It will also drastically save cost on R&D and they will more easily benefit from die shrinks and other advances. As you have pointed out, the same holds true for netbook/laptop screens and TVs.
My bet is that they are going to aim for a current top of the line APU with the expectation that in 3+ years those units that were top of the line and expensive are now effectively the low end dirt cheap units. IIRC both Microsoft and Sony are aiming for 10 year life cycles on the consoles so it would make sense to just go all out at the beginning and then let die shrinks and other advances lower costs as time goes on. Though of course that is also a bit of a risk because there is always the off chance we hit some sort of wall, as Intel did with the P4, and those lower production costs don't come.
They can also substitute more advanced APUs that may become cheaper than the original and just mod the system software so the game software sees it as the same chip.
See, this is why I like you hairyfeet. You and I disagree on a LOT of stuff, and agree on enough to keep me following your posts, but I can't recall you ever deliberately equivocating or misrepresenting an argument of even people you disagree with. You''ve, in my view, failed to understand an argument, you're rejected an argument, but you've never played stupid and misrepresented it. Simplify for the sake of argument, sometimes imperfectly, yes, but misrepresent, no.
Just adding a bit to what you said, not intending to actually debate the subject here, I don't have the time right now. So many people simply conflate people in the the intelligent design camp (You term them creationists, but not going to get make a big issue with that.) with the young-earth creationists. It's like saying French and Spanish are basically the same language because both use the Roman Alphabet. Some people do it out of simple ignorance, but the other practical reason is to avoid having to answer the scientific objections raised by those in the ID movement by claiming they hold their view because of their worldview and not because of evidence. (As if the same doesn't apply to Dawkins and his worldview.) It's so irritating because just a little basic reading would show the differentiation. To be fair, the Young-Earthers do try to hitch a ride with the ID movement, just like how Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons sometimes try to associate themselves with Christianity.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Aristotle. Bravo to you for making the distinction even though you reject the view.
As for Climate Change, I lean toward the skeptical side of man being the driving factor, but we both agree the "solutions" are little more than power grabs by the political elite and the privileged few businesses that have the right connections.
Thanks for taking the time to slap down an obvious attempt at derailing the discussion.
My main concern though is the upgrade path. A Core2 Duo CPU/board built 5 years ago is still perfectly serviceable as far as processing power for people like my dad and many of my relatives. The big bottleneck I have found has been how much ram those older boards can take. A 4 memory slot 775 board is golden as you can fill it with 2gb DDR2 sticks, which are relatively cheap and plentiful. 4gb sticks are rather expensive.
I don't equip any of those boards with SSDs when I put together a system for my relatives, I'm using used parts I get from work, so the caching becomes a lot more important, and even my aunt can easily get a 4gb RAM Windows 7 build to fill up all the main memory with cached files. Granted her programs only use about 2gb so windows still has a 2gb cache, but with a slower hard drive that cache can still make a big difference even with non-power users.
I would agree that an SSD would reduce the need for caching, but with platter drives it is very important. A 4gb 775 Core2 Duo board still works today, but who knows for how long. 8gb gives you far more leeway in the future. Intel continuing to limit Atom boards to 4gb is a stupid move, as it pushes people to AMD for low power systems simply because the systems can handle more RAM. They can see the trend, my guess is that they don't let the Atoms have more RAM in order to get people into the i3/Celeron/Pentium. AMD is the underdog and wants to get as much business from Intel as they can, they can't afford to nerf anything if they don't have to because, for them, there is no benefit to doing so.
Isn't that the same problem that the PS3 has had? From what I read it is a real PITA to program for compared to the other consoles, even though on paper it has the most powerful hardware. In part though that had to do with the development tools being inferior at the start, which gave the 360 a nice heat start despite the hardware problems and the Wii hardware was never powerful enough to compete with either.
4gb? Please. That is still WAY too little. If it doesn't support at least 8 gb there's no point to consider it unless it is being given to me. Cramming laptops/netbooks/media PCs with ram is VERY sound because it means that windows can cache lots of files and compensate for the slow hard drives these machines typically have.. My one C60 simply FLIES with 8gb of ram.
I also have a Asus X53U-RH11 AMD C60 that I went full retard with. I got 16gb of FAST laptop ram and crammed it into the two memory slots, the machine only "officially" supports 4gb IIRC. BIOS recognized the ram right away. Took a couple of reboots and removing and re-installing the second stick a couple of times for Windows to say that all 16 were useable. Made a 6gb RAMdisk and loaded all the program files onto it. Only way I can get that thing to start chugging is to play 1080 video on it and sometimes it can keep up if things aren't too busy.
Loading up computers with 8gb or more of RAM is a very sound thing to do due to prices being so cheap. 4gb is simply too restrictive as it limits upgrade options. I bought an open-box E450 mobo off NewEgg for a file server and I am going to be putting 16 gigs, yea I know it only supports 8 officially, in that thing just because it is so cheap I want to future proof it. Every PC/mobo I have throw away was thrown not because of the processor, but because it didn't have enough RAM and by the time I wanted to buy more, the prices for the older ram had shot up to where it didn't make sense to buy more.
Both my parents made it very clear to my brother and I that if either or both of them are brain dead/non-recoverable coma, to pull the plug on them. Both of us have asked them the same.
Not to nitpick, but OF COURSE you can prove a negative. If I say that you broke into my garage, are you going to go to jail because you can't prove that you didn't? (Prove the negative?) Of course not, you'll prove the negative by pointing out that you and I both live about 1,700 miles apart and you'll probably have credit card records or witnesses who can show that you were not anywhere near my garage at the date in question.
People prove negatives every single day. We could not function in day to day activities if we couldn't prove negatives. Now, it can be very difficult to prove a negative, but it most certainly is not impossible. You can also show something to be more plausibly true than false which, while not "proving" a proposition, would show that it is reasonable to hold a proposition as true absent any evidence to the contrary.
Sorry, but that's just a little pet peeve of mine. Carry on with the interesting discussion.
We seem to be arguing past each other, you're arguing about his personal life, which I could care less about, I'm arguing about his policies he has supported in the past and would likely bring to the WH. While true that he flip flops constantly, like Mr Peace Prize winning Obama who then starts bombing countries all over the place and hands Libya to Al Qaeda, the policies he has actually backed are not much different than Obama. He passed Romenycare, which has been a predictable disaster in Massachusetts, he is just as pro-war was Obama has been, neither he or Obama have any clue what made the US into an economic superpower and neither seem to have any grasp on the fiscal train wreck that is coming, both favor high taxes on the people who create jobs and support even higher taxes on the poor via currency debasement.
As far as being president, it was black Obama vs White Obama and in that sort of race, the black Obama was going to win simply because of his skin color.
Um, Romeny was nothing more than the White Obama. He only got people who would vote for a can of baked beans if it had an (R) next to its name, which of course wasn't enough to win. Their rhetoric differed a little, but their actions and policies are effectively the same. (Fun game, write down policies they supported and see if people can differentiate between Romeny and Obama.) Obama, like all black politicians I can think of, doesn't care one hoot about blacks. They know that they will vote for a black candidate no matter how dismal their record and how much their policies hurt blacks and minorities. Just look at Detroit and other places where blacks dominate the political scene. No jobs, failing schools, etc. If those politicians were white there would be riots in the street, but since it's black politicians they don't care.
Neither one knows what the problems are, let alone that the solutions are. Gonna be interesting when the bond bubble pops and Obama and congress are left standing their with their willies in hand.
Exactly, ask anyone if they would want a laptop with a 2560x1600 monitor and they will say yes. The REAL test is to see if they are willing for forgo something to have the money to buy that laptop.
Resources are always limited and so everything is about tradeoffs. Sure I can spend $2000 on that high-res laptop vs the $400 one, but what else could I have used that $1,600 for? The vast majority of people would rather use that money for other things. Linus might as well be complaining that not every laptop is an i7 with 32 gb of ram and a 1tb SSD. He's living in a fantasy while his creation can't even do 720 video without crapping all over itself..
That is exactly how we got into the mess we have in the first place. One group needing protection, then another and another. If Japan is subsidizing their exporters that means they are effectively giving us stuff for less. If I have a friend who sells me a $2 beer for $1, how is doing that to his benefit and why should I not take advantage of the offer for all it is worth..Likewise with the Chinese subsedizing the production of solar panels.
Those policies are expensive, hurt the counties own citizens more than they hurt us, and will ultimately collapse, along with big government, as our 40 year old fiat money system collapses. The Chinese are already starting to get serious unrest and bubble conditions in their country with the inflation they have to create in order to keep the dollar from dropping like a rock, they will not be able to continue for much longer without getting a possible revolution. Very similar to what the US Federal Reserve did in the 1920's to prop up the British Pound, which fueled the stock market bubble of the mid/late 1920's that was the cause of the 29 crash. (and the 2000 crash, and the 2008 crash, and the cause of the current bubble in the government bond market that will crash.)
The scam of the century is how the US government keeps sugar prices in the US twice that of world sugar prices. Sure I live in an area with lots of sugar beet farming, but the farmers can always grow something else. (Hemp would grow nicely on some of the high-salt land if they were allowed to.) Robbing Peter to pay Paul does nothing except make both poorer in the long term.
This is why so many small businesses,like the one I work for, can run rings around larger firms..The boss/owner started the company. He was the one running cable for many years, while he doesn't understand a lot of the newer stuff as well as me or my co-worker does, he understands it more than enough to understand what we are saying.and why we are saying it. He owns the business outright, he is in it for the long haul and wants things built properly.
Several years ago I developed a method to resolder the capacitors on a particular motherboard that we HAD to have, but had the caps with the bad electrolyte. (Nothing fancy, but the board has a few issues that made replacement difficult.) The Mark 1 variant was very ugly, but functional and proved the concept, the Mark 2 variant is what we still do today. When looking at the invoice the boss asked me why I was using capacitors that cost over 75 cents each, I simply pointed to the spec sheet and told him that the ones I bought were rated for 8,000 hours at 105C while the ones that were 10 cents each were rated for 1,000 hours at 80C. He immediately understood and saw how my decision was correct. No need to try to explain cost-benefit to some bean counter. No need to write up some fancy report, just point out the specs and he understands that by going with the expensive caps we will never have to re-solder those caps again and saving us gobs of money in the long term.
Hard drives in our recorders? WD Blacks all the way. Greens are so much cheaper, especially during the shortage, but he never even considered telling us to use cheaper drives and the increased cost was easily factored into our budgets. Contrast that with my brother, who works for a national company. When hard drives skyrocketed, getting them to authorize the funds they needed for hard drives was a monumental task and took several weeks of daily emails and phone calls.
There are many inefficiencies in small companies, however there are many inefficiencies as well that give them an advantage. Despite the government giving the large firms heaps of advantages,many small firms can still compete, though many simply leave the country, some better than others, as we have seen over the last couple decades.
It's stupid easy to hit such an object from a guidance standpoint, heck, Iraqi air defenses in the Saddam years swept them from the sky with ease. UAVs largely fly in straight predictable patterns, they are not made to be maneuverable like a fighter jet. Any SAM that can physically reach them will blow them out of the sky.
While we agree on many things Crosshair on this one you are DEAD WRONG. Look up the number of Muslims in a country and how the violence goes UP the more Muslims you have. If the country is 100% Muslim no problem right? WRONG as then the Imams start jockeying and fighting each other for control!
False cause fallacy. I can do the EXACT same thing and show how you get more violence the more black people, Irish, Hispanics, etc. The problem has more to do with large uncontrolled immigration of unskilled people who refuse to assimilate into their new country. These people become concentrated in ghetos where such violence can ferment
As for them fighting in their own countries, let them. None of our business. That is what they did before we started intervening and it is what they will start doing soon after we leave. If people want to renounce that lifestyle and be peaceful then we can let them immigrate.
And tell me friend...what does the west have to do with the Shia murdering the Sunni and vice versa? that has only be going on...ohhh...about 600 YEARS now and shows no let up in sight.
I never said it had anything to do with that, that is a separate subject. What our interference HAS done is united many Muslims together to fight against a common enemy who gets in the way of them fighting over who gets to rule. It's none of our business and nothing we can do to solve it. It is entirely up to them.
Remember friend you are a cow to them, that's right, a cow. You might want to read this [samharris.org] with just a few snippets of what they think of you infidel, and I'll just end with some quotes from their own book that illustrates better than i ever could why there can NEVER be peace with Islam:
I am reasonably well versed in the Quran thank you very much. I checked it over years ago when I was going through that phase in my life of searching for the truth. (That endeavor is a long story by itself.) Islam has many philosophical problems with it. A historically inaccurate portrayal of Jesus of Nazareth that seems to be based off the 2nd century forgery known as the Gospel of Peter. A philosophically inadequate conception of the nature of God and god dealing with human sin. No records of Mohammad performing miracles, to authenticate his supposed revelation, until centuries after his death once Islam had firsthand contact with Christianity and Judaism. Not to mention other issues that go far deeper than what you mention. For that reason Islam was one of the worldviews that I rejected.
The point I am trying to make is that we have two practical option, either leave them alone and focus on capturing/killing any that come here to do harm, or worldwide genocide and killing every single one. Historically we see that they were quite content in staying in their part of the world killing each other. What we are doing now, trying to install secular democracies, cannot and will not work. If we simply leave the region they will quickly go back to killing each other. After all, it is MUCH easier to go to the next town to kill the Shia/Sunni than it is to go 12,000 miles to try and kill some infidel. With them focused on killing each other it will be very hard to gather support for acting against us, the Ayatollah tried that in the 70's and got nowhere. Bin laden was able to rally Muslims because of foreign intervention in the Muslim world.
The clear solution I see is to leave the region and let them kill each other. We then step up policing action at home to find and kill/capture the ones that do come over who, at worst, will be little more than a lethal nuisance. To further cripple them we created a legal drug market and treat drug use as a health problem, eliminating a large source of funding for them. Any extra money we pay for oil because of instability in the region will be more than offset by the money saved by not having our military over there.
Leave them alone, kill/capture any that try to come over to hurt us.
It is not a race to the bottom. It is an attempt to cater to families who can only afford mopeds up until now. This thing is worlds safer than fitting a family of 4 onto a moped, as is common in those parts of the world.
I know I drive differently depending on what car I am driving. I drive very carefully in the wintertime in my Ford Contour because I know the ABS craps itself when it's actually needed. (Design flaw that Ford never deemed worthy of a recall.) Hit the brakes in snow, ABS works for about 3 seconds, ABS light comes on and then the wheels lock.
Copying something like a car is hardly a simple task. The Soviet Union gave up trying to copy western computer chips after the 286. They wasted years reverse engineering the B-29 when their own engineers correctly pointed out that it would be faster to use the B-29 for inspiration and design an even more advanced bomber from scratch.
Contrary to what many people think, reverse engineering is NOT an easy task. Just having a sample in front of you doesn't tell you how it was made and why the designers made the design choices they did.
Had the government done nothing the American automakers would have seen growing competition from foreign auto makers. We saw that competition begin to take root in the late 60's and early 70's. Today's regulations stifle innovation. How many cars today have foam metal crumple zones? None, because expensive airbags are mandated, other possible solutions cannot be explored because of cost in a production car.
Exactly, if people want to drive tin cans then they should have the option and let the insurance companies figure out what the risk premium is.
I'm eventually going to get the clutch replaced on my dad's old 89 Sprint and have the tranny linkage adjusted properly. Been sitting on my uncles farm for 10 years, but is still in great shape other than some moss. Still starts up np when you put a battery in it.
Muslims are so hostile towards the west, the US in particular, because of the last 40 years of US foreign policy; supporting Saudi police state and other tyrannies that oppress and murder Muslims. I've talked to people from Iran and elsewhere, they have no problem with Americans as people, they admire many things about it, but the American government is detested because of what it has done in the Arab world. They have immediate family members who are dead because of what the US government has done, be it the overthrow of the Iranian government in 53 or the US backing of Sadam in the Iran-Iraq war.
Those Who Make Peaceful Revolution Impossible Will Make Violent Revolution Inevitable. - John F Kennedy
What we are seeing is simply the response to decades of foreign policy that has been based on the maintenance of tyrannies and the oppression of Muslims. Are they blameless, of course not. However they were not sending fire ships into our harbors in the 19th century.
Bin Laden and other have been EXTREMELY clear about this in their writings from as far back as the mid 90's. Yes there is a religious component, but one could easily formulate secular justifications if you wanted to. All their grievances boil down to the desire for self rule. Yes there are many who would like Islamic law worldwide, but the main issue is self-rule in the Arab world. Of course once they had that they would quickly go back to killing each other as they were doing before we got involved in the region.
Checkout this interview of Michael Scheuer , the man who was tasked with tracking Bin Laden for years. The US government knows WHY they are attacking us, but go with the propaganda because it absolves them of blame.
The next question then is why did they chose to use a POP chip if there would be such difficulty in acquiring them. I would assume that a POP design would allow things to be more compact while using cheaper, lower density chips would have decreased the costs of chips, might have increased the price of construction in other ways. I suppose the use of laptop memory was probably considered at some point and rejected for some reason.
Just trying to get a grasp of why they made the design choices they did. There could have been good reasons for doing what they did, but until I know those reasons I can only go by what I can see.
Slashdot Mirror
It will also drastically save cost on R&D and they will more easily benefit from die shrinks and other advances. As you have pointed out, the same holds true for netbook/laptop screens and TVs.
My bet is that they are going to aim for a current top of the line APU with the expectation that in 3+ years those units that were top of the line and expensive are now effectively the low end dirt cheap units. IIRC both Microsoft and Sony are aiming for 10 year life cycles on the consoles so it would make sense to just go all out at the beginning and then let die shrinks and other advances lower costs as time goes on. Though of course that is also a bit of a risk because there is always the off chance we hit some sort of wall, as Intel did with the P4, and those lower production costs don't come.
They can also substitute more advanced APUs that may become cheaper than the original and just mod the system software so the game software sees it as the same chip.
See, this is why I like you hairyfeet. You and I disagree on a LOT of stuff, and agree on enough to keep me following your posts, but I can't recall you ever deliberately equivocating or misrepresenting an argument of even people you disagree with. You''ve, in my view, failed to understand an argument, you're rejected an argument, but you've never played stupid and misrepresented it. Simplify for the sake of argument, sometimes imperfectly, yes, but misrepresent, no.
Just adding a bit to what you said, not intending to actually debate the subject here, I don't have the time right now. So many people simply conflate people in the the intelligent design camp (You term them creationists, but not going to get make a big issue with that.) with the young-earth creationists. It's like saying French and Spanish are basically the same language because both use the Roman Alphabet. Some people do it out of simple ignorance, but the other practical reason is to avoid having to answer the scientific objections raised by those in the ID movement by claiming they hold their view because of their worldview and not because of evidence. (As if the same doesn't apply to Dawkins and his worldview.) It's so irritating because just a little basic reading would show the differentiation. To be fair, the Young-Earthers do try to hitch a ride with the ID movement, just like how Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons sometimes try to associate themselves with Christianity.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Aristotle. Bravo to you for making the distinction even though you reject the view.
As for Climate Change, I lean toward the skeptical side of man being the driving factor, but we both agree the "solutions" are little more than power grabs by the political elite and the privileged few businesses that have the right connections.
Thanks for taking the time to slap down an obvious attempt at derailing the discussion.
My main concern though is the upgrade path. A Core2 Duo CPU/board built 5 years ago is still perfectly serviceable as far as processing power for people like my dad and many of my relatives. The big bottleneck I have found has been how much ram those older boards can take. A 4 memory slot 775 board is golden as you can fill it with 2gb DDR2 sticks, which are relatively cheap and plentiful. 4gb sticks are rather expensive.
I don't equip any of those boards with SSDs when I put together a system for my relatives, I'm using used parts I get from work, so the caching becomes a lot more important, and even my aunt can easily get a 4gb RAM Windows 7 build to fill up all the main memory with cached files. Granted her programs only use about 2gb so windows still has a 2gb cache, but with a slower hard drive that cache can still make a big difference even with non-power users.
I would agree that an SSD would reduce the need for caching, but with platter drives it is very important. A 4gb 775 Core2 Duo board still works today, but who knows for how long. 8gb gives you far more leeway in the future. Intel continuing to limit Atom boards to 4gb is a stupid move, as it pushes people to AMD for low power systems simply because the systems can handle more RAM. They can see the trend, my guess is that they don't let the Atoms have more RAM in order to get people into the i3/Celeron/Pentium. AMD is the underdog and wants to get as much business from Intel as they can, they can't afford to nerf anything if they don't have to because, for them, there is no benefit to doing so.
Isn't that the same problem that the PS3 has had? From what I read it is a real PITA to program for compared to the other consoles, even though on paper it has the most powerful hardware. In part though that had to do with the development tools being inferior at the start, which gave the 360 a nice heat start despite the hardware problems and the Wii hardware was never powerful enough to compete with either.
4gb? Please. That is still WAY too little. If it doesn't support at least 8 gb there's no point to consider it unless it is being given to me. Cramming laptops/netbooks/media PCs with ram is VERY sound because it means that windows can cache lots of files and compensate for the slow hard drives these machines typically have.. My one C60 simply FLIES with 8gb of ram.
I also have a Asus X53U-RH11 AMD C60 that I went full retard with. I got 16gb of FAST laptop ram and crammed it into the two memory slots, the machine only "officially" supports 4gb IIRC. BIOS recognized the ram right away. Took a couple of reboots and removing and re-installing the second stick a couple of times for Windows to say that all 16 were useable. Made a 6gb RAMdisk and loaded all the program files onto it. Only way I can get that thing to start chugging is to play 1080 video on it and sometimes it can keep up if things aren't too busy.
Loading up computers with 8gb or more of RAM is a very sound thing to do due to prices being so cheap. 4gb is simply too restrictive as it limits upgrade options. I bought an open-box E450 mobo off NewEgg for a file server and I am going to be putting 16 gigs, yea I know it only supports 8 officially, in that thing just because it is so cheap I want to future proof it. Every PC/mobo I have throw away was thrown not because of the processor, but because it didn't have enough RAM and by the time I wanted to buy more, the prices for the older ram had shot up to where it didn't make sense to buy more.
Both my parents made it very clear to my brother and I that if either or both of them are brain dead/non-recoverable coma, to pull the plug on them. Both of us have asked them the same.
Not to nitpick, but OF COURSE you can prove a negative. If I say that you broke into my garage, are you going to go to jail because you can't prove that you didn't? (Prove the negative?) Of course not, you'll prove the negative by pointing out that you and I both live about 1,700 miles apart and you'll probably have credit card records or witnesses who can show that you were not anywhere near my garage at the date in question.
People prove negatives every single day. We could not function in day to day activities if we couldn't prove negatives. Now, it can be very difficult to prove a negative, but it most certainly is not impossible. You can also show something to be more plausibly true than false which, while not "proving" a proposition, would show that it is reasonable to hold a proposition as true absent any evidence to the contrary.
Sorry, but that's just a little pet peeve of mine. Carry on with the interesting discussion.
We seem to be arguing past each other, you're arguing about his personal life, which I could care less about, I'm arguing about his policies he has supported in the past and would likely bring to the WH. While true that he flip flops constantly, like Mr Peace Prize winning Obama who then starts bombing countries all over the place and hands Libya to Al Qaeda, the policies he has actually backed are not much different than Obama. He passed Romenycare, which has been a predictable disaster in Massachusetts, he is just as pro-war was Obama has been, neither he or Obama have any clue what made the US into an economic superpower and neither seem to have any grasp on the fiscal train wreck that is coming, both favor high taxes on the people who create jobs and support even higher taxes on the poor via currency debasement.
As far as being president, it was black Obama vs White Obama and in that sort of race, the black Obama was going to win simply because of his skin color.
Um, Romeny was nothing more than the White Obama. He only got people who would vote for a can of baked beans if it had an (R) next to its name, which of course wasn't enough to win. Their rhetoric differed a little, but their actions and policies are effectively the same. (Fun game, write down policies they supported and see if people can differentiate between Romeny and Obama.) Obama, like all black politicians I can think of, doesn't care one hoot about blacks. They know that they will vote for a black candidate no matter how dismal their record and how much their policies hurt blacks and minorities. Just look at Detroit and other places where blacks dominate the political scene. No jobs, failing schools, etc. If those politicians were white there would be riots in the street, but since it's black politicians they don't care.
Neither one knows what the problems are, let alone that the solutions are. Gonna be interesting when the bond bubble pops and Obama and congress are left standing their with their willies in hand.
Exactly, ask anyone if they would want a laptop with a 2560x1600 monitor and they will say yes. The REAL test is to see if they are willing for forgo something to have the money to buy that laptop.
Resources are always limited and so everything is about tradeoffs. Sure I can spend $2000 on that high-res laptop vs the $400 one, but what else could I have used that $1,600 for? The vast majority of people would rather use that money for other things. Linus might as well be complaining that not every laptop is an i7 with 32 gb of ram and a 1tb SSD. He's living in a fantasy while his creation can't even do 720 video without crapping all over itself..
That is exactly how we got into the mess we have in the first place. One group needing protection, then another and another. If Japan is subsidizing their exporters that means they are effectively giving us stuff for less. If I have a friend who sells me a $2 beer for $1, how is doing that to his benefit and why should I not take advantage of the offer for all it is worth..Likewise with the Chinese subsedizing the production of solar panels.
Those policies are expensive, hurt the counties own citizens more than they hurt us, and will ultimately collapse, along with big government, as our 40 year old fiat money system collapses. The Chinese are already starting to get serious unrest and bubble conditions in their country with the inflation they have to create in order to keep the dollar from dropping like a rock, they will not be able to continue for much longer without getting a possible revolution. Very similar to what the US Federal Reserve did in the 1920's to prop up the British Pound, which fueled the stock market bubble of the mid/late 1920's that was the cause of the 29 crash. (and the 2000 crash, and the 2008 crash, and the cause of the current bubble in the government bond market that will crash.)
The scam of the century is how the US government keeps sugar prices in the US twice that of world sugar prices. Sure I live in an area with lots of sugar beet farming, but the farmers can always grow something else. (Hemp would grow nicely on some of the high-salt land if they were allowed to.) Robbing Peter to pay Paul does nothing except make both poorer in the long term.
This is why so many small businesses,like the one I work for, can run rings around larger firms..The boss/owner started the company. He was the one running cable for many years, while he doesn't understand a lot of the newer stuff as well as me or my co-worker does, he understands it more than enough to understand what we are saying.and why we are saying it. He owns the business outright, he is in it for the long haul and wants things built properly.
Several years ago I developed a method to resolder the capacitors on a particular motherboard that we HAD to have, but had the caps with the bad electrolyte. (Nothing fancy, but the board has a few issues that made replacement difficult.) The Mark 1 variant was very ugly, but functional and proved the concept, the Mark 2 variant is what we still do today. When looking at the invoice the boss asked me why I was using capacitors that cost over 75 cents each, I simply pointed to the spec sheet and told him that the ones I bought were rated for 8,000 hours at 105C while the ones that were 10 cents each were rated for 1,000 hours at 80C. He immediately understood and saw how my decision was correct. No need to try to explain cost-benefit to some bean counter. No need to write up some fancy report, just point out the specs and he understands that by going with the expensive caps we will never have to re-solder those caps again and saving us gobs of money in the long term.
Hard drives in our recorders? WD Blacks all the way. Greens are so much cheaper, especially during the shortage, but he never even considered telling us to use cheaper drives and the increased cost was easily factored into our budgets. Contrast that with my brother, who works for a national company. When hard drives skyrocketed, getting them to authorize the funds they needed for hard drives was a monumental task and took several weeks of daily emails and phone calls.
There are many inefficiencies in small companies, however there are many inefficiencies as well that give them an advantage. Despite the government giving the large firms heaps of advantages,many small firms can still compete, though many simply leave the country, some better than others, as we have seen over the last couple decades.
It's stupid easy to hit such an object from a guidance standpoint, heck, Iraqi air defenses in the Saddam years swept them from the sky with ease. UAVs largely fly in straight predictable patterns, they are not made to be maneuverable like a fighter jet. Any SAM that can physically reach them will blow them out of the sky.
While we agree on many things Crosshair on this one you are DEAD WRONG. Look up the number of Muslims in a country and how the violence goes UP the more Muslims you have. If the country is 100% Muslim no problem right? WRONG as then the Imams start jockeying and fighting each other for control!
False cause fallacy. I can do the EXACT same thing and show how you get more violence the more black people, Irish, Hispanics, etc. The problem has more to do with large uncontrolled immigration of unskilled people who refuse to assimilate into their new country. These people become concentrated in ghetos where such violence can ferment
As for them fighting in their own countries, let them. None of our business. That is what they did before we started intervening and it is what they will start doing soon after we leave. If people want to renounce that lifestyle and be peaceful then we can let them immigrate.
And tell me friend...what does the west have to do with the Shia murdering the Sunni and vice versa? that has only be going on...ohhh...about 600 YEARS now and shows no let up in sight.
I never said it had anything to do with that, that is a separate subject. What our interference HAS done is united many Muslims together to fight against a common enemy who gets in the way of them fighting over who gets to rule. It's none of our business and nothing we can do to solve it. It is entirely up to them.
Remember friend you are a cow to them, that's right, a cow. You might want to read this [samharris.org] with just a few snippets of what they think of you infidel, and I'll just end with some quotes from their own book that illustrates better than i ever could why there can NEVER be peace with Islam:
I am reasonably well versed in the Quran thank you very much. I checked it over years ago when I was going through that phase in my life of searching for the truth. (That endeavor is a long story by itself.) Islam has many philosophical problems with it. A historically inaccurate portrayal of Jesus of Nazareth that seems to be based off the 2nd century forgery known as the Gospel of Peter. A philosophically inadequate conception of the nature of God and god dealing with human sin. No records of Mohammad performing miracles, to authenticate his supposed revelation, until centuries after his death once Islam had firsthand contact with Christianity and Judaism. Not to mention other issues that go far deeper than what you mention. For that reason Islam was one of the worldviews that I rejected.
The point I am trying to make is that we have two practical option, either leave them alone and focus on capturing/killing any that come here to do harm, or worldwide genocide and killing every single one. Historically we see that they were quite content in staying in their part of the world killing each other. What we are doing now, trying to install secular democracies, cannot and will not work. If we simply leave the region they will quickly go back to killing each other. After all, it is MUCH easier to go to the next town to kill the Shia/Sunni than it is to go 12,000 miles to try and kill some infidel. With them focused on killing each other it will be very hard to gather support for acting against us, the Ayatollah tried that in the 70's and got nowhere. Bin laden was able to rally Muslims because of foreign intervention in the Muslim world.
The clear solution I see is to leave the region and let them kill each other. We then step up policing action at home to find and kill/capture the ones that do come over who, at worst, will be little more than a lethal nuisance. To further cripple them we created a legal drug market and treat drug use as a health problem, eliminating a large source of funding for them. Any extra money we pay for oil because of instability in the region will be more than offset by the money saved by not having our military over there.
Leave them alone, kill/capture any that try to come over to hurt us.
Or.
Kill them all.
Those are our two practical options.
It is not a race to the bottom. It is an attempt to cater to families who can only afford mopeds up until now. This thing is worlds safer than fitting a family of 4 onto a moped, as is common in those parts of the world.
I know I drive differently depending on what car I am driving. I drive very carefully in the wintertime in my Ford Contour because I know the ABS craps itself when it's actually needed. (Design flaw that Ford never deemed worthy of a recall.) Hit the brakes in snow, ABS works for about 3 seconds, ABS light comes on and then the wheels lock.
Except not all places HAVE a reasonable supply of used cars, meaning price of used cars is very high. This is true in many parts of the US.
Copying something like a car is hardly a simple task. The Soviet Union gave up trying to copy western computer chips after the 286. They wasted years reverse engineering the B-29 when their own engineers correctly pointed out that it would be faster to use the B-29 for inspiration and design an even more advanced bomber from scratch.
Contrary to what many people think, reverse engineering is NOT an easy task. Just having a sample in front of you doesn't tell you how it was made and why the designers made the design choices they did.
So two wrongs make a right?
Had the government done nothing the American automakers would have seen growing competition from foreign auto makers. We saw that competition begin to take root in the late 60's and early 70's. Today's regulations stifle innovation. How many cars today have foam metal crumple zones? None, because expensive airbags are mandated, other possible solutions cannot be explored because of cost in a production car.
Exactly, if people want to drive tin cans then they should have the option and let the insurance companies figure out what the risk premium is.
I'm eventually going to get the clutch replaced on my dad's old 89 Sprint and have the tranny linkage adjusted properly. Been sitting on my uncles farm for 10 years, but is still in great shape other than some moss. Still starts up np when you put a battery in it.
Perhaps, but it's known that airbags are not cost effective, and even increase injuries, yet the government still mandates them.
http://www.scienceservingsociety.com/ts/text/ch12.htm
My 1990 ford Ranger has no power steering and that is only a problem when turning at low speeds.
Muslims are so hostile towards the west, the US in particular, because of the last 40 years of US foreign policy; supporting Saudi police state and other tyrannies that oppress and murder Muslims. I've talked to people from Iran and elsewhere, they have no problem with Americans as people, they admire many things about it, but the American government is detested because of what it has done in the Arab world. They have immediate family members who are dead because of what the US government has done, be it the overthrow of the Iranian government in 53 or the US backing of Sadam in the Iran-Iraq war.
Those Who Make Peaceful Revolution Impossible Will Make Violent Revolution Inevitable. - John F Kennedy
What we are seeing is simply the response to decades of foreign policy that has been based on the maintenance of tyrannies and the oppression of Muslims. Are they blameless, of course not. However they were not sending fire ships into our harbors in the 19th century.
Bin Laden and other have been EXTREMELY clear about this in their writings from as far back as the mid 90's. Yes there is a religious component, but one could easily formulate secular justifications if you wanted to. All their grievances boil down to the desire for self rule. Yes there are many who would like Islamic law worldwide, but the main issue is self-rule in the Arab world. Of course once they had that they would quickly go back to killing each other as they were doing before we got involved in the region.
Checkout this interview of Michael Scheuer , the man who was tasked with tracking Bin Laden for years. The US government knows WHY they are attacking us, but go with the propaganda because it absolves them of blame.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEQviZPyeXk
Finally, an actual explanation, thank you.
The next question then is why did they chose to use a POP chip if there would be such difficulty in acquiring them. I would assume that a POP design would allow things to be more compact while using cheaper, lower density chips would have decreased the costs of chips, might have increased the price of construction in other ways. I suppose the use of laptop memory was probably considered at some point and rejected for some reason.
Just trying to get a grasp of why they made the design choices they did. There could have been good reasons for doing what they did, but until I know those reasons I can only go by what I can see.