stingwray

No, short answer. Its unlikely that the power management in the laptop will accept anything else, also your other one is supplying significantly less power overall so would be unlikely to run the laptop on it and the battery charging circuits are unlikely to accept a lower voltage to protect the battery cells. Go and buy an equivalent adaptor.

There's a big difference from being able to run an application "smoothly" and being able to run an application well and fast. Running multiple applications at the same time is hardly a test either, computers are very efficient at paging memory out and in depending on need, you computer might be "running" multiple applications, however you are really only using one of them at a time.

You'll notice performance problems from lack of memory way before lack of cpu power. I ran a Ahtlon 800MHz for about 4 years perfectly fine, because it had 768MB of memory, which was about 3 times as much as most computers at the time,

The amount of RAM required by the average computer user hasn't changed in a long time, memory usage will level out for most people (assuming no radical developments that require lots of memory). Given the fact that most people don't even come close to using 2GB properly, the only reason why computers are shipping with more is because people think more is always getter and so will pay for it, even if they won't use it, its also one of the areas that has a high-mark up for the computer builder. Its even looking like digital cameras number of pixels is leveling off, because they've realized that people don't need more than 12MP really, given that photo correction is the the biggest use of memory in a normal system, if the number of pixels don't go up, not much need for more memory. Also providing the fact that most people just click the buttons for brightness and red-eye reduction. Before anyone needs any more memory, both the OS managing it and the applications using it need to be away for the large memory footprint available, current they have no idea what they are doing.

No, 8Gb chips, now count the number of chips on your DIMMs. It should allow for single DIMMs to carry up to 32GB of memory. Then allow that most computers have >=4 DIMM slots and you can do the final calculation.

The problem is not that Apples aren't good value for their specific markets, like the iMac and the all in one market. Because of Apple's limited number of products people compare the iMac against all consumer desktops, its against them that they don't fair too well. Another example some people comparing the Macbook Air to laptops nearly twice the size and weight.

Really not impressive, given that 4GB DIMMs are becoming more cost effective and intels new platforms are making use of tri-channel memory this was as likely to happen as it will be dark tonight. What was impressive was samsung recently announcing that they have made a breakthrough with memory chips and will be soon making 8Gb individual chips.

I'd consider the Latitude E6400 more as the competitor to the MacBook Pro 15". Cheapest MBP 15: £1369.00 E6400 at the same spec: £1256.95 Not really that much difference, and the MBP is still a considerably better machine, for size, weight, quality, design etc, and uses DDR3 if you want the most uber performance machine compare spec yar yar yar.

Your still missing the point, people who buy the Air want it for its size and its weight, not its uber-performance. This is why it is better if that is what you want, clearly the Air is not aimed at you because you can't understand this. None of the apples are weaker machines, by your argument all smart phones are rubbish because for the same price you can buy a netbook, they are very different markets, like the Air is supposed to be an ultra portable style, the Dell is a small notebook. If you want to compare that dell to an Apple compare it to the MacBook, you'll find the difference in price more favorable there will be little difference between them.

Well the fact that your Air spec has a SSD and the Dell spec doesn't, makes the price very different. Over in the UK, the Dell Studio XPS 13 costs about £800 where the Air costs around £1200. The dell weighs 2.2Kg where the Air weighs 1.36Kg. The dells dimensions are Width: 12.56" (319mm), Height: 0.88" (22.55mm) front / 1.35" (34.34mm) back, Depth: 9.3" (236.12mm) Where the Airs dimensions are Height: 0.4-1.94 cm (0.16-0.76 inch) Width: 32.5 cm (12.74 inches) Depth: 22.7 cm (8.9 inches) So for your extra money, you get laptop which weighs nearly 1Kg less and is nearly less than half the physical size.

Sorry, FTP is working fine for me, I can also choose from FTPS or SFTP and occasionally SCP, with mounting those external locations as drives as the cherry.

You could not be more wrong about who builds the laptop components. Apple designs and builds the laptop motherboard and for the same reason why with desktop motherboards that the prices vary greatly is that you can have the chance to use poor electrical components or good ones. The cases are designed and manufactured by apple, all the unibody macbooks are made out of aluminum, where as the majority of PC laptops are still made out of plastic, also because of the unique design Apple has the ability to offer better strength and a more solid feel to the laptops. If you can buy a better spec laptop than the Macbook Air for only 9oz more, then your missing the point. You can't, part of the Air's specification is its weight, which you've just said you can't build. You don't need a power house in your bag all the time, not having a broken back is more important to some people.

After the latest round of Apple hardware updates, bang for buck has gone down and is too low is some places still. However their laptops are still in a class of their own and are very competitive for what they offer. OS X offers a great environment to work with and in, where Apple do some things wrong, Microsoft still does a lot more wrong, for instance Apple dependable cycle rate and pricing of OS X, compared to Microsoft erratic cycle and silly pricing scheme with various editions. If you buy Apple products because they are shiny and look good, its up to you and its fine by me. If you buy Apple products because they have been getting good reviews and they are generally dependable, constructed from high quality components, its up to you and its fine by me. If you by a cheap Acer laptop for half the price, that offers you 75% of the experience and does most of the things you want, its up to you and its fine by me. As for OS X being run on PC hardware, I think its a fun exercise and might be a good way for people to have a little play, but in a production environment, you need to know everything's going to work and its going to work well. The fact that Apple makes sure that OS X runs brilliantly on all of the hardware that it ships is a feature worth paying for in my opinion.

Ham radio still interests me, perhaps sometime this summer I'll try a little. Problem is in this society, with the cheapness and availability of high speed GSM networks, it has the chance of turning into a dying art.

Couple of bugs, but nothing major. Guide covers pretty much everything. I really do recommend netbook remix for the interface, or if XFCE is a good alternative to normal Gnome, which I find to heavy handed for the AAO and the 1024x600 screen.

Ha ha ha, at 25C3 we were sitting in the paths, on the stairs, and practically on each other to see a number of talks. Standing at the back of saal 1 next to an egg box wall for 4 hours wasn't fun.

Is this not just you want to build a computer and run computer games on it. Surely the computer you are writing your posts on can accomplish these things?

They have every right to limit your web use however they want, its their service As for blocking attempts to learn, just look at the U.S. governments policy on some types of knowledge, actually some of the things on this website/forum would be illegal in a number of countries, so by blocking it they are preventing you from breaking the law. So you should start thanking them and go back to facebook instead of a 'lame ass' rant about someone doing and providing you a service.

My suggestion would be Jinzora, you don't have to transcode everything to flash and lose lots of quality.

Fine by me. As for capitalizing months and days I normally let my spell checker do that! :D

Well there's C, C++, C# and Objective-C. C was the original and really created the syntax style that so many languages now take from, allowing developers to quickly pick up similar languages. C++ built on C, adding a number of 'improvement', the one big difference being that C++ has support for objects and so is object orientated. C# is not related to C or C++ really in any way other than it has a C like syntax, C# is Microsoft's answer to Java and works very similarly, it is heavily integrated with .NET and ASP. Objective-C is really only used my Apple I believe for the OS X and iPhone/iPod Touch platforms, it is built on C but adds a number of other 'features'. (If I remember correctly.) There other types of C and C++ which are different from the standards, one example is that Symbian use their own proprietary version of C++ they created, apparently because C++ wasn't finished when they started working on the Symbian OS. As for popularity, you could argue that C is the most popular and Objective-C the least, this being based on the age of the language and also the number of platforms it is used with, however they all fit different areas and you should always choose the right tool for the job. If you are looking to learn C, then the best book around is the "The C Programming Language" by Brian W. Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie (ISBN-10: 0131103628, ISBN-13: 978-0131103627). I still believe every programmer should have this on their bookshelf, your not a programmer without it! :-p

Well I really hate the Office 2007 UI, but I haven't used it a lot anyway. I played around with iWork a little and found it interesting, they've done some things well but it has a little bit of a learning curve. Personally I use Open Office because of using Linux a decent amount and having the ability to run it on windows and os x means that I can keep the same application for all my systems. The fact is free also has something to do with it. As for formats, I hardly distribute documents anyway really, most of my work is text files. But if I do create a document the last thing I normally do is export to PDF. PDF has really taken over from everything, documents, slideshows etc.

Actually that's the easy part, assuming the correct plain text is not random data (not very useful to send large quantities around encrypted) then its nearly trivial to realize when you have successfully decrypted the cipher text. Any data that contains information that conveys some kind of meaning has patterns in it.

Dammit metatron, I was trying to loose my club mate addiction. I'm going to have to order some now for the meet up, it wouldn't be the same without it.

I was thinking about that, I've still only managed to go a couple of times in the last year, first Friday of the month for me always seems to be busy when it comes around. Definitely worth putting on the list. There is always DC4420, but they meet on a Thursdays nomally, but still haven't got to that at all, and then theirs OWASP which also meet on Thursdays. Still haven't gotten to that either.