My buddy works in a factory that makes furniture. Guess what? They prefer iPads to the old notepads. It has reduced duplication of effort and sped up the entire workflow process by automating it. No need to wait until your floor check run (two or more hours) is over before heading back into the offices to get the data entered. It's all done from the floor.

Keep on trying to live out the old style. If it's not broke, fix it anyway because there's a much better way.

YMMV.

I don't know where you work but I haven't printed more than a handful of pages in the last 5 years which were actually necessary to do my job.

In the two places I speak of, there's a culture of sharing information via e-mail/PDF or, in my current role, via Google Docs.

I can't imagine going to a job which didn't act that way.

The way unions control things here, they'd probably be sent to jail for 20 years and not be fired... and continue to collect pay.

Well, to be fair, it can cost a lot of money to support all the browsers if you have lousy developers. Its easy to write code the right way the first time, but if you write it the wrong way, it costs a lot of money to keep twiddling with things.

Replacing their developers with people who have better knowledge/skills would be cheaper than throwing $100k at a problem that shouldn't have existed to begin with.

A poutine cart!

But I think he doesn't want to get run out of China...

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.

Except that Google isn't profiting from Android as a mobile search platform. They have acknowledged this in their quarterly reports.

then what we really need is a few deer hunter MMOs.