They're known because those incidents happen. Prior to those, nobody thought to examine that aspect. Things like this happen quite often where an aspect of a design is not investigated because it hasn't caused a problem yet, but still leads to very real weakness in the product. Software gets this more than other, more established fields of engineering because it is such a comparatively young field. We don't have enough experience with it yet to have uncovered the majority of possible failure modes.
Two part epoxy wouldn't be my first choice of encapsulant materials for a circuit board. The epoxy doesn't give enough under thermal stress. Ordinarily, for consumer goods this wouldn't be a problem, but given the temperature extremes you can see inside the car you left your flash drive in, you may be asking for a premature failure. Better solution is to mold something like this around the electronics.
We don't even use crop rotation any more in big agribusiness; it's basically hydroponics in a soil medium.
While it's fun to toss out the "big agribusiness" card, crop rotation isn't such a foreign concept to today's farmers. In many cases it improves the bottom line, and helps break dependence on rapidly increasing input costs (fertilizer, fuel to run tractors and pump irrigation water). I don't disagree, incidentally that corn isn't a particularly good choice for biofuels, it just happens to have the most money behind it at the moment. The people raising it aren't quite as clueless as you seem to believe.
...These developers wouldn't be "better" than anyone else...
If these developers aren't any better, then the seal is worth nothing, and in my experience designing software and hardware for industrial process control, few if any certifications actually enhance the quality of the product. They seem to be in large part sponsored by people interested in inserting themselves in the flow of money from customers to providers.
I haven't read all the replies, but one thing that people seem to be missing in the price comparison to the Macbook Air is the inclusion of the solid state drive, which commands a $500 premium over the now standard 120 GB standard drive. This brings the cost of the Air up to $2300 in the 1.6 GHz configuration. Mind you, the Air still has it beat in terms of cost and it comes with OS X, but it makes the difference between the two computers not quite so extreme. Couple that with some fat Dell exclusive supplier deals with some companies and management's concurrent lust for the sexy laptop they aren't allowed to buy should make this laptop a solid contender on the business side of things.
You've just hit on one of the few major obstacles to both adopting Linux as a "daily use" OS as well as getting these problems fixed. The typical linux-user response will likely be some snarky variation on an obscure command line sequence that will automagically fix your problem while condescendingly pointing out how much of a noob you are for not having either known it, or taken 45 minutes that you didn't have to go find/discover the solution yourself. Things like this that don't often bother developers (who know how to fix things like this quickly) are actually major obstacles to most users since they seem such a trivial fix, and since it's a relatively easy problem to fall into.
I can't think of anything to fix the ISP issue (which would be a deal breaker for me) but as far as screen resolution goes, might check out
Slashdot Mirror
And you do this how, exactly? Last few places I've lived you have your choice between any one of one company for broadband service.
They're known because those incidents happen. Prior to those, nobody thought to examine that aspect. Things like this happen quite often where an aspect of a design is not investigated because it hasn't caused a problem yet, but still leads to very real weakness in the product. Software gets this more than other, more established fields of engineering because it is such a comparatively young field. We don't have enough experience with it yet to have uncovered the majority of possible failure modes.
To quote Team America - f**k yeah!
Two part epoxy wouldn't be my first choice of encapsulant materials for a circuit board. The epoxy doesn't give enough under thermal stress. Ordinarily, for consumer goods this wouldn't be a problem, but given the temperature extremes you can see inside the car you left your flash drive in, you may be asking for a premature failure. Better solution is to mold something like this around the electronics.
We don't even use crop rotation any more in big agribusiness; it's basically hydroponics in a soil medium.
While it's fun to toss out the "big agribusiness" card, crop rotation isn't such a foreign concept to today's farmers. In many cases it improves the bottom line, and helps break dependence on rapidly increasing input costs (fertilizer, fuel to run tractors and pump irrigation water). I don't disagree, incidentally that corn isn't a particularly good choice for biofuels, it just happens to have the most money behind it at the moment. The people raising it aren't quite as clueless as you seem to believe.
And this helps how? Seriously, you said yourself
...These developers wouldn't be "better" than anyone else...
If these developers aren't any better, then the seal is worth nothing, and in my experience designing software and hardware for industrial process control, few if any certifications actually enhance the quality of the product. They seem to be in large part sponsored by people interested in inserting themselves in the flow of money from customers to providers.
I haven't read all the replies, but one thing that people seem to be missing in the price comparison to the Macbook Air is the inclusion of the solid state drive, which commands a $500 premium over the now standard 120 GB standard drive. This brings the cost of the Air up to $2300 in the 1.6 GHz configuration. Mind you, the Air still has it beat in terms of cost and it comes with OS X, but it makes the difference between the two computers not quite so extreme. Couple that with some fat Dell exclusive supplier deals with some companies and management's concurrent lust for the sexy laptop they aren't allowed to buy should make this laptop a solid contender on the business side of things.
You've just hit on one of the few major obstacles to both adopting Linux as a "daily use" OS as well as getting these problems fixed. The typical linux-user response will likely be some snarky variation on an obscure command line sequence that will automagically fix your problem while condescendingly pointing out how much of a noob you are for not having either known it, or taken 45 minutes that you didn't have to go find/discover the solution yourself. Things like this that don't often bother developers (who know how to fix things like this quickly) are actually major obstacles to most users since they seem such a trivial fix, and since it's a relatively easy problem to fall into.
I can't think of anything to fix the ISP issue (which would be a deal breaker for me) but as far as screen resolution goes, might check out
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=842847
and the site linked at
http://ubuntutip.googlepages.com/nodisplay
to see about resetting your screen res.