I'm not attacking the USA. If I'd said "the USA are crap", I'd have been attacking the USA.
I'm attacking the current administration - I live in the USA. I like the USA (well, the parts I've managed to visit, anyway). I like the people. I loath the administration and what they've done to the fundamental rights of humans, all in the name of "protection". I loath the callous manipulation of people just to maintain their grasp on power. I loath the casual attitude to human life if it's not the life of one of their voters.
If I'd read the last 5 years in a sci-fi novel, I'd say the author was high - no-one would be able to do that to the USA, would they ? Sadly, they could, and they did.
Well, the EU may want to go overboard with regulation, but at least we still have habeus corpus, hmm ? I seem to recall that reduces your famous "bill of rights" actually to a "bill of right" - the right not to have soldiers bivouacked at your housewithout your permission...
To quote one of your more-famous presidents: "Those who give up essential liberty to gain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety". I can't think of a more-appropriate quote...
I'm not the first person to defend the EU, but it does do some good things (and of course some bad ones) - I tend to think their heart is in the right place though, unlike the current US Administration, who seem evil incarnate to me... I'm not so sure that Chavez wasn't so wrong when he was complaining of sulphur smells...
Sounds like a logical assumption, but it's a bit like claiming a driver went from Point A to Point B, 100 miles apart, in one hour must have been speeding, though there was no witness to the driver actually speeding.
Well, assuming no weird configurations (it's 100 miles by land but 4 miles by Ferry; points A nd B are airports; etc...), the laws of reality sort of confirm the guy has been speeding. I believe the French police just look at the time on your entrance/exit tickets on their equivalent of (pay-for) freeways...
Here, on the other hand, the cracker may have found 2 exploits originally, and MS only fixed one of them...
My point was that I have only had to use the installer on applications that come from Apple. Just like.debs come from the Debian project (well, I guess you *could* make your own up, but...)
Maybe this is the difference - *I* think Apple and the debian project are equally trustworthy when it comes to installing applications into thier respective OS's. Perhaps you don't.
Since you have to be the author of the package being installed to make this "hack" work, I don't see *any* difference between the.deb problem, and the mac one. If I'm the author of a.deb, and I want to be nasty, why can't I crypographically sign the nasty version of the code ?
Sure, people may (will?) soon find out I'm a bad guy, but the exact same situation is the case here.
I don't see the usage difference you're talking about either - if I'm installing something I want/need, I'm going to do it on Debian Linux or OSX. Pretty much all the s/w I've had to use an installer for on my Mac comes from Apple; in fact I can think of 'Civilisation' and 'MS Office' as the only non-Mac apps I've installed, but I don't think they needed an installer - I'm reasonably sure I just drag them to the Applications folder (so this issue is moot).
You *are* aware that most Apple apps don't use the installer, right ? You just drag the app to the Applications folder, and you're done. It's only if you need to meddle with the guts of the machine that you need the installer.
That's not to say that I think Apple oughtn't fix this - I can't really see the use for a we-want-to-meddle-with-your-computer-without-telli ng-you scenario, so I'd like to see it gone.
10 LET ZONK = 1 20 LET EDITOR = 1 30 IF (EDITOR = ZONK) THEN GOSUB 1000 40 GOTO 30 1000 REM DUPE POST 1010 RETURN... or something similar, unless you're on BBC BASIC of course - just about the only 8-bit BASIC with real structure to it
... and neither are mentioned, as far as I can see:
Price & battery-life
Bit of a pity that:
"The Zune-to-Zune sharing feature may not be available for all songs on your device, and works only between Zune devices within wireless range of each other. This feature allows recipients to play full-length sample tracks up to three times in three days. Recipients cannot resend music that they have received via the sharing feature."... as well...
On the BBC micro I don't think I ever used a GOTO or GOSUB. It was all DO...WHILE, REPEAT...UNTIL, DEFPROC and DEFFN (procedures and functions), etc. etc.
And then there was the built-in 2-pass assembler with access to the BASIC variables and functions. Truly an awesome (in the real, not the Californian sense) machine to learn on. Oh, and it had co-processors, floppy and hard disks, a network interface, a user-io port (digital and analogue), plug-in ROMs, etc. etc.
A 32-bit version of the BBC micro would *still* be an excellent way to learn programming. It was designed for the education market, and it was designed really well - elegant, fast (for the time), and structured. One of the best micros ever invented IMHO, and a tribute to the designers.
Actually it *is* the graphics chipset. It's basically unloading work onto the CPU. The Core Duo can handle it, but the Coro Solo can't keep up.
That's a rather strange argument. Generally speaking, it's the CPU's job to process stuff, and the video card's job to show stuff. There are some (several, even) graphics cards that can take on some of that decoding work, but this is very much the CPU offloading work to the GPU. I've never heard anyone say the GPU is unloading work back onto the CPU!
It's like saying the ethernet chip is generally unloading the TCP/IP load to the CPU, because some ethernet chips can do the packet-parsing onboard. It's the CPU's *job* to do this, and if it can take advantage of other hardware, fine! But it's a bit ass-backwards to claim the graphics card is at fault for MPEG decoding, just because it doesn't help out the CPU. Well, it seems that way to me, anyway...
Simon
You're probably in for a nice surprise
on
Apple Unveils 24" iMac
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Since I ordered my Mac Pro, the price for one of the components dropped, so I got the following from Apple...
To Our Valued Apple Customer:
Apple is pleased to announce a price drop for the Mac Pro you recently
ordered. We have automatically adjusted your order to reflect the new price.
For up-to-date information on your order, please visit our Order Status
website at http://www.apple.com/orderstatus. Once your order is shipped, you
can also obtain tracking information on this site.
Thank you for your interest in Apple products.
Sincerely,
Apple Store Customer Support
... just a form-letter, but they did drop the price. I'd expect you to get the latest and greatest mini too... Apple are pretty good about that sort of thing...
Simon
Re:All Mac Mini now have Core Duo inside...
on
Apple Unveils 24" iMac
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
With regard to your complaints...
Graphics: The onboard video chipset does *not* make HDTV playback a problem, it was the core SOLO that stuttered during playback. I have a core duo linked up to my plasma, and it works beautifully.
CPU: The mini is the low-end machine, you can't expect the top-end processors in the low-end machines
I don't know about even if it is a bad driver, it's still the OS's fault for letting the driver take the whole system down, so it's still the OS writer's problem
Consider a video-card driver. That's blasting several hundred megabytes of data across the bus at any one time (say you're playing a full-screen MPEG4 with no gfx-card support for decode). Would you want the OS to validate and check every one of those transactions ? Whoops, there goes the frame-rate. Still, slow-motion is fun...
Or a SCSI-driver, connected to a high-end RAID. Again, we're transferring hundreds of megabytes/second. Your throughput just dropped "through" the floor... Hope that wasn't crucial.
Or, a network driver in a department server, serving several fibre-channel connections. Again, throughput is the victim.
My point is that sometimes you need the driver to be performing at its optimum. You can make the argument that an exploit could bring the whole machine down, and that people lose more time/work/money that way, but that's a hard argument to make, when the video-artists in the post-production suite can't transfer their video over the gigabit network fast enough any more and the clients are walking out the door...
I can see what you're saying - that the OS ought not be vulnerable to bad drivers, but to insist on verification as part of each driver transaction with the OS is broken-by-design, IMHO. Perhaps it just needs more R&D before pushing it out the door, and pen-testing ought to be part of that R&D. I very much suspect at the moment, that any driver that adheres to a spec will be sold as "working"...
Buying pre-built is always costly, which is a lot of the reason why people like me end up going the Windows OS route. You can't by a modern Mac for under $1000
Not true - the Mac Mini starts at $599. Add a cheap keyboard/mouse/monitor and you can get it for well under $1000. It doesn't compare to a tower for the same price, but it is a modern Mac, and it is under $1k.
I'd be willing to bet that I could build a quad-core machine out of AMD Opterons that would smoke your Mac.
I'd like to see you try, on the basis that everyreviewshows the Xeons out-performing the Opterons [and I could find more, that's just a quick googling]...
As for the speed difference between OSX and Windows - I think we have different priorities. I don't really care if something takes 3% longer on the Mac version, as long as I'm not plagued by viruses, nastyware, adware, etc. etc. Even the damn virus scanners will take a lot more away from the general performance than the OS difference...
If you were used to Windows and not OSX then you'd likely not be making claims like you did.
I've used a lot of computers - I've been using them for over 25 years. I've used mainframes, minis, 8-, 16-, and 32 bit micros (runnin Windows from 3.1 through 95, 98, NT, and XP), Macs and Unix workstations. Until OSX, I thought Macs sucked big-time - the lack of memory protection, and the general weakness of the OS was a huge turn-off. My preference back then was Unix (I started playing with Linux on a college PC when it came on 4 floppies). Now, I far prefer the Mac - it's the best damn unix workstation I've ever owned/used. All the "business" apps are there, the shell is there, the UI is simply gorgeous, and (for the most part) it really does "just work". There's even the occasional game [grin] - I'm currently hooked on civ-4.
As for "making me money", yes it's making me money. I work as a software developer, and a fast machine (and XCode automatically spreads compilation across all 4 cpus) is a big win on big compiles:-) Plus it's about time - I haven't bought a computer in 3 years, and I expect this one to last roughly the same time-span.
Well, if you *want* to pay more for the Dell, be able to run less software, and suffer all that Windowshas to "offer", feel free. Personally, I went for the cheaper option and bought a Mac.
Well then you will appreciate the fact that you *were* a class-action f___-tard at that stage of life.
Hell yes, and that was by no means the worst thing I did 'when I were a lad' [grin].
In my defence, you have to remember that this was the very first networked virus we had ever seen. As far as we were concerned, the first of its kind. Which is why we wanted to try it:-) It's easy to have 20-20 vision in hindsight, not so much, when you're doing something new. Sure, we *ought* to have thought about it. We didn't.
I'm reminded of a witticism: "If at first, you don't succeed, sykdiving is not for you".
We weren't trying to contain it, in our case - we *wanted* to see if it would work as well as we thought it would. The problem came because we *didn't* think about the consequences of someone using a floppy - we were focussed on the network aspects.
So, we had a general routine to write a !boot (an autoexec-on-read-the-media) file, and hadn't considered the sequence of events of:
someone writing the virus to a floppy
Us wanting to get rid of the virus
That person bringing the floppy back into the lab and re-infecting the network.
Oh sh*t!
So, even though we knew exactly what it was capable of, we hadn't considered the actions of one of those infected, and *that* caused us problems. It's not the capabilities that changed, it's the environment. You don't tend to find that out until you've hit the problem, or you would have dealt with it in the source code - that's all I'm saying...
Oh, and I'm sure they'll take a more-responsible attitude than we had, we *were* 1st-year students...
(See my Journal entry for the gory details)... I would sincerely recommend they don't play with fire. There are too many ways that self-replicating programs can go wrong... or too-right, as in my case:-(
If they can guarantee containment, of course, a virus is completely harmless to the rest of the world. The problem comes when containment is breached because of something you didn't think of - and the problem with things you didn't think of, is that you didn't think of them [grin].
Simon (now a thoroughly-reformed character, honest guv)
This is something that comes up again and again in British politics - it's never the elected representatives who stand up for justice, freedom from tyranny, the common rights of the common man; it's always the unelected, completely privileged members of the house of Lords who cock a snook at the government of the day, and make a stand on these issues.
Strange, that it's precisely the people who are voted into power who abuse it, but the "undemocratic" "establishment" figures are the ones who defend it. Sad, really. The lords can do and say what they like because they're not elected (well, some (all?) are, now), and that freedom is worth something to others.
When Tony Blair said he was going to abolish the house of Lords, I thought "there goes democracy in Britain", I've lost count of the number of times the Lords have told the government (and I mean *both* parties here, both Tory and Labour) of the day to re-think something because the effect on the least-fortunate or most-vulnerable in society is too extreme. Partly it comes because they're *not* elected, part because of the social contract inherent in British society, partly because as individuals they *are* partisan, so the {labour} lords will pick apart the {tory} government policies and vice versa. It's a weird typically-British hotch-potch of conflicts, but somehow it all works... You'd never get it past a "government design" planning committe...
The government can always bulldoze a bill through parliament if it gets rejected/resubmitted by the Lords 3 times (I think), but that creates news, and normally when a bill is that bad, news is not what the government want... The Lords act as a counter-balance to over-eager legislation. It *is* weird, but it works quite well:-)
Now this isn't a consumer device, I want it for development and for FPGA place-and-route work, but still you said "every time"...
In a followup, I detail the exact spec of the Dell I was comparing with (because someone disputed my numbers). As far as I can see, these are pretty much identical machines, and one is $2000 cheaper than the other...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not attacking the USA. If I'd said "the USA are crap", I'd have been attacking the USA.
I'm attacking the current administration - I live in the USA. I like the USA (well, the parts I've managed to visit, anyway). I like the people. I loath the administration and what they've done to the fundamental rights of humans, all in the name of "protection". I loath the callous manipulation of people just to maintain their grasp on power. I loath the casual attitude to human life if it's not the life of one of their voters.
If I'd read the last 5 years in a sci-fi novel, I'd say the author was high - no-one would be able to do that to the USA, would they ? Sadly, they could, and they did.
Note the lack of personal attacks in this too...
Simon.
[grin] Good point. Oh well, I can't remember the names of Kings and Queens in my own country, let alone historical figures in others :-)
I still think the quote is a good fit, though...
Simon.
Well, the EU may want to go overboard with regulation, but at least we still have habeus corpus, hmm ? I seem to recall that reduces your famous "bill of rights" actually to a "bill of right" - the right not to have soldiers bivouacked at your housewithout your permission...
To quote one of your more-famous presidents: "Those who give up essential liberty to gain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety". I can't think of a more-appropriate quote...
I'm not the first person to defend the EU, but it does do some good things (and of course some bad ones) - I tend to think their heart is in the right place though, unlike the current US Administration, who seem evil incarnate to me... I'm not so sure that Chavez wasn't so wrong when he was complaining of sulphur smells...
Simon.
Um, I regularly fly LHR SFO. I always get 2 movies-worth out of my Ipod.
That is all.
Simon.
Sounds like a logical assumption, but it's a bit like claiming a driver went from Point A to Point B, 100 miles apart, in one hour must have been speeding, though there was no witness to the driver actually speeding.
Well, assuming no weird configurations (it's 100 miles by land but 4 miles by Ferry; points A nd B are airports; etc...), the laws of reality sort of confirm the guy has been speeding. I believe the French police just look at the time on your entrance/exit tickets on their equivalent of (pay-for) freeways...
Here, on the other hand, the cracker may have found 2 exploits originally, and MS only fixed one of them...
Simon
What's a PIII ?
My point was that I have only had to use the installer on applications that come from Apple. Just like .debs come from the Debian project (well, I guess you *could* make your own up, but...)
Maybe this is the difference - *I* think Apple and the debian project are equally trustworthy when it comes to installing applications into thier respective OS's. Perhaps you don't.
Simon
Since you have to be the author of the package being installed to make this "hack" work, I don't see *any* difference between the .deb problem, and the mac one. If I'm the author of a .deb, and I want to be nasty, why can't I crypographically sign the nasty version of the code ?
i ng-you scenario, so I'd like to see it gone.
Sure, people may (will?) soon find out I'm a bad guy, but the exact same situation is the case here.
I don't see the usage difference you're talking about either - if I'm installing something I want/need, I'm going to do it on Debian Linux or OSX. Pretty much all the s/w I've had to use an installer for on my Mac comes from Apple; in fact I can think of 'Civilisation' and 'MS Office' as the only non-Mac apps I've installed, but I don't think they needed an installer - I'm reasonably sure I just drag them to the Applications folder (so this issue is moot).
You *are* aware that most Apple apps don't use the installer, right ? You just drag the app to the Applications folder, and you're done. It's only if you need to meddle with the guts of the machine that you need the installer.
That's not to say that I think Apple oughtn't fix this - I can't really see the use for a we-want-to-meddle-with-your-computer-without-tell
Simon
Surely it ought to be:
... or something similar, unless you're on BBC BASIC of course - just about the only 8-bit BASIC with real structure to it
10 LET ZONK = 1
20 LET EDITOR = 1
30 IF (EDITOR = ZONK) THEN GOSUB 1000
40 GOTO 30
1000 REM DUPE POST
1010 RETURN
Simon
... and neither are mentioned, as far as I can see:
... as well...
Price & battery-life
Bit of a pity that:
"The Zune-to-Zune sharing feature may not be available for all songs on your device, and works only between Zune devices within wireless range of each other. This feature allows recipients to play full-length sample tracks up to three times in three days. Recipients cannot resend music that they have received via the sharing feature."
Simon.
On the BBC micro I don't think I ever used a GOTO or GOSUB. It was all DO...WHILE, REPEAT...UNTIL, DEFPROC and DEFFN (procedures and functions), etc. etc.
And then there was the built-in 2-pass assembler with access to the BASIC variables and functions. Truly an awesome (in the real, not the Californian sense) machine to learn on. Oh, and it had co-processors, floppy and hard disks, a network interface, a user-io port (digital and analogue), plug-in ROMs, etc. etc.
A 32-bit version of the BBC micro would *still* be an excellent way to learn programming. It was designed for the education market, and it was designed really well - elegant, fast (for the time), and structured. One of the best micros ever invented IMHO, and a tribute to the designers.
Simon
Actually it *is* the graphics chipset. It's basically unloading work onto the CPU. The Core Duo can handle it, but the Coro Solo can't keep up.
That's a rather strange argument. Generally speaking, it's the CPU's job to process stuff, and the video card's job to show stuff. There are some (several, even) graphics cards that can take on some of that decoding work, but this is very much the CPU offloading work to the GPU. I've never heard anyone say the GPU is unloading work back onto the CPU!
It's like saying the ethernet chip is generally unloading the TCP/IP load to the CPU, because some ethernet chips can do the packet-parsing onboard. It's the CPU's *job* to do this, and if it can take advantage of other hardware, fine! But it's a bit ass-backwards to claim the graphics card is at fault for MPEG decoding, just because it doesn't help out the CPU. Well, it seems that way to me, anyway...
Simon
Since I ordered my Mac Pro, the price for one of the components dropped, so I got the following from Apple...
... just a form-letter, but they did drop the price. I'd expect you to get the latest and greatest mini too... Apple are pretty good about that sort of thing...
To Our Valued Apple Customer:
Apple is pleased to announce a price drop for the Mac Pro you recently
ordered. We have automatically adjusted your order to reflect the new price.
For up-to-date information on your order, please visit our Order Status
website at http://www.apple.com/orderstatus. Once your order is shipped, you
can also obtain tracking information on this site.
Thank you for your interest in Apple products.
Sincerely,
Apple Store Customer Support
Simon
With regard to your complaints...
Graphics: The onboard video chipset does *not* make HDTV playback a problem, it was the core SOLO that stuttered during playback. I have a core duo linked up to my plasma, and it works beautifully.
CPU: The mini is the low-end machine, you can't expect the top-end processors in the low-end machines
Simon
I don't know about even if it is a bad driver, it's still the OS's fault for letting the driver take the whole system down, so it's still the OS writer's problem
Consider a video-card driver. That's blasting several hundred megabytes of data across the bus at any one time (say you're playing a full-screen MPEG4 with no gfx-card support for decode). Would you want the OS to validate and check every one of those transactions ? Whoops, there goes the frame-rate. Still, slow-motion is fun...
Or a SCSI-driver, connected to a high-end RAID. Again, we're transferring hundreds of megabytes/second. Your throughput just dropped "through" the floor... Hope that wasn't crucial.
Or, a network driver in a department server, serving several fibre-channel connections. Again, throughput is the victim.
My point is that sometimes you need the driver to be performing at its optimum. You can make the argument that an exploit could bring the whole machine down, and that people lose more time/work/money that way, but that's a hard argument to make, when the video-artists in the post-production suite can't transfer their video over the gigabit network fast enough any more and the clients are walking out the door...
I can see what you're saying - that the OS ought not be vulnerable to bad drivers, but to insist on verification as part of each driver transaction with the OS is broken-by-design, IMHO. Perhaps it just needs more R&D before pushing it out the door, and pen-testing ought to be part of that R&D. I very much suspect at the moment, that any driver that adheres to a spec will be sold as "working"...
Simon
Hmm - I don't think so ... ... whereas I get no results for floccipaucinihilipilification...
Simon.
Not true - the Mac Mini starts at $599. Add a cheap keyboard/mouse/monitor and you can get it for well under $1000. It doesn't compare to a tower for the same price, but it is a modern Mac, and it is under $1k.
I'd like to see you try, on the basis that every review shows the Xeons out-performing the Opterons [and I could find more, that's just a quick googling]...
As for the speed difference between OSX and Windows - I think we have different priorities. I don't really care if something takes 3% longer on the Mac version, as long as I'm not plagued by viruses, nastyware, adware, etc. etc. Even the damn virus scanners will take a lot more away from the general performance than the OS difference...
I've used a lot of computers - I've been using them for over 25 years. I've used mainframes, minis, 8-, 16-, and 32 bit micros (runnin Windows from 3.1 through 95, 98, NT, and XP), Macs and Unix workstations. Until OSX, I thought Macs sucked big-time - the lack of memory protection, and the general weakness of the OS was a huge turn-off. My preference back then was Unix (I started playing with Linux on a college PC when it came on 4 floppies). Now, I far prefer the Mac - it's the best damn unix workstation I've ever owned/used. All the "business" apps are there, the shell is there, the UI is simply gorgeous, and (for the most part) it really does "just work". There's even the occasional game [grin] - I'm currently hooked on civ-4.
As for "making me money", yes it's making me money. I work as a software developer, and a fast machine (and XCode automatically spreads compilation across all 4 cpus) is a big win on big compiles
Simon.
Well, if you *want* to pay more for the Dell, be able to run less software, and suffer all that Windowshas to "offer", feel free. Personally, I went for the cheaper option and bought a Mac.
Simon.
Well then you will appreciate the fact that you *were* a class-action f___-tard at that stage of life.
:-) It's easy to have 20-20 vision in hindsight, not so much, when you're doing something new. Sure, we *ought* to have thought about it. We didn't.
Hell yes, and that was by no means the worst thing I did 'when I were a lad' [grin].
In my defence, you have to remember that this was the very first networked virus we had ever seen. As far as we were concerned, the first of its kind. Which is why we wanted to try it
I'm reminded of a witticism: "If at first, you don't succeed, sykdiving is not for you".
Simon.
So, we had a general routine to write a !boot (an autoexec-on-read-the-media) file, and hadn't considered the sequence of events of:
So, even though we knew exactly what it was capable of, we hadn't considered the actions of one of those infected, and *that* caused us problems. It's not the capabilities that changed, it's the environment. You don't tend to find that out until you've hit the problem, or you would have dealt with it in the source code - that's all I'm saying...
Oh, and I'm sure they'll take a more-responsible attitude than we had, we *were* 1st-year students...
Simon.
(See my Journal entry for the gory details) ... I would sincerely recommend they don't play with fire. There are too many ways that self-replicating programs can go wrong... or too-right, as in my case :-(
If they can guarantee containment, of course, a virus is completely harmless to the rest of the world. The problem comes when containment is breached because of something you didn't think of - and the problem with things you didn't think of, is that you didn't think of them [grin].
Simon (now a thoroughly-reformed character, honest guv)
This is something that comes up again and again in British politics - it's never the elected representatives who stand up for justice, freedom from tyranny, the common rights of the common man; it's always the unelected, completely privileged members of the house of Lords who cock a snook at the government of the day, and make a stand on these issues.
:-)
:-)
Strange, that it's precisely the people who are voted into power who abuse it, but the "undemocratic" "establishment" figures are the ones who defend it. Sad, really. The lords can do and say what they like because they're not elected (well, some (all?) are, now), and that freedom is worth something to others.
When Tony Blair said he was going to abolish the house of Lords, I thought "there goes democracy in Britain", I've lost count of the number of times the Lords have told the government (and I mean *both* parties here, both Tory and Labour) of the day to re-think something because the effect on the least-fortunate or most-vulnerable in society is too extreme. Partly it comes because they're *not* elected, part because of the social contract inherent in British society, partly because as individuals they *are* partisan, so the {labour} lords will pick apart the {tory} government policies and vice versa. It's a weird typically-British hotch-potch of conflicts, but somehow it all works... You'd never get it past a "government design" planning committe...
The government can always bulldoze a bill through parliament if it gets rejected/resubmitted by the Lords 3 times (I think), but that creates news, and normally when a bill is that bad, news is not what the government want... The Lords act as a counter-balance to over-eager legislation. It *is* weird, but it works quite well
Thank [insert random deity] for the Lords
Simon.
... it would do all the spell-checking for you without you having to load up Word. It's a system-wide facility for any NSText-derived object...
Sometimes the small things are what make the difference.
Simon.
here
Now this isn't a consumer device, I want it for development and for FPGA place-and-route work, but still you said "every time"...
In a followup, I detail the exact spec of the Dell I was comparing with (because someone disputed my numbers). As far as I can see, these are pretty much identical machines, and one is $2000 cheaper than the other...
Simon
So here's my configuration, going down the page options at Dell's page
Base price is $2358
Dual Core Intel® Xeon® Processor 5160 3.00GHz, 4MB L2,1333 [add $930]
Dual Core Intel® Xeon® Processor 5160 3.00GHz, 4MB L2,1333 [add $1,279]
4GB, DDR2 SDRAM FBD Memory, 667MHz, ECC (4 DIMMS) [add $870]
256MB PCIe x16 nVidia Quadro FX 3450, Dual DVI or Dual VGA or DVI + VGA [add $525]
500GB SATA 3.0Gb/s,7200 RPM Hard Drive with 16MB DataBurst Cache(TM) [add $400]
16X DVD+/-RW w/ Cyberlink PowerDVD(TM) and Roxio Creator(TM) Dell Ed [add $20]
No Monitor Option [subtract $149]
Broadcom NetXtreme 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet controller-PCI Express card [add $49]
Dell Wireless 1450 (802.11 b/g) WLAN USB 2.0 DT Adapter [add $49]
For a total of $6331 - must have missed something last time. I don't see how you can get $3592 with the same specs. Love to see how you did it!
Simon