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PC Sales Slump Over Economic Crisis
nandemoari writes "The damage isn't just limited to the United States. Shipments of PCs in Europe, the Mid-East, and Africa dipped to records posted around the turn of the century. It was even worse in Asia, which according to Gartner, posted its worst growth rate ever — just 1.8 per cent.
Within the industry, desktops took the hardest hit, as was expected. Sales of non-portable computers were down about 16 per cent as consumers opted instead for the rising 'netbook' and similar hybrids. That fact alone is troubling for PC makers, given that $300-$500 netbooks offer a far lower profit margin than more expensive and more powerful laptops and desktops."
These days, you can get a powerful PC with a decent GPU (if you're a gamer) for less than $1k, and a $400 netbook for when you're on the road. Why have anything in between?
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
"$200 for a 2.8GHz P4 with 1GB of RAM. It is the only way I can keep up a 25% turn-over rate and stay under budget."
Alternatively, about $250 plus an hour to assemble it and install Linux will get you a dual-core Atom with 2GB of RAM and a 100+GB-ish hard drive; you'll probably save the difference in reduced power usage over the next couple of years, given how power-hungry P4s were.
There is more than just the economy which is slowing the growth of PC market. Growth comes from two factors: 1) New buys 2) Upgrades. Recently, the PC speed have been good enough, that those who don't want to upgrade, don't need to. I have a 6 year old desk top with spec 2.6 GHz, 180GB HD 1 GB RAM, DVD-Writer, XP-Home, Firewire, TV Tuner. Is there any compulsion for me to upgrade? Now think back 6 years ago when I bought that machine. My older machine didn't have dvd player (let alone writer), didn't have USB and it was 200 MHz (really slow even for MP3 decoding).
However, as we can see, recently the laptops have become far more powerful than they were 5 years ago, so laptop has both the markets, the first time buyers and upgraders and that is why the growth in that segment is high.
no... Windows seven will run on a AMD 1.4Ghz Thunderbird with 2gb of ram with no issues what so ever. (Nvidia FX5500 means it even handles Aero with no issues)
I had old parts lying around and wanted to see how Win7 ran on older hardware.
Don't rush me, Sonny. You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles.
It wasn't modded down. He's just a habitual troll with such bad karma that he starts at -1.
Instead, toss a bunch of blade racks together, virtualize your userbase, simplify your desktop management, address many of your network security issues, keep all your data "safe" in the data center, allow better user experience for remote users... lots and lots of benefits (if you can get it to work).
In my company (a large bank), we are due to refresh 10's of thousands of PCs, yet instead, we may refresh NONE of them, go with virtualization (and the saved costs of keeping older PCs will fund the new infrastructure). With PCs bought in the last 3-4 years, acting as thin-clients, we can keep them until they break, and replace them with some cheap thintops.
If many companies are going down this route, then it would be no surprise, coupled with the economy, that PC sales in the corporate world would be dropping!
Lokatana
4. There are computing-jobs that are inherently not parallel.
5. Parallel programming is hard not because of bad programming languages but because of the logical problems that come with shared state and parallelism.
http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-23.html#%25_idx_3598
Therefore multicores do not bring a substantial performance benefit. Futhermore because the problems are fundamental logical ones, there is no big hope.
Dell has a problem with creating BTX based machines too. If they were really following his advise we'd not have the BTX platform. This is used only by the pre-fab makers for the purpose of forcing customers to return to the manufacturer for repairs/replacements.
I worked yesterday for about 2 hours to clean a system of all the crapware that came pre-installed on a compaq computer. By removing it I turned this extremely slow and annoying Vista box into something that was quite snappy.
Let's just say that companies such as Dell and HP are wasting a lot of consumer time putting this shit on the computers. I mean there was a lot of shit and it did nothing. Even the start up process was so slow and convoluted I ended up just alt+F4 to close it and began uninstalling the junk.
And it seems Microsoft is working hard to get companies such as HP to install all their crap on the computer, such as Silverlight (preinstalled), Live toolbar (preinstalled), search engine preinstalled to Microsoft, Live messenger (links everywhere to install it).
At least with their Ubuntu offerings this shit isn't pre-loaded.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Whoosh
He's saying insert a 'No' at the '*', giving a sentence of 'No Sales Slump Over Economic Crisis'. Obviously 'No' is one of the words you can't appropriately insert there.
I think that's what you meant to say, since technically they're making more money.
If you want to split hairs, it depends what you call money. Take the DJIA, for instance. In 1999, the Dow was at 11,000 and change. In July '08, the Dow was at 11,000 and change. Technically they were at the same level. Effectively, the Dow was lower in July, since inflation has been occurring, by whatever compounded percent that's been since 1999. But actually, it took 4 times as much gold to buy the Dow in 2008 as it did in 1999, so in real terms the Dow has lost 75% of its value in the past decade.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Well, other than the 1930's, which had a much larger foreclosure rate than we're having now.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Sure processes are better isolated, but the problem of time and concurrency stays.
This will always be a problem because it is a fundamental logical one, comming from mother nature.
SICP has an good examples of that problem: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-23.html#%25_sec_3.4
Functional programming may be an answer, but this answer is limited by mother nature.