A third possibility exists: DigiTimes has written 'G5' when it should have typed 'G4'.
Certainly, Apple wants to move the PowerBook line to the G5 and will do so as soon as possible. But Freescale's upcoming 90nm G4-class MPC7448 chip has been seen as a more likely candidate than the G5 for the next PowerBook and/or iBook revisions.
This is really long overdue. Apple has been an force for innovation in the desktop market since its inception, but they've never been taken all that seriously in the enterprise-class server market until recently. This shows that Apple really does want to be taken seriously.
There's no reason why a satellite can't have a satellite. A ring system is just another orbiting object (or rather, many, many objects). Planets in our solar system have moons, and rings, after all, and their orbits are not disrupted by the Sun. Therefore, it should be possible for a moon to have a natural satellite or ring system. I don't know that we've ever seen that in practice, but we did put a man-made orbiting vehicle around our own Moon.
Oh, I know that. But still, we've yet to see the really hard problems of computer science solved by faster hardware. Faster computing may make things possible, but it doesn't guarantee anything. Actual effort must be put in to these hard projects (such as AI) in order to see results. We've mostly stagnated for 20 years because for most of that time computer scientists have only had a dim understanding of the problem they're trying to solve.
That's my point -- most people aren't that interesting. There ARE some people who can benefit from faster processing. Most of them are happy to increase their computing power through parallelization rather than ramping up the processor speed. For problems that aren't able to benefit from parallelization, they're kindof stuck right now, but there's not very many people who have those problems.
Could home users make use of terahertz processors? I'm sure they could. It might allow human-like AI and natural language interpretation and all kinds of stuff. Does anyone NEED it today? Arguably, yes. But is anything people presently use a computer for lacking for processor speed? Maybe. But does a 2GHz processor adequately run nearly any application you care to name? Pretty much.
Pretty much; for present day applications, 2GHz ought to be enough for almost anyone. There a few people who really need more than that, but they're not driving the market.
Why? Silicon is cheap, and any replacement material is bound to be more expensive. Most users' needs are far exceeded by 2+GHz processors. There's some people who could use faster procs, but they're pretty rare, and many of them are happy enough with SMP and clustering.
I don't know what an acceptable margin is, I'm not a businessman. My point is that the margin is a fairly small amount of money per unit, and that's with the cost of the hardware roughly figured in. The cost of hardware isn't the only cost, of course -- there's all kinds of other expenses associated with bringing the product to market.
The fact that Apple owns the OS is irrelevant -- the cost of developing OS X is a real cost, and it just gets spread across a wider line of products now. The cost is going to be in there, somehow. But for the sake of argument, I said forget the cost of the OS. Apple may well have to pay licensing on certain components of OS X -- I'm not aware of any, but they may well use patents owned by other companies through some kind of agreement.
Not taking bulk quanity reseller pricing into account, right now, I can buy:
256MB DDR RAM can be had sub-$50 80GB HDD can be had for ~$40 Combo DVD/CD-RW drive for ~$30 So, we're already at $120 and counting
G4 processor and motherboard... not sure. Last I heard, the motherboard alone was around $400. They're not cheap like x86 PC motherboards because the market is small. And that does not include the cost of the processor. Let's figure that Apple can get these parts for significantly cheaper than you or I, though, and that these parts cost around $250
Plus you have to figure in the cost of the case and power supply. I'd guesstimate this to cost ~$50.
The OS doesn't cost Apple anything to bundle, but it does cost them to develop it and they're not just doing that for their health. Presumably they'd want to recoup something on the investment. For now, though, let's say they're giving out free crack in the hopes of hooking a few more Mac junkies, and give away the OS with the hardware, and no cost is factored in. They'll make up for it by charging for updates every year, anyway.
So now, we're up to $420. An $80 margin is barely making it worthwhile for Apple, considering all the R&D they have to put in to bring this product to market. But if every miniG4 buyer ends up becoming a Mac convert, and later on decides to buy a G5 (or a G6 or whatever is out by that time) it will have been well worth it for Apple. This is a venture to expand their marketshare, not just to compete with Dell.
It's not my logic... but anyway, the *AA's are objecting to piracy/copyright violation/unauthorized distribution. If p2p doesn't get used for those purposes, they would have no leg to stand on.
First, the Pledge of Allegiance is not a founding document. It's not even a law.
The USA is nominally a representative democracy, aka a republic, as you rightly point out. Which is pretty much exactly the point I was trying to make when I said USA-style democracy isn't really democracy, in the sense of Classical direct democracy.
Of course, there's the additional subversion of that democracy by the relatively recent emergence of megacorporations and their dominance in the political arena.
Right, employers just "put bread on your table" out of the goodness of their hearts. Yeah, right!
Obviously, the people working at this company must have thought that they weren't being compensated adequately for the value that they brought to the company. They thought that their management was clueless and didn't deserve the employees and the business that it had, and that they could do better on their own.
The only dumb thing these people did was use company resources to do their conspiring, and that it led to them getting caught before they could pull it off.
That's very true, and I'd mod you up if I werent responding to your comment.
BUT, you have to acknowledge that Soviet-style Communism isn't really Communism, it's totalitarianism. USA-style democracy isn't really democracy, either, but that's another matter...
The response speed of individual pixels is one constraint.
The ability of the video card to calculate the values for all 48,000,000 pixels in an 8000x6000 array and send that information to the monitor is another constraint, and this constraint would be met much sooner than the first constraint.
48,000,000 pixels * 32 bits of color = 1,536,000,000 bits per refresh cycle.
To achieve 60Hz refresh rates (which is what current LCD monitors use as their refresh rate, regardless of the response time of the pixels) you'd need to process 92,160,000,000 -- 92.16 BILLION bits per second, calculated and pushed over a cable to the monitor.
There's no video card in existence capable of doing this, and there won't be one for a good, long time.
OLED display responses are 1,000 times faster than liquid crystal displays (LCDs), thus enabling greater resolution.
How does pixel response time have anything to do with resolution? That should strictly be a function of pixel size, shouldn't it? I have a feeling that someone didn't translate something right, or else flat out doesn't know what they're talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
So, basically, who knows what's going to happen?
3GHz or bust, I say.
A billion trillion metric fuckloads.
"I was born in 1988 you insensitive clod!!!"
This is really long overdue. Apple has been an force for innovation in the desktop market since its inception, but they've never been taken all that seriously in the enterprise-class server market until recently. This shows that Apple really does want to be taken seriously.
There's no reason why a satellite can't have a satellite. A ring system is just another orbiting object (or rather, many, many objects). Planets in our solar system have moons, and rings, after all, and their orbits are not disrupted by the Sun. Therefore, it should be possible for a moon to have a natural satellite or ring system. I don't know that we've ever seen that in practice, but we did put a man-made orbiting vehicle around our own Moon.
Oh, I know that. But still, we've yet to see the really hard problems of computer science solved by faster hardware. Faster computing may make things possible, but it doesn't guarantee anything. Actual effort must be put in to these hard projects (such as AI) in order to see results. We've mostly stagnated for 20 years because for most of that time computer scientists have only had a dim understanding of the problem they're trying to solve.
That's my point -- most people aren't that interesting. There ARE some people who can benefit from faster processing. Most of them are happy to increase their computing power through parallelization rather than ramping up the processor speed. For problems that aren't able to benefit from parallelization, they're kindof stuck right now, but there's not very many people who have those problems.
Could home users make use of terahertz processors? I'm sure they could. It might allow human-like AI and natural language interpretation and all kinds of stuff. Does anyone NEED it today? Arguably, yes. But is anything people presently use a computer for lacking for processor speed? Maybe. But does a 2GHz processor adequately run nearly any application you care to name? Pretty much.
Pretty much; for present day applications, 2GHz ought to be enough for almost anyone. There a few people who really need more than that, but they're not driving the market.
I accidentally ran over your 10GHz PC with my flying car.
I'm sure my estimates are all much higher, which is why I prefaced the comment with "Not taking bulk quanity reseller pricing into account..."
Why? Silicon is cheap, and any replacement material is bound to be more expensive. Most users' needs are far exceeded by 2+GHz processors. There's some people who could use faster procs, but they're pretty rare, and many of them are happy enough with SMP and clustering.
I don't know what an acceptable margin is, I'm not a businessman. My point is that the margin is a fairly small amount of money per unit, and that's with the cost of the hardware roughly figured in. The cost of hardware isn't the only cost, of course -- there's all kinds of other expenses associated with bringing the product to market.
The fact that Apple owns the OS is irrelevant -- the cost of developing OS X is a real cost, and it just gets spread across a wider line of products now. The cost is going to be in there, somehow. But for the sake of argument, I said forget the cost of the OS. Apple may well have to pay licensing on certain components of OS X -- I'm not aware of any, but they may well use patents owned by other companies through some kind of agreement.
Ah, good point. I was assuming that this system would use integrated graphics and would not be expandable, much like the iMac G5.
Not taking bulk quanity reseller pricing into account, right now, I can buy:
256MB DDR RAM can be had sub-$50
80GB HDD can be had for ~$40
Combo DVD/CD-RW drive for ~$30
So, we're already at $120 and counting
G4 processor and motherboard... not sure. Last I heard, the motherboard alone was around $400. They're not cheap like x86 PC motherboards because the market is small. And that does not include the cost of the processor. Let's figure that Apple can get these parts for significantly cheaper than you or I, though, and that these parts cost around $250
Plus you have to figure in the cost of the case and power supply. I'd guesstimate this to cost ~$50.
The OS doesn't cost Apple anything to bundle, but it does cost them to develop it and they're not just doing that for their health. Presumably they'd want to recoup something on the investment. For now, though, let's say they're giving out free crack in the hopes of hooking a few more Mac junkies, and give away the OS with the hardware, and no cost is factored in. They'll make up for it by charging for updates every year, anyway.
So now, we're up to $420. An $80 margin is barely making it worthwhile for Apple, considering all the R&D they have to put in to bring this product to market. But if every miniG4 buyer ends up becoming a Mac convert, and later on decides to buy a G5 (or a G6 or whatever is out by that time) it will have been well worth it for Apple. This is a venture to expand their marketshare, not just to compete with Dell.
It's not my logic... but anyway, the *AA's are objecting to piracy/copyright violation/unauthorized distribution. If p2p doesn't get used for those purposes, they would have no leg to stand on.
Note that I'm not against p2p apps, I'm just saying this argument of simplicity is no justification.
I can kill someone with as much simplicity as a bullet to the head. Does that make murder laws silly?
First, the Pledge of Allegiance is not a founding document. It's not even a law.
The USA is nominally a representative democracy, aka a republic, as you rightly point out. Which is pretty much exactly the point I was trying to make when I said USA-style democracy isn't really democracy, in the sense of Classical direct democracy.
Of course, there's the additional subversion of that democracy by the relatively recent emergence of megacorporations and their dominance in the political arena.
Right, employers just "put bread on your table" out of the goodness of their hearts. Yeah, right!
Obviously, the people working at this company must have thought that they weren't being compensated adequately for the value that they brought to the company. They thought that their management was clueless and didn't deserve the employees and the business that it had, and that they could do better on their own.
The only dumb thing these people did was use company resources to do their conspiring, and that it led to them getting caught before they could pull it off.
That's very true, and I'd mod you up if I werent responding to your comment.
BUT, you have to acknowledge that Soviet-style Communism isn't really Communism, it's totalitarianism. USA-style democracy isn't really democracy, either, but that's another matter...
Let me rephrase:
The response speed of individual pixels is one constraint.
The ability of the video card to calculate the values for all 48,000,000 pixels in an 8000x6000 array and send that information to the monitor is another constraint, and this constraint would be met much sooner than the first constraint.
48,000,000 pixels * 32 bits of color = 1,536,000,000 bits per refresh cycle.
To achieve 60Hz refresh rates (which is what current LCD monitors use as their refresh rate, regardless of the response time of the pixels) you'd need to process 92,160,000,000 -- 92.16 BILLION bits per second, calculated and pushed over a cable to the monitor.
There's no video card in existence capable of doing this, and there won't be one for a good, long time.
Refresh rate would be constrained by the speed of the video card in that case, not by the response time of the individual pixels.
How does pixel response time have anything to do with resolution? That should strictly be a function of pixel size, shouldn't it? I have a feeling that someone didn't translate something right, or else flat out doesn't know what they're talking about.
Unless you're heating that balloon passively via solar furnace, it's going to be using fuel to heat the air.
How's that jumbo airliner come out against a schooner?