timuralp

All right, the question was not about "what OS should I get?" The question also specifically referred to a non-Apple laptop computer. There is also nothing to indicate that the person already has an iPhone. I'd say turning this thread into a flame-war (the road it's trending toward) is not warranted.

Also, this may be useful to anyone with an AmEx card (or if you open one now): up to 45% off on ThinkPad Edge models when purchasing a Lenovo laptop with an AmEx card.

I agree that it depends on what you want to do with each. However, note-taking is not the only reason to get a laptop. For instance, the flexibility to work in different settings is one plus. For my particular work, I also need to use it to collect data in various locations. At the same time, I don't think it needs to be a top-of-the-line machine because most universities have clusters available to run the simulations/process data. At that point a laptop and a desktop become comparable in price and in my opinion a laptop is more useful than a desktop. If note-taking is the primary reason, I would consider getting a netbook if the screen is not too tiny for you. In terms of brands, I think there's been plenty of discussions in other threads here. In my opinion, the quality won't vary that significantly between the more popular brands and it comes down to how it feels to you.

Also, if the recipient needs to be able to modify the file, one could save the document as an .rtf (albeit rtf does not have as many formatting options).

Well, this definitely derails the original thread, but I would argue the promise to take care of the pets is not a scam. If one subscribed to the notion that when the end comes, the believers are lifted and their pets may be left behind, it makes perfect sense to sign a contract with non-believers to take care of the pets for the remainder of the pets' short life. It would be a scam if the rapture occurred and the pets were not taken care off, but I'm not sure why selling "Rapture" insurance for the pets is a scam.

Wiki to the rescue: "The Document Foundation created LibreOffice from their former project, over concerns that Oracle Corporation would either discontinue OpenOffice.org, or place restrictions on it as an open-source project, as it had on OpenSolaris. [...] As a result of the fork of OpenOffice.org into LibreOffice, and the resulting loss of developers, Oracle announced in April 2011 that it was terminating the commercial development of OpenOffice.org" Basically, most likely, there won't be OpenOffice in the future and the development effort will be focused on LibreOffice.

Barring a particularly bad batch (pretty rare), sadly, it does come down to luck. Also, aside from Amazon, check out the offerings on NewEgg. The search filters and the selection are better (in my opinion). Lastly, consider buying an enclosure separately from the drive. Make sure to pay attention to the form factor (2.5" vs 3.5") and the interface (IDE vs SATA, in particular). It really takes 5 minutes and (sometimes) a screwdriver to put the drive into it. That way you could get whatever "internal" drive is particularly popular/has good reviews and whatever enclosure looks nice.

For presentations, I still use PowerPoint + Excel (even though I have to remake all the graphs). OpenOffice has gotten a lot better in recent years, but the .pptx files are still not formatted correctly when I use animations of any kind in PowerPoint. OOCalc lacks some features that excel has when plotting data. There are other quirks that escape me at the moment. I guess my only comment is subjective: to me, the presentations and graphs look nicer when done in Office and I don't want to deal with any of the OpenOffice quirks. PowerPoint is the only thing in the Office suite that I use and getting it with the student discount was somewhere around $50. Since it's not something I have to update frequently, it's $10/year for 5 years -- doesn't seem too bad. P.S. To be more precise, OpenOffice is Free Open Source Software

I agree that the ethics of doing what the poster suggested are not field specific. It is an unethical thing to do across the board. The characterization of what happens when someone does it, however, was. The conversation took a detour into the structure of the programs and their requirements, how likely it is for someone to succeed, and what it implies about academia. Those are the issues I was referring to. I know of both cases, but I was referring to too much student funding, in particular. This does occur and there are cases where students are actively recruited as the funding is there, but no one is using it. At the same time, the group looks for a qualified candidate and as such, even with superfluous funding, can take some time to fill the positions.

The more common action in the case of too much money is to offer RA positions to current MS students (either for a summer or a semester or however long) and then get them to stay in the group for PhD. There are, often, plenty of MS students looking to transition to PhD. Also, I have heard of a number of cases of too much money. I believe this is discipline specific. Also, I believe the value of MS is discipline specific and what the MS entails (for one, it frequently does not entail a thesis in CS). The one thing that I found interesting about this thread is how many people from outside of CS jumped on it, but, in my opinion, did not always have a good perspective of the ramifications and typical practice in this particular field.

They did not lose money, but not because of FDIC. These were credit cards. Every customer can, within 60 days, dispute any charge on the credit card and is not responsible for paying the charge if found to be the result of fraudulent activity. My guess is CITI mailed out a bunch of new cards. In general, if this sort of thing is a major concern, I would consider using a credit card for all the purchases. The problem with debit cards is that the money leaves your bank account immediately and can take a while to get it back. If the purchase was made with a credit card, you have not paid any money yet. For one, they often offer better interest rates. American Express offers a savings account earning 1% right now. The local credit union offers highest rate at 0.2%. There are potential perks. BAC (Bank of America) offers up to 30 free trades in a brokerage account to customers with a balance over $25k. This probably doesn't apply to most people, but it's a nice option. Lastly, I would look around at what deals you qualify for right now. I know Chase offers something like $100-$150 to new clients opening a checking account. Another bank here offers an iPod touch. In my experience, after having banked with a big bank, a smaller bank, and a credit union, there were no big issues with any of them, so I would go with whichever one has the best offer going on right now.

Something around $300 seems about right. If the state income tax is lower, might be closer to $200. This is for a $2200 stipend.

I disagree. I've been offered work+MS at two companies. I'm sure there are more (I can't be that special). Two friends of mine got their part-time MS while also working at different companies. If the goal is to get a part-time MS, look for jobs that specifically allow funding for education. Otherwise, I would encourage you to apply for MS and then apply for all the TA positions. Depending on the school, those may be entirely staffed by MS students. A lot (most? all?) of professors won't want to pay for someone's RA position if that person is not doing any work and won't hesitate to let the person go.

I have no idea what their rankings are, but check out Washington University in St. Louis, Rutgers, and Rice University.

It depends. What field are you in? In certain fields, EPFL is pretty well known and papers from EPFL appear regularly. Same with UIUC, in certain subfields, UIUC papers don't show up as much. My advice would be to consider what your particular interests are, who the faculty in each place in these areas are, what they've been working on recently and what they've published. The rankings rarely tell the whole story. Lastly, I know students that have gone back to Iran to visit their families and returned to US, but it usually takes a few months as they have to get another visa. In that light, you will also have a tough time going to conferences outside of US. It's one more annoying thing you have to deal with, but I don't think it should influence your decision.

Depends. EE does not study (extensively or often) what the poster described. The schools I've listed are strong "systems" schools, however, the research work is in the CS departments. If he were interested in network coding, signals, DSP, then EE would be better.

If you're interested in MANETs, then I don't know of too many groups working in this space anymore. In terms of 802.11 work, consider groups at Wisconsin, UCLA (also, VANET stuff), UIUC, Michigan, UMass Amherst, UC Berkeley, MIT, University of Washington, UCSD (in no particular order). I think that's probably the most active groups in that space. The faculty will vary in their interests and it would behoove you to look at what's going on at each school. This should be a good starting point though. There are also schools I've left out, I'm sure, but these came to mind first.

The whole point of RAID is to use cheap disks, but that wasn't your point. I would just think if you had RAID setup, then the cheapest disks would be the ones you go for -- sorry about the tangent. Personally, I'd go for any drive in the < $40 range as the backup drive. I disagree with the SSD recommendation as the backup drive doesn't need to be fast and the price/GB is too high. If there is a desktop computer available, the it may be worthwhile to get 2 drives, have them mirror each other, and backup to that machine.

What aspect of wireless networking are you interested in? The physical layer? The MAC layer? Are you interested in 802.11, cell, or something else (zigbee, etc)? While it may seem narrow, a lot of things can fall under the "wireless networks" umbrella, including mobility and pervasive computing, for example.

Not exactly small, but T-Mobile's pay as you go service is fine, as far as I can tell. I've used them very sparsely, but didn't seem to have any issues. In general, I have friends that have Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon. I haven't had a dropped call while talking to any of them in Ann Arbor. Can't say much about Northwood in particular or Michigan in general, though. I believe that within the city all providers will be fine, to varying degrees, but you won't be completely disconnected. If it doesn't work out, you can change carriers at the end of your contract. Sorry I could not be of more help.

The insurance is nice. One thing I found out after looking through my AmEx card agreement was that AmEx also provides Loss Damage Insurance if the car was rented on the card. The liability, I think, is included in every rental contract. So, that should be enough coverage. Also, a lot of schools have contracts with various car rental places through which under 25 fee is waived and might give some other perks. Some also waive the under-25 fee through promotions (Hertz seems to have been doing that for the past 2 years?). A number of them also offer pick up and drop off services. It seems to me that if not renting frequently, shopping around the area may be a good idea?

At $66/day, would it be cheaper to rent from one of the car rental companies, like Enterprise, Hertz, etc? Their weekend rentals can be pretty cheap.

Right, that's what I was getting at. I realized I was not as clear on this. I think when email is used as an instant way of communication, personally, I expect more typos and shorter messages (also, a short or no signature and the "sent from my phone" is definitely reasonable). However, if it is the case that I received a long email with a number of points that need to be addressed, I guess I assume that the sender realizes I'll take my time to respond, as most likely I have to collect my thoughts for it (and proof read it). By the way, the "Sent from my iPhone" and "Sent from my iPad", etc are the best way of advertising I've seen so far.

I think it depends. For all the emails I send so far, I end with -- Cheers, Name My advisor goes between no signature, -initial, and the full signature, which is Name, Title, Institution. I'd argue that the recipient already has the email address (primary way of communication most of the time) and anything else can be looked up on the sender's webpage. I guess the "Sent from my phone" signature is reasonable to account for typos, but either the recipient doesn't care about the typos anyway or that email should not be sent from the phone. I don't think email is an instantaneous mode of communication (there was a thread about that too, I guess?) and it's better to take the time to respond thoughtfully sometimes.

The point is that overcharging, as defined in that paper and what I've commonly come across, is once the battery is fully charged (according to cell voltage level, for example), current is still applied. At this point, once the voltage raises above that level, a secondary reaction takes place, which can cause the battery to start bulging. That paper goes into the details a bit more. The difference is that this is not because of the number of *charge cycles* it has undergone. The process with charge/discharge cycles is that deposits form on the electrodes (from what I understand), raising internal resistance. The charge circuitry will still prevent the cell voltage to exceed that of the voltage corresponding to 100% charge. The battery at that point stores less charge, but also charges up quicker.