That's not my experience. I've always wondered why Asus has been held in such high regard when I've found their stuff be to be pretty much crap, dating back to at least the Socket A days. Not just motherboards too, as their video cards are just as flaky and die just as quickly, and don't buy their laptops either unless you need a paperweight. Heck, I'd buy ECS before buying Asus. The quality may not be any better but I'd at least save myself some money.

Literally, by the time you get to the workplace the language does not matter.

We may know that, but try convincing the hiring manager of that. If the job is programming in language X, and you don't have Y years of experience in language X, your resume goes straight into the circular file.

VGA forever!

They exist as medical-grade monitors, and cost as much as a decent used car.

Myth. There are no TVs for sale with a 1080p screen smaller than 22". The 1080p screens found in laptops are pretty much only used in laptops. Since those screens are pretty much being built for laptops only, there's no reason they couldn't be some other resolution.

Going up the line from the TI-81 to the TI-84+ every new model can do everything the previous one could, plus more. On the other hand, the TI-84+ can't do things the old TI-85 can, even though the TI-85 was the second graphing calculator the TI made (the TI-81 being the first).

A lot of those big LCDs use a surprising amount of power. The savings might be less than you think. And if he opted for a plasma the power usage would go up considerably.

Besides, another factor is how much the TV is used. I have a tube TV but I use it so little the payback would be decades, easily. Though with 1300+ movies on Laserdisc and VHS alone, I would guess the TV sees quite a bit of use.

A Core 2 Duo is is a ton faster than en shitty P4 3.8 GHz though. You'll have trouble playing HD video with a P4.

That'll depend a lot on what generation of P4 you're running. If you have a late LGA775 P4 in a motherboard with a PCI Express slot you can slap in a decent graphics card and you'll have no problems playing HD video. If it's an older socket 478 P4 you'll have an AGP slot and your options are a lot more limited.

I'm just hoping that there is a way to disable that obnoxious "Install Flash" bar that comes up every time you visit a site with Flash and you don't have Flash installed. It's like Google can't imagine that someone would not want to install Flash (ditto for builds of Chromium running on OSes that don't even have Flash).

38.58 words per sentence.

Bullshit.

If they now think that transparency is a bad idea, then why didn't they catch this in trials before launching Windows Vista?

I wouldn't say transparency is bad, it's just a fad that's has run its course. Though if you ask me, Microsoft is pushing Metro as the future and is purposely trying to make desktop mode look dated on purpose.

The next big push may be high resolution. Things get different when you have to start pushing beyond 2M pixels (which modern desktops can do without a sweat). Try playing a modern game on a 4K monitor, for example. Now, if we could only get the monitor manufacturers to start cranking out some really high resolution desktop displays. You would think they would, but they still seem to be stuck in a 100DPI world. The few 4K screens out there are a nice start, but the resolution/DPI king is still the IBM T221 which has been out of production for nearly a decade now...

I take that you don't have Java or Flash installed on any of your Windows computers? Because from what I've seen, you can be a smart and savvy user, but if those plugins are installed, especially Java, you will get owned at some point.

I've played around with surround myself, and eventually came to the conclusion that for any reasonable budget, you're better off with a stereo system. As in, if you're going to spend $400 on speakers, you're much better off with two $200 speakers than with eight $50 speakers needed to do 7.1. Having two speakers also makes the setup a lot easier too, and unless you're going to set up a surround set up correctly you might as well not bother. Most home surround set ups that I have are set up incorrectly, which is pretty understandable given that most people can't dedicate a room to a home theater.

Actually, I would say that the MHz lost it's usefulness in the x86 world long before the P4 came out. More like the (original) Pentium-era, when Cyrix and AMD starting selling chips with the "PR" rating. Of course, the PR thing was even more meaningless, as a 150MHz Cyrix chip may perform like a Pentium 200 when it came to integer performance (hench "PR200+"), but was more like a Pentium 90 when it came to FPU performance.