> Oh wait, it's not. If you were running a business...
But I'm not. And I suspect you aren't either. I have owned Apple, Inc. stock at a few points, but mostly I'm a user of computing products. As a user I want low affordable prices, features, shiny, nerd things. As long as a key tech supplier isn't losing so badly I'm afraid their tech is about to do the buyout, reorg and fade into obscurity (see Palm) dance I could care less how much cash the guys in charge are carrying out in bulging sacks.
Apple users on the other hand seem emotionally attached to Apple the company almost as much as they like the products. It seems to account for the fact they can admit Apple stuff is way overpriced but that is good since it contributes to the health of their beloved corporate overlord and are thus happy to contribute a premium to ensure it's survival. That is what was wierd when I noticed it. Nobody feels that way about any other hardware or software maker outside Team OS/2 or Team Amiga.
I notice a trend among the Apple fanbois. It took a while to notice what was wrong but once I hit on the answer it was shocking.
Lately you guys use Apple's insane profits (i.e. the fact they ruthlessly screw as many dollars out of you fans as possible) as a positive. You always cite sales figures, profits, and other things that stockholders of Apple should be approving of but a customer who isn't totally emotionally invested in the Cult of Mac shouldn't care so much for.
Not that the the anti side doesn't gleefully note that Macs are a 10% niche, iPhone has been eclipsed by Android, etc. but you don't see our side extolling the financial strength of Samsung or Dell or giddy about how Dell shafted us lately.
When flash BIOS first appeared you had to move a hardware jumper to enable writing it. Then we had systems where you could fix it so that once POST finished the possibility to write the BIOS was physically removed. But people wanted simple Windows based utilities to reflash the BIOS instead of booting from a special floppy or even using the flashers many BIOSes themselves offered, and nobody wanted end users to have to open the case and move a jumper. So the vital security functions were removed. Hilarity ensues.
>...However you argue it, that's a lot of energy, that can be reduced by a factor of TEN...
If the economic case were as stark as you pretend it is your team wouldn't be needing to use force to ram your preference down our throats. But it isn't nearly as good as you want to believe. First off to replace a 100W incandescent bulb needs a 22W curly bulb so it isn't a 10-1 reduction, more like a 4-1. And the curly bulb costs a lot more and despite the claims do not last longer than a normal bulb unless you retrofit the enclosures to get rid of the heat, ensure they are operated in the base down position, etc. So now compare the total lifecycle cost of both and you find that while there is still some economic case left, it is entirely possible for a rational actor to decide that the cost difference isn't enough to offset the non-economic factors such as the better quality of light one gets from an incandescent bulb, especially the GE Reveal bulbs.
But no, anyone who disagrees has to be an idiot, a knuckle dragging demihuman who must be ruled by his betters because left to themselves those poor fools in flyover country would revert to cannibalism or something. Leave those savages free to make their own choices? Never! Have you guys ever considered your attitude is one of the biggest detriments to your cause? When normal people see that kind of elitist attitude our shields snap on, especially Americans as we are bred to resist aristocracy, whether of inherited inbred nobles or inbred ivory tower elites.
> BTW, lighter cars aren't less safe per se
Another example. Listen up idiot, a car is a complex balance between many factors, safety, efficiency (mpg), handling, cost, resource use, etc. To improve one you almost by definition reduce another. All things being equal a lighter car is going to get better milage but is probably going to either be less safe or more expensive. You have your preferred priorities, let us have ours and stop dreaming yourself our master.
> Renewable Energy, shouldn't be advertised as a way to make you feel less > guilty about using fossil fuel, but as a cheaper alternative.
Good idea but there is a problem. If you put ad copy out there pitching windmills or electric cars or any of the other popular 'alternative' or 'green' tech as a money saver you run into a pretty insurmountable problem. The authorities will put you in jail for committing the crime of fraud. So they have to use the guilt trip sales pitch and other fact free ad campaigns. Bottom line is no alternate energy source makes economic sense, by definition. If one ever crossed the line it would be a mainstream energy source and greens would latch on to it's flaws (no free lunches, all energy sources have some side effects) and begin working to outlaw it.
Not saying there is never an argument for solar, some people live way off the grid for example. But you will never compete with the power company on it's own tuff on an economic basis. And no electric car is likely to compete with an IC car anytime soon on a purely economic basis.
> In recognition of this "politics in science", the U.S. created NSF, NASA, DARPA, and NIH.
Lemme try to parse that. Problem: Politics and science getting mixed up. Solution: Create several massive government funding sources (read politically driven), drive out almost all other funding by thus flooding the zone and declare this to be a solution. This word 'solution,' I do not think it means what you think it means.
This whole/. story is frickin lame anyway. Jeeze, slashdot has trolled the readers before to generate pageviews but this one is so full of stupid I was tempted to just ignore it. Bunch of pussy scientists whining about the ignorant little people who won't just shut the hell up and let their better run their lives for them. Bah.
They don't worry about people getting upset about their silly little diamond star for a reason so simple it is apparently beyond their overly developed brains to figure out. (Or they are just trolls in labcoats, and my money is on troll.) Nobody really gives a damn whether there is a diamond star/planet somewhere beyond our reach. It is kinda neat, those of us with an interest in science will read the story and move on. Other scientists might eventually poke holes in the data or conclusions but it won't matter to the world at large for a hundred years at a minimum. It is thus pure science and the scientists are free to do in in peace, free from political influence because it doesn't matter. On the other hand AGW does matter. If AGW is correct our civilization as we know it will certainly change, if not be brought to an end. Even if it is wrong, if we allow the progressives to use it to scare us, our civilization as we know it ends. In short, it MATTERS. And when debating something that MATTERS fierce passions will be stirred, people will take sides, politics will happen. Only a pointy headed intellectual in an ivory tower safely insulated from the real world would have to wonder about the level of debate currently going on about AGW.
> In particular, the WSJ was saying years ago that rampant inflation was just around the corner. When again?
Been to Walmart lately? Everything except tech is going up. The government is suppressing the official inflation figures with a lot of smoke and mirrors but for an ordinary person wages are pretty flat and the price of everything is going up. Same for unemployment, when you can't apply for another extension you aren't considered 'unemployed' anymore, which is the only way the rate is staying under 10%. But Bushitler isn't president anymore so the media play along. Remember when 6% unemployment was 'a jobless recovery?'
As for Krugman, if that idiot said the sky was blue I'd look up from the TV and peek out the window half expecting cavorting unicorns and rainbows under a pink sky. He deserved his Nobel Prize less than Obama deserved his, if that is possible. Most Nobels these days are political trophies for being a socialist or terrorist (Arafat).
Might as well go for the gold and trash bitcoin as well while I'm in snark mode. Remember e-gold? That will be bitcoin's fate. The only people who will be doing anything with it will be criminals laundering their ill-gotten gains. And once a service gets that taint on it there is very little that can be done to attract enough reputable business to get rid of it since nobody wants to associate with a criminal enterprise. Paypal succeeded because of a symbiotic relationship with eBay, which is why they were bought out. Unless bitcoin quickly finds a legitimate source of commerce to own they are toast. And that is making the assumption for the sake of argument that the tech isn't bogus. Which it almost certainly is. They talk out both sides of their mouth. On the one hand it is anonymous enough for money laundering but on the other they promise accountability.
> The Federalist Papers are available for free, online, in their entirety.
Duh, I am a librarian. I mirror PG. Also have a dead tree edition of the Federalist Papers.
> Not sure why there's a need for a modernized version, considering we're specifically talking about what the Federalist > papers said, not what their modern interpretation is.
Go browse the new translation at your local bookstore, it really is a LOT easier to read. 18th Century English is a lot different than how we communicate now. One day on Beck's TV show he said he would like to see the Federalist translated into modern English so more people would read it and actually understand it. Some college kid was watching, grabbed the ball and ran with it. Before publishing it Beck ran the manuscript by a few scholars to make sure there wouldn't be too many arguments over the translation, added some infographics and intro material and published it under his Mercury Arts label. Best as I can tell the meaning isn't changed just the sentence structure, word choice and grammer. Also notice a few places where the original would have just listed stuff in a paragraph where this edition does an enumerated list. Also a lot of notes have been added to explain things that would have been more obvious to a contemporary of the writers but aren't as well known now.
> Your idea of the Rule of Law is fine and dandy, but it's a shell game. All laws are men's laws, even the ones in the bible.
True enough. But the idea is to have Laws that are known and enforced on everyone. We don't have that anymore and that is a problem. They could arrest any one of us at any time for violating some law that probably exists but nobody with a life has time to even know of. Unless one were a speed reader you couldn't even read all the laws as they are being passed and forget the more important regulations created by unlelected asshats and as good as laws created out of whole cloth by judges. And nobody knows what a law even means if they have found it and read it. It is illegal for a non lawyer to even express an opinion and no two lawyers or judges agree anyway.
Meanwhile if we had the Rule of Law and got things back under control you would be able to read the law yourself and know, in 99.9% of real world cases what the law meant and could thus be expected to know and obey all of the laws. And if things were sane again everyone would be expected to obey from a hobo to a President. How hard is "Congress shall make no law..."? How does one reimagine words so simple to get them meaning exactly the opposite? How did We the People allow that to happen? Why isn't Senator McCain covered in tar and feathers and running for his life down a railroad track?
Dude, it has HDMI output and USB for input, what more do you want? A case and power supply would be nice if ya ask me but what do I know.
Of course anyone who thinks this thing will ever actually ship at $25 or $35 probably thought the OLPC would ship for $100. Probably still believes in Santa. I'll be shocked if it ships for $2500 for a case lot of 100 raw boards but I'll at least give that a 1 in 3 chance of happening this year since they have alpha hardware actually booting.
Academics always neglect the many expenses involved in retail selling quantity one until they bite em on the butt. Expect quantity one price to be at least double the advertised price and include a hefty P&H to further cover their costs. All in all I wouldn't expect to see a completed unit with case and power supply sitting some person's desk for less than $75US until they are remaindering this model out. And to actually DO interesting things (things that can't be done on any random PC) will need an additional interface board to get at the GPIO/i2c/SPI, etc. pins because they intentionally made them hard to get at because they are raw unbuffered 1.8v signals.
And at that price it isn't worth it. 128MB of RAM with a hefty chunk gobbled up by the GPU doesn't leave much room to run modern applications. And the upsell unit isn't much better. Lose the cellphone mentality that sharply limits RAM because it has to be powered all the time.
In the my objection is bigger. Who is the target audience? Someone who can't get their hands on used Pentium IVs but can cope with taking a bare board and getting a weak PC up and running? People who want to do hardware interfacing/robotics but who can't just hook up a USB interface board to last year's discarded smartphone that still can run circles around this product? You can buy a new production Android based Archos player for $79.99 at K-Mart today that is in this device's ballpark except for the hdmi port. But you get a case, battery, display and a usb port. Don't know it can be jacked into host mode though, bet the right hacker can do it though. Anyway that is but one example.
I mean, sure, cool idea and it makes my nerd propeller spin just thinking about it.... until I start asking just WHAT I'd do after I played around with it for a few days. Something I couldn't do with a PC or old laptop or an off the shelf router running OpenWRT.
> I really, really wish that people who say this would actually - actually! - read the Federalist Papers, and not just say they did.
I really did read most of them years ago. Rereading the modernized version inspired by a comment by Glenn Beck and find them very helpful. Wish he had went ahead and made all of them available even if it didn't make sense to publish them all. Apparently the kid did rework all of them, Beck only printed about half though.
> And as an FYI, the battle cry "Rule of Law" is favored by dictators of all stripes.
They may hide behind the words but the defining characteristic of a dictator is the Rule of Men vs the Rule of Law. The Rule of Law binds even Kings where it hold sway and Bad Things(tm) happen if that is violated. That was one of the core lessons of the Arthurian legends, which was why the stories had staying power. The same themes recur in most of the works of the Western literary canon because the idea is at the very core of our civilization.
If you are to actually have the Rule of Law you have to have knowable laws that bind everyone. We don't even approach that standard anymore. Nobody knows the law. You can ask two lawyers and get two answers and both will tell you they might be wrong, the only way to know for sure is to wait for a judge to rule. And that doesn't actually settle the matter for the next case because another judge is free to rule differently with no reason or rhyme until the Supremes rule and guessing which way they will go is a popular spectator sport these days because NOBODY knows. You can make educated guesses and set up point spreads, but again, that is sports book not law. In other words there is no Law other than the Word of powerful men in robes.
> Yeah, I sure they how they built that giant house of cards out of selling bogus mortgages and then blew up the economy.
No, that was the government. Who put regulations on the banks subjecting them to punishment if they failed to meet government quotas for issuing loans to people who had little hope of repaying them in the name of 'affordable housing? Why that would be people like a certain lawyer for ACORN Housing by the name of Barack H. Obama. That would be certain influential Congressmen like Barney Frank. And just to share the blame for the stupid widely I remember a certain recent President flogging universal home ownership as the one stop solution to every social ill. He was a Harvard MBA named Bush. When the banks still wouldn't obey the government's wish that they commit suicide in the name of 'social justice' they had Freddie and Fannie (Cong. Franks' gay lover just happened to be a high official, no conflict there with the Banking Cmte having oversight... nothing to see here, move along ya stupid bigots and homophobes) start buying the toxic debt so the banks would write the loans safe in the knowledge they only had to hold the paper a year before they could offload it.
Of course Freddie and Fannie couldn't actually hold that much paper without anyone getting wise so they packaged it up along with good paper into securities and spread the poison far and wide in the financial community. Bankers not being stupid, well at least the smarter ones (grin), saw what was happening and tried to spread the pain away with the invention of the whole derivitives industry trying to keep the toxic paper away from themselves. In the end it just ensured that everyone dies.
> It's possible to set up a company structure that is, by definition of the company bylaws, owned by its workers. > They would own a "share" of the company in a definitional sense, but not in the sense of a stock certificate > that they can sell or take with them when they quit the company.
That would suck ass if you bothered to actually THINK about the implications. Lets imagine an attempt to do this.
We begin with 100 unemployed workers who happen to have a bit of capital saved up. Each contributes $10,000US into an account and a corporation is chartered along the lines you suggest. Each investor receives one share with a special condition that they must be an employee to maintain possession of their share. They invest in a small abandoned factory and begin bringing it up to make the infamous 'unspecified widget.' At the first meeting the duly elect a board of directors and a CEO from among their number to meet the legal requirements of incorporation and elect the rest of the initial management.
Problems set in almost instantly when one of the peeps wants to buy a house and finds that no bank will accept their stock as collateral because of the special restriction on the ownership. Out of a hundred people the odds are quite good that one will die in the first year. How to deal with inheritence? Does the next of kin have to take the job to inherit? Does the company buy out the share? When a new employee is hired does he have to buy a share as a condition of employment?
Now imagine that the company has somehow survived the above problems for a few years and prospered. How does an employee reap the benefit of his invested capital short of retiring? In light of this, why would anyone invest in such a venture in the first place vs investing in the more liquid traditional market?
> And it does so because there is no democratic government tamplate for:
Here is your mistake number one. Democracy is a stupid idea right off the bat. Which is why the guy said "A Republic, if you can keep it" walking out of the Convention. The Founders, unlike today's products of government education, understood the difference and knew Democracy always ends the same way, the plebs figure out they can vote themselves bread and circuses from the public treasury.
> 1. Bring the capitalism;
And if your step two had been, "2. END PROGRAM" you would have been correct. But of course you are just as full of fail as this Harvard socialist (oh no, Communist is a dirty word, I'm just a socialist, progressive, liberal, anything but a filthy COMMIE) who has never worked a real job.
All the government has a responsibility to do is create an environment where we can PURSUE happiness. That means create a sane, moral and knowable set of laws and enforce them equally. The Rule of Law is ingredient #1 in a successful capitalist society. Then the government defends the citizens from threats foreign and domestic. After that it should mostly get the hell out of the way.
> 2. Regulate it in such way that most profit can be gained from doing what's really needed > (although we start to see this with tax cuts for less carbondioxide vehicles);
And who decides where the most profit can be gained? Who decides what is really needed? That is the fatal conceit of the progressive/communist mind. The A type Democrat always believes him/herself a better species of being, born to rule, to know by dint of their superior Harvard/Yale education what is good and what the lesser B type Democrats should be prevented from doing... for their own good of course. The ruled always disagree on those things, force is resorted to and unless the commies are kept from gaining the power of the gun mass graves and reeducation camps are ALWAYS the end state. ALWAYS, no known exceptions.
> 3. (Probably he most important point:) hand out tax money to people that want to start a business that's > good for society and while you're at it: don't fscking own it and hand it a monopoly/unfair advantage.
Same mindset as your #2 but so full of epic Obama scale fail that beating you up over it feels like kicking a special kid.
The market makes mistakes because the actors are humans and thus subject to all human failings. But the market corrects over time, that is what it does and it is as relentless as water on stone. Government on the other hand is also made up of the same human actors, but because it has a monopoly on the use of force is much slower to realize its mistakes and thus to correct them. Until you understand that basic Truth you are destined to create only misery any time your ideas see implementation. Perfection is impossible. What is possible is to design a system which can operate in an imperfect world populated by imperfect humans. That system is a Republican form of government given the absolute minimum power required to perform those few things that the Free People associating freely can't do for themselves.
> Define what you consider to be getting those three items right.
We know what 'right' looks like. A hundred years ago students knew a lot more than a student does now at any grade level. If you haven't seen it go find and watch Ken Burn's documentary on the "Civil War". Besides being a good program on the subject observe his use of letters from the soldiers. Not just officers from the landed gentry class but enlisted men writing letters home to their wives and sweethearts. Observe the literacy, the firm command of grammar and well developed vocabularies without spell checkers or even pocket dictionaries. Observe the advanced grasp of philosophical, religious and political theory. Observe their ability to reference and quote at length from the core works of the western literary tradition, again without aid of reference works or Google.
They were a people worthy of receiving the blessings of liberty. We lost both, there is a lesson here.
> I'll leave aside the problems of getting reading, writing, and math without technology to you simply not > realizing the full impact of what you were saying.
You need no more technology than the printing press, pencil and blackboard to teach reading, writing and math in a K-12 environment. Do I think it possible to use technology to actually improve on the achievements of our forebearers? Yes, but not with the current school system in the grip of the educrats, politically correct dogmists and unions. So barring the political will to rip and replace a failed system I say at least waste no additional resources on a failure.
> The poor get disproportionately less benefits than the rich do.
The poor are also disproportionally less productive than the rich. Amazing how that works. Sitting on yer illiterate ass waiting for the mailman is a losing game. Who would have figured that. However there are NO poor in America. Look in the third world sometime, those people are poor. Our poor are obese. Seriously, obesity is the number one health problem for the 'poor' in America according to your beloved government's statistics. Sorry, but if you have a smart phone you are not poor. If you have cable TV you aren't poor. If you have multiple flat screen TVs in your house you aren't poor. This scam of defining a fixed percentage of the US population as 'poor' has to stop. We fought a "War on Poverty" and won. Too bad we destroyed the country in the process and now almost everyone is likely to soon be poor because of it.
Despite the governments' attempts to make America 'just another country' it is still possible for anyone who really wants to put in the effort to succeed. Being in the bottom of the wealth distribution isn't something you are born into and must accept until death. Stay in school, even if they are crappy, read the whole textbook including the parts the teacher never gets around to, keep yer genitals in your pants until you find someone of the moral fiber to marry and stay married to, get a job, any job and start clawing. Do those things and the odds are achieving at least the middle class are very good.
> Also, the country is not broke.
Spoke like a true product of the American education system. We are indeed broke. Our government is spending far more than it could possibly ever raise through taxes. Any attempt to even try would destroy what economic activity remains and result in less revenue than is coming in now. The problem isn't a lack of tax revenue, it is vastly increased spending compared too historical trends. And worse we have made commitments in social security/medicare, state pensions, etc. that can't possibly be kept. We can't just keep borrowing from China either because a) they won't keep loaning forever without a price we won't pay and b) they are boned too and won't be able to loan us much more even if they wanted to.
> the iTunes Store is not a large source of profit for apple
Yet. Hardware is a losing game in the long term. Moore's law is running into Good Enough and when that happens prices fall through the floor. See the thread this weekend on desktop PCs. It is eating up the smartphone space now and pads/tablets will also trend toward no profit commodity. And iTunes will still be making thirty thick and juicy points. Steve Jobs isn't stupid. It might suck to be his customer but it is great to be one his investors.
> So, I will say it again - if Apple is making an outrageously large profit on the iPad then where are the > many, many companies would can undercut the iPad with the same specs?
First off, capitalism works over the long haul but short term corporations can be stupid, wrong headed and make mistakes. And the tablet market is intertwined with the cell companies so it is probable some of their stupid has rubbed off. Snark aside I think they looked at the iPad and took the wrong lesson because they wanted to hear it. They saw Apple making their insane margins and though the buying public wanted tablets and would pay through the nose for em. In a recession where the profits of the hardware side of the computing industry has been nuked form orbit for a decade before that idea of a new segment opening where there was PROFIT to be had was a story they wanted to be true. Apple, because the RDF (controlling the commanding heights of the culture for one, their products are placed EVERYWHERE) has always been able to command premiums over the base value of the product since the Mac.
And remember that just anyone CAN'T roll a competitive tablet. Google is playing some sort of game that nobody has sussed out yet in withholding the versions of Android most suitable for tablets to only select vendors who are bound by unknown conditions. Android 2.2 just ain't going to make it into the big leagues and so the generic chinese oems stick to cheap rubbish hardware they sell dirt cheap and still make nice markup.
The HP fiasco just might have sent a wakeup call though. There just aren't enough slashdot nerds to have snatched up all that inventory so fast. Hell, by the time it hit slashdot they were gone. I called around when the story broke and couldn't get in on the deal. It struck a chord, it changed perceptions.
> If an iPad-comparable tablet could be sold for $100+ less or more by someone else, it would > already be on the shelves - it's not rocket science.
iPads go for $499-$999, there are a lot of pretty decent tablets going under the $499 mark. But being $50 cheaper won't counter a marketing campaign so pervasive. Half does. See the PC vs Mac battle and now the iPhone vs Android smartphone battle.
Although I really consider the lot of em 1.0 products. A tablet needs to be an ereader and there ain't a tablet or ebook marketed yet that I'd buy for more than simple novel grazing. I want something that can display an 8 1/2 x 11 letter page at least at fax (fine mode) resolution and have enough gpu//cpu grunt to flawlessly flick around in the pages to look up a bit of information with the speed of a physical book. EPUB is nice and all, but there are zillions of pages formatted for letter paper stored in PDFs and I need to view them.
Schools should not be wasting time and money on tech until they can get reading writing and basic math right. Without those none of the rest matter.
And I have yet to be convinced that handing out Macs (and it is ALWAYS Apple who wins these school contracts) does one damned thing to improve education, other than twitter and facebook skills of course.... future employers are going to be hungering for that.... NOT.
I think it is possible to use tech to make a better education process, but that the American education system is wholly unsuited to making the fundamental change in mindset required. So quit wasting money until we are ready to blow it up and start over. In case nobody has noticed the country is broke.
> If Apple were making a huge profit on the iPad (in the region of what pie in the sky percentages/. seems to think Apple is making per unit)..
I don't know where you get your figures, but I get em off the financial pages every quarter when Apple releases performance numbers to the shareholders or when I had stock they mailed it out in an envelope. But I don't like to ride stocks that go on moonshots because of the tendency to crash without warning so I chickened out a hundred or so ago. Never thought it would keep going up this long. But one otherwise ordinary morning the news on Steve's healthis going to be bad and that price will cut in half. Too risky.
Apple doesn't sell any physical product they don't get at least fifty points on. And that is before Walmart/BestBuy takes their cut. So when Apple sells through their own retail channels (physical stores or the Apple Store) they really score. And we all know the rake off thirty nice thick points off the top of anything sold through the iTunes Store. Great as long as people are willing to keep paying up.
Uh huh. What kind of moron compares refurb product to an item so new that it hasn't even shipped yet? If you are willing to go refurb, remaindered, etc. there are always all sort of deals to be had. Not that $399 for a REFURB outdated product is a deal unless you deeply inside the RDF.
But a product that introduces at $249 (price of product that will actually be made available in the 1st world) can be expected to go on sale for $199 this Xmas and will get closed out for $149 next summer on Woot and such. That is what you would compare to some refurb ipad and there isn't much competition there, at least not on price.
I have never owned an Apple product and really can't understand why anyone would. But millions do. Of course I have never watched American Idol of my own will either, nor Survivor or Big Brother, etc. Can't for the life of me understand why Lady Gaga is all that either, can't even make a high probability call on it's gender. Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public and Apple understands that. Good for them, it is immoral to let a sucker keep his money after all.
Don't buy the Apple hype. First Apple makes fifty points or more on their tablets. Drop that to more typical consumer electronics margins and that $499 iPad would drop more than a hun right there.
And the tablets are full of expensive stuff line is bunk anyway. Unless we are being fed a huge lie, ARM is supposed to be less expensive than Intel Inside, right? Then most tablets use Sysem on Chip solutions which slash part count dramatically. They have lighter specs just by the numbers before taking into account an Intel/AMD CPU does more per cycle, hence the unleashing of the fires of hell on your nuts and the battery. A dual core 1.2Ghz tablet is state of the moment while a crappy trailing edge Atom. Compare a tablet to a netbook. A decent netbook can be had any day of the week for $250-$300. The netbook has more battery, more CPU, a spinning hard drive and a Windows license. The tablet has a display with a better display viewable over a wider range so it can tilt with a touch screen overlay, a g-sensor and maybe a gps. But it loses the more complex case, Windows license and most of the battery. Don't tell me a tablet should cost more, the BOM says otherwise.
No it isn't Android isn't 'Linux' so OEMs can load it without bringing down the wrath of Microsoft. Notice how there are zero ARM based netbooks/laptops for purchase. But they all have models ready to roll, sampling now, for the launch of Windows 8. They could have introduced a model running some version of Linux this year if for no other reason than to put moderate quantities of the hardware out into the world for wider testing. But there are zero available in the US. There are one or two that have popped up on liliputing being sold by unheard of vendors you could import if you were hellbent on it, but none have US distributors.
Zero is an important number. Had there only been one or two failures that would be the market talking. Zero means there is an unseen force at work. ARM is the buzzword, netbooks aren't as hot this year as last but still a major segment and running time, weight and cost are key specs. An arm netbook should be better on all three fronts at the only 'negative' of no Windows. Somebody should have at least tried, at least in an unfettered market.
Or finally look at the Chromebooks. Why did they have Intel Inside? Arm would have been better in every way. Except of course we would have been buying the shit out of them, ditching the Chrome silliness and installing Ubuntu like crazy. I know I WANT a light laptop that can run all fricking day.
They already announced they aren't following through. Slashdot editors can't read. The article says the $249 model is the least expensive model intended to ship to the US. Doubt the low end model will make it to much of the 1st world.
Good first step though, put a decent tablet out at non-apple prices. The HP disaster proved product will fly off shelves at $99. I suspect they would have moved briskly at $199, i.e. selling out in days instead of the gone before most people even heard the news of the demise, selling out so fast they still had ads up on CNN after they were all gone. The trick is the costs of production need to drop just a smidge more and the manufacturers have to be willing to accept consumer electronics margins instead of Apple margins.
Get a really usable tablet/ereader on shelves at a reliable (not firesale/closeout, loss leader, etc) and they willl become viable. For those who don't need a laptop and need more than a smartphone provides. Apparently that niche is fairly large.
No, they will end up shipping units for at least double that, if at all, everyone misjudges how much it actually costs to put a product into retail in unit 1 vs case lots. And remember they don't even include a case, power brick or USB hub in that price. Plus the $25 Model A is pretty crippled, only 128MB RAM and no ethernet. So start with the Model B which will end up shipping at closer to $70, add a case and power brick for another $20, a USB hub so you can connect a keyboard AND a mouse and you are up to a hundred dollars. Not such a bargain anymore is it. eBay has ARM based Google G1 phones new in the box closing out for a hundred or so right now that have a decent ARM cpu, the 128MB ram of the base Model A plus a display and keyboard and lots of radios, WiFi and BT being the most useful for a tinkering project that repurposes the hardware. No you don't get the HDMI port which is a bummer.
Yes the OP is flaming and a bit trollish with thye offtopic ranting about the CLI but there is a solid nugget of truth in there. Drivers ARE breaking a lot.
Let me give three examples.
1. A desktop box I own with a Highpoint PATA RAID card. It works fine with RHEL3 or 4 and Fedora up through somewhere before 8. I manually butchered the GPL driver from Highpoint into loading into Fedora 9 & 10 but along that release's update stream they put out a kernel version bump that I couldn't figure out how to patch the driver into so I rolled back the kernel and have been stuck on F10 since. Every release I boot the DVD and check and nope, the regression is still there. Since it is a PATA controller it is doubtful it will ever work again.
2. My current Thinkpad X200s. It was a current production machine when Fedora 12's update train broke docking on it forcing another kernel rollback and freeze. Fedora 15 finally fixed docking at the cost of GNOME3, hell of a choice ain't it: break docking, break the desktop or run a machine without security patches. What to do, what to do. Fedora 15 with XFCE was my solution.
3. My boss's Thinkpad running Ubuntu lost the second monitor while docked during an update of xorg this week. Yup, rollback again and freeze. For one update cycle? A year? Who the hell knows. Of course since the current Ubuntu is the last to have GNOME2 it probably won't matter until the desktop suicide mission is resolved.
Why do I get the impression you say that like it is a bad thing? The purpose of a public equity corporation is to provide a return to the investors first and foremost, lest the shareholders select a better use of their resources. Hint, your retirement is likely tied to corporate performance. If you object to that notion you could try only doing business with non-profits and co-ops but I doubt you will have much luck. Capitalism is sometimes messy but it delivers better than any other system so far devised. It eliminates want and poverty far better than any government program has even aspired to, far better than the not for profit sector and beats the crap out of the other *isms.
Slashdot Mirror
> Oh wait, it's not. If you were running a business...
But I'm not. And I suspect you aren't either. I have owned Apple, Inc. stock at a few points, but mostly I'm a user of computing products. As a user I want low affordable prices, features, shiny, nerd things. As long as a key tech supplier isn't losing so badly I'm afraid their tech is about to do the buyout, reorg and fade into obscurity (see Palm) dance I could care less how much cash the guys in charge are carrying out in bulging sacks.
Apple users on the other hand seem emotionally attached to Apple the company almost as much as they like the products. It seems to account for the fact they can admit Apple stuff is way overpriced but that is good since it contributes to the health of their beloved corporate overlord and are thus happy to contribute a premium to ensure it's survival. That is what was wierd when I noticed it. Nobody feels that way about any other hardware or software maker outside Team OS/2 or Team Amiga.
I notice a trend among the Apple fanbois. It took a while to notice what was wrong but once I hit on the answer it was shocking.
Lately you guys use Apple's insane profits (i.e. the fact they ruthlessly screw as many dollars out of you fans as possible) as a positive. You always cite sales figures, profits, and other things that stockholders of Apple should be approving of but a customer who isn't totally emotionally invested in the Cult of Mac shouldn't care so much for.
Not that the the anti side doesn't gleefully note that Macs are a 10% niche, iPhone has been eclipsed by Android, etc. but you don't see our side extolling the financial strength of Samsung or Dell or giddy about how Dell shafted us lately.
> The only real reason a computer needs a BIOS is to run a bootloader...
Oh how I wish that were still true. Got one word for ya, ACPI.
When flash BIOS first appeared you had to move a hardware jumper to enable writing it. Then we had systems where you could fix it so that once POST finished the possibility to write the BIOS was physically removed. But people wanted simple Windows based utilities to reflash the BIOS instead of booting from a special floppy or even using the flashers many BIOSes themselves offered, and nobody wanted end users to have to open the case and move a jumper. So the vital security functions were removed. Hilarity ensues.
> ...However you argue it, that's a lot of energy, that can be reduced by a factor of TEN...
If the economic case were as stark as you pretend it is your team wouldn't be needing to use force to ram your preference down our throats. But it isn't nearly as good as you want to believe. First off to replace a 100W incandescent bulb needs a 22W curly bulb so it isn't a 10-1 reduction, more like a 4-1. And the curly bulb costs a lot more and despite the claims do not last longer than a normal bulb unless you retrofit the enclosures to get rid of the heat, ensure they are operated in the base down position, etc. So now compare the total lifecycle cost of both and you find that while there is still some economic case left, it is entirely possible for a rational actor to decide that the cost difference isn't enough to offset the non-economic factors such as the better quality of light one gets from an incandescent bulb, especially the GE Reveal bulbs.
But no, anyone who disagrees has to be an idiot, a knuckle dragging demihuman who must be ruled by his betters because left to themselves those poor fools in flyover country would revert to cannibalism or something. Leave those savages free to make their own choices? Never! Have you guys ever considered your attitude is one of the biggest detriments to your cause? When normal people see that kind of elitist attitude our shields snap on, especially Americans as we are bred to resist aristocracy, whether of inherited inbred nobles or inbred ivory tower elites.
> BTW, lighter cars aren't less safe per se
Another example. Listen up idiot, a car is a complex balance between many factors, safety, efficiency (mpg), handling, cost, resource use, etc. To improve one you almost by definition reduce another. All things being equal a lighter car is going to get better milage but is probably going to either be less safe or more expensive. You have your preferred priorities, let us have ours and stop dreaming yourself our master.
> Renewable Energy, shouldn't be advertised as a way to make you feel less
> guilty about using fossil fuel, but as a cheaper alternative.
Good idea but there is a problem. If you put ad copy out there pitching windmills or electric cars or any of the other popular 'alternative' or 'green' tech as a money saver you run into a pretty insurmountable problem. The authorities will put you in jail for committing the crime of fraud. So they have to use the guilt trip sales pitch and other fact free ad campaigns. Bottom line is no alternate energy source makes economic sense, by definition. If one ever crossed the line it would be a mainstream energy source and greens would latch on to it's flaws (no free lunches, all energy sources have some side effects) and begin working to outlaw it.
Not saying there is never an argument for solar, some people live way off the grid for example. But you will never compete with the power company on it's own tuff on an economic basis. And no electric car is likely to compete with an IC car anytime soon on a purely economic basis.
> In recognition of this "politics in science", the U.S. created NSF, NASA, DARPA, and NIH.
Lemme try to parse that. Problem: Politics and science getting mixed up. Solution: Create several massive government funding sources (read politically driven), drive out almost all other funding by thus flooding the zone and declare this to be a solution. This word 'solution,' I do not think it means what you think it means.
This whole /. story is frickin lame anyway. Jeeze, slashdot has trolled the readers before to generate pageviews but this one is so full of stupid I was tempted to just ignore it. Bunch of pussy scientists whining about the ignorant little people who won't just shut the hell up and let their better run their lives for them. Bah.
They don't worry about people getting upset about their silly little diamond star for a reason so simple it is apparently beyond their overly developed brains to figure out. (Or they are just trolls in labcoats, and my money is on troll.) Nobody really gives a damn whether there is a diamond star/planet somewhere beyond our reach. It is kinda neat, those of us with an interest in science will read the story and move on. Other scientists might eventually poke holes in the data or conclusions but it won't matter to the world at large for a hundred years at a minimum. It is thus pure science and the scientists are free to do in in peace, free from political influence because it doesn't matter. On the other hand AGW does matter. If AGW is correct our civilization as we know it will certainly change, if not be brought to an end. Even if it is wrong, if we allow the progressives to use it to scare us, our civilization as we know it ends. In short, it MATTERS. And when debating something that MATTERS fierce passions will be stirred, people will take sides, politics will happen. Only a pointy headed intellectual in an ivory tower safely insulated from the real world would have to wonder about the level of debate currently going on about AGW.
> In particular, the WSJ was saying years ago that rampant inflation was just around the corner. When again?
Been to Walmart lately? Everything except tech is going up. The government is suppressing the official inflation figures with a lot of smoke and mirrors but for an ordinary person wages are pretty flat and the price of everything is going up. Same for unemployment, when you can't apply for another extension you aren't considered 'unemployed' anymore, which is the only way the rate is staying under 10%. But Bushitler isn't president anymore so the media play along. Remember when 6% unemployment was 'a jobless recovery?'
As for Krugman, if that idiot said the sky was blue I'd look up from the TV and peek out the window half expecting cavorting unicorns and rainbows under a pink sky. He deserved his Nobel Prize less than Obama deserved his, if that is possible. Most Nobels these days are political trophies for being a socialist or terrorist (Arafat).
Might as well go for the gold and trash bitcoin as well while I'm in snark mode. Remember e-gold? That will be bitcoin's fate. The only people who will be doing anything with it will be criminals laundering their ill-gotten gains. And once a service gets that taint on it there is very little that can be done to attract enough reputable business to get rid of it since nobody wants to associate with a criminal enterprise. Paypal succeeded because of a symbiotic relationship with eBay, which is why they were bought out. Unless bitcoin quickly finds a legitimate source of commerce to own they are toast. And that is making the assumption for the sake of argument that the tech isn't bogus. Which it almost certainly is. They talk out both sides of their mouth. On the one hand it is anonymous enough for money laundering but on the other they promise accountability.
> The Federalist Papers are available for free, online, in their entirety.
Duh, I am a librarian. I mirror PG. Also have a dead tree edition of the Federalist Papers.
> Not sure why there's a need for a modernized version, considering we're specifically talking about what the Federalist
> papers said, not what their modern interpretation is.
Go browse the new translation at your local bookstore, it really is a LOT easier to read. 18th Century English is a lot different than how we communicate now. One day on Beck's TV show he said he would like to see the Federalist translated into modern English so more people would read it and actually understand it. Some college kid was watching, grabbed the ball and ran with it. Before publishing it Beck ran the manuscript by a few scholars to make sure there wouldn't be too many arguments over the translation, added some infographics and intro material and published it under his Mercury Arts label. Best as I can tell the meaning isn't changed just the sentence structure, word choice and grammer. Also notice a few places where the original would have just listed stuff in a paragraph where this edition does an enumerated list. Also a lot of notes have been added to explain things that would have been more obvious to a contemporary of the writers but aren't as well known now.
> Your idea of the Rule of Law is fine and dandy, but it's a shell game. All laws are men's laws, even the ones in the bible.
True enough. But the idea is to have Laws that are known and enforced on everyone. We don't have that anymore and that is a problem. They could arrest any one of us at any time for violating some law that probably exists but nobody with a life has time to even know of. Unless one were a speed reader you couldn't even read all the laws as they are being passed and forget the more important regulations created by unlelected asshats and as good as laws created out of whole cloth by judges. And nobody knows what a law even means if they have found it and read it. It is illegal for a non lawyer to even express an opinion and no two lawyers or judges agree anyway.
Meanwhile if we had the Rule of Law and got things back under control you would be able to read the law yourself and know, in 99.9% of real world cases what the law meant and could thus be expected to know and obey all of the laws. And if things were sane again everyone would be expected to obey from a hobo to a President. How hard is "Congress shall make no law..."? How does one reimagine words so simple to get them meaning exactly the opposite? How did We the People allow that to happen? Why isn't Senator McCain covered in tar and feathers and running for his life down a railroad track?
Dude, it has HDMI output and USB for input, what more do you want? A case and power supply would be nice if ya ask me but what do I know.
Of course anyone who thinks this thing will ever actually ship at $25 or $35 probably thought the OLPC would ship for $100. Probably still believes in Santa. I'll be shocked if it ships for $2500 for a case lot of 100 raw boards but I'll at least give that a 1 in 3 chance of happening this year since they have alpha hardware actually booting.
Academics always neglect the many expenses involved in retail selling quantity one until they bite em on the butt. Expect quantity one price to be at least double the advertised price and include a hefty P&H to further cover their costs. All in all I wouldn't expect to see a completed unit with case and power supply sitting some person's desk for less than $75US until they are remaindering this model out. And to actually DO interesting things (things that can't be done on any random PC) will need an additional interface board to get at the GPIO/i2c/SPI, etc. pins because they intentionally made them hard to get at because they are raw unbuffered 1.8v signals.
And at that price it isn't worth it. 128MB of RAM with a hefty chunk gobbled up by the GPU doesn't leave much room to run modern applications. And the upsell unit isn't much better. Lose the cellphone mentality that sharply limits RAM because it has to be powered all the time.
In the my objection is bigger. Who is the target audience? Someone who can't get their hands on used Pentium IVs but can cope with taking a bare board and getting a weak PC up and running? People who want to do hardware interfacing/robotics but who can't just hook up a USB interface board to last year's discarded smartphone that still can run circles around this product? You can buy a new production Android based Archos player for $79.99 at K-Mart today that is in this device's ballpark except for the hdmi port. But you get a case, battery, display and a usb port. Don't know it can be jacked into host mode though, bet the right hacker can do it though. Anyway that is but one example.
I mean, sure, cool idea and it makes my nerd propeller spin just thinking about it.... until I start asking just WHAT I'd do after I played around with it for a few days. Something I couldn't do with a PC or old laptop or an off the shelf router running OpenWRT.
> I really, really wish that people who say this would actually - actually! - read the Federalist Papers, and not just say they did.
I really did read most of them years ago. Rereading the modernized version inspired by a comment by Glenn Beck and find them very helpful. Wish he had went ahead and made all of them available even if it didn't make sense to publish them all. Apparently the kid did rework all of them, Beck only printed about half though.
> And as an FYI, the battle cry "Rule of Law" is favored by dictators of all stripes.
They may hide behind the words but the defining characteristic of a dictator is the Rule of Men vs the Rule of Law. The Rule of Law binds even Kings where it hold sway and Bad Things(tm) happen if that is violated. That was one of the core lessons of the Arthurian legends, which was why the stories had staying power. The same themes recur in most of the works of the Western literary canon because the idea is at the very core of our civilization.
If you are to actually have the Rule of Law you have to have knowable laws that bind everyone. We don't even approach that standard anymore. Nobody knows the law. You can ask two lawyers and get two answers and both will tell you they might be wrong, the only way to know for sure is to wait for a judge to rule. And that doesn't actually settle the matter for the next case because another judge is free to rule differently with no reason or rhyme until the Supremes rule and guessing which way they will go is a popular spectator sport these days because NOBODY knows. You can make educated guesses and set up point spreads, but again, that is sports book not law. In other words there is no Law other than the Word of powerful men in robes.
> Yeah, I sure they how they built that giant house of cards out of selling bogus mortgages and then blew up the economy.
No, that was the government. Who put regulations on the banks subjecting them to punishment if they failed to meet government quotas for issuing loans to people who had little hope of repaying them in the name of 'affordable housing? Why that would be people like a certain lawyer for ACORN Housing by the name of Barack H. Obama. That would be certain influential Congressmen like Barney Frank. And just to share the blame for the stupid widely I remember a certain recent President flogging universal home ownership as the one stop solution to every social ill. He was a Harvard MBA named Bush. When the banks still wouldn't obey the government's wish that they commit suicide in the name of 'social justice' they had Freddie and Fannie (Cong. Franks' gay lover just happened to be a high official, no conflict there with the Banking Cmte having oversight... nothing to see here, move along ya stupid bigots and homophobes) start buying the toxic debt so the banks would write the loans safe in the knowledge they only had to hold the paper a year before they could offload it.
Of course Freddie and Fannie couldn't actually hold that much paper without anyone getting wise so they packaged it up along with good paper into securities and spread the poison far and wide in the financial community. Bankers not being stupid, well at least the smarter ones (grin), saw what was happening and tried to spread the pain away with the invention of the whole derivitives industry trying to keep the toxic paper away from themselves. In the end it just ensured that everyone dies.
> It's possible to set up a company structure that is, by definition of the company bylaws, owned by its workers.
> They would own a "share" of the company in a definitional sense, but not in the sense of a stock certificate
> that they can sell or take with them when they quit the company.
That would suck ass if you bothered to actually THINK about the implications. Lets imagine an attempt to do this.
We begin with 100 unemployed workers who happen to have a bit of capital saved up. Each contributes $10,000US into an account and a corporation is chartered along the lines you suggest. Each investor receives one share with a special condition that they must be an employee to maintain possession of their share. They invest in a small abandoned factory and begin bringing it up to make the infamous 'unspecified widget.' At the first meeting the duly elect a board of directors and a CEO from among their number to meet the legal requirements of incorporation and elect the rest of the initial management.
Problems set in almost instantly when one of the peeps wants to buy a house and finds that no bank will accept their stock as collateral because of the special restriction on the ownership. Out of a hundred people the odds are quite good that one will die in the first year. How to deal with inheritence? Does the next of kin have to take the job to inherit? Does the company buy out the share? When a new employee is hired does he have to buy a share as a condition of employment?
Now imagine that the company has somehow survived the above problems for a few years and prospered. How does an employee reap the benefit of his invested capital short of retiring? In light of this, why would anyone invest in such a venture in the first place vs investing in the more liquid traditional market?
> And it does so because there is no democratic government tamplate for:
Here is your mistake number one. Democracy is a stupid idea right off the bat. Which is why the guy said "A Republic, if you can keep it" walking out of the Convention. The Founders, unlike today's products of government education, understood the difference and knew Democracy always ends the same way, the plebs figure out they can vote themselves bread and circuses from the public treasury.
> 1. Bring the capitalism;
And if your step two had been, "2. END PROGRAM" you would have been correct. But of course you are just as full of fail as this Harvard socialist (oh no, Communist is a dirty word, I'm just a socialist, progressive, liberal, anything but a filthy COMMIE) who has never worked a real job.
All the government has a responsibility to do is create an environment where we can PURSUE happiness. That means create a sane, moral and knowable set of laws and enforce them equally. The Rule of Law is ingredient #1 in a successful capitalist society. Then the government defends the citizens from threats foreign and domestic. After that it should mostly get the hell out of the way.
> 2. Regulate it in such way that most profit can be gained from doing what's really needed
> (although we start to see this with tax cuts for less carbondioxide vehicles);
And who decides where the most profit can be gained? Who decides what is really needed? That is the fatal conceit of the progressive/communist mind. The A type Democrat always believes him/herself a better species of being, born to rule, to know by dint of their superior Harvard/Yale education what is good and what the lesser B type Democrats should be prevented from doing... for their own good of course. The ruled always disagree on those things, force is resorted to and unless the commies are kept from gaining the power of the gun mass graves and reeducation camps are ALWAYS the end state. ALWAYS, no known exceptions.
> 3. (Probably he most important point:) hand out tax money to people that want to start a business that's
> good for society and while you're at it: don't fscking own it and hand it a monopoly/unfair advantage.
Same mindset as your #2 but so full of epic Obama scale fail that beating you up over it feels like kicking a special kid.
The market makes mistakes because the actors are humans and thus subject to all human failings. But the market corrects over time, that is what it does and it is as relentless as water on stone. Government on the other hand is also made up of the same human actors, but because it has a monopoly on the use of force is much slower to realize its mistakes and thus to correct them. Until you understand that basic Truth you are destined to create only misery any time your ideas see implementation. Perfection is impossible. What is possible is to design a system which can operate in an imperfect world populated by imperfect humans. That system is a Republican form of government given the absolute minimum power required to perform those few things that the Free People associating freely can't do for themselves.
> Define what you consider to be getting those three items right.
We know what 'right' looks like. A hundred years ago students knew a lot more than a student does now at any grade level. If you haven't seen it go find and watch Ken Burn's documentary on the "Civil War". Besides being a good program on the subject observe his use of letters from the soldiers. Not just officers from the landed gentry class but enlisted men writing letters home to their wives and sweethearts. Observe the literacy, the firm command of grammar and well developed vocabularies without spell checkers or even pocket dictionaries. Observe the advanced grasp of philosophical, religious and political theory. Observe their ability to reference and quote at length from the core works of the western literary tradition, again without aid of reference works or Google.
They were a people worthy of receiving the blessings of liberty. We lost both, there is a lesson here.
> I'll leave aside the problems of getting reading, writing, and math without technology to you simply not
> realizing the full impact of what you were saying.
You need no more technology than the printing press, pencil and blackboard to teach reading, writing and math in a K-12 environment. Do I think it possible to use technology to actually improve on the achievements of our forebearers? Yes, but not with the current school system in the grip of the educrats, politically correct dogmists and unions. So barring the political will to rip and replace a failed system I say at least waste no additional resources on a failure.
> The poor get disproportionately less benefits than the rich do.
The poor are also disproportionally less productive than the rich. Amazing how that works. Sitting on yer illiterate ass waiting for the mailman is a losing game. Who would have figured that. However there are NO poor in America. Look in the third world sometime, those people are poor. Our poor are obese. Seriously, obesity is the number one health problem for the 'poor' in America according to your beloved government's statistics. Sorry, but if you have a smart phone you are not poor. If you have cable TV you aren't poor. If you have multiple flat screen TVs in your house you aren't poor. This scam of defining a fixed percentage of the US population as 'poor' has to stop. We fought a "War on Poverty" and won. Too bad we destroyed the country in the process and now almost everyone is likely to soon be poor because of it.
Despite the governments' attempts to make America 'just another country' it is still possible for anyone who really wants to put in the effort to succeed. Being in the bottom of the wealth distribution isn't something you are born into and must accept until death. Stay in school, even if they are crappy, read the whole textbook including the parts the teacher never gets around to, keep yer genitals in your pants until you find someone of the moral fiber to marry and stay married to, get a job, any job and start clawing. Do those things and the odds are achieving at least the middle class are very good.
> Also, the country is not broke.
Spoke like a true product of the American education system. We are indeed broke. Our government is spending far more than it could possibly ever raise through taxes. Any attempt to even try would destroy what economic activity remains and result in less revenue than is coming in now. The problem isn't a lack of tax revenue, it is vastly increased spending compared too historical trends. And worse we have made commitments in social security/medicare, state pensions, etc. that can't possibly be kept. We can't just keep borrowing from China either because a) they won't keep loaning forever without a price we won't pay and b) they are boned too and won't be able to loan us much more even if they wanted to.
> the iTunes Store is not a large source of profit for apple
Yet. Hardware is a losing game in the long term. Moore's law is running into Good Enough and when that happens prices fall through the floor. See the thread this weekend on desktop PCs. It is eating up the smartphone space now and pads/tablets will also trend toward no profit commodity. And iTunes will still be making thirty thick and juicy points. Steve Jobs isn't stupid. It might suck to be his customer but it is great to be one his investors.
> So, I will say it again - if Apple is making an outrageously large profit on the iPad then where are the
> many, many companies would can undercut the iPad with the same specs?
First off, capitalism works over the long haul but short term corporations can be stupid, wrong headed and make mistakes. And the tablet market is intertwined with the cell companies so it is probable some of their stupid has rubbed off. Snark aside I think they looked at the iPad and took the wrong lesson because they wanted to hear it. They saw Apple making their insane margins and though the buying public wanted tablets and would pay through the nose for em. In a recession where the profits of the hardware side of the computing industry has been nuked form orbit for a decade before that idea of a new segment opening where there was PROFIT to be had was a story they wanted to be true. Apple, because the RDF (controlling the commanding heights of the culture for one, their products are placed EVERYWHERE) has always been able to command premiums over the base value of the product since the Mac.
And remember that just anyone CAN'T roll a competitive tablet. Google is playing some sort of game that nobody has sussed out yet in withholding the versions of Android most suitable for tablets to only select vendors who are bound by unknown conditions. Android 2.2 just ain't going to make it into the big leagues and so the generic chinese oems stick to cheap rubbish hardware they sell dirt cheap and still make nice markup.
The HP fiasco just might have sent a wakeup call though. There just aren't enough slashdot nerds to have snatched up all that inventory so fast. Hell, by the time it hit slashdot they were gone. I called around when the story broke and couldn't get in on the deal. It struck a chord, it changed perceptions.
> If an iPad-comparable tablet could be sold for $100+ less or more by someone else, it would
> already be on the shelves - it's not rocket science.
iPads go for $499-$999, there are a lot of pretty decent tablets going under the $499 mark. But being $50 cheaper won't counter a marketing campaign so pervasive. Half does. See the PC vs Mac battle and now the iPhone vs Android smartphone battle.
Although I really consider the lot of em 1.0 products. A tablet needs to be an ereader and there ain't a tablet or ebook marketed yet that I'd buy for more than simple novel grazing. I want something that can display an 8 1/2 x 11 letter page at least at fax (fine mode) resolution and have enough gpu//cpu grunt to flawlessly flick around in the pages to look up a bit of information with the speed of a physical book. EPUB is nice and all, but there are zillions of pages formatted for letter paper stored in PDFs and I need to view them.
Schools should not be wasting time and money on tech until they can get reading writing and basic math right. Without those none of the rest matter.
And I have yet to be convinced that handing out Macs (and it is ALWAYS Apple who wins these school contracts) does one damned thing to improve education, other than twitter and facebook skills of course.... future employers are going to be hungering for that.... NOT.
I think it is possible to use tech to make a better education process, but that the American education system is wholly unsuited to making the fundamental change in mindset required. So quit wasting money until we are ready to blow it up and start over. In case nobody has noticed the country is broke.
> If Apple were making a huge profit on the iPad (in the region of what pie in the sky percentages /. seems to think Apple is making per unit)..
I don't know where you get your figures, but I get em off the financial pages every quarter when Apple releases performance numbers to the shareholders or when I had stock they mailed it out in an envelope. But I don't like to ride stocks that go on moonshots because of the tendency to crash without warning so I chickened out a hundred or so ago. Never thought it would keep going up this long. But one otherwise ordinary morning the news on Steve's healthis going to be bad and that price will cut in half. Too risky.
Apple doesn't sell any physical product they don't get at least fifty points on. And that is before Walmart/BestBuy takes their cut. So when Apple sells through their own retail channels (physical stores or the Apple Store) they really score. And we all know the rake off thirty nice thick points off the top of anything sold through the iTunes Store. Great as long as people are willing to keep paying up.
Uh huh. What kind of moron compares refurb product to an item so new that it hasn't even shipped yet? If you are willing to go refurb, remaindered, etc. there are always all sort of deals to be had. Not that $399 for a REFURB outdated product is a deal unless you deeply inside the RDF.
But a product that introduces at $249 (price of product that will actually be made available in the 1st world) can be expected to go on sale for $199 this Xmas and will get closed out for $149 next summer on Woot and such. That is what you would compare to some refurb ipad and there isn't much competition there, at least not on price.
I have never owned an Apple product and really can't understand why anyone would. But millions do. Of course I have never watched American Idol of my own will either, nor Survivor or Big Brother, etc. Can't for the life of me understand why Lady Gaga is all that either, can't even make a high probability call on it's gender. Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public and Apple understands that. Good for them, it is immoral to let a sucker keep his money after all.
Don't buy the Apple hype. First Apple makes fifty points or more on their tablets. Drop that to more typical consumer electronics margins and that $499 iPad would drop more than a hun right there.
And the tablets are full of expensive stuff line is bunk anyway. Unless we are being fed a huge lie, ARM is supposed to be less expensive than Intel Inside, right? Then most tablets use Sysem on Chip solutions which slash part count dramatically. They have lighter specs just by the numbers before taking into account an Intel/AMD CPU does more per cycle, hence the unleashing of the fires of hell on your nuts and the battery. A dual core 1.2Ghz tablet is state of the moment while a crappy trailing edge Atom. Compare a tablet to a netbook. A decent netbook can be had any day of the week for $250-$300. The netbook has more battery, more CPU, a spinning hard drive and a Windows license. The tablet has a display with a better display viewable over a wider range so it can tilt with a touch screen overlay, a g-sensor and maybe a gps. But it loses the more complex case, Windows license and most of the battery. Don't tell me a tablet should cost more, the BOM says otherwise.
> I guess it's not gonna happen.
No it isn't Android isn't 'Linux' so OEMs can load it without bringing down the wrath of Microsoft. Notice how there are zero ARM based netbooks/laptops for purchase. But they all have models ready to roll, sampling now, for the launch of Windows 8. They could have introduced a model running some version of Linux this year if for no other reason than to put moderate quantities of the hardware out into the world for wider testing. But there are zero available in the US. There are one or two that have popped up on liliputing being sold by unheard of vendors you could import if you were hellbent on it, but none have US distributors.
Zero is an important number. Had there only been one or two failures that would be the market talking. Zero means there is an unseen force at work. ARM is the buzzword, netbooks aren't as hot this year as last but still a major segment and running time, weight and cost are key specs. An arm netbook should be better on all three fronts at the only 'negative' of no Windows. Somebody should have at least tried, at least in an unfettered market.
Or finally look at the Chromebooks. Why did they have Intel Inside? Arm would have been better in every way. Except of course we would have been buying the shit out of them, ditching the Chrome silliness and installing Ubuntu like crazy. I know I WANT a light laptop that can run all fricking day.
They already announced they aren't following through. Slashdot editors can't read. The article says the $249 model is the least expensive model intended to ship to the US. Doubt the low end model will make it to much of the 1st world.
Good first step though, put a decent tablet out at non-apple prices. The HP disaster proved product will fly off shelves at $99. I suspect they would have moved briskly at $199, i.e. selling out in days instead of the gone before most people even heard the news of the demise, selling out so fast they still had ads up on CNN after they were all gone. The trick is the costs of production need to drop just a smidge more and the manufacturers have to be willing to accept consumer electronics margins instead of Apple margins.
Get a really usable tablet/ereader on shelves at a reliable (not firesale/closeout, loss leader, etc) and they willl become viable. For those who don't need a laptop and need more than a smartphone provides. Apparently that niche is fairly large.
No, they will end up shipping units for at least double that, if at all, everyone misjudges how much it actually costs to put a product into retail in unit 1 vs case lots. And remember they don't even include a case, power brick or USB hub in that price. Plus the $25 Model A is pretty crippled, only 128MB RAM and no ethernet. So start with the Model B which will end up shipping at closer to $70, add a case and power brick for another $20, a USB hub so you can connect a keyboard AND a mouse and you are up to a hundred dollars. Not such a bargain anymore is it. eBay has ARM based Google G1 phones new in the box closing out for a hundred or so right now that have a decent ARM cpu, the 128MB ram of the base Model A plus a display and keyboard and lots of radios, WiFi and BT being the most useful for a tinkering project that repurposes the hardware. No you don't get the HDMI port which is a bummer.
Yes the OP is flaming and a bit trollish with thye offtopic ranting about the CLI but there is a solid nugget of truth in there. Drivers ARE breaking a lot.
Let me give three examples.
1. A desktop box I own with a Highpoint PATA RAID card. It works fine with RHEL3 or 4 and Fedora up through somewhere before 8. I manually butchered the GPL driver from Highpoint into loading into Fedora 9 & 10 but along that release's update stream they put out a kernel version bump that I couldn't figure out how to patch the driver into so I rolled back the kernel and have been stuck on F10 since. Every release I boot the DVD and check and nope, the regression is still there. Since it is a PATA controller it is doubtful it will ever work again.
2. My current Thinkpad X200s. It was a current production machine when Fedora 12's update train broke docking on it forcing another kernel rollback and freeze. Fedora 15 finally fixed docking at the cost of GNOME3, hell of a choice ain't it: break docking, break the desktop or run a machine without security patches. What to do, what to do. Fedora 15 with XFCE was my solution.
3. My boss's Thinkpad running Ubuntu lost the second monitor while docked during an update of xorg this week. Yup, rollback again and freeze. For one update cycle? A year? Who the hell knows. Of course since the current Ubuntu is the last to have GNOME2 it probably won't matter until the desktop suicide mission is resolved.
Why do I get the impression you say that like it is a bad thing? The purpose of a public equity corporation is to provide a return to the investors first and foremost, lest the shareholders select a better use of their resources. Hint, your retirement is likely tied to corporate performance. If you object to that notion you could try only doing business with non-profits and co-ops but I doubt you will have much luck. Capitalism is sometimes messy but it delivers better than any other system so far devised. It eliminates want and poverty far better than any government program has even aspired to, far better than the not for profit sector and beats the crap out of the other *isms.