm sure it can be broken apart.
True, but fixing the screen is a "fixed cost" on a computer. The SSD has whatever work I've done and data I've generated since I last backed it up - and who knows how much that is worth at any given time. Even if the screen is toast, I can take the drive out and get my data off it.
As someone who's had hard drives crash, but never lost a screen, I see it as a form of insurance for my work. Plus there's the other benefits of speed and lower power consumption.
Indeed - I did the same thing. I recently started bike-commuting to work and school so I got a netbook for my mobile commuting needs. The netbook worked fine, even using Virtualbox to run a virtualized windows instance I need for work.
I was worried about a drive failure with all the riding around and possibly getting dropped in class so decided to install an SSD. I also wanted longer battery life.
So far, so good. The battery lasts about 20% longer and it is so much faster! It boots in a fraction of the time and extended read/writes take about 1/5th the time. I used dd with 4 GB reads and writes to test the difference.
The downside, of course, is that the drive is much smaller than the one that came with it. But I have a NAS at home, so I can easily keep just what I need for my current work on the netbook. I've started using unify to keep the folders in sync.