Well you're really asking about 2 different career routes. Generally speaking, when you get to a certain level, "web developer" and "web server admin" are often not the same job. Is there one that you like much more than the other?
If you want to be a web developer, as other people have said, put together a portfolio. If you don't have enough sites that you've done to put together a portfolio, then offer your services for free/cheap to some people and build one up. Find some local businesses or musicians or... really anyone. Make their website. Make it awesome. Don't ask for a lot of pay. Not only will this let you build a portfolio, but it might also build up some word-of-mouth to get you additional jobs. Be ready to freelance for a while until you can some up with something steady. A steady job may come later, or you may find that freelancing suits you fine.
If the problem with your old work is that it's no longer accessible, then try asking your clients if it's ok to use their site in your portfolio, and keep screenshots and even functional copies of their websites on your own server. One way or another, you need to show people what you can do.
If you want to get into IT support and system administration, then expect to start at the bottom. Take whatever job you can. Keep in mind from the outset that doing professional level support is more complicated than setting up your own LAMP server. You may have to learn a lot about things like customer support, documentation, change management, and working within arbitrary constraints set by someone else. Real support jobs can be very different from tinkering/hobby system administration, so don't go in expecting that you know everything. On the other hand, most IT people are pretty incompetent, so don't feel too frightened either.
Metrics are one of those things that sometimes set me off. The main problem is, you have to know what you're measuring. You're measuring number of lines produced per hour? That's fine. But do you know what you're measuring? You're measuring the number of lines produced per hour. You aren't measuring the quality of the code or the productivity of the programmer. The number of lines that a programmer produced may have some relation to the programmer's overall productivity, or it may not, so you are *not* measuring overall productivity with that metric.
Same goes for other metrics. Know what you're measuring. Don't rely too much on a metric to give you a value for something that it doesn't measure.
Well I can't really say for sure whether your IT department has valid security concerns, if they're responding to some corporate policy, or if they're just being unreasonable. It could be anything.
In general, the worst people to support are the people who know a little bit and think they know a lot. Most developers fit into this category. They're very demanding, not very understanding, and they won't listen to you because they're sure they know better.
And I'm not saying that developers are stupid, or anything like that. It's just that they generally don't realize that providing IT support is different from their job, and further that IT support is something they don't know very well. It's a different skill and a different knowledge base. Even more to the point, it's a different approach, a different perspective. They tend to be very patronizing instead, acting as though they know how to do your job but you could never do theirs. They tinker with their own systems, break them, and then act indignant about the fact that their systems are broken. Everything is your fault, nothing is theirs.
Of course, I'm generalizing, but it has been the trend from my own anecdotal evidence. And developers are harder to support than most people who "know a little and think they know a lot", mostly because they often have legitimate reasons why they need higher privileges than normal users.
In my experience, doing IT support is inherently a thankless job. Lots of people who do it are bad at their jobs, but the people receiving the support are rarely in a position to evaluate the competency of their support personnel, which makes things difficult. Even if you've done a really good job, the person you're supporting might not think so. If you're doing a crappy job, they might not know that either.
And a big part of the problem is that, by the nature of the job, if someone is calling you, they're probably already frustrated. They're trying to do something and their computer broke. They've probably already made a few attempts to fix things themselves. Often enough, they've put off asking for help for a little while already, and they're only contacting you now because the problem has hit the point of crisis. So now, then they're completely frustrated and pissed off, they call you, and they're looking for someone to be angry at. Guess what? That someone is you.
And often enough, you have to tell people that they can't have what they want. It's part of the job. Some employee wants Microsoft Publisher installed, but their boss has said not to buy them a license. "I have a disc. Can't you just install it? My son downloaded it for my home computer, so why can't you do that? If my son can do it, surely you can figure it out?!" Nope. Sorry, I'm not allowed to pirate. I'm not allowed to give you access to this file or that file without some manager's approval. I can't just buy you a new computer-- not unless your boss has budgeted for it.
The job requires dealing with people when they're at the end of the rope, and even then telling them "no". They're not going to like you most of the time. But they need you, and if you do a good job, they'll like you more than the alternative. It's what you need to settle for.
There's some truth to this, except at as an IT support person with a fair amount of experience, I'd like to raise 2 points:
First, often enough the draconian restrictions are forced on us by upper management. Like... I might not care at all whether you're looking at Facebook at work, but if upper management says we need to filter the web usage to block Facebook, I'll do it. I might even let them know that I don't agree with the policy, but if they overrule me and tell me to implement the filter, I will. It's my job, after all.
Second, I have to comment on your statement, "This is especially true in software shops, where everyone tends to be fairly technically literate..." Honestly, software developers and the "fairly technically literate" are some of the worst people to support. They'll constantly break their own computers and make work for the help desk staff.
Seriously. Sorry, I know there are a lot of programmers on Slashdot and you think you know everything there is about computers, but most software developers I've known, no matter how brilliant, don't understand how to do IT support. They don't know how to make a stable system. They're one step away from the guy who wants admin access to his own machine because he upgraded his own video card once and he "knows what he's doing".
Now depending on the situation, it may still be a good idea to give developers some more leeway, but only because they need it. It can be a necessary evil, but be sure to have an "software developer" image ready, because they *will* trash their computers and expect you to fix it immediately.
I don't mean to make flamebait, but it needs to be said.
With even really cheap monitors these days, the analog sync is exceptionally good compared to what it was. Almost all crappiness can be fixed by pressing the auto-adjust button.
Not true. I don't know where the problem creeps in, but I can usually see the difference between VGA and HDMI, and there's no sufficient method to fix the VGA signal. It might be interference on the VGA line, a problem with the video card, or a problem with the monitor's processing of the signal, but in my experience, it's universally a problem. You can see the VGA picture flickering and shifting, and the colors are wrong unless you put some real effort into calibrating it.
Now, I've talked to other people who say that they can't see the difference, so there might be some people who can see it and some who can't. I've been on the other end of something like that-- I've worked with audio engineers who can hear compression artifacts in audio that I honestly can't hear.
But no, VGA is generally an unacceptable solution, and I don't see any reason to be pushing an analog signal these days. If you don't see it, then I suspect you're not as much of a pixel nazi as you think.
It's not any worse than Dell's other lines. I had the same poor experience with their precision line (hardware being different among computers of the same model purchased only months apart). Not that these machines are bad for what they are, but a "consistent hardware platform with a known lifecycle" it ain't.
It doesn't seem like *that much* of a stretch to me. My reaction to this Dell story is less extreme than some of you-- I don't think it's intentional fraud. I think it's probably the marketing department themselves not understanding the relevance of a good video card. However, it's still extremely misleading, and companies do stuff like this all the time because there's effectively no consequences. No one is holding them accountable.
Now, I don't know what you would realistically want to do about it. I'm not sure I want a roaming government agency that's browsing ads looking for anything remotely misleading. However, it'd be nice to think there was someone somewhere that you could submit this Dell thing to and trust that someone with authority would tell their marketing department, "Hey, you can't do that. Take that down."
I'm all for making real improvements, and I'm sure that logging could be improved in various ways. However, when I'm looking at logs, it's generally because something is broken and I want to find information on how to fix it quickly and easily. Storing something in straight text makes it extremely accessible. It's not just about using grep, which many people are accustomed to, but also because text viewers are simple. If your computer can't run programs like cat, tail, or nano, then you've got big problems. However, even if you can't run those programs for some reason, you can copy a text file to another system-- any other system-- and read it without any special software or encryption keys.
If you want to make another logging system that also tracks security-related information in a way that's easy to audit, I suppose that's worthwhile. However, if you want even basic diagnostic information to be stored in something other than plain-text, then you'd better have a simple, robust, cross-platform method of reading that data. After all, worrying about hackers is a bit of a fringe case. Most of the time, problems are caused by misconfiguration, software bugs, or bad hardware.
In reality, it doesn't work out very well in most situations. Or rather, here's the problem: it's essentially a good way of creating guidelines, but not a good way to actually accomplish things. In another way of saying it, it's a good way of figuring out how to set up your widget factory, but as soon as you start actually making widgets, you're going to have to constantly keep on top of things and make adjustments, or your widget factory is going to do a crappy job of producing widgets.
Don't underestimate the complexity of running a widget factory. Even if the widgets themselves aren't complicated, you're dealing with business practices being carried out by imperfect people. Two people following the same procedure will come up with different results, and metrics don't measure everything.
Do you think you're arguing with me? My original point is that this is a cultural/societal problem of over-valuing procedures and metrics. We should also value judgment/wisdom in decision-making and in performance evaluations. Instead we insist that the only things of value are those which are easy to measure.
Yeah, that's my point. As a manager, it's your job to learn about the people who work for you, to help them understand what they should be working on, to help motivate them, to judge their strengths and weaknesses, and to coordinate/arrange things so that their weaknesses don't keep them from doing their job well. Then you have to weed out people who aren't going to do a good job, and meanwhile reward, foster, and develop the employees who have potential and do good work.
That's a lot of work, but that's the work that a manager is supposed to be doing. Too often they shirk that work and instead treat their employees like "gears in a box". Sometimes it's laziness, but a big part of the problem is that our society/culture doesn't recognize the work/judgement of a good manager as valuable. We instead expect people to be interchangeable, which is a problem.
Yeah, I've come to realize that nobody understands what a manager is supposed to do anymore. Most people's concept is that managers exist to play the part of the PHB, but they don't do anything useful.
More and more, I think no one even understands the value of having a knowledgeable person make difficult decisions based on well thought-out judgments. People want procedures that they can just give to anyone and assume that the outcome will be the same, and then they want metrics that they can use to measure the outcome without knowing anything about the situation.
The proper role of a manager-- aside from particular responsibilities he/she might have on top of this-- is to understand the people working for him and understand his unit's role in the greater context of the company, and then to eliminate obstacles that prevent the people working for him from performing their roles. This might mean protecting the people that work for you from upper management, it might mean recognizing and rewarding good performance, or it might mean all sorts of other things. But to do it right, it takes a lot of work and it takes good judgment.
It doesn't say anything about turning a public park (privately owned I know) into an encampment for the convenience of the protesters.
Why can't they protest, then go home and come back the following day. Convenient, no, but that's the price of admission.
The park was open 24 hours a day, so there's no reason why they should have to leave unless they were doing something there that they weren't allowed to do.
As far as I know, they didn't prevent other citizens from accessing the park. Unfortunately, the coordination between cities to shut down the protests show that it wasn't a response to any particular thing they were doing, but a response to the movement itself. It's not like NYC said, "Oh, the conditions here are bad and we need to clean it up!" They said, "We don't like what these people are saying, and we don't like that they're getting attention for saying it. We need to organize against them." And *that* is why this is an attack on the first amendment. They're saying, "You can't have your public protest, wherever you have it and whatever the conditions are, because we don't like your message."
I also find it highly ironic that some of the protesters relying on the 1st amendment to enable their protest, also take offense
to the very same freedom of the press that amendment enables.
Could you elaborate? Were the protesters saying that the press should not legally be allowed to cover their event?
Yeah, I find the most effective note-taking method for me is to write it all down with pen/paper during the class/lecture/meeting, and then afterwards immediately transcribe everything to a digital form. Pen and paper allows me the freedom to draw webs/graphs/pictures, draw big arrows connecting things, underline/circle important ideas, etc. It's all very quick and natural. Then having it later in digital form makes it easier to look up and read later.
But more importantly, the act of transcribing gives me an opportunity to review the notes, synthesize ideas, erase some of my stupid notes, and summarize things more intelligently. In short, the act of transcribing helps me remember later, and it also gives me the opportunity to improve my notes before storing them.
It depends on what "specs" he wanted. Is it the cheapest Core i5 laptop with 4GB of RAM? I'm sure it's not, but that's a fairly limited way of viewing things.
Yes, there's the issue of build quality. There's also size/weight, the resolution and quality of the screen, whether the computer has SSD, built-in camera/mic, battery life, and probably other features that aren't leaping to mind. If you spec out a system from other manufacturers with comparable hardware and features, I'm sure Apple is at least competitive. Hell, if you're looking at Macbook Airs, there are hardly any laptops in the same class.
The only problem with what you're saying is, it's really being marketed as a e-reader and media-consumption device. If it does a good job at those things for less than half the price of an iPad, then they might have a working combination. However, I don't think that most people will spend $200 *just* for a mobile web browser. I could be wrong.
To some extent, there isn't much of a reason to have a fast connection until there are services that exploit it. But then, who's going to develop services that exploit fast connections when most people don't have them?
I'm not so much talking about "missing features" as "crashes, corrupts profiles, loses emails." It's not nearly as bad as Entourage, and if you're trying to connect to an Exchange server on the Mac, I'd definitely recommend it. However, it isn't remotely as stable and trouble-free as Outlook 2010 on Windows.
(I'm talking from experience of supporting dozens of Exchange servers and hundreds of Outlook clients.)
Microsoft discontinued Outlook in 2001, I believe, which was for OS9. They only released a version for OSX this year (Outlook 2011). Perhaps you've been using Entourage? Entourage is even crappier and more unstable than Outlook 2011, but Outlook 2011 isn't remotely as good as Outlook 2010 for Windows.
There are a number of things, but honestly Outlook is one of the big common reasons to stick with Windows. Microsoft is finally selling Outlook for Mac, but it's still kind of crappy and unstable in comparison. For businesses, the Exchange/Outlook combination is often pretty vital. Last time I used Evolution, it wasn't as good, and don't even think about recommending Thunderbird.
Otherwise, what personally keeps me on Windows is the fact that I work in IT and I'm supporting mostly Windows clients. I often test/troubleshoot my client's applications on my own computer, so I need Windows. Why are my clients on Windows? Well, there's often some random application that they need that's Windows-only, but most often the answer is "Outlook".
Slashdot Mirror
Well you're really asking about 2 different career routes. Generally speaking, when you get to a certain level, "web developer" and "web server admin" are often not the same job. Is there one that you like much more than the other?
If you want to be a web developer, as other people have said, put together a portfolio. If you don't have enough sites that you've done to put together a portfolio, then offer your services for free/cheap to some people and build one up. Find some local businesses or musicians or... really anyone. Make their website. Make it awesome. Don't ask for a lot of pay. Not only will this let you build a portfolio, but it might also build up some word-of-mouth to get you additional jobs. Be ready to freelance for a while until you can some up with something steady. A steady job may come later, or you may find that freelancing suits you fine.
If the problem with your old work is that it's no longer accessible, then try asking your clients if it's ok to use their site in your portfolio, and keep screenshots and even functional copies of their websites on your own server. One way or another, you need to show people what you can do.
If you want to get into IT support and system administration, then expect to start at the bottom. Take whatever job you can. Keep in mind from the outset that doing professional level support is more complicated than setting up your own LAMP server. You may have to learn a lot about things like customer support, documentation, change management, and working within arbitrary constraints set by someone else. Real support jobs can be very different from tinkering/hobby system administration, so don't go in expecting that you know everything. On the other hand, most IT people are pretty incompetent, so don't feel too frightened either.
Metrics are one of those things that sometimes set me off. The main problem is, you have to know what you're measuring. You're measuring number of lines produced per hour? That's fine. But do you know what you're measuring? You're measuring the number of lines produced per hour. You aren't measuring the quality of the code or the productivity of the programmer. The number of lines that a programmer produced may have some relation to the programmer's overall productivity, or it may not, so you are *not* measuring overall productivity with that metric.
Same goes for other metrics. Know what you're measuring. Don't rely too much on a metric to give you a value for something that it doesn't measure.
Well I can't really say for sure whether your IT department has valid security concerns, if they're responding to some corporate policy, or if they're just being unreasonable. It could be anything.
In general, the worst people to support are the people who know a little bit and think they know a lot. Most developers fit into this category. They're very demanding, not very understanding, and they won't listen to you because they're sure they know better.
And I'm not saying that developers are stupid, or anything like that. It's just that they generally don't realize that providing IT support is different from their job, and further that IT support is something they don't know very well. It's a different skill and a different knowledge base. Even more to the point, it's a different approach, a different perspective. They tend to be very patronizing instead, acting as though they know how to do your job but you could never do theirs. They tinker with their own systems, break them, and then act indignant about the fact that their systems are broken. Everything is your fault, nothing is theirs.
Of course, I'm generalizing, but it has been the trend from my own anecdotal evidence. And developers are harder to support than most people who "know a little and think they know a lot", mostly because they often have legitimate reasons why they need higher privileges than normal users.
In my experience, doing IT support is inherently a thankless job. Lots of people who do it are bad at their jobs, but the people receiving the support are rarely in a position to evaluate the competency of their support personnel, which makes things difficult. Even if you've done a really good job, the person you're supporting might not think so. If you're doing a crappy job, they might not know that either.
And a big part of the problem is that, by the nature of the job, if someone is calling you, they're probably already frustrated. They're trying to do something and their computer broke. They've probably already made a few attempts to fix things themselves. Often enough, they've put off asking for help for a little while already, and they're only contacting you now because the problem has hit the point of crisis. So now, then they're completely frustrated and pissed off, they call you, and they're looking for someone to be angry at. Guess what? That someone is you.
And often enough, you have to tell people that they can't have what they want. It's part of the job. Some employee wants Microsoft Publisher installed, but their boss has said not to buy them a license. "I have a disc. Can't you just install it? My son downloaded it for my home computer, so why can't you do that? If my son can do it, surely you can figure it out?!" Nope. Sorry, I'm not allowed to pirate. I'm not allowed to give you access to this file or that file without some manager's approval. I can't just buy you a new computer-- not unless your boss has budgeted for it.
The job requires dealing with people when they're at the end of the rope, and even then telling them "no". They're not going to like you most of the time. But they need you, and if you do a good job, they'll like you more than the alternative. It's what you need to settle for.
There's some truth to this, except at as an IT support person with a fair amount of experience, I'd like to raise 2 points:
First, often enough the draconian restrictions are forced on us by upper management. Like... I might not care at all whether you're looking at Facebook at work, but if upper management says we need to filter the web usage to block Facebook, I'll do it. I might even let them know that I don't agree with the policy, but if they overrule me and tell me to implement the filter, I will. It's my job, after all.
Second, I have to comment on your statement, "This is especially true in software shops, where everyone tends to be fairly technically literate..." Honestly, software developers and the "fairly technically literate" are some of the worst people to support. They'll constantly break their own computers and make work for the help desk staff.
Seriously. Sorry, I know there are a lot of programmers on Slashdot and you think you know everything there is about computers, but most software developers I've known, no matter how brilliant, don't understand how to do IT support. They don't know how to make a stable system. They're one step away from the guy who wants admin access to his own machine because he upgraded his own video card once and he "knows what he's doing".
Now depending on the situation, it may still be a good idea to give developers some more leeway, but only because they need it. It can be a necessary evil, but be sure to have an "software developer" image ready, because they *will* trash their computers and expect you to fix it immediately.
I don't mean to make flamebait, but it needs to be said.
With even really cheap monitors these days, the analog sync is exceptionally good compared to what it was. Almost all crappiness can be fixed by pressing the auto-adjust button.
Not true. I don't know where the problem creeps in, but I can usually see the difference between VGA and HDMI, and there's no sufficient method to fix the VGA signal. It might be interference on the VGA line, a problem with the video card, or a problem with the monitor's processing of the signal, but in my experience, it's universally a problem. You can see the VGA picture flickering and shifting, and the colors are wrong unless you put some real effort into calibrating it.
Now, I've talked to other people who say that they can't see the difference, so there might be some people who can see it and some who can't. I've been on the other end of something like that-- I've worked with audio engineers who can hear compression artifacts in audio that I honestly can't hear.
But no, VGA is generally an unacceptable solution, and I don't see any reason to be pushing an analog signal these days. If you don't see it, then I suspect you're not as much of a pixel nazi as you think.
Optiplex is the cheap crap of business hardware
It's not any worse than Dell's other lines. I had the same poor experience with their precision line (hardware being different among computers of the same model purchased only months apart). Not that these machines are bad for what they are, but a "consistent hardware platform with a known lifecycle" it ain't.
It doesn't seem like *that much* of a stretch to me. My reaction to this Dell story is less extreme than some of you-- I don't think it's intentional fraud. I think it's probably the marketing department themselves not understanding the relevance of a good video card. However, it's still extremely misleading, and companies do stuff like this all the time because there's effectively no consequences. No one is holding them accountable.
Now, I don't know what you would realistically want to do about it. I'm not sure I want a roaming government agency that's browsing ads looking for anything remotely misleading. However, it'd be nice to think there was someone somewhere that you could submit this Dell thing to and trust that someone with authority would tell their marketing department, "Hey, you can't do that. Take that down."
Not true. HP is just distributing some crap drivers these days.
I'm all for making real improvements, and I'm sure that logging could be improved in various ways. However, when I'm looking at logs, it's generally because something is broken and I want to find information on how to fix it quickly and easily. Storing something in straight text makes it extremely accessible. It's not just about using grep, which many people are accustomed to, but also because text viewers are simple. If your computer can't run programs like cat, tail, or nano, then you've got big problems. However, even if you can't run those programs for some reason, you can copy a text file to another system-- any other system-- and read it without any special software or encryption keys.
If you want to make another logging system that also tracks security-related information in a way that's easy to audit, I suppose that's worthwhile. However, if you want even basic diagnostic information to be stored in something other than plain-text, then you'd better have a simple, robust, cross-platform method of reading that data. After all, worrying about hackers is a bit of a fringe case. Most of the time, problems are caused by misconfiguration, software bugs, or bad hardware.
In reality, it doesn't work out very well in most situations. Or rather, here's the problem: it's essentially a good way of creating guidelines, but not a good way to actually accomplish things. In another way of saying it, it's a good way of figuring out how to set up your widget factory, but as soon as you start actually making widgets, you're going to have to constantly keep on top of things and make adjustments, or your widget factory is going to do a crappy job of producing widgets.
Don't underestimate the complexity of running a widget factory. Even if the widgets themselves aren't complicated, you're dealing with business practices being carried out by imperfect people. Two people following the same procedure will come up with different results, and metrics don't measure everything.
Do you think you're arguing with me? My original point is that this is a cultural/societal problem of over-valuing procedures and metrics. We should also value judgment/wisdom in decision-making and in performance evaluations. Instead we insist that the only things of value are those which are easy to measure.
Yeah, that's my point. As a manager, it's your job to learn about the people who work for you, to help them understand what they should be working on, to help motivate them, to judge their strengths and weaknesses, and to coordinate/arrange things so that their weaknesses don't keep them from doing their job well. Then you have to weed out people who aren't going to do a good job, and meanwhile reward, foster, and develop the employees who have potential and do good work.
That's a lot of work, but that's the work that a manager is supposed to be doing. Too often they shirk that work and instead treat their employees like "gears in a box". Sometimes it's laziness, but a big part of the problem is that our society/culture doesn't recognize the work/judgement of a good manager as valuable. We instead expect people to be interchangeable, which is a problem.
Yeah, I've come to realize that nobody understands what a manager is supposed to do anymore. Most people's concept is that managers exist to play the part of the PHB, but they don't do anything useful.
More and more, I think no one even understands the value of having a knowledgeable person make difficult decisions based on well thought-out judgments. People want procedures that they can just give to anyone and assume that the outcome will be the same, and then they want metrics that they can use to measure the outcome without knowing anything about the situation.
The proper role of a manager-- aside from particular responsibilities he/she might have on top of this-- is to understand the people working for him and understand his unit's role in the greater context of the company, and then to eliminate obstacles that prevent the people working for him from performing their roles. This might mean protecting the people that work for you from upper management, it might mean recognizing and rewarding good performance, or it might mean all sorts of other things. But to do it right, it takes a lot of work and it takes good judgment.
It doesn't say anything about turning a public park (privately owned I know) into an encampment for the convenience of the protesters. Why can't they protest, then go home and come back the following day. Convenient, no, but that's the price of admission.
The park was open 24 hours a day, so there's no reason why they should have to leave unless they were doing something there that they weren't allowed to do.
As far as I know, they didn't prevent other citizens from accessing the park. Unfortunately, the coordination between cities to shut down the protests show that it wasn't a response to any particular thing they were doing, but a response to the movement itself. It's not like NYC said, "Oh, the conditions here are bad and we need to clean it up!" They said, "We don't like what these people are saying, and we don't like that they're getting attention for saying it. We need to organize against them." And *that* is why this is an attack on the first amendment. They're saying, "You can't have your public protest, wherever you have it and whatever the conditions are, because we don't like your message."
I also find it highly ironic that some of the protesters relying on the 1st amendment to enable their protest, also take offense to the very same freedom of the press that amendment enables.
Could you elaborate? Were the protesters saying that the press should not legally be allowed to cover their event?
Yeah, I find the most effective note-taking method for me is to write it all down with pen/paper during the class/lecture/meeting, and then afterwards immediately transcribe everything to a digital form. Pen and paper allows me the freedom to draw webs/graphs/pictures, draw big arrows connecting things, underline/circle important ideas, etc. It's all very quick and natural. Then having it later in digital form makes it easier to look up and read later.
But more importantly, the act of transcribing gives me an opportunity to review the notes, synthesize ideas, erase some of my stupid notes, and summarize things more intelligently. In short, the act of transcribing helps me remember later, and it also gives me the opportunity to improve my notes before storing them.
That might work in a big city where multiple options exist
I live in NYC, and I have no real options. It's Time Warner Cable, dialup, or cell phone networks. Dialup and cell phone networks aren't real options.
Yes, there's the issue of build quality. There's also size/weight, the resolution and quality of the screen, whether the computer has SSD, built-in camera/mic, battery life, and probably other features that aren't leaping to mind. If you spec out a system from other manufacturers with comparable hardware and features, I'm sure Apple is at least competitive. Hell, if you're looking at Macbook Airs, there are hardly any laptops in the same class.
The only problem with what you're saying is, it's really being marketed as a e-reader and media-consumption device. If it does a good job at those things for less than half the price of an iPad, then they might have a working combination. However, I don't think that most people will spend $200 *just* for a mobile web browser. I could be wrong.
To some extent, there isn't much of a reason to have a fast connection until there are services that exploit it. But then, who's going to develop services that exploit fast connections when most people don't have them?
If you build it, they will come.
I'm not so much talking about "missing features" as "crashes, corrupts profiles, loses emails." It's not nearly as bad as Entourage, and if you're trying to connect to an Exchange server on the Mac, I'd definitely recommend it. However, it isn't remotely as stable and trouble-free as Outlook 2010 on Windows.
(I'm talking from experience of supporting dozens of Exchange servers and hundreds of Outlook clients.)
Microsoft discontinued Outlook in 2001, I believe, which was for OS9. They only released a version for OSX this year (Outlook 2011). Perhaps you've been using Entourage? Entourage is even crappier and more unstable than Outlook 2011, but Outlook 2011 isn't remotely as good as Outlook 2010 for Windows.
There are a number of things, but honestly Outlook is one of the big common reasons to stick with Windows. Microsoft is finally selling Outlook for Mac, but it's still kind of crappy and unstable in comparison. For businesses, the Exchange/Outlook combination is often pretty vital. Last time I used Evolution, it wasn't as good, and don't even think about recommending Thunderbird.
Otherwise, what personally keeps me on Windows is the fact that I work in IT and I'm supporting mostly Windows clients. I often test/troubleshoot my client's applications on my own computer, so I need Windows. Why are my clients on Windows? Well, there's often some random application that they need that's Windows-only, but most often the answer is "Outlook".
The remote for the Apple TV will have no buttons
There may be some truth to this. Apparently Apple is planning on making their new TV powered by Siri, so it may be (to some degree) voice controlled.