I really doubt that there are lots of people buying boxed upgrades to Vista. What seems more likely is that they are negligible compared to the people who don't know enough to request XP when they buy a new system.
Also, among potential Mac switchers, it is probably common knowledge that now is not the time to buy. Let's wait until this time next year, after Leopard has started to settle in and more people have gotten frustrated by Vista. We could see a very different picture.
At the end of 2006, Google had about $11.2B cash on hand according to their 10K filings. As of the end of last March (after the BellSouth acquisition), AT&T reports $2.3B in "cash and cash equivalents", and only $24.5B in "total current assets". I'm no broker, but it sure looks to me like Google is in the same league as the telcos.
Are there any almost-computer-illiterate people who have a strong preference for a desktop? I've certainly never met anybody at all like that. They certainly aren't the die-hard desktop users the author mentioned. You are, because you like working in your computer almost as much as you like working with your computer. Most people are borderline luddites when it comes to modern computer hardware.
But nobody is trying to make laptops the universal replacement for desktops. The simple truth is that the vast majority of computer users never consider upgrading their graphics card, let alone actually do the deed. Very few people are willing to throw away a fully functional $300 component in exchange for a slightly newer component that costs just as much and will only make their games a bit faster or prettier. On top of that, even fewer people can accurately evaluate who much they can spend on their graphics card before all their games will be CPU-bound.
The simple truth is that upgrading a core component like the GPU doesn't make economic sense. The market of people willing to ignore that fact is much smaller than the PC market as a whole, and even then, most of those people are going to blow their money on a big-ass TV first.
Well, sure, a laptop in a docking station is basically a desktop, except that you have to pay far more for the same thing, making the whole exercise seem rather pointless. Except for the fact that, at the end of the day, you are left with a system that is still usable when you take it away from the desk. Also, I can see this easily becoming a moot point for people switching from desktops to laptops - they simply replace the tower with a docking station for their newer, faster laptop.
And the increased speed and reach of modern networking means that the benefit of being able to undock your computer and take it home with you is decreasing. I'm pretty sure most people would consider the exact opposite to be true. Modern networking means that you are more able to take the computer away from the home ofice to the couch or anywhere else where you can be more productive (or simply productive longer). This is actually a benefit to most people.
I mean, why spend umpteen dollars on a laptop plus two docking stations and peripherals, and go through all the constant hassle of docking and undocking, and also face a significantly increased risk of a single theft completely depriving you of a computer and all your data -- when you could spend less, get two desktops and a smartphone, and keep your files synchronised over the internet? A laptop doesn't limit you to a finite number of places to work from. For most people, the best solution would be to get a good laptop, NAS if necessary, and a single docking station for when they need to do work that requires a larger monitor or optical mouse. (By the way, a docking station with peripherals is always going to cost less than a desktop PC with the same peripherals. If that weren't the case, it would never have been profitable to sell docking stations. And docking stations have always been designed to minimize the hassle of docking and undocking.)
Every credible source I've read has said that the way you've counted a charge cycle applies to NiMH batteries and not lithium ion cells. With Li-ion cells, frequent short charges aren't a problem. Also, the self-discharge rate of Li-ion battery packs is so low that they would only be topped off once or twice a month.
None of the problems you bring up were included in the post I responded to. I wasn't passing off laptops as a silver bullet or a one-size-fits-all solution. It has already been established, in TFA and comments by myself and others that, if you need a server you buy.... a server.
Also, it is worth pointing out that with technologies like Firewire and ExpressCard, laptops can also have essentially unlimited high-performance mass storage. Latency is not an issue, because Firewire has always been able to transfer video from the camera to the computer in realtime.
Please re-read the third and final sentence in the summary about "die-hard" users.
And leaving a notebook plugged in all the time kills the battery. WTF? Since when? Last time I checked, my laptop simply charges the battery when it is plugged in, and then leaves it alone. I can even take the battery out while it is plugged in and the laptop will continue running. The only way your comment could be true is if all laptops had very idiotic charging circuits. That is not the case.
By the way, Apple already has.Mac as an internet-based syncing solution.
Hmmm... It doesn't seem that you've named any problems that weren't solved by docking stations a decade ago. Did you simply forget about such things, or do you have some reason to consider them obsolete or no longer economically or technologically feasible?
My university library already loans out laptops for use in the library only. They have access to all the site-licensed software, which is distributed and installed on-the-fly by the Novell network software they use for all windows machines. If it weren't for the current ubiquity of computer labs on campus, we would probably have expanded the system to be campus-wide. It isn't hard to keep track of who has what laptop, and to lock them down to only connect through the university's wifi.
That said, I'm glad we're keeping our computer labs stocked with fast desktops and 30" Cinema displays. (Have you ever worked on a coding project with four files open side-by-side?:)
1. Cost In TFA, they point out that fewer and fewer consumers mind the $100-$200 premium for a laptop with comparable specs.
2. Upgrades People who upgrade critical components like motherboards, cpus, and graphics cards are already very much in the "die-hard" category. Normal consumers never upgrade those things except by replacing the machine. For almost everything else, USB and Firewire suffice. (The exception being, of course, RAM. But most laptops produced in the past 10 years have had upgradeable RAM).
It seems to me that the only people who will stay firmly in the "desktop" category are people who by definition don't need the mobility. They are the people running computer labs, servers, and office computing systems. I expect even the high-end professional users to migrate to laptops except when laptops don't offer enough raw performance at any cost.
The interesting thing to note is that, from a technological perspective, desktop vs. laptop doesn't matter anyways. So much of the desktop market it migrating to iMac-like all-in-ones and other small enclosures that they will pretty much all be using laptop chips, too.
First of all, in APL, you don't have to use one-liners if you care about readability. Wait. That's an oxymoron. APL programmers by definition don't care about readability.
Besides, APL is so obscure and different from traditional languages that it pretty much requires its own editor anyways. Why should C-style syntax rules be affected by something like APL?
Why are most programmers still using fixed-width fonts in their editors/IDEs? Using a proportional font, you can fit a lot more code onscreen without sacrificing readability. It can also make some typos much easier to spot. The only thing I can think of is that it makes ascii art a bit harder, but it isn't impossible. And besides, shouldn't our more complex documentation (tables, etc.) be separate from the code anyways, in a format like DocBook or LaTeX?
Now, I can understand that once you throw things open to variable width fonts, there will be disagreements amongst coders as to what fonts should be used. But given how complex our current indentation and formatting rules can get, is it that hard to standardize on the Arial/Helvetica metrics?
So? The iPod got where it is on its own, without any help from the Mac. And while the iPod has certainly made iTunes more popular, iTunes is still a free application and iPod users don't have to use it unless they are using DRM'd music or purchasing from iTMS. It isn't like the music iTunes offers is not available on CDs too. I don't see any monopolistic abuse there. Just the usual mess with DRM and a product (iPod) that won its dominance in the market fairly.
The thing is, Apple's operating system actually does comply with plenty of open standards that have been implemented by others as well (single unix spec, openstep, etc.) On top of that, OS X ships with several major open source packages that function pretty much the same as on other platforms (X11, bsd userland, apache, gcc, etc.)
While it is true that most of the Windows APIs are now accessible to mortals (at some cost), Apple has the track record of actually being interoperable and supporting portable software. The fact that MS and Apple control their respective GUIs tightly is unrelated to the openness of their platforms. The fact that a python script or x11 app can run on a stock (plus optional stuff from the install dvds) OS X system is what makes it an open platform.
The things Apple has done with their proprietary GUI libraries are no better or worse than what MS has done with DirectX, but Apple leaves you an out. With OS X, you still have a real and usable operating system when you choose not to boot into the Aqua UI. With windows, you can't escape.
You aren't forced to use any of the iApps. There are alternatives to all of them. You are to some extent forced to use the Finder, but there are other programs you can use as your primary file manager, and if you really resent the UI as much as you seem to, you can just use X11. Apple offers the most open platform that is still proprietary, and they don't abuse their dominance in one market to get into another market.
Windows is still highly sensitive to high latency. Try running a bandwidth test with a nearby server and one across an ocean. You'll notice a much bigger difference with Windows than with a stock modern UNIX, which can still be tweaked quite a bit.
Just off the top of my head, I'm not a physicist but I like to read. If the universe is expanding then it must be a finite area. Nope. The rest of your logic is sound, but unfortunately it depends on that false assumption. The standard analogy is to imagine a 2d universe existing on the surface of a balloon. As you inflate the balloon, all points on the surface move away from each other. Now, realize that this is completely independent of the volume of the balloon, and it does not even require a finite surface area. Then extrapolate to three dimensions.
I thought that output could only be required to be under the GPL if the compiler copied a non-trivial portion of its GPL code into the output. In this case, though, it is the standard library that gets included, not part of the compiler. With a tool like bison, where parser code is copied into the output, an exception is necessary.
Motion sickness? Even after you've turned off most of the animations? Try leaning back away from the monitor. Are you able to play any other 3d games, particularly FPS? I can't imagine living with that susceptibility to motion sickness. You have my sympathy.
No, it isn't. Higher overall complexity means there is more to be debugged. If there are bugs in the RISC portion (even though that is a bit of a false dichotomy) that means that portion didn't get enough testing. If there weren't other subsystems competing for testing efforts, the RISC core would end up getting tested more thoroughly.
It doesn't really matter whether the bugs are in the x86 decoder and compatibility stuff or not. The problem is that they add greatly to the overall complexity. A cleaner architecture is easier to implement. This has been shown many times with ARM and Power chips, that manage to be very efficient and fast, even with significantly smaller R&D budgets.
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I really doubt that there are lots of people buying boxed upgrades to Vista. What seems more likely is that they are negligible compared to the people who don't know enough to request XP when they buy a new system.
Also, among potential Mac switchers, it is probably common knowledge that now is not the time to buy. Let's wait until this time next year, after Leopard has started to settle in and more people have gotten frustrated by Vista. We could see a very different picture.
At the end of 2006, Google had about $11.2B cash on hand according to their 10K filings. As of the end of last March (after the BellSouth acquisition), AT&T reports $2.3B in "cash and cash equivalents", and only $24.5B in "total current assets". I'm no broker, but it sure looks to me like Google is in the same league as the telcos.
Are there any almost-computer-illiterate people who have a strong preference for a desktop? I've certainly never met anybody at all like that. They certainly aren't the die-hard desktop users the author mentioned. You are, because you like working in your computer almost as much as you like working with your computer. Most people are borderline luddites when it comes to modern computer hardware.
But nobody is trying to make laptops the universal replacement for desktops. The simple truth is that the vast majority of computer users never consider upgrading their graphics card, let alone actually do the deed. Very few people are willing to throw away a fully functional $300 component in exchange for a slightly newer component that costs just as much and will only make their games a bit faster or prettier. On top of that, even fewer people can accurately evaluate who much they can spend on their graphics card before all their games will be CPU-bound.
The simple truth is that upgrading a core component like the GPU doesn't make economic sense. The market of people willing to ignore that fact is much smaller than the PC market as a whole, and even then, most of those people are going to blow their money on a big-ass TV first.
Every credible source I've read has said that the way you've counted a charge cycle applies to NiMH batteries and not lithium ion cells. With Li-ion cells, frequent short charges aren't a problem. Also, the self-discharge rate of Li-ion battery packs is so low that they would only be topped off once or twice a month.
None of the problems you bring up were included in the post I responded to. I wasn't passing off laptops as a silver bullet or a one-size-fits-all solution. It has already been established, in TFA and comments by myself and others that, if you need a server you buy .... a server.
Also, it is worth pointing out that with technologies like Firewire and ExpressCard, laptops can also have essentially unlimited high-performance mass storage. Latency is not an issue, because Firewire has always been able to transfer video from the camera to the computer in realtime.
Please re-read the third and final sentence in the summary about "die-hard" users.
By the way, Apple already has
Hmmm... It doesn't seem that you've named any problems that weren't solved by docking stations a decade ago. Did you simply forget about such things, or do you have some reason to consider them obsolete or no longer economically or technologically feasible?
My university library already loans out laptops for use in the library only. They have access to all the site-licensed software, which is distributed and installed on-the-fly by the Novell network software they use for all windows machines. If it weren't for the current ubiquity of computer labs on campus, we would probably have expanded the system to be campus-wide. It isn't hard to keep track of who has what laptop, and to lock them down to only connect through the university's wifi.
:)
That said, I'm glad we're keeping our computer labs stocked with fast desktops and 30" Cinema displays. (Have you ever worked on a coding project with four files open side-by-side?
It seems to me that the only people who will stay firmly in the "desktop" category are people who by definition don't need the mobility. They are the people running computer labs, servers, and office computing systems. I expect even the high-end professional users to migrate to laptops except when laptops don't offer enough raw performance at any cost.
The interesting thing to note is that, from a technological perspective, desktop vs. laptop doesn't matter anyways. So much of the desktop market it migrating to iMac-like all-in-ones and other small enclosures that they will pretty much all be using laptop chips, too.
I thought this was what tabs/indentation were for. That still works with a proportional font.
No.
First of all, in APL, you don't have to use one-liners if you care about readability. Wait. That's an oxymoron. APL programmers by definition don't care about readability.
Besides, APL is so obscure and different from traditional languages that it pretty much requires its own editor anyways. Why should C-style syntax rules be affected by something like APL?
Why are most programmers still using fixed-width fonts in their editors/IDEs? Using a proportional font, you can fit a lot more code onscreen without sacrificing readability. It can also make some typos much easier to spot. The only thing I can think of is that it makes ascii art a bit harder, but it isn't impossible. And besides, shouldn't our more complex documentation (tables, etc.) be separate from the code anyways, in a format like DocBook or LaTeX?
Now, I can understand that once you throw things open to variable width fonts, there will be disagreements amongst coders as to what fonts should be used. But given how complex our current indentation and formatting rules can get, is it that hard to standardize on the Arial/Helvetica metrics?
So? The iPod got where it is on its own, without any help from the Mac. And while the iPod has certainly made iTunes more popular, iTunes is still a free application and iPod users don't have to use it unless they are using DRM'd music or purchasing from iTMS. It isn't like the music iTunes offers is not available on CDs too. I don't see any monopolistic abuse there. Just the usual mess with DRM and a product (iPod) that won its dominance in the market fairly.
The thing is, Apple's operating system actually does comply with plenty of open standards that have been implemented by others as well (single unix spec, openstep, etc.) On top of that, OS X ships with several major open source packages that function pretty much the same as on other platforms (X11, bsd userland, apache, gcc, etc.)
While it is true that most of the Windows APIs are now accessible to mortals (at some cost), Apple has the track record of actually being interoperable and supporting portable software. The fact that MS and Apple control their respective GUIs tightly is unrelated to the openness of their platforms. The fact that a python script or x11 app can run on a stock (plus optional stuff from the install dvds) OS X system is what makes it an open platform.
The things Apple has done with their proprietary GUI libraries are no better or worse than what MS has done with DirectX, but Apple leaves you an out. With OS X, you still have a real and usable operating system when you choose not to boot into the Aqua UI. With windows, you can't escape.
You aren't forced to use any of the iApps. There are alternatives to all of them. You are to some extent forced to use the Finder, but there are other programs you can use as your primary file manager, and if you really resent the UI as much as you seem to, you can just use X11. Apple offers the most open platform that is still proprietary, and they don't abuse their dominance in one market to get into another market.
Windows is still highly sensitive to high latency. Try running a bandwidth test with a nearby server and one across an ocean. You'll notice a much bigger difference with Windows than with a stock modern UNIX, which can still be tweaked quite a bit.
I thought that output could only be required to be under the GPL if the compiler copied a non-trivial portion of its GPL code into the output. In this case, though, it is the standard library that gets included, not part of the compiler. With a tool like bison, where parser code is copied into the output, an exception is necessary.
t
See http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLOutpu
Motion sickness? Even after you've turned off most of the animations? Try leaning back away from the monitor. Are you able to play any other 3d games, particularly FPS? I can't imagine living with that susceptibility to motion sickness. You have my sympathy.
Why did you phrase that as though you were contradicting me?
Correction: The K5 was also a RISC internally.
No, it isn't. Higher overall complexity means there is more to be debugged. If there are bugs in the RISC portion (even though that is a bit of a false dichotomy) that means that portion didn't get enough testing. If there weren't other subsystems competing for testing efforts, the RISC core would end up getting tested more thoroughly.
It doesn't really matter whether the bugs are in the x86 decoder and compatibility stuff or not. The problem is that they add greatly to the overall complexity. A cleaner architecture is easier to implement. This has been shown many times with ARM and Power chips, that manage to be very efficient and fast, even with significantly smaller R&D budgets.