Oh dear lord my CULV laptop w/ SSD is wonderful. Feels super fast and I average 7 hours of battery for day to day use. It's great to be able to fully shutdown too and not have to use battery draining standby because the boot is so quick. Forget hibernate, that'll only kill the drive life faster. You really don't need a large drive to run your typical applications off of. I took the 500GB HD that came with the laptop and popped it in an external case for my portable media storage (pictures, videos, etc). I can't wait for prices to come down and performance to keep going up as these fantastic devices become more mainstream.

What I want to know is how does something like this happen? You would think McAfee takes their new patch and tests it to make sure that it doesn't cause this type of annoying issue. How does something like this slip through the cracks?

I totally agree here. Netbooks suit a very good need for portability which is ironic for laptops when you think about it. I can stay on campus all day and check e-mail, read news/articles, write code (to some extent), surf the web, etc with my netbook. It's cheap, light, and most importantly the battery will last me all day so I don't have to carry that damned power cord around with me! If I do bring the power cord? It's a tiny brick -- minimal hassle. I do feel like they are a bit underpowered and I am now starting to look into ultralights like the Asus UL30, however this laptop wouldn't be a necessity. I get by just fine on a netbook during the day, an ultralight would just make it more comfortable. Netbooks/laptops/tablets/whatever are all meant to supplement a primary desktop IMO. I've been a great deal happier since I started working under that model.

That is quite an impressive post and I thank you for it.

I would agree that language has changed in informal applications. However, it's hard enough to communicate through written form. Having a traditional reference for grammar helps to reduce the complexity because it encourages uniformity. Think of Bluetooth versus Zigbee. Unlike Bluetooth, Zigbee allows different proprietary implementations which have an end result of one Zigbee device possibly not being able to communicate with another. This makes Zigbee unthinkable for use in broad applications. It's the same issue here. Learning to write effectively takes time, patience, and practice. I'm not the best at written language but at least I make an effort. It's like these people don't give a damn. I don't have the time of day for their crap; exceptionally poor writing speaks volumes about your intelligence whether you think it should or not. The trash that these people produce should be exclusively limited to text messages, twitter, or other informal means of communication.

This makes me wonder though if there is a point of saturation which is a term thrown around in economics for a market that has run its course of growth. Or is the human appetite for expansion and consumption simply insatiable? Even if there isn't enough on this planet, if humans could travel to other habitable planets, would they ever reach a point of contentment and equilibrium naturally? In a nut shell I guess what I'm asking is that, does a finite point exist such that the available resources would be enough or do we just continue asymptotically on to infinity? And I mean this in a way that avoids disasters. Maybe it's just a flaw in the sense that we can't reach such a point because we can't be content with what we have. People go out and need to achieve success, once this happens they have the need to achieve more success (i.e. corporate ladder). In this case its just a pyramid scheme and everyone certainty can't be at the top....

How about an operating system like Vista/7 that has a decent support structure for combing through features and allowing users to decide the ones that they want and do not want to initially install? Slipstream disks do this but are not always pretty in what it takes to handle them and the results they produce. What really annoys me is how non-compartmentalized these unused features are, although that may a false perception generated by MS. I remember one point in time where they claimed IE wasn't removable from the core of Windows, they came up with something...