VMWare Player is great and runs on both hosts you mentioned. VMs created with it can be used on all VMware products if you decide to get more sophisticated later. It also lets you migrate to VMWare Fusion on a MAC if that becomes your host of choice.

I agree. We have one linux laptop on the cocktail table that does nothing but browse the internet and create google docs. We don't need big local storage or an OS with a large security footprint. That is the machine we throw in a backpack when we travel.

$40K is a big quality of life difference in the short and long term. It affects the vacations you can take with your family, non-insured medical issues, the type of college your kids can go to and , the lifestyle you can have when your kids move out. Our schools are good and my kid can have a decent hearing aid because I put in the extra time.

The macbook air has best in class packaging and has a higher resolution display than almost all of the ultrabooks. It's also cheaper than the ultrabooks with similar features, including LCD.

I do reasonable size development on a macbook air with external monitor. It was fast enough to be my enterprise developer platform for java and now for .Net development when booted into windows 7. (Yeah it makes me sad.)

Nothing in your posting addresses the fact that these countries want to move "control of the internet" to the UN so that content can be restricted. People can complain all they want about corporate influence but it's countries that demand wide scale filtering of search results. The "great firewall of china" wasn't created at corporate behest. It was created because governments fear a loss of power and control.

I'm not sure how someone is a titan when his last (and only real design) was some time in the 70s.

+1 I wish I had mod points for you.

A company like apple is bigger than one person. You don't create a company by yourself. You recruit and motivate the right people. Jobs was able to do that.

The company was rebuilt after Jobs returned. The new team and focus pretty much made the company what it is today.

It all depends how you structure the rewards. Most people do part-personal and part-team. We do want high-achievers to feel appreciated but we want to also encourage team work. I've seen this done well with agile teams. They are self organizing so encouraging the high productivity of a team can act as an additional reward.

So its really about finding the right type of "gold star" or reward...

Doctor and hospital ratings are public scores that we do check. The better the medical rating, the more likely I am to use them. The only caveat is that I expect the system to be policed in a way that it's hard to "game" the scores.

I agree with parent. What's up with the low vertical resolution in the business laptops? The Macbook Air 1440x900 in a 13" package. Why is that higher than Dells standard 14" resolution?

I worked on a project about 6 years ago where we actually tracked work for the staff across days. The whole "middle of the bell curve" part of our team did significantly less work on their Friday "work at home days". Less email, fewer source code commits, fewer tickets closed. Someone is going to claim it was because they were more "heads down" but I don't buy it given the size repeatability of the differences.

+1

Public speaking classes tell you that over 1/2 of the communication between you and an audience is through non verbal cues including tone and body language, mostly body language. Even regular conversations are better in person because your meeting is better conveyed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_language

If you're job can be done without communication then I can send that job to the cheapest place that can read the directions.