That's just it. I have a feeling that these companies feel the market justifies a high price and so there is probably a ton of premium baked into these things. With the craze going around the hp touchpad, I wouldn't be surprised if one of the lesser manufacturers takes a hint and drops their price for high end tablet hardware to ride the same wave.

I have to say, I used vi for a long time but then switched to vim for syntax highlighting and deletion of history. People seem to get bent out of shape with it but my guess is that it just doesn't match the format of the file they are editing, so fair enough, disable it for those files. I still can't stand emacs, though, even though I work with an army of developers that use it and need to use it for their IDE. Maybe if people just used your phrase, but with a small alteration, they would not hate vim so much:

I use vim to write code, and vi to edit config files.

Not only that, but if you disagree with this article you aren't considered cool.

Considering the number or patches and updates that come out on a regular basis, it really isn't a bad habit to reboot weekly. Besides, you collapse your expectations that everything is working correctly on an actualized understanding that everything is working correctly every time you do a change in your environment that has any unforeseen potential of impacting your machines.

Try to sell your dad on a spending rate. You can't guarantee a computer to last 15 years, but if you can figure out his risk tolerance and try to maintain his spending allowance. If he bought two 486s in 1994 and each were $2000 and the value of the dollar being about 1.3 what it is now, so he spent $5200 in today's currency back in 1994, that's about $350/year. Do you think with these numbers, you could convince him that it would be worth buying two netbooks for about $350 each, with the high chance they would last two years? If they last an unheard of 3 years, he would actually be spending less per year 700/3 ~ 250. If they last more he will actually be saving money over his old setup. In fact, if he took the same amount of money, $5200. Invested $700 in hardware. Put the remaining 4500 into bonds at 5%, over 15 years he could almost buy a new netbook every year on interest alone. -Bjorn

Even if they had a similar algorithm, it was still either created by a student or staff member. If it's staff than it's rightful the college's property but if it's a student's I think there is a contradiction. The student is paying to use college resources so doesn't that fall under the copyright ownership of "for hire" works so that the student would actually have a claim to the work?