Yeah... I'd be surprised if his sister even knew what a right-click-drag was. You're really, really, really reaching.

Reaching for what, exactly ?

I made mention precisely because I've been very surprised at people who do use it (ie: secretaries, CEOs, etc).

That's funny, because in a recent Slashdot discussion about laptops the exact opposite was recommended - business grade laptops are typically priced higher for essentially the same hardware you get in the "consumer" grade.

It's not the hardware specs you're paying for, it's the better warranty and support and _vastly_ better case construction.

For at least three years the trackpads have been multi-touch; so, at least within bootcamp, the right click etc is emulated by having two fingers on the trackpad while clicking...

I no longer have Windows installed on my MBP to check, but it certainly used to be that the two-finger-right-mouse-button-emulation didn't work when trying to do a right-click-drag, which a surprising number of people use quite a lot.

Sounds like a job for the ACCC to me, they have the independence and the teeth to tackle something like this, as you say the opposition are not going to want to help the government look useful.

After ten years of Liberals in Government, the ACCC is but a shadow of its former self.

5 subsequent years of "New Labor" has (unsurprisingly) done little to remedy the situation.

Allow free importation of goods from the US and other markets and watch the vendor premiums for your mysterious island continent collapse. If Australians could simply buy from Adobe US, It'd be pretty difficult for Adobe to maintain a price premium...

There are few import restrictions to Australia in general and even fewer from the US thanks to the "Free" Trade Agreement.

i will sell everything i own and move to australia because it is the last western nation with a little redemption left in it

I wouldn't rush into it. Most of the people and politicians here seem determined to turn Australia into a clone of America. If the Liberals (Australian equivalent of the Republicans) take power in the next Federal election I, for one, will be aiming to leave the country.

It is easy. Very easy. You simply aren't doing it. You start by eating less, then go from there.

Eating less is quite difficult when you end up spending 3/4 of your day trying to ignore gnawing hunger.

The automobile can be a bit fuzzier - but certainly highway driving requires extreme amounts of attention. City driving isn't usually done for long stretches - unless it's stop and go, in which case nothing is happening to make it require much brain exercise.

This sounds backwards. City driving has a lot more hazards and variations that need to be tracked simultaneously. Trundling along on a highway at a pretty constant speed (probably using cruise control, at that) isn't especially taxing.

I would be interested to see some actual studies, but I would be surprised if the typical driver found highway driving more stressful than city driving.

First, show me where I said anything about a typical corporate environment.

That would be the part where you're making a sweeping, generalised judgement call. It seems reasonable to assume one of the most common scenarios would be encompassed.

Yeah. I'm funny like that. I think an order of magnitude increase in bandwidth has the capability to be more useful, and conversely an order of magnitude less could be considered "less useful." If 100Mb wasn't "less useful" there wouldn't be a 1 Gigabit standard.

However, this difference does not happen in isolation. You are trading off bandwidth against POE.

Ultimately, the question becomes: is 1Gb more useful or is POE more useful ? My answer is that in most common corporate environments, POE will be considered more useful because 1Gb is largely unnecessary.

I'll try to put it in a way you can understand. With Gigabit it has potential to do real computing ... e.g. boot Linux with PXE and access a data store in a NAS, for example.

100Mb is quite adequate for this.

I don't care what it was designed for, nor did I claim that their design decisions were unsound. The whole point, which you are working so hard to not get (perhaps because you are too busy putting words in my mouth) is that anyone who had an idea of using this in some very cool applications with visions of high performance networking at their disposal and powering it with PoE is SOL.

Your original comment in this thread was: "... which drops to 10/100 when using PoE, thereby making it only marginally useful for very thin applications."

Which is patently false. 100Mb is not only very useful for just about anything anyone would want to do with a thin client, it's also quite adequate even for normal, managed desktop PCs booting from local disk and accessing data off the network. It's even adequate for thick clients booting over the network, as evidenced by all the places that not only did it before they could get gigabit, but continued to do it for years afterwards.

Fundamentally, the marginal utility of 1Gb over 100Mb for most end-user computing scenarios is very small. I know of several companies that have, within the last five years, replaced their entire office networks (multiple floors in multiple buildings, thousands of endpoints) and chosen to stay at 100Mb for ~95% of endpoints because no benefit (to justify the additional cost) was perceived in going to 1Gb.

Obviously HP put Gigabit capability in there for a reason (you did know that companies count every penny and add up the cost of the BOM, right?)

1Gb adds SFA to the cost of the end user device. It adds _shitloads_ to the cost of the networking infrastructure to support thousands of those devices.

It's kinda hard to say, given that it's not clear what you mean by "desirable". Have you considered Australia or New Zealand?

Both Australia and New Zealand are also still in the midst of massive real estate bubbles (Australia's, at least, is starting to deflate - though it still remains to be seen if we'll get a US-style ~4 year crash or a Japan-style ~20 year slow melt).

In fact, about the only places in the English-speaking world that don't have ludicrous real estate prices are Ireland and the USA.