When laptops plummet in price, so do margins on laptops.
I feel there's still money to be made in the high-end market, and I do not feel laptops will ever match desktops in performance/$. If you have two components of the same architecture, same performance, the one that is larger in size is probably cheaper to produce.
Also, passengers cars will never catch on...how will people move around their pianos?
Taking your car analogy further, trucks and larger vehicles are still being sold today; they are still useful. There are still pianos that need to be moved.
So I am puzzled when you say:
Sane people have realized desktop computers were going away for quite some time
Some use cases/applications that I can think of that would benefit from the higher performance of a desktop:
1. PC gaming market is still going to be around 2. Growth of 3D media, I certainly see a need for higher performance computing here 3. Media creation/editing (3D modeling, video editing, etc.)
What's more, in the future much of the "power" in our computers will come from the Internet. You probably won't even need to store or edit your music, movies, and other files locally for long—we're getting better wireless network drives and Internet-based storage systems, and soon all your media will reside in a central location (in your house or some far-off server farm) accessible to all your machines.
Given that people will have remotely-accessible storage residing in the home for their portable devices, I could also imagine people running a more powerful personal server machine in their homes.
Perhaps your mobile applications can offload expensive calculations to your home server, who knows? Bringing the data center to the home, in a way.
And so I feel that's another area where there's a need for more powerful stationary computing.
The article references a Forrester Research report, and the article really missed an important point in the original report:
Desktops aren’t dead. Fewer desktops will be sold in 2015 than in 2010, but in 2015, they’ll still be used by more consumers than any other type of PC.
Well, when I search for restaurant reviews on Google, I often see Yelp near or at the top of the results.
With online reviews, I would agree with you if the establishment in question has only a handful of reviews.
On the other hand, if I see a place with 150+ positive online reviews, it's likely that place has good food.
Yes, there are shills, unreasonable customers, people with poor taste, not every good restaurant will be reviewed, some duds will get good reviews, etc., but it's better than having no information at all.
Technically, you could implement such intricate server-side dependencies, but I'm not convinced that makes business sense.
Developing this code will be more costly because you've now made your single player, locally run game a networked game. You will have increased support costs as customers complain about their game not working because of some network failure. Your game is now vulnerable to denial of service attacks. You now have to maintain servers for your game, which incurs maintenance. hardware, bandwidth, electricity costs. You will get bad press, and drive away some % of your paying customers.
You will potentially get some % of the pirates to buy your game. Is this worth it?
I think the author's idea that this is an experiment has merit, I do remember when Ubisoft released a Prince of Persia game without DRM to see how it sell.:
"But this will make everyone hate them.
Perhaps. Make no mistake. Ubisoft will lose customers and earn much nerdrage over this. But they are engaged in a grand experiment. They are seeing if an adequately pirate-proof game can make money. Will keeping cracked copies off the Torrents for a month make extra sales? And enough extra sales to make writing PC games worthwhile? Because the current system, where 90% of the copies out there are pirated and only megahits that could turn a profit on that 10%, doesn't seem to be working."
That said, I think he overestimates the difficulty of cracking this specific implementation.
If you really wanted to do hardware-specific optimizations today, you'd probably be better off finding parts of the code where you can execute things in parallel. You could get good performance benefits from multicore processors.
1. that would be an absolute nightmare in terms of code maintainability, debugging, etc. Windows source code today is far larger than Windows 3.0 code
2. compilers have improved since the Windows 3.0 days, they're far better than humans at optimizing in many cases
3. Itanium architecture is explicitly parallel, writing assembly for that is completely different from writing x86, it's far from a simple conversion
4. Game performance is limited mostly by your GPU, and CPU usage by your OS is minimal compared to CPU usage by the game itself. Gamers won't see much benefit from this.
The effort required to write and maintain the code in assembly is so great that it's infeasible in practice, and you wouldn't really get that much benefit from doing it.
The people who own that server sitting on a nice piece of fiber will probably notice that you've put malware on the machine, and take steps to fix it; it won't stay on your botnet for long.
If you hijack a Windows machine used by a non-technical user, your malware is more likely to stay there.
If you go to a restaurant, you don't have to tip your waiter anything. Yet many people would feel bad if the waiter was decent and they left nothing.
Neither the waiter nor the game company work for free, they really you to tip them or pay for their games, and they can't really make any money if you don't.
THE COMPANY IS NOT LOSING SALES it is earning players...
I'll admit that I've personally pirated games I would've bought otherwise, and I'm sure there are plenty of other people who have done the same. Game companies are certainly losing sales to piracy, maybe not as many in reality as they claim, but it happens.
I would agree to some extent, but I think more importantly, a good programmer should have a strong sense of logic and general problem solving skills.
With that, a programmer could pick up any type of programming language, it's just a matter of understanding the style of the language, and getting familiar with libraries and what not.
Well, even if you do pay $2 extra for Protoman, it's still only $12. You'd probably spend more for a meal at a restaurant, or more by going to the movies.
I played through it yesterday, and for $10, you get a pretty complete and fun Megaman game.
Would you feel any different if they released the game for $12, but included Protoman with sliding?
I think much of the contention is from the fact that it was a public school. I doubt anyone would say much if a private school suspended or expelled a student for doing something similar.
Also,, I think bringing up "threats" is a bit of a straw man argument. The students didn't threaten anyone, they made a lewd and immature parody Myspace, which any reasonable person would've recognized as something done by students.
Personally, I'm not sad to see the students punished, but I don't really think the judge's ruling is legally sound.
I'm not generalizing anything, just saying there's no reason that cellphones should be judged under different criteria in terms of openness, vs. game consoles and music players.
You say you wouldn't risk hacking your Samsung phone, you don't expect it to be upgradable because cellphones "are just like that"
but earlier you say:
"Neither does Apple. Microsoft makes game consoles and music players, and neither of those are upgradable at all."
How many game consoles and music players are highly customizable and upgradable? You could say that music players and game consoles are "just like that" too, traditionally closed platforms. They're all guilty of the same thing, IMO.
I'd definitely agree with you, that gaming laptops in general are not a good idea.
I guess what bothers me is that a new MBP is pushing into the lower end of the gaming laptop price ranges, so I'd expect hardware specs a bit closer to gaming laptops.
The prices for the refurbished ones, on the other hand, seem pretty fair to me.
I showed an Inspiron configuration with nearly identical specs. Both have a 2.5 GHz Core Duo, 800 MHz bus speed.
If you want to make a fair comparison, why did you upgrade the HDD spin speed? The default MacBook Pro, which I was comparing prices against, comes with a 5400 RPM drive. In fact, how the hell did you upgrade your HDD spin speed on the XPS1730? They only offer 7200 RPM hard drives, unless you choose one of the lower-end RAID configurations with 5400 RPM drives.
The closest comparison is not the XPS1730.~$2800 on an XPS1730 will get you RAID and far superior graphics performance (two 8700M in SLI). The MacBook Pro is definitely not a gaming laptop.
As for DVI out, I know Inspirons had DVI out 3 years ago, there's one sitting in my closet. If that's changed, though I seriously doubt it, I would certainly value the Dell offering less. Where did you see that the Dell laptops we're discussing have no DVI out?
I don't think anyone would dispute that the Mac has a superior physical design, and maybe you like the non-hardware aspects that the Mac offers. However, I expect significantly better hardware at that price range. Perhaps we have different criteria for laptops?
Slashdot Mirror
I've never studied quantum mechanics, but those folks make it understandable.
How can you be sure that you understand quantum mechanics, if you have never studied it?
When laptops plummet in price, so do margins on laptops.
I feel there's still money to be made in the high-end market, and I do not feel laptops will ever match desktops in performance/$. If you have two components of the same architecture, same performance, the one that is larger in size is probably cheaper to produce.
Also, passengers cars will never catch on...how will people move around their pianos?
Taking your car analogy further, trucks and larger vehicles are still being sold today; they are still useful. There are still pianos that need to be moved.
So I am puzzled when you say:
Sane people have realized desktop computers were going away for quite some time
Some use cases/applications that I can think of that would benefit from the higher performance of a desktop:
1. PC gaming market is still going to be around
2. Growth of 3D media, I certainly see a need for higher performance computing here
3. Media creation/editing (3D modeling, video editing, etc.)
What's more, in the future much of the "power" in our computers will come from the Internet. You probably won't even need to store or edit your music, movies, and other files locally for long—we're getting better wireless network drives and Internet-based storage systems, and soon all your media will reside in a central location (in your house or some far-off server farm) accessible to all your machines.
Given that people will have remotely-accessible storage residing in the home for their portable devices, I could also imagine people running a more powerful personal server machine in their homes.
Perhaps your mobile applications can offload expensive calculations to your home server, who knows? Bringing the data center to the home, in a way.
And so I feel that's another area where there's a need for more powerful stationary computing.
The article references a Forrester Research report, and the article really missed an important point in the original report:
http://forrester.com/rb/Research/us_consumer_pc_market_in_2015/q/id/57210/t/2
http://blogs.forrester.com/sarah_rotman_epps/10-06-17-steve_ballmer_right_pc_market_getting_bigger
Desktops aren’t dead. Fewer desktops will be sold in 2015 than in 2010, but in 2015, they’ll still be used by more consumers than any other type of PC.
Well, when I search for restaurant reviews on Google, I often see Yelp near or at the top of the results.
With online reviews, I would agree with you if the establishment in question has only a handful of reviews.
On the other hand, if I see a place with 150+ positive online reviews, it's likely that place has good food.
Yes, there are shills, unreasonable customers, people with poor taste, not every good restaurant will be reviewed, some duds will get good reviews, etc., but it's better than having no information at all.
Technically, you could implement such intricate server-side dependencies, but I'm not convinced that makes business sense.
Developing this code will be more costly because you've now made your single player, locally run game a networked game. You will have increased support costs as customers complain about their game not working because of some network failure. Your game is now vulnerable to denial of service attacks. You now have to maintain servers for your game, which incurs maintenance. hardware, bandwidth, electricity costs. You will get bad press, and drive away some % of your paying customers.
You will potentially get some % of the pirates to buy your game. Is this worth it?
I think the author's idea that this is an experiment has merit, I do remember when Ubisoft released a Prince of Persia game without DRM to see how it sell.:
"But this will make everyone hate them.
Perhaps. Make no mistake. Ubisoft will lose customers and earn much nerdrage over this. But they are engaged in a grand experiment. They are seeing if an adequately pirate-proof game can make money. Will keeping cracked copies off the Torrents for a month make extra sales? And enough extra sales to make writing PC games worthwhile? Because the current system, where 90% of the copies out there are pirated and only megahits that could turn a profit on that 10%, doesn't seem to be working."
That said, I think he overestimates the difficulty of cracking this specific implementation.
I think the intent is closer to:
"Cheating kills your game because it makes legit players not want to play it anymore, whereas pirates don't affect your legit users"
If you really wanted to do hardware-specific optimizations today, you'd probably be better off finding parts of the code where you can execute things in parallel. You could get good performance benefits from multicore processors.
1. that would be an absolute nightmare in terms of code maintainability, debugging, etc. Windows source code today is far larger than Windows 3.0 code
2. compilers have improved since the Windows 3.0 days, they're far better than humans at optimizing in many cases
3. Itanium architecture is explicitly parallel, writing assembly for that is completely different from writing x86, it's far from a simple conversion
4. Game performance is limited mostly by your GPU, and CPU usage by your OS is minimal compared to CPU usage by the game itself. Gamers won't see much benefit from this.
The effort required to write and maintain the code in assembly is so great that it's infeasible in practice, and you wouldn't really get that much benefit from doing it.
whoops, accidentally modded you down, posting to remove mod
then you just don't like the Beatles, no music has universal appeal
The people who own that server sitting on a nice piece of fiber will probably notice that you've put malware on the machine, and take steps to fix it; it won't stay on your botnet for long.
If you hijack a Windows machine used by a non-technical user, your malware is more likely to stay there.
Another comparison could be:
If you go to a restaurant, you don't have to tip your waiter anything. Yet many people would feel bad if the waiter was decent and they left nothing.
Neither the waiter nor the game company work for free, they really you to tip them or pay for their games, and they can't really make any money if you don't.
THE COMPANY IS NOT LOSING SALES it is earning players...
I'll admit that I've personally pirated games I would've bought otherwise, and I'm sure there are plenty of other people who have done the same. Game companies are certainly losing sales to piracy, maybe not as many in reality as they claim, but it happens.
I would agree to some extent, but I think more importantly, a good programmer should have a strong sense of logic and general problem solving skills.
With that, a programmer could pick up any type of programming language, it's just a matter of understanding the style of the language, and getting familiar with libraries and what not.
Well, even if you do pay $2 extra for Protoman, it's still only $12. You'd probably spend more for a meal at a restaurant, or more by going to the movies.
I played through it yesterday, and for $10, you get a pretty complete and fun Megaman game.
Would you feel any different if they released the game for $12, but included Protoman with sliding?
I think much of the contention is from the fact that it was a public school. I doubt anyone would say much if a private school suspended or expelled a student for doing something similar.
Also,, I think bringing up "threats" is a bit of a straw man argument. The students didn't threaten anyone, they made a lewd and immature parody Myspace, which any reasonable person would've recognized as something done by students.
Personally, I'm not sad to see the students punished, but I don't really think the judge's ruling is legally sound.
that was my impression after reading the article as well, I didn't get "Army brainwashing" vibes from it.
It sounds like educational physics simulations that just happen to use the America's Army engine.
i'd like one of these in a garden or something
For clarification, he is talking about Xinjiang, not Tibet(Xizang)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang#Continued_tensions
not sure about India, but I can tell you without a doubt that's not true for China
I was always under the impression SLI was geared towards gaming setups. This is a workstation for CAD and what not, hence the Quadro card inside.
If you want a quad core laptop for gaming, you can get one with SLI'd 9800M GTs for about $3000.
I'm not generalizing anything, just saying there's no reason that cellphones should be judged under different criteria in terms of openness, vs. game consoles and music players.
To be fair:
You say you wouldn't risk hacking your Samsung phone, you don't expect it to be upgradable because cellphones "are just like that"
but earlier you say:
"Neither does Apple. Microsoft makes game consoles and music players, and neither of those are upgradable at all."
How many game consoles and music players are highly customizable and upgradable? You could say that music players and game consoles are "just like that" too, traditionally closed platforms. They're all guilty of the same thing, IMO.
I'd definitely agree with you, that gaming laptops in general are not a good idea.
I guess what bothers me is that a new MBP is pushing into the lower end of the gaming laptop price ranges, so I'd expect hardware specs a bit closer to gaming laptops.
The prices for the refurbished ones, on the other hand, seem pretty fair to me.
Addendum:
I'm not saying the XPS1730 is a great deal either, there are better gaming laptop configurations out there.
I showed an Inspiron configuration with nearly identical specs. Both have a 2.5 GHz Core Duo, 800 MHz bus speed.
If you want to make a fair comparison, why did you upgrade the HDD spin speed? The default MacBook Pro, which I was comparing prices against, comes with a 5400 RPM drive. In fact, how the hell did you upgrade your HDD spin speed on the XPS1730? They only offer 7200 RPM hard drives, unless you choose one of the lower-end RAID configurations with 5400 RPM drives.
The closest comparison is not the XPS1730.~$2800 on an XPS1730 will get you RAID and far superior graphics performance (two 8700M in SLI). The MacBook Pro is definitely not a gaming laptop.
As for DVI out, I know Inspirons had DVI out 3 years ago, there's one sitting in my closet. If that's changed, though I seriously doubt it, I would certainly value the Dell offering less. Where did you see that the Dell laptops we're discussing have no DVI out?
I don't think anyone would dispute that the Mac has a superior physical design, and maybe you like the non-hardware aspects that the Mac offers. However, I expect significantly better hardware at that price range. Perhaps we have different criteria for laptops?
How is it not? They have roughly equivalent hardware.
If you're considering the design and feel of the product, that's another matter, and much more subjective.