I bought my 13" MacbookPro for $1100 (and that includes 8GB of RAM purchased externally, Windows 7, Office 2007, and Parallels). Yes, I exercised educational discounts for all, but for you to say that you need to spend $2000 to get a good computer.

I have a Lenovo laptop and this MacbookPro (as our main machines, we also have a desktop server machine). The Lenovo laptop outlasted its usefulness over a year ago. The keyboard has broken keys and trying to get Lenovo to tell me what I need to buy to replace it is like pulling teeth (no, I should not be transferred around to 6 different people and finally be told that I need to remove the keyboard itself and find the part number to get a replacement).

The Lenovo was an ok machine and I liked their warranty replacement service when I needed it. However the machine feels and looks cheap--because it was. It's woefully underpowered for Win7 even though that's what it came with. It had a TON of bullshit installed on it that I had to spend time removing when I first turned on the machine.

Counter to this is my MBP (13" which I upgraded to 8GB of RAM myself) which I took out of the box and haven't had a single complaint about yet. The machine is rock solid, its fast, even with only 8GB of RAM, and I didn't have a bunch of bullshit software on there.

Yeah, I admit to thinking (and still thinking) $1100 is a lot for a machine. But I use it all day, every day. Just like the bike I bought to commute to work, I need something durable, reliable, and easy to utilize. I particularly love going into a coffee shop or sitting in the airport and looking at the number of PCs plugged in somewhere and the number of Mac users happily chugging along on battery only. The MBP fits that comfortably. I am impressed and as long as Apple keeps this sort of quality up, I will be coming back time and time again.

That said, I figure I can get 5 years or more out of the MBP after an upgrade to 16GB (when it's reasonable) and SSD. I am worried OS X will stop supporting older chips (as they did with PowerPC) and I'll be left with unsupported hardware in the future but I have hope.

However, the Lenovo is underpowered, miserable to use, and has the battery life of a hooker on speed's dildo (even with a brand new battery--less than a month old).

I don't recommend Macs to everyone but it's serving its purpose well for me and I'm glad I made the switch. It does absolutely everything I need it to do and I'm quite happy with it.

YMMV.

I sounds right beacuse Watts per hour implies you have squred the time unit and are now measuring the growth or acceleration of watts. However it won't change the dollar amount amount on the bill, so the whole thing is a mathematical curiosity to me.

There is also this idea that coal doesn't have up's and down's, you just light the boiler and feed it coal. In the real world they need maintenance to the extent that you need to build 7 plants to get the adevrtised 'constant output' of 6. Then you also need to work out if it's better(TM) to have a higher 'base load' to pump water uphill for peaks, or have a lower "base load" and bunch of gas turbines for the peaks.

Coal has the same optimization problems meeting the demand curve as renewables, but all that existing complexity is hidden when you plug the TV into the wall and it demonstrably 'just works'.

If you don't think governments (including the US) already have control over power generation then you're delusional. If you actually want unregulated power generation then you're suicidal.

I haven't read through all the comments yet, but in a previous story on a similar topic, someone posted an interesting anecdote about a southern town in the pre-civil war US. This town had strong feelings in opposition to slavery and they eventually outlawed the practice. The town was unable to compete in various markets because the surrounding areas still allowed slavery. The town was doomed until they repealed the anti-slavery law.

This story illustrates an important thing. Economic factors trump moral factors. The only way to defeat the economic factors to enable moral factors is to dictate them by law... and even that's pretty difficult to do. Take the prohibition of alcohol in the US as an example.

And here's the kicker: We are talking about imports from nations outside of the legal structure of the US. (As much as the US keeps trying, the world IT still outside of its legal structure.) So if there is to be any progress in the area of quality of life for workers in other countries, there has to be some serious changes made. And the way to make those changes? Some pretty extreme things need to happen... things which most people in the US and in other nations oppose.

So either learn to live with the guilt or buckle down and support some serious changes in world government because the leaders of other nations are not going to adopt our ideals or beliefs willingly.

Its the rate at which they installed new power generation capacity. Those Germans are demons.

For example, suppose you needed to order some laptops for your developers, and some compilers as well.

Shouldn't that be handled by the manager or someone?

The actual coders should never have to look up the prices on any of their tools. New hardware should just show up as soon as the manager can complete all the paperwork and the political fights.

Government can affect productivity by making some economic activities unprofitable. There are many, many ways of doing this.

Yeah, how dare those cautious people who save money actually reap any benefit at all from their savings. The argument that the economy would come to a stop under deflation is ridiculous, since at one point people who believe they can "afford" a more lavish lifestyle will spend more, and their dollar will go further. Under the current system it's spend now because tomorrow your money will be worthless anyway. Under deflation it's spend because we can afford it. I know which world I would like to live in. Of course the real trick is to be the one printing the money.

doesn't wish to learn another way of doing things.

That's your problem.

It's nice when you have a 10 year old formula in excel and can boot up office 2k and it works.

If you had written it in R to begin with you'd be able to run the same code on either Windows or Linux.