Okay.... there are some pretty loaded phrases in that comment. "shiny new government," "throwing money," "tax base is collapsing"
Are you for the new government or not? Do you approve of carbon emissions as a basis for taxation?
You're not really expressing any sort of comprehensible opinion in your comment, despite the fact that it's loaded with sarcasm.
I'm all for intelligent debate, but these snarky/sarcastic comments from both sides of the peanut gallery are beginning to drive me nuts. If you formulate your own opinion, and provide valid reasons behind your argument, you might actually be able to convince others to agree with you.
I'll counter that argument by stating that these devices deliver and consume very little power overall.
If it takes twice as much power to charge my cell phone, it will still only be a drop in the bucket compared to what a lightbulb, oven, heater, etc. consume in just a few minutes.
Less efficiency is never a good thing, although it's probably not that big of a deal for the sake of charging mobile devices.
Seriously. I'm always amazed whenever I come across a modern program that's still using Windows 3.1-style graphical controls.
It's almost like they just don't care at all.
I've never used R, though I hear that the learning curve is a bit steep to non-programmers (to the extent that it's been described to me by several friends as being actively user-hostile)
Movie-grade CG tends to rendered via raytracing, which, AFAIK, is an algorithm that is more suited to be run on a general-purpose CPU, instead of a GPU.
I'm sure part of the reason that nVIDIA and ATI have been working to develop alternative applications of their GPU technology is that their GPUs could potentially become unnecessary to gamers, should CPUs ever reach the speed where real-time raytracing is practical.
Yeah. Seriously. What the hell were the French thinking with the TGV?
(Also, to kill an argument that's inevitably going to come up: The US as a whole indeed does not have the same population density as Europe. However, the coasts do have a similar (or even higher) density than most of Europe.)
Compared to what some other countries have, the Acela sucks pretty hard... and it's still faster (and occasionally cheaper) than regional air travel by a good margin.
Support Verizon, and I'll be the first in line for this. Why is it that we never get any love from the phone manufacturers?
I don't think it's *quite* on the level of the iPhone, though it certainly seems to have come the closest of any thus far. The UI looks a lot nicer than Android, and the hardware nicer than the iPhone (physical keyboard FTW).
As long as Palm make the price reasonable, and keep the application interface as open as possible, they'll sell a ton of these.
Frankly, I'm impressed, given that virtually everyone's been expecting Palm to kick the bucket in the near future.
After the many reforms of the past eight years, this is your biggest concern about the erosion of your civil rights?
That all said, if electricity was an elastic resource with an infinite supply and no external costs, you might have a point. However, as it stands, your argument is selfish, and reeks of entitlement. Although the consequences of producing enough power for one person are fairly minimal, multiplying that by 36.5 million (California's population as of 2007), you start to see some pretty dramatic large-scale effects. Reducing per-capita energy consumption by just 1% can have massive effects when multiplied onto a population that large.
Although lots of people here are blaming the Intel/Microsoft debacle for the failure of the OLPC project, I'd blame the "free educational content."
Namely, there wasn't any. Sure, Sugar was fun to play around with, but you can't argue that the OLPC provided access to remotely anywhere nearly as much useful and conveniently-indexed information as a small library. The proponents of the project kept spouting off about mountains of free educational materials available online that simply didn't exist.
The "teach a man to fish" argument is great, although I was never really quite able to see how the OLPC project would actually meet this goal without years (if not decades) of additional work.
Music and film production suites frequently employ DSP chips, which are nestled cosily onto PCI cards. They are quite common in these industries.
Hasn't that all moved to FireWire these days?
All of the replies here have mentioned solutions that apply generally only for server-use and high-end media production, neither of which you'd typically find yourself doing on a $500 computer, regardless of the manufacturer.
Anyone who cares enough about massive amounts of storage or exotic disk controllers can build their own systems and run Linux, BSD, or OpenSolaris. It'll be cheaper, better-supported, and you shouldn't have a problem doing it, considering that your technical aptitude is clearly above that of the typical PC/Mac user. I just rebuilt a PC for that exact purpose, to replace an old 450mhz G4 tower I got used a few years back that had been serving that purpose up until now.
Sure, it'd be nice if Apple had a cheaper version of the Mac Pro. However, it's really not worth crying over. Odds are, you can either get by with a Mini, or with something that isn't a mac. If you're a gamer, you'll be happier with Windows, and if you're an über-geek, you'll be happier with Linux. This is Apple's loss, not ours.
What the heck do you use PCI cards for these days anyway?
This isn't a flame/troll. I'm genuinely curious --- what functionality can be provided by a PCI(e) card that can't also be provided via USB or Firewire?
"Expensive laptop parts" doesn't really apply to the Mini. The price premium for USB devices over their internal equivalent is down to a bare minimum. SO-DIMM memory barely costs more than a full-sized DIMM, and replacing the 2.5" hard drive is largely irrelevant, given that you can just as easily add an external device if you really want more storage. Chipsets and CPU sockets change so frequently that you probably also wouldn't be interested in changing the CPU in any machine.
Graphics is the only thing that immediately comes to mind, and there are other ways to accommodate that scenario (socketed GPUs, or ignoring the problem entirely since macs don't really "do" games). I have a Mac Mini, and this is pretty much my only complaint.
Your last point also stands out particularly well. The average person doesn't care about expandability. The average laptop is barely expandable at all (I do have to penalize Apple here for making their laptops unnecessarily difficult to service), yet we see laptop sales dominating the "home user" segment of the market. Apple seems to have hit the "sweet spot" of price and features with the Macbook, which is the only logical explanation for why the things sell so well.
4. Lower environmental risk. We have barely studied the long term effects caused by draining energy out of the wind, or, of robbing the ground from solar energy to convert to electricity. The aggregate effects of billions of windmills and solar panels upon the earth are not understood. With nukes, we know the risks. We might have a meltdown, some radiation, and a leak, but that's about it.
Seriously? I'm pretty sure we'd need to cover an appreciable portion of the surface of the planet with solar panels and windmills to have even any sort of noticeable effect.
I'm all for nuclear power, but this is an absolutely absurd argument for it.
Honestly, of all the places I'd expect a hardware manufacturer to screw up the drivers, the Real Time Clock would be just about the last thing on my list.
The "No Photos" rule, I believe, is a NY/NJ Port Authority policy. I'm not quite sure what their Jurisdiction is over there, although there are definitely rules against taking photos on the PATH (which the Port Authority directly operates)
Whether or not these rules are constitutional or not is up to debate (they're almost certainly not). However, you can't fault the officers at the station for obeying their (fairly innocuous) orders. This sounds like something that the ACLU (or similar organization) should take up in court to have the official policy changed.
I have an old Zaurus SL-5500 PDA with 64MB of memory, and I run X on it continuously. X adds so much functionality, why would anyone choose a framebuffer-based display instead?
Nothing's wrong with X, but people hate things they don't understand, and most people perceive X as old and complicated, therefore it must be junk. It doesn't matter if it's the best solution for the problem at hand.
Say what you want about how good it is.... X is old and complicated. The 'old' part is mostly irrelevant, given that there's plenty of software that's both good and old (Unix itself being the obvious example). Dealing with the complexity is a bit more tricky, but can be done.
My assessment is that X does a whole lot of things right, and a whole lot of things wrong. X.Org have done a fantastic job cleaning things up with their implementation of the protocol, though I think that there's a lot more that can be cleaned up/standardized. Even the network transparency could use a lot of work... remote X sessions are painful without something like NX added on top.
No, the app-store is important to the kool-aid drinkers
I understand that you might be a little upset about Apple's somewhat obsessive and illogical control over their products.
However, comparing that to an event during which 1,000 people died seems a bit inappropriate, doesn't it?
Even from a logical point of view, the analogy doesn't even stand. Are you seriously insinuating that Apple users are impressionable to the degree by which they'd join a suicide cult? Sure, the CEO is charismatic, though it's not really all that difficult to see why their products are popular at the moment given just how badly their competitors screwed up over the past few years.
They are gaining some traction in the theatrical world, thanks to the fact that it's extremely easy to do continuous color mixing with an array of RGB LEDs. Their popularity is most certainly not due to cost or efficiency (they lose badly on the former, and theatres don't tend to care about the latter)
Similarly, they're just simply not that bright when compared to tungsten-halogen or HID fixtures. This is quite simply a deal-breaker for most.
750W and 1K lamps are used because they have to illuminate a very large area very brightly.
You don't need "complex optics" to focus a conventional incandescent light source either. A PAR fixture is extremely simple in its construction.
The problem with LEDs is that, yeah -- a single LED can be a decent point source of light. The problem is, however, that a single LED simply isn't that bright. Some of the better LEDs are a bit brighter, but require tons of heatsinking, thus ruining the whole "point source" thing.
To get the brightness up, you then need an array of many LEDs, which suddenly complicates (or outright prevents) anything you'd want to do with the light in terms of optics or focusing.
The bulbs themselves are actually not that cheap to produce. In the theatrical lighting world, we have various fixtures that accept HID lamps, very similar to those used in an LED projector.
Although they're not quite as expensive as what you'd put in the projector, they are standardized, and still cost up to $200 a pop.
I imagine that the projector companies are profiting a good bit, although HID lamps are most certainly not cheap to manufacture.
One does not get knighted for doing the exact same thing as his or her predecessors.
Tradition can be great for some things, and not-so-great for others.
Most Brits are very happy with the current arrangement, where the royal family play a strong role in the cultural development of the nation, while having a relatively minor role in the government.
"Tradition is bad, progress is good" is a terrible philosophy to live by. Don't fix what isn't broken!
You can also consolidate many discrete components onto a single IC, or redesign circuits to require fewer components. I don't think the feature cuts could account for 1,200 fewer parts.
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Okay.... there are some pretty loaded phrases in that comment. "shiny new government," "throwing money," "tax base is collapsing"
Are you for the new government or not?
Do you approve of carbon emissions as a basis for taxation?
You're not really expressing any sort of comprehensible opinion in your comment, despite the fact that it's loaded with sarcasm.
I'm all for intelligent debate, but these snarky/sarcastic comments from both sides of the peanut gallery are beginning to drive me nuts. If you formulate your own opinion, and provide valid reasons behind your argument, you might actually be able to convince others to agree with you.
I'll counter that argument by stating that these devices deliver and consume very little power overall.
If it takes twice as much power to charge my cell phone, it will still only be a drop in the bucket compared to what a lightbulb, oven, heater, etc. consume in just a few minutes.
Less efficiency is never a good thing, although it's probably not that big of a deal for the sake of charging mobile devices.
Seriously. I'm always amazed whenever I come across a modern program that's still using Windows 3.1-style graphical controls.
It's almost like they just don't care at all.
I've never used R, though I hear that the learning curve is a bit steep to non-programmers (to the extent that it's been described to me by several friends as being actively user-hostile)
Movie-grade CG tends to rendered via raytracing, which, AFAIK, is an algorithm that is more suited to be run on a general-purpose CPU, instead of a GPU.
I'm sure part of the reason that nVIDIA and ATI have been working to develop alternative applications of their GPU technology is that their GPUs could potentially become unnecessary to gamers, should CPUs ever reach the speed where real-time raytracing is practical.
Yeah. Seriously. What the hell were the French thinking with the TGV?
(Also, to kill an argument that's inevitably going to come up: The US as a whole indeed does not have the same population density as Europe. However, the coasts do have a similar (or even higher) density than most of Europe.)
Compared to what some other countries have, the Acela sucks pretty hard... and it's still faster (and occasionally cheaper) than regional air travel by a good margin.
Support Verizon, and I'll be the first in line for this. Why is it that we never get any love from the phone manufacturers?
I don't think it's *quite* on the level of the iPhone, though it certainly seems to have come the closest of any thus far. The UI looks a lot nicer than Android, and the hardware nicer than the iPhone (physical keyboard FTW).
As long as Palm make the price reasonable, and keep the application interface as open as possible, they'll sell a ton of these.
Frankly, I'm impressed, given that virtually everyone's been expecting Palm to kick the bucket in the near future.
After the many reforms of the past eight years, this is your biggest concern about the erosion of your civil rights?
That all said, if electricity was an elastic resource with an infinite supply and no external costs, you might have a point. However, as it stands, your argument is selfish, and reeks of entitlement. Although the consequences of producing enough power for one person are fairly minimal, multiplying that by 36.5 million (California's population as of 2007), you start to see some pretty dramatic large-scale effects. Reducing per-capita energy consumption by just 1% can have massive effects when multiplied onto a population that large.
Next time, hire a real electrician, and have him wire your outlets in parallel.
I'm going to guess that far more 3rd-world inhabitants actually know how to fish than those in developed nations.
Choose your metaphors carefully.
(Also, here's a fun game: How would the OLPC have helped these people achieve that goal?)
Although lots of people here are blaming the Intel/Microsoft debacle for the failure of the OLPC project, I'd blame the "free educational content."
Namely, there wasn't any. Sure, Sugar was fun to play around with, but you can't argue that the OLPC provided access to remotely anywhere nearly as much useful and conveniently-indexed information as a small library. The proponents of the project kept spouting off about mountains of free educational materials available online that simply didn't exist.
The "teach a man to fish" argument is great, although I was never really quite able to see how the OLPC project would actually meet this goal without years (if not decades) of additional work.
Music and film production suites frequently employ DSP chips, which are nestled cosily onto PCI cards. They are quite common in these industries.
Hasn't that all moved to FireWire these days?
All of the replies here have mentioned solutions that apply generally only for server-use and high-end media production, neither of which you'd typically find yourself doing on a $500 computer, regardless of the manufacturer.
Anyone who cares enough about massive amounts of storage or exotic disk controllers can build their own systems and run Linux, BSD, or OpenSolaris. It'll be cheaper, better-supported, and you shouldn't have a problem doing it, considering that your technical aptitude is clearly above that of the typical PC/Mac user. I just rebuilt a PC for that exact purpose, to replace an old 450mhz G4 tower I got used a few years back that had been serving that purpose up until now.
Sure, it'd be nice if Apple had a cheaper version of the Mac Pro. However, it's really not worth crying over. Odds are, you can either get by with a Mini, or with something that isn't a mac. If you're a gamer, you'll be happier with Windows, and if you're an über-geek, you'll be happier with Linux. This is Apple's loss, not ours.
What the heck do you use PCI cards for these days anyway?
This isn't a flame/troll. I'm genuinely curious --- what functionality can be provided by a PCI(e) card that can't also be provided via USB or Firewire?
"Expensive laptop parts" doesn't really apply to the Mini. The price premium for USB devices over their internal equivalent is down to a bare minimum. SO-DIMM memory barely costs more than a full-sized DIMM, and replacing the 2.5" hard drive is largely irrelevant, given that you can just as easily add an external device if you really want more storage. Chipsets and CPU sockets change so frequently that you probably also wouldn't be interested in changing the CPU in any machine.
Graphics is the only thing that immediately comes to mind, and there are other ways to accommodate that scenario (socketed GPUs, or ignoring the problem entirely since macs don't really "do" games). I have a Mac Mini, and this is pretty much my only complaint.
Your last point also stands out particularly well. The average person doesn't care about expandability. The average laptop is barely expandable at all (I do have to penalize Apple here for making their laptops unnecessarily difficult to service), yet we see laptop sales dominating the "home user" segment of the market. Apple seems to have hit the "sweet spot" of price and features with the Macbook, which is the only logical explanation for why the things sell so well.
4. Lower environmental risk. We have barely studied the long term effects caused by draining energy out of the wind, or, of robbing the ground from solar energy to convert to electricity. The aggregate effects of billions of windmills and solar panels upon the earth are not understood. With nukes, we know the risks. We might have a meltdown, some radiation, and a leak, but that's about it.
Seriously? I'm pretty sure we'd need to cover an appreciable portion of the surface of the planet with solar panels and windmills to have even any sort of noticeable effect.
I'm all for nuclear power, but this is an absolutely absurd argument for it.
Honestly, of all the places I'd expect a hardware manufacturer to screw up the drivers, the Real Time Clock would be just about the last thing on my list.
Microsoft Bob drove the entire QA team to insanity.
Port Authority owns NY penn station. Not Amtrak.
Care to cite a source? Wikipedia says otherwise.
First it isn't their premises.
Amtrak owns New York Penn station.
The "No Photos" rule, I believe, is a NY/NJ Port Authority policy. I'm not quite sure what their Jurisdiction is over there, although there are definitely rules against taking photos on the PATH (which the Port Authority directly operates)
Whether or not these rules are constitutional or not is up to debate (they're almost certainly not). However, you can't fault the officers at the station for obeying their (fairly innocuous) orders. This sounds like something that the ACLU (or similar organization) should take up in court to have the official policy changed.
Nothing's wrong with X, but people hate things they don't understand, and most people perceive X as old and complicated, therefore it must be junk. It doesn't matter if it's the best solution for the problem at hand.
Say what you want about how good it is.... X is old and complicated. The 'old' part is mostly irrelevant, given that there's plenty of software that's both good and old (Unix itself being the obvious example). Dealing with the complexity is a bit more tricky, but can be done.
My assessment is that X does a whole lot of things right, and a whole lot of things wrong. X.Org have done a fantastic job cleaning things up with their implementation of the protocol, though I think that there's a lot more that can be cleaned up/standardized. Even the network transparency could use a lot of work... remote X sessions are painful without something like NX added on top.
No, the app-store is important to the kool-aid drinkers
I understand that you might be a little upset about Apple's somewhat obsessive and illogical control over their products.
However, comparing that to an event during which 1,000 people died seems a bit inappropriate, doesn't it?
Even from a logical point of view, the analogy doesn't even stand. Are you seriously insinuating that Apple users are impressionable to the degree by which they'd join a suicide cult? Sure, the CEO is charismatic, though it's not really all that difficult to see why their products are popular at the moment given just how badly their competitors screwed up over the past few years.
Sure. However..... if your power supply circuitry has 1,200 parts, you're doing something horribly horribly wrong.
They are gaining some traction in the theatrical world, thanks to the fact that it's extremely easy to do continuous color mixing with an array of RGB LEDs. Their popularity is most certainly not due to cost or efficiency (they lose badly on the former, and theatres don't tend to care about the latter)
Similarly, they're just simply not that bright when compared to tungsten-halogen or HID fixtures. This is quite simply a deal-breaker for most.
750W and 1K lamps are used because they have to illuminate a very large area very brightly.
You don't need "complex optics" to focus a conventional incandescent light source either. A PAR fixture is extremely simple in its construction.
The problem with LEDs is that, yeah -- a single LED can be a decent point source of light. The problem is, however, that a single LED simply isn't that bright. Some of the better LEDs are a bit brighter, but require tons of heatsinking, thus ruining the whole "point source" thing.
To get the brightness up, you then need an array of many LEDs, which suddenly complicates (or outright prevents) anything you'd want to do with the light in terms of optics or focusing.
Sure about that?
The bulbs themselves are actually not that cheap to produce. In the theatrical lighting world, we have various fixtures that accept HID lamps, very similar to those used in an LED projector.
Although they're not quite as expensive as what you'd put in the projector, they are standardized, and still cost up to $200 a pop.
I imagine that the projector companies are profiting a good bit, although HID lamps are most certainly not cheap to manufacture.
One does not get knighted for doing the exact same thing as his or her predecessors.
Tradition can be great for some things, and not-so-great for others.
Most Brits are very happy with the current arrangement, where the royal family play a strong role in the cultural development of the nation, while having a relatively minor role in the government.
"Tradition is bad, progress is good" is a terrible philosophy to live by. Don't fix what isn't broken!
You can also consolidate many discrete components onto a single IC, or redesign circuits to require fewer components. I don't think the feature cuts could account for 1,200 fewer parts.