Joseph Dickinson

When looking to buy a computer the first thing you might see is a cheap dell for $500 and jump at it! But, you should reconsider, while a macbook can be a whopping $1000+ in the long run, the TCO (total cost of ownership) will be a lot less. I’ll show you how:

1. Virtually no viruses – While the mac operating system, may have a handful of viruses – the fact of the matter is : most people (to date) do not need antivirus. How does this save you? Well, consider you run a business and use your laptop to store information about clients and all of a sudden a virus steals all of the confidential customer data and sends them all hate mail while at the same thing steals all of the social security numbers and open accounts in them. Lesson learned: mac users typically would not have to worry about this.

2. Much faster – The operating system behind a macbook is built behind the legendary: unix operating system. This increases not just your everyday browsing capabilities, but let’s you develop software quicker, simultaneously run multiple applications, and on the off chance you need to leave your mac for the day; it will within seconds come and warmly welcome you.

3. Native Backup Built In – Time Machine! Every time you make an edit to something on your harddrive, Time Machine backs up that file immediately to an external drive (such as an External Hard drive, Flash Drive, etc). The best part of it is, if you want to backup to an earlier date, even years ago, you can with two clicks! Can you say no more losing your data?

4. Easier Program Install / Uninstall – Simply drag and drop a program into the /applications/ directory on your mac and voila! You have installed a program. If you choose to then delete that file all you need to do is right click and “Move to Trash”; file deleted.

5. Longer Battery Life – Have you ever been sitting in starbucks (or a local coffee shop) without your power cable and after 2 hours your computer is ready to die? Worry to longer, a macbook has 4-5 hours of battery life whether its idling or working between multiple programs; kiss good-bye those days where you need to furious save your work because your battery is going to die.

6. Need Windows? No Problem – Have you thought about a windows program that you just can’t get your hands off of? Well, you’re in luck, by using Cross Over or Parallels or Mac’s Native solution Boot Camp – you can natively run windows just like if you have a clunker PC to work on rejoice, you have the best of both worlds!

7. Develop out of the box – No need to install all of this software when you first get it out of the box! Apple has done that for you, Apple preinstalls on its macbooks everything from Python to Php to AppleScript to C all editable in the native program X-Code (similiar to Visual Studio) – programmers : program from the get go!

When all is said and done, the TCO for own a mac when you factor in time, money, and learning easily outbeats any PC-competitor. It runs like a champ out of the box. I’ve owned both 3 different PC brands, 1 macbook, and 1 macbook pro. I cannot emphasive it enough; a mac comes out on top either way

Many people think net-books are just not powerful enough for their demands. But, you maybe be enticed by their price-to-performance ratio. This especially should be your computer if you all do you is instant messaging, internet browsing, and other light-cpu tasks.

1. Initial Cost – Are you in the market for a new computer? How does $200 to $300 sound? This does not sacrifice what you can do however, you can just as easily connect to your facebook, or twitter, or stream Youtube videos.

2. Option not with Windows – For those of you (myself included) who absolutely loath Microsoft – you can now rejoice: some net books are offered with Windows 7 or a distribution of linux. In fact, most net books today can run both simultaneously (if you’re that geeky).

3. Easier Portability – Did you know – some net books weight 1-2 lbs? This is a significant difference both when putting your net book in your laptop and when your carrying it around. Other primarily windows-based net books can weigh anywhere from 5 to 8 lbs.

Whether or not you are a current smart phone owner, have you briefly looked at your past cell phone bill? Most cell phone plans nowadays can be as much as $100 per month for one phone, never mind a smart phone.

Give up the smart phone – Have you realized that there are an emerging amount of android-based cell phones like the Motorola Droid, Droid Incredible, iPhone, etc out there? Their reeling you in by acting like its a cheap investment by only having to spend $50 for upfront, but what their really aimed at targeting is the bill at the end of the month with a data plan. Let’s analyze how much a plan can really cost you:

Lose Unlimited Texting – For the average 30 to 50 year old they are not sending out a mere 1000+ texts per month. They may send out the occasional text to their spouse or sister. Unlimited texting is only cost-beneficial if you are sending out 1000s of texts per week like many young teens do everything. Saving that extra $10+ per month really adds up.

Save on Un-needed Minutes – Have you given your minute usage a gander lately? Many people easily are giving themselves the short end of the stick, they buy hundreds and hundreds of minutes and hardly use the majority of them. You really should give everyone a limit who is on the plan (obviously the plan owner with the most) and stick to it. This way, you maximize the money in your pocket and your usage. So, this was, you win; not the cell phone company.

When all is said and done, you ultimately choose what you want and what you need on your cell phone plan. However, by utilizing these three simple steps when choosing and/or modifying your cell phone bill you can pocket these extra hundred dollars per year instead of giving it away.

The top 4:

1. Loss of Business Focus – Current employees who are onsite are not going to be too convinced that you, as the Ceo, are making decisions that are best for everyone’s future in the company. Many of these employees are the ones you started the business with and now your stabbing them in the back. You still want these back-stabbed employees to still bring the level of dedication that they brought fresh into the company? Kiss that good bye.

2. Abandoned relationships – Now that you – the ceo have decided to save money and get piss-pour work overseas you may not realize it, but in the process are destroying colleague relationships that have been established decades ago and by laying off others, I am certain you will not make current employees happy.

3. Time Zone Differences – Imagine you run a small business ( > 10 employees ) you decide to save some more money for yourself (as if you don’t do that already). Meanwhile, your new employee overseas is running into a problem with some of his work, but its 3am in the United States. Therefore, he has to wait until at least 8am here for you to wake up to respond. By the time you wake up, its time for him to go to bed. For the workers in the United States – they cannot help the guy overseas because hes sleeping. When push comes to shove, someone is going to have to make a sacrifice; sleep. By being fatigue it leads you to poor productivity.

4. The Overlooked Cost-Over-Time – Have you considered the future of business if an employee’s work isnt sufficient for your needs? Suppose a company hires an overseas programmer for $15 per hour, that employee works 40 hours per week totaling $600. An onsite programmer is $30 per hour, practically double that of an overseas programmer.

See the huge difference? Not yet! Let’s say the overseas guys code is piss-poor then you have to consider his $600 per week to work on that code, plus some mis-communication time of yours, then either you (let’s say your worth $75 per hour) or your lead programmer onsite will need to fix the code if it takes whomever fixes it around 5 hours, that’s $150 upfront. That doesn’t include the 3 hours out of 8 hours in a day he now wasted trying to fix lousy code where he could be using it to fix his own problems. The problems go back and forth, on and on.

What is net neutrality?

You can think of the term “net neutrality” as organization who protects the common individual from the government being able to control everything we do on the internet from shopping to selling to well… everything online.

By the net being ‘neutral’, this helps protect us from governments being able to enforce harsh restrictions on the content, websites, and platforms we utilize. While, the internet was first used as a way for communication in armed services, it does not mean that they can control the portal that billions of people nationwide utilize everything from banking, shopping, marketing, and much much more.

How does it affect you?

Life without online banking – Can you imagine it? Everything would have to revert to the old method: banks would need to hire new tellers, people would need to spend a lot of time in the branches, atm machines would be flooded with annoyed customers who just want that get their hands on that $100 to go down the shore this weekend, and individuals lifestyles would just be astray

Decreased video streaming – Imagine if the government created a law that tracks your ip address and only allows each ip address to watch say, five hours per video a month online? The millions upon millions of users who use Youtube and other popular video sharing websites would be heartbroken.

Designated website viewing – This is probably the worst thought of all of them, imagine net neutrality isn’t put into effect and you can only see certain websites? Imagine if the only website’s you could view were few and far between? Do you realize that this could happen very soon if net neutrality isn’t enacted?

Just think of the amazing jobs the internet has produced for people, how it drastically has changed the way people communicate, and what disaster it could cause to Information Technology if we do not fight to enact this into legislation?

Greetings!

On my blog, I will be writing about various technology related including web design advice, database securities, mobile computing through smart phones such as iphones and blackberry’s, and finally startup business advice.

Thanks for stopping by!