TV's may be a huge market, but with the advent of Best-Buy, Walmart, and cheap imports from China, there are almost no margins left in it. You could charge $5000 for a 48" Tv 5 years ago. Today, price it more than $1000 and it will collect dust on the shelf.
And it's a market that already has an 800 lb Gorilla.
Sony has been manufacturing far more complex chips, figuring out how to make them uber cheap, and has brand name recognition in the consumer electronics industry. They also sell their cheap stuff under several other brands. If Intel started trying to eat into Sony's lunch pail, Viaos would probably start running a Sony designed x86 compadible.
It's called the mud on the wall principle. There was no clear-cut path the Industry has been going in for some time. They simply dumped money into a pile of projects in hopes that one would pay off.
With the explosion in laptop sales, it would seem that the Pentium-M was a good bet. They simply had options on a few other racehorses as well.
You could always meta-moderate the "Overrated" mark on an unrated post. But that sort of makes my head hurt thinking about. Do you disagree that the post was overrated, or do you think it silly that an otherwise unrated post... ouch my head hurts.
Considering that the US was supposed to turn into a "Service" economy, no. The US is screwed.
That said, we lower strata of geek may yet have a career as a robotic technician. We and that kids who spend 6 weeks learning how to repair truck engines, air conditioners, and cars.
I will treat any beast which I control through magic or technology with respect and kindness. Thus if the control is ever broken, it will not immediately come after me for revenge.
Except that robots aren't human, and that the tactile stimulation of the sexual encounter pales in comparison to the emotional stimulation. Frankly if people wanted to simply get off, the solution has been "at hand" since the dawn of time.
The problem is that a researcher working for a few months can't possibly subject his or her work to the truely off-the-wall situations in which TCP is used.
Will it work well across a satellite link (bandwidth to spare, but high latency)? How about a modem connection over a crappy rural phone line? In a steel mill with a ton of magnetic interference? Across a saturated T1 connection? I have actually seen, and had to push live data that mattered, through each of these.
TCP/IP is about 40 years of lessons learned the hard way. It would be like a graduate student designing a high-performance car that gets 100 miles per gallon. Sure, it's fuel efficient, but can it be built cheaply, and how will it fare in a crash?
You know, the alphabet is getting old too. The modern standard is a good 150 years old, with varients going back for thousands of years. Surely such antiquated standards need to up updated for the 20th century as well.
The 8 track analogy is just plain silly. With digital recording you can store music on memory sticks, portable hard drives, mini-discs, CD's, DAT, and even battery powered RAM. Even if an embedded device won't play MP3s in the future, your computer will be able to translate the signal into a future format.
With 8 track, the tapes only worked with 8 track players.
That said, I usually re-encode my music to a low bitrate MP3 format to pack more stuff on. That copy only lives long enough for me to get sick of it on my walk to work. The master copy is usually a high-bitrate MP3, though I do have a pile of Oggs and good old fashioned CD's.
You also have organizations, like the one I work for (but will remain nameless), where we get sick of people clogging the RAID with pirated music files and issue a crackdown.
Marketing data, that we can archive. 2 Live Crew's greatest hits, rm -rf *. If someone wants to back up their music on tape, I recommend casette
Keep in mind that Humans are also one of the most in-bred species in existance. At one point there were less than 10,000 of us. Having such a limited gene pool to work with has meant that some lesser essential genes have been lost.
For instance, we only produce a fraction of the vitamins we need to survive. The most critical is vitamin C. We, other primates, and guinea pigs are the only animals that don't produce our own. Without a regular infustion our body starts to break down.
Actually intelligence does not negate the need for a lot of code. Especially when dealing with biochemistry. We simply don't perform a whole lot of fancy chemistry. We largely rely on bacteria in our gut to break down our food and produce nutrients, vitamins, and break down toxins.
I'm an IT professional and a Laptop snob. I've been working off a laptop for the better part of 5 years. My previous laptop was a Viao running Gentoo linux. (It came with ME, and XP just wasn't happy on it.) I'm currently on a 12" iBook.
I find that Apple has really done it's homework designing the OS for the hardware, and the hardware for the OS. My PC laptops, even the Sonys (designed from the ground up as a consumer electronic) to be Windows with laptop features bolted on. Macs on the other hand are an integrated package. You just turn the thing on, and it works. You plug in peripherals and they simply work. (I did have to buy a piece of shareware for OS X to talk to my Sony Clie, though.)
The other nifty thing about the units is that they come with all the software you need to make them useful. Work would happily buy me a copy of Office for X, but I find that AppleWorks does everything I need it to do.
Now what do I do on this thing? I run a 200 person network. My "killer app" is a package called Fink that lets me compile Unix applications under OSX. I have all of my Linux tools (even our in-house intranet application) ported over to run natively on my iBook.
When it comes time to upgrade, most of the time the new OS will happily install on your old hardware. I came into OS/X late, but many people have reported that 10.3 actually run better on older machines than 10.2. We have original iMacs that are still in operation, and running the latest OS. That's a computer from 1998. Try running Windows XP on a PII 400. Even if a PII/400 was powerful enough, I've tried to upgrade a laptop. Tracking down the right drivers is a royal pain in the neck.
So yes, an iBook is a bit more expensive than an x86 PC. But you can be sure that it will be actively supported for years beyond what is possible for an x86 PC.
(On a sidenote, I did luck out with this particular model of Sony though. The line lasted from 1999 until 2002. Later varients were bundled with 2000 and XP, so drivers were available for my old one. Then again, a Viao isn't exactly cheap either.)
Yes. I have several adapter that take S-video in and output RCA.
That said I really had to look around for a TV with an S-Video jack. My wife thought I was nuts, but my PS/2 plugged into the S-Video jack has a much crisper picture. Of course you also have to invest in the S-Video cable for the PS/2.
That said, I think my PS/2 has played more hours of Baby Einstein videos than console games.
They will also sell you an X-Raid without a battery backed-up cache. (Bad idea.) The Apple reps basically explained it that you can always add stuff to an order, or upgrade later. In some situations, the parties can barely afford the unit, so the offer a model that is stripped down.
Those that can afford extra RAM generally buy it pre-installed. Those that can't can at least buy the machine and upgrade it later. $100 bucks isn't that much to me, but to a starving art major they can live without the performance.
I'm a laptop snob. When work bought me x86 laptops I insisted on Sony Viaos. The equipment replacement fairy only comes once every three years, so my trusty R-505 was replaced this year with an iBook.
Having used a low-end Mac and a high-end Viao, the Mac is a much more complete package. You aren't running an OS with Laptop drivers bolted into it. You are running an OS that was designed for your Laptop and vice versa.
Software upgrades on PC laptops are horrible. My 505 came with Windows ME. I had so much fun trying to upgrade the puppy to XP that I finally reformatted the thing and ran Linux. (First RedHat, then Gentoo.) Apple stuff tends to upgrade very well, assuming you have enough RAM and horsepower. It's easy to find an 8 year old Mac serving files.
An 8 year old x86 would have been thrown out by now. A top of the line box would have been a 200Mhz Pentium Classic then. My cutoff date for a salvageble PC is a PII 450, Circa 1998.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget though, that you are going to be popping $800 bulbs into the puppy every 6 months to a year.
And it's a market that already has an 800 lb Gorilla.
Sony has been manufacturing far more complex chips, figuring out how to make them uber cheap, and has brand name recognition in the consumer electronics industry. They also sell their cheap stuff under several other brands. If Intel started trying to eat into Sony's lunch pail, Viaos would probably start running a Sony designed x86 compadible.
With the explosion in laptop sales, it would seem that the Pentium-M was a good bet. They simply had options on a few other racehorses as well.
Part of the problem is people who could afford something like this have fewer kids to begin with.
You could always meta-moderate the "Overrated" mark on an unrated post. But that sort of makes my head hurt thinking about. Do you disagree that the post was overrated, or do you think it silly that an otherwise unrated post... ouch my head hurts.
That said, we lower strata of geek may yet have a career as a robotic technician. We and that kids who spend 6 weeks learning how to repair truck engines, air conditioners, and cars.
I will treat any beast which I control through magic or technology with respect and kindness. Thus if the control is ever broken, it will not immediately come after me for revenge.
Except that robots aren't human, and that the tactile stimulation of the sexual encounter pales in comparison to the emotional stimulation. Frankly if people wanted to simply get off, the solution has been "at hand" since the dawn of time.
Will it work well across a satellite link (bandwidth to spare, but high latency)? How about a modem connection over a crappy rural phone line? In a steel mill with a ton of magnetic interference? Across a saturated T1 connection? I have actually seen, and had to push live data that mattered, through each of these.
TCP/IP is about 40 years of lessons learned the hard way. It would be like a graduate student designing a high-performance car that gets 100 miles per gallon. Sure, it's fuel efficient, but can it be built cheaply, and how will it fare in a crash?
(Tongue firmly in cheek)
Yes, but only for pidgeons and percussion instruments.
With 8 track, the tapes only worked with 8 track players.
I can't tell. I'm on an Apple and their site keeps telling me I'm dead already.
That said, I usually re-encode my music to a low bitrate MP3 format to pack more stuff on. That copy only lives long enough for me to get sick of it on my walk to work. The master copy is usually a high-bitrate MP3, though I do have a pile of Oggs and good old fashioned CD's.
Marketing data, that we can archive. 2 Live Crew's greatest hits, rm -rf *. If someone wants to back up their music on tape, I recommend casette
I'd agree. Most of the music I really care about is archived on CD-Rom in uncompressed format.
For instance, we only produce a fraction of the vitamins we need to survive. The most critical is vitamin C. We, other primates, and guinea pigs are the only animals that don't produce our own. Without a regular infustion our body starts to break down.
Jeeze. It's tough being human. Even our genetic code is being downsized.
Actually intelligence does not negate the need for a lot of code. Especially when dealing with biochemistry. We simply don't perform a whole lot of fancy chemistry. We largely rely on bacteria in our gut to break down our food and produce nutrients, vitamins, and break down toxins.
Hence poll numbers.
What is really creapy. I was reading up on General Relativity earlier today.
I find that Apple has really done it's homework designing the OS for the hardware, and the hardware for the OS. My PC laptops, even the Sonys (designed from the ground up as a consumer electronic) to be Windows with laptop features bolted on. Macs on the other hand are an integrated package. You just turn the thing on, and it works. You plug in peripherals and they simply work. (I did have to buy a piece of shareware for OS X to talk to my Sony Clie, though.)
The other nifty thing about the units is that they come with all the software you need to make them useful. Work would happily buy me a copy of Office for X, but I find that AppleWorks does everything I need it to do.
Now what do I do on this thing? I run a 200 person network. My "killer app" is a package called Fink that lets me compile Unix applications under OSX. I have all of my Linux tools (even our in-house intranet application) ported over to run natively on my iBook.
When it comes time to upgrade, most of the time the new OS will happily install on your old hardware. I came into OS/X late, but many people have reported that 10.3 actually run better on older machines than 10.2. We have original iMacs that are still in operation, and running the latest OS. That's a computer from 1998. Try running Windows XP on a PII 400. Even if a PII/400 was powerful enough, I've tried to upgrade a laptop. Tracking down the right drivers is a royal pain in the neck.
So yes, an iBook is a bit more expensive than an x86 PC. But you can be sure that it will be actively supported for years beyond what is possible for an x86 PC.
(On a sidenote, I did luck out with this particular model of Sony though. The line lasted from 1999 until 2002. Later varients were bundled with 2000 and XP, so drivers were available for my old one. Then again, a Viao isn't exactly cheap either.)
That said I really had to look around for a TV with an S-Video jack. My wife thought I was nuts, but my PS/2 plugged into the S-Video jack has a much crisper picture. Of course you also have to invest in the S-Video cable for the PS/2.
That said, I think my PS/2 has played more hours of Baby Einstein videos than console games.
Those that can afford extra RAM generally buy it pre-installed. Those that can't can at least buy the machine and upgrade it later. $100 bucks isn't that much to me, but to a starving art major they can live without the performance.
Having used a low-end Mac and a high-end Viao, the Mac is a much more complete package. You aren't running an OS with Laptop drivers bolted into it. You are running an OS that was designed for your Laptop and vice versa.
Software upgrades on PC laptops are horrible. My 505 came with Windows ME. I had so much fun trying to upgrade the puppy to XP that I finally reformatted the thing and ran Linux. (First RedHat, then Gentoo.) Apple stuff tends to upgrade very well, assuming you have enough RAM and horsepower. It's easy to find an 8 year old Mac serving files.
An 8 year old x86 would have been thrown out by now. A top of the line box would have been a 200Mhz Pentium Classic then. My cutoff date for a salvageble PC is a PII 450, Circa 1998.