I haven't read Susskind yet, but I have read General Relativity by Dirac.

According to Dirac's, the singularity will never actually occur because of time and space dilation. The stellar matter will accelerate towards the singularity but never actually reach it. And never is an appropriate term since according to Hawking the black holes have a finite lifetime and will eventually evaporate according to Quantum Mechanics.

Will get to Susskind as soon as I finish a couple of Penrose books.

Okay, they've changed their product lineup.

Maybe you go through enough systems that you have to judge by series/model, but I don't. I get whatever the company wants me to have. But for my personal systems, and I do keep work separate from personal, I've been burned once by Dell, not again because there are plenty of other manufactures out there to choose from.

Seriously, like I said, they burned me once, not again, when someone sells you shitty product, you don't go back to them, again. Sure there are things that are broken, and what not. But the last laptop was completely underperformant relative to the IBM with the same hardware. So I have no reason to trust Dell now, no matter what they claim about hardware.

Also just checked out the XPS, I still don't see a 15" with 1920 x 1080, which is what I have now, so Dell still can't meet even my minimum requirements.

And actually they used to make such a beast, but that was more than 5 years ago.

In addition, I have looked at Alienware systems in the store, nice chassis, but nothing whatsoever impressive about the rest of the hardware or the performance; and the whizbang alienware customization software was show as shit.

Dell had their chance with my money, and they blew it.

So with all the numerous alternatives out there, I have no reason to give them a second one.

Completely irrelevant since the IBM and the Dell speced out the same with the same OS.

So as far as I'm concerned Dells are shit.

Don't buy a Dell, Dude; just don't.

I was never happy with the performance of any Dell laptop I had, either personally, or work provided.

I had a thinkpad with essentially identical hardware as my personal dell: same memory, GFX, CPU, screen rez, I think the HD on the Dell even speced faster. But the actual usage difference between the two was like night and day; so just don't buy a Dell.

Welcome to capitalism.

I love my NT, I got a color before the Fire was ever released.

Many of the Ebooks I have are PDFs from DriveThruRPG, so color was a requirement and the Fire wasn't even an option at the time.

Now the Fire seemed, and still does seem when comparing it to the NTs & Colors, like an "Oh shit, people want this? We have to slap something together and get it out for the holiday season."