No, since it's absence can be empirically proven simply by means of a banana peal.

Haha, that's some funny shit.

Well, I don't have much of their stuff but I think what I have is ok stuff. Probably just a matter of a grossly overreaching marketing department. Some idiot fatass willing to eat babies to get his bonus.

Criminals get dumber and dumber.

If he was not such a retard he'd just sign up with bogus accounts and write the reviews himself, from a public library terminal.

No, if you read my whole post, I made the same point as you, that she didn't get what she wanted and needed.

However, I also looked ath the price. $1100 ids much more than most people need. And this girl did not seem to possess any of the traits of a power user that needs a powerful machine.

And if you note my critique of ubuntu advocacy, you woudl inow I am not a fanboy.

I suspect you are less than a one-bit thinker.

Maybe my post was too long for you, since you seem to have room for only 1 chunk of information in your short term active memory, as opposed to the more common 4-7 chunks.

Yes I am arrogant, but you are a pedant. I have always despised pedants and will always do so. They are little people of no consequence.

You are absolutely wrong.
She is a bit of a luddite by not being competent in this technology. If she knew about operating systems, she would know that word only runs on windows and mac. It is my contention that someone who does not know this, is unlikely to require an $1100 laptop. She is also being a bit of ludite for showing helplessness in dealing with these issues. She is blaming the technology for her lack of knowledge. And going to the news instead of finding a skillfull helper. That's ludite behavior. So I stand uncorrected. Not gonna give you an inch. You are behaving like a one bit dictionary.

Ludite(sic(sic)).

I misspelled it because of the spell checker, which gave a red line under luddite. Thanks for getting me straightned out on that.

You must apparently be a binary thinker, a person with a one-bit brain. If not you would realize that such traits are not binary. Between full luddite, which is basically a cave woman, and the ultra-wired gadget obsessed, which has to have tomorrows gadgets yesterday, there is a sliding scale. I wrote "a bit of a luddite", which kind of makes your point pointless, but thanks for pointing out the spelling.

It is certainly possible that you are right. However, you could also be wrong. She might be a depressed procrastinator/worry wort, and the obstacle of this super expensive but ultimately useless (as far as she is concerned) computer really prevented her from getting into those online classes.

Assuming the version of events in the article are correct, then I blame Dell first.

Dell's job should be to serve the customer and get them what they want, since Dell can't possibly guess what they need. Talking someone into using something they are not familiar with is a misplaced form of advocacy. It is as bad as talking people into buying something they don't need.

That she payed a whopping $1100 for a laptop makes it even worse. Since she is a bit of a ludite, I expect the computer will not be used for extreme graphics or number crunching. So she probably overpaid by as much as $500 versus what she really needed. However this was her choice, and her bad. She should have asked savvy friends for advice on this purchase, or done some research on "the intenets".

I cannot blame her for complaining about the verizon CD. That's how that stuff is sold, and even many so called "power users" would not know how to configure that stuff if the CD didn't do it automatically for them. I find it hard to blame Verizon as well, since it is non-trivial to do automatic setup via CD for linux. Maybe something clever could be done, but there will always be some that fall between the cracks.

Ultimately I like to blame Dell here. If their sales interface was better, she would not only have gotten what she wanted, and maybe even what she needed.

I am a big ubuntu fan myself, but find it idiotic that other fans pretend to know what is best for others. If ubuntu was an exact drop in replacement for windows, then I don't see what the advocacy is about, and if it isn't then someone who wants whatever they are used to should be allowed to do so. (someone might argue that Vista is even more different from what she is used to than ubuntu, but that would be Microsoft's problem, not a problem of misplaced advocacy)

I also question this bad habit of many ludites to call customer service for help. Don't people have friends anymore, or are they ashamed to ask for help?

I am also disturbed that the default kneejerk response to this story is even more ubuntu advocacy. Ironic when considering that misplaced advocacy is what gave ubuntu a black eye here in the first place. Way to go morons, in destroying for an OS that I love.