hmmm you're not far off on most of the numbers you quote ...EXCEPT w.r.t. mobile quad for about $350 you can get an intel q9000 mobile quad core cpu it has less lvl 2 cache (2 megs less i think?) and runs slightly slower (think the 9000 runs at about 2 gigahertz and the 9100 2.53 ghz supposedly) but it makes for a really really fast laptop Also the nvidia GTS 120/150/160 mobile gpus give fairly good mileage. Probably won't see quantities of laptops with one of these nvidia gpus & the intel q9000 until mid summer though for $1500 which works out to about 2x the expense of a similarly equipped desktop. C++ya, xkey

<blockquote class="FQ"><div class="FQA">Shog9 wrote:</div>http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/01/08.html\[^\] Imagine instead an undergraduate curriculum that consists of 1/3 liberal arts, and 2/3 software development work. The teachers are experienced software developers from industry. The studio operates like a software company. You might be able to major in Game Development and work on a significant game title, for example, and that's how you spend most of your time, just like a film student spends a lot of time actually making films and the dance students spend most of their time dancing. Frankly, i'd love to see this... and not because i consider CS topics to be too abstract or impractical. To me, it seems as though programmers are being pushed further and further into the category of interchangeable grunts/clerks, with all-too-little value being placed on the style or quality of the work they do. The last time we were hiring, it was all we could do to find any practical experience in the candidates we interviewed, much less anything approaching a love of, or pride in their work. Of course, it doesn't help that The Powers That Be remain convinced that all problems will be solved by farming out work to consultants who consider writing code akin to building prefab homes, sans elegance and quality control. IMHO, this isn't something that's going to be fixed top-down (all claims of the Six-Sigma for Software folks aside). If crap coders are all that are available, The System will work around it by building processes that don't require skill... to the detriment of us all. Thoughts?</blockquote> Liberal Arts or any number of non-tangential courses don't benefit a developing mind that is disinterested in them. So to toss out ratios of particular classes in the hopes they will aide and increase some creativity and style component is a pipedream. As to having people from industry teaching courses - I had that 15+ years ago when an undergraduate student - the graduate students that taught my Software Engineering, OOP, and assembly courses were all just a few years older working for various companies in Milwaukee and working towards their MS in Compsci. It's almost always beneficial to a degree because they've been in the trenches; be careful though of those who follow lousy practices at work teaching courses though lol!!!! Why does everyone almost always bring up game development industry examples? They have some of the worst quality assurance practices across software; I wo