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by elblanco 5722 days ago
BTW, even though it shows only -4 on my posts, I've lost far more than 12 points of karma. PG appears to actually be counting the downvotes these days even if he's only showing -4. I think I just bled away about 25 points last night because people can't accept that an 11" notebook with an SSD and no optical drive is a netbook.
2 comments
gjm11 5722 days ago
I'll hazard a guess that quite a lot of that bleeding isn't because people can't accept that, but because you whined about losing karma.
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elblanco 5722 days ago
Oh no, I lost that karma way before I whined about it. I knew as soon as I posted that it's just a karma burning exercise. Any contrary (or slightly contrary) post in a discussion about Apple is pretty much treated like leprosy. I know that going in. I was just observing that the algorithm appears to have changed and now downvotes are all counted regardless of what the displayed score is.
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gjm11 5722 days ago
You didn't lose all of it before you whined. I know that because I downvoted your whine about being downvoted, and didn't downvote your bah-it's-just-a-netbook comments.

(I have a policy of always downvoting whines about being downvoted and "I know I'll be downvoted for this ..." comments and so forth, because (1) they're boring and (2) I have a nasty suspicion that they produce net-positive results for their authors and want to make them not do so.)

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elblanco 5722 days ago
So I lost 80% of it pre-whine...any other hairs you'd like to look at cutting?
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allwein 5722 days ago
Netbook generally isn't about form factor, it's about use factor. A netbook is made for lightweight browsing, emailing, IM'ing, etc. You know, stuff on the 'net.

The new MBA falls into the class of devices known as ultraportables. It's a full powered machine in a very small form factor/weight factor.

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elblanco 5722 days ago
This is an interesting point. I actually use my netbook for lots more than stuff on the net. I pretty much use it as an ultra portable laptop. I don't expect awesome performance for it, but hey, it was $270 so I get what I pay for. It can run some old games on it, I play Sim City 4k on it all the time and it does ok. I can run all of Office on it, do some light photo editing on it, etc.

I've used it in a pinch to replace my desktop when my 5 year old power supply bit the dust. It did "ok".

If you compare it to other ultra-portables, the MBA seems to be competitively priced compared some of the ultra high end stuff.

But you can still get ultraportables for about 1/2 of the MBA with competitive specs.

http://reviews.cnet.com/laptops/dell-inspiron-m101z/4505-312...

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