His point stands. The larger laptop is heavier and bulkier.

This is disregarding the fact that the things that the macbook beats the hp in (processor speed, video card, etc.) you just ignore. Without a conclusion explanation, I am not really certain how you came to determine that your 17" hp has the "exact specs" as the macbook.

Go the opposite way: look at the $999 macbook and see if you can find a machine that is comparable.

You won't.

Proper grammar, spelling and punctuation really go a long way to informing a reader about the subject. With those three things, along with logical paragraph break-down in a semi-lengthy on-topic reply you are usually going to get moderated up.

Presentation counts for a lot, especially on topics that are complex and not completely understood by the main-stream reader. I understand that content trumps presentation, but I'd much rather read a eloquent post about something that leads me to become more interested in a topic (even if not 100% correct) than non-knowable gibberish that is technically spot-on.

Those wrongly-informated +5s usually are well written. Well written posts are hard to down-rate.

The problem is that people like me install Ubuntu on thier home desktop machine. I understand apt and all of the debian specific configuration file locations.

When I go into work and have to work on the RHEL servers, I can mostly get yum and rpms to work for the server configuration that I want, but god damn if it isn't like pulling teeth.

Now that I have enough power, and I have to make a decision on which distro to get support from, do I go with something that I know (Debian/Ubuntu and Canonical?) or something that is similiar yet foreign (Redhat/RHEL)?

The last 3 servers that I've been in control of have been Ubuntu.

The same happens the other way too. I've had a manager in a different part of a large corporate company asks to see my resume... and then just copy+paste my resume skills and relevant information into the job requisition. They either wanted me to apply for it, or wanted someone with my skillset.

I had the opposite experience, mainly with the transition of the Web Browser to Firefox 3/XulRunner 1.9.

Recently, on a RHEL box without access to the Red Hat update site (which was its own issue), but access to the RHEL rpms, using the version of 3.1 that was packaged by Red Hat, everything that was included worked very well (albeit it was releases behind). The upstream Eclipse 3.4 had issues with the Internal Web Browser (due to the fact that my rpm dependencies weren't fixed, and that xulrunner 1.7/1.8/1.9), in that it could not use any internal browsing modules. It never did get fixed, we stopped doing development on that machine (which probably wasnt a good idea in the first place, but whatever).