You don't need to handpick criteria in order to make Apple products seem cheaper. All you really need to do is include some criteria other than clock speeds and memory capacities. Geeks have a tendency to ignore advantages that aren't trivially quantifiable, even when those advantages have real monetary value to most consumers.
When you look at Apple's product line, you find that many products have no true head-on competitors. Most obvious are the iPod Touch, the iMac, and the Mac Mini. Those are products that clearly have a large market and large margins for Apple, so you would expect there to be some competitors trying to undercut Apple while matching them for features and capabilities. Instead, what you see are companies that try to undercut Apple by offering products that have significant disadvantages, such as ultra-small form factor PCs that only offer Atom processors and crappy Intel graphics, while still being bigger than the Mac Mini, or slightly larger boxes that are as fast or faster than an iMac, but when you add in the price of a good monitor, it ends up being several hundred dollars more expensive than the iMac, while lacking the convenience and not really offering much more in the way of upgradeability.
The only reasonable way to explain this is that all would-be Apple competitors lack either the engineering talent or the scale necessary to compete head-on with Apple's offerings. But if that's the case, then the "Apple tax" is no longer arbitrary - it is supported at least in part by very narrow and apparently natural monopolies Apple has in some niches.
Only if you bought a shit PSU to begin with. A quick google search has turned up a Tom's Hardware test showing a system with 2 5770s running Furmark and drawing 324W from the wall. Any 400W PSU that can actually deliver 400W would be sufficient for such a system. Unless you think it is common or reasonable to buy an SLI-capable motherboard and a power supply that doesn't have two PCIe power connectors.
All I said is that the hardware you get is generally properly configured and the software works well with it. That, generally speaking, has nothing to do with how well suited the hardware is for your needs or how much choice you had in selecting the hardware.
If Apple makes a product that is targeted at your needs, it's usually a very compelling offering. If they don't, you usually end up being an Apple hater tinged with what looks suspiciously like jealousy.
This, even more than the issue of debugging hardware problems, separates Macs from PCs. The hardware on a Mac is properly configured. You don't need to worry about low-level power management settings for a MacBook Pro, because it's already been tuned to be the most efficient laptop on the market. I don't know for sure how Macs handle memory timings, but they don't do anything stupid with memory clock speeds. As for legacy ports, there are none around to hog IRQs.
Now, if it's overclocking you're after, you're out of luck, but that doesn't matter because Apple doesn't make a high-end desktop computer, which is what you want if you're an overclocker.
Most Mac software is already Mac-only, since OS X is the only good implementation of the APIs used by Mac software. Changing how the app is sold doesn't really affect the existing and insurmountable technical barrier to moving a mac app to another platform.
The whole point of sensors like this is that what may look to you like black with a few white dots is in fact a much more vivid image, but at intensities too low for human perception. When your sensor is capable of discriminating the differences in intensity or color between stars, stitching the exposures is very easy.
Of, to put it another way, Microsoft gave up on the idea of WYSIWYG, and Apple didn't. Even though the original selling point of TrueType was that the fonts on-screen would match the printer's fonts.
Umm, most Mac users aren't vulnerable to PDF exploits because they use the built-in Preview.app to read PDFs, not Adobe's Reader, and Preview.app doesn't support JavaScript, which is required for any PDF exploit. You also can't disguise an application or shell script or executable binary or disk image by putting.pdf at the end of the filename.
For interactive use, nearly all the output of a physics engine goes straight to the graphics engine to be rendered. Notification of a collision doesn't need timing so precise that a couple dozen nanoseconds matters, because humans have trouble noticing differences on the order of milliseconds.
For non-interactive use, latency will almost certainly not matter at all if throughput is good. Applications that need very complex vector number crunching to happen with low latency are truly rare.
Don't you think that GPUs are smart enough today that they could just take in updated geometry data, etc. and render, without any performance-critical need to send data back up the pipeline to the CPU? Sure, our current software stack isn't well-suited for that kind of use, but lightpeak could provide the impetus for that relatively small re-architecting.
I really don't think one of these would be good for a Jiffy Pop. Those things are wrapped in foil, so if any of the RF energy did make it to the corn, it wouldn't be evenly distributed and would probably burn anything that got hot enough to pop. If, however, you aimed it up and put your corn and butter on top of the output RF window, you could have a very large-scale popcorn maker with no moving parts (except in the coolant system for your klystron).
The ADS isn't a MASER, because it doesn't use stimulated emission for the amplification, but the end result is still coherent microwaves. The typical way to amplify millimeter waves of the wavelength used by the ADS is with a klystron.
DisplayPort is also more computer-oriented than HDMI, so it is more flexible about what kind of data streams it can carry. For example, the latest version of the standard supports carrying USB signals and a wider range of audio formats than HDMI supports.
Also, DisplayPort wasn't invented by Apple. They just adopted it (except for their own connector) because it suited their needs better than HDMI.
1913 isn't really a fair data point to use, considering that that was the year that federal income taxes were first explicitly allowed by the Constitution. Insight can be had by realizing that by the time that federal income tax was 4 years old, the top rate had grown to 67% (though most of this was to fund WW1).
However, any discussion of top marginal tax rates is incomplete and even disingenuous without considering how much you had to earn in order to qualify for that top bracket. A graph like the one at http://www.visualizingeconomics.com/2007/11/03/nytimes-historical-tax-rates-by-income-group/ is necessary to accurately convey the change in tax structure over time. The super-rich elite truly have had it easier in recent decades, but during the 90's most of the population was subject to more progressive taxation than during the 60's.
PHBs will perhaps base their decisions on the shininess of the product rather than the shininess of the brochure. It's a step in the right direction: it gets the PHBs looking at the actual product.
I'm pretty sure the capabilities of ATI's Eyefinity cards show that our graphics cards are starting to outpace our monitors, even without liquid cooling.
The iPod was introduced on October 23, 2001. The iTunes Store opened on April 28, 2003, the same day that the third generation iPod was released. The iPod's initial success had nothing to do with DRM.
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You don't need to handpick criteria in order to make Apple products seem cheaper. All you really need to do is include some criteria other than clock speeds and memory capacities. Geeks have a tendency to ignore advantages that aren't trivially quantifiable, even when those advantages have real monetary value to most consumers.
When you look at Apple's product line, you find that many products have no true head-on competitors. Most obvious are the iPod Touch, the iMac, and the Mac Mini. Those are products that clearly have a large market and large margins for Apple, so you would expect there to be some competitors trying to undercut Apple while matching them for features and capabilities. Instead, what you see are companies that try to undercut Apple by offering products that have significant disadvantages, such as ultra-small form factor PCs that only offer Atom processors and crappy Intel graphics, while still being bigger than the Mac Mini, or slightly larger boxes that are as fast or faster than an iMac, but when you add in the price of a good monitor, it ends up being several hundred dollars more expensive than the iMac, while lacking the convenience and not really offering much more in the way of upgradeability.
The only reasonable way to explain this is that all would-be Apple competitors lack either the engineering talent or the scale necessary to compete head-on with Apple's offerings. But if that's the case, then the "Apple tax" is no longer arbitrary - it is supported at least in part by very narrow and apparently natural monopolies Apple has in some niches.
Only if you bought a shit PSU to begin with. A quick google search has turned up a Tom's Hardware test showing a system with 2 5770s running Furmark and drawing 324W from the wall. Any 400W PSU that can actually deliver 400W would be sufficient for such a system. Unless you think it is common or reasonable to buy an SLI-capable motherboard and a power supply that doesn't have two PCIe power connectors.
All I said is that the hardware you get is generally properly configured and the software works well with it. That, generally speaking, has nothing to do with how well suited the hardware is for your needs or how much choice you had in selecting the hardware.
If Apple makes a product that is targeted at your needs, it's usually a very compelling offering. If they don't, you usually end up being an Apple hater tinged with what looks suspiciously like jealousy.
This, even more than the issue of debugging hardware problems, separates Macs from PCs. The hardware on a Mac is properly configured. You don't need to worry about low-level power management settings for a MacBook Pro, because it's already been tuned to be the most efficient laptop on the market. I don't know for sure how Macs handle memory timings, but they don't do anything stupid with memory clock speeds. As for legacy ports, there are none around to hog IRQs.
Now, if it's overclocking you're after, you're out of luck, but that doesn't matter because Apple doesn't make a high-end desktop computer, which is what you want if you're an overclocker.
Try reading an EULA and then come back and tell me that English is sufficiently expressive as-is.
Yes, but you still can't make it from a microwave oven.
I think you missed the point. They're all full-sized, though none of them has a number pad.
Are you aware that all the Apple laptops (even the 11.6" MacBook Air) use the same size keyboard?
Most Mac software is already Mac-only, since OS X is the only good implementation of the APIs used by Mac software. Changing how the app is sold doesn't really affect the existing and insurmountable technical barrier to moving a mac app to another platform.
The whole point of sensors like this is that what may look to you like black with a few white dots is in fact a much more vivid image, but at intensities too low for human perception. When your sensor is capable of discriminating the differences in intensity or color between stars, stitching the exposures is very easy.
Of, to put it another way, Microsoft gave up on the idea of WYSIWYG, and Apple didn't. Even though the original selling point of TrueType was that the fonts on-screen would match the printer's fonts.
Umm, most Mac users aren't vulnerable to PDF exploits because they use the built-in Preview.app to read PDFs, not Adobe's Reader, and Preview.app doesn't support JavaScript, which is required for any PDF exploit. You also can't disguise an application or shell script or executable binary or disk image by putting .pdf at the end of the filename.
For interactive use, nearly all the output of a physics engine goes straight to the graphics engine to be rendered. Notification of a collision doesn't need timing so precise that a couple dozen nanoseconds matters, because humans have trouble noticing differences on the order of milliseconds.
For non-interactive use, latency will almost certainly not matter at all if throughput is good. Applications that need very complex vector number crunching to happen with low latency are truly rare.
Don't you think that GPUs are smart enough today that they could just take in updated geometry data, etc. and render, without any performance-critical need to send data back up the pipeline to the CPU? Sure, our current software stack isn't well-suited for that kind of use, but lightpeak could provide the impetus for that relatively small re-architecting.
I really don't think one of these would be good for a Jiffy Pop. Those things are wrapped in foil, so if any of the RF energy did make it to the corn, it wouldn't be evenly distributed and would probably burn anything that got hot enough to pop. If, however, you aimed it up and put your corn and butter on top of the output RF window, you could have a very large-scale popcorn maker with no moving parts (except in the coolant system for your klystron).
The ADS isn't a MASER, because it doesn't use stimulated emission for the amplification, but the end result is still coherent microwaves. The typical way to amplify millimeter waves of the wavelength used by the ADS is with a klystron.
DisplayPort is royalty-free; HDMI isn't.
DisplayPort is also more computer-oriented than HDMI, so it is more flexible about what kind of data streams it can carry. For example, the latest version of the standard supports carrying USB signals and a wider range of audio formats than HDMI supports.
Also, DisplayPort wasn't invented by Apple. They just adopted it (except for their own connector) because it suited their needs better than HDMI.
Ironic that even the Tea-Party mainstream couldn't stop their party from being taken over by extremists and Fox News.
1913 isn't really a fair data point to use, considering that that was the year that federal income taxes were first explicitly allowed by the Constitution. Insight can be had by realizing that by the time that federal income tax was 4 years old, the top rate had grown to 67% (though most of this was to fund WW1).
However, any discussion of top marginal tax rates is incomplete and even disingenuous without considering how much you had to earn in order to qualify for that top bracket. A graph like the one at http://www.visualizingeconomics.com/2007/11/03/nytimes-historical-tax-rates-by-income-group/ is necessary to accurately convey the change in tax structure over time. The super-rich elite truly have had it easier in recent decades, but during the 90's most of the population was subject to more progressive taxation than during the 60's.
PHBs will perhaps base their decisions on the shininess of the product rather than the shininess of the brochure. It's a step in the right direction: it gets the PHBs looking at the actual product.
Until you get the next SCO claiming they bought the rights to Helvetica and all its derivatives.
64-bit computing isn't about having 64-bit ints. It's about having 64-bit pointers.
I'm pretty sure the capabilities of ATI's Eyefinity cards show that our graphics cards are starting to outpace our monitors, even without liquid cooling.
The iPod was introduced on October 23, 2001. The iTunes Store opened on April 28, 2003, the same day that the third generation iPod was released. The iPod's initial success had nothing to do with DRM.
When the government does it, it is called an incentive.