what about the wonder swan sure it never made it anywhere but japan...
and one thing i hate, is the way 'Blu-ray' adoption rates "Don't Count PS3s, because they're console sales" even though every website I googled said 'PS3 is the best Blu-ray movie player, PS3 is the Only Blu-Ray Player to support BDJava, yada yada yada..'
Why would anyone pay $400 for a Blu-ray stand alone when the PS3 is $400? and furthermore, $200 'BD-rom drives' aren't Blu-ray players even though you can buy plenty of HD movie playback software for M$ windows. $250 in 'upgrade' costs is a lot less than $400, especially if your PC is already hooked to you HDTV because you didn't want to pay $1400 for a crappy 30" PC monitor display when a 42" HDTV with PC in was $1000
anyways, consoles aren't all used to play games, and not all PCs come with a graphic card capable of playing a video game. http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/card-wars/intel-graphics-business-still-champ-but-nvidia-is-showing-rockys-pluck-257035.php at least 37% of the market have intel graphics and intel graphics don't even run 'aero' much less video games, and nvidia and AMD sell tons of graphic cards that don't play video games (any nvidia card below 'X,500' won't play modern games at any frame rate and ATI doesn't have a convenient scheme to determine which cards play games, but as intel has shown the lions share of the market is in cheap chipsets. but that's because something like 60% of the PC market is aimed at businesses most of which (graphic artists aside) want the cheapest chip available... and then about 20% of the market are people who want 'internet capable' machines, with maybe 20% who want a multi use game capable machine, of those only 25% are serious gamers who will spend more than $200 on a graphic solution just to be able to play modern games at full frame rates (in less than HD resolution) and an even smaller set of those will buy $400+ for full HD capable graphic solutions rather than running on a PC monitor at a 'lower resolution' to get acceptable framerates...
personally, I've decided to go SLI/crossfire, and all told will spent almost 4 grand on my next gaming PC plus the TV set, and i should be able to run games for many years to come, without needing new graphic cards or a new PC... but I'm a serious gamer, and i spend thousands of hours playing games. and I expect my gaming rig to handle any game i throw at it for 4 years... if Full HD isn't the end of graphic card evolution... (of course physics engines etc might some day go beyond a quad core CPU, and newer computer setups might save significant electric consumption)
but for at least the next 4 years I plan on being able to play anything i buy at the stores, when i build my next gaming rig.
"It's unrealistically limiting to imagine that you can know ahead of time what every file on a computer should be"
it's not though, linux creates a database of the checksums of every file, where it should be installed etc, rpm has a simple way of verifying every file based on this DB, the debian package manager doesn't but it's trivial to use the database files created to independently verify every file on the system... except user created files, or files downloaded from the internet (pictures etc) but compromised 'picture' files are easy to scan for, because they target specific flaws in specific image loading libraries, having an over sized 'comment' section in your jpeg with binary code after 2048 bytes of 'new lines' is trivial to detect, compromises that target 'file extraction' vulnerabilities are a little harder, because most file extraction tools are licensing the same extraction libraries as everyone else, especially on the linux side of things...
if it's so easy for linux to create a database of checksums, then why doesn't windows have a sane, automatic verification of files? because it wasn't a 'selling' feature microsoft only looked at what features people wanted, and were willing to pay for, that were easily promised, or easily produced. anything that was too hard to implement, was scrapped despite any promises they had used to kill competitors. Anything 'extra' that they didn't think would make them money was scratched.
Root Kits can lie, yes, they can, but it's trivial to build a bootable CD-rom in linux, and as Bart's PE shows it can even be done, to an extent for windows... and such a boot media, should be able to detect any type of shenanigans that a rootkit is using to make itself 'invisible.'
(pe, requires legitimate boot media, to create a bootable windows disk, and normal AV scanners aren't designed to run with PE, even normal root kit scanners don't always run from PE, but that's a windows problem...)
Linux can also be locked down as tight as you want it, so that even root can't install programs, so that the only directory where anyone can modify a singe file is in the user's own personal folder... it's not the best way to secure a linux system, but in practice some people have found that level of lock-down essential.
don't be so sure... there have been numerous security warnings about 'copy protection schemes' incorporated into video games, that allow an 'infected' user to 'infect' new users while playing online video games with the 'infected' basically, you play the video game, the trojan infects through the update vector of the 'anti-piracy' scheme, by pretending to be an "updated 'no-cd hack' detector", which allows them to put and run any kind of executable into anyone in the same game with them (they get the IPs from being in game with them, and the infection spreads from gamer to gamer)
Playing Video games online means your computer will be hacked, it's gotten so bad on battle.net that they removed the protection scheme from warcraft 3 The frozen throne, from online play so as to remove the 'vector' of attack.
"But on a more serious note, I think these new super stealth rootkits are going to be the beginning of the end for the AV industry. IMHO we are going to have to end up with whitelisting at the OS level as the never ending tidal wave of viruses will simply become too hard for the AV industry to keep up with without overloading the systems with the constant scanning and updating. And in this day and age IMHO it is kind of silly that I can't simply make a list of the two dozen or so programs that I use and have them be the only things that are allowed to run. And with all the legacy systems out there running older MSFT OSes some company could make some good money with an easy to use system that lets a user specify the couple of dozen programs he uses and refuse to run the rest. Anyway that is my 02c,YMMV."
I had to dig deep, but the company that did the test, tested software that was released in 2005-2006. They weren't even testing what had been released in the past 2 years, only stuff that was known in security circles in 05-06!!!
they tested security suites as well as specialized removal tools, the sad part was that 3 of the rootkits were on COMMERCIAL PRESSED CD/DVDs I guess, only the likes of sony gets sued over offering rootkits on DVDs/CDs.
I knew about this problem, but my experience was even worse, I couldn't find a single scanner that could even detect the trace files in a zipfile, other than google's g-mail scanner...
once again the rootkit came to infect my systems around 2006, or possibly earlier, but it could re-infect from CD-rs and DVD-rs I'm basically in a situation now where i am being forced to use linux to read those discs and salvage what data i can, and never even dare let that data go near a windows machine again... not a practical solution, but i couldn't find a single scanner that could detect the problem from it's source... so all my old cd-r and dvd-r are now suspect... because the virus can add on to any disc not 'finalized' and there isnt' a single detection program i can run (sending files through g-mail only works when you have small files, and a lot of free time)
but yeah, security firms aren't keeping up anymore. if they can't even keep up with 'known' rootkits, then frankly we should all switch to linux, and never never install anything not in a repository... (essentially white listing ourselves)
"They were looking for the most recent Visible super nova."
not quite...
But I'm a little confused, TMM's quote couldn't be found by me on any of the links here on slashdot... apparently someone decided to edit the data on the web page to make it astronomically correct..
"The original supernova explosion was not seen in optical light about 140 years ago because it occurred close to the center of the Galaxy, and is embedded in a dense field of gas and dust"
They saw it with x-ray and radio telescopes, it wasn't visible at all. Unless you're a Kryptonian and can see in X-rays
well, it's a nice gui, but it doesn't look like it's scriptable... is there anything that does what release forge does, that can be scripted, and perhaps automatically fill in values that (this gui) asks you to fill in?
in this case, the 'victim' had her IM automatically sign in whenever the laptop went online, and she got a call from a good friend, congratulating her on getting her laptop back. But the thing is, the laptop owner was paying '$99 a year' for the 'ability' from any 'mac' to sign in and control the computer from anywhere (including, taking a photo and sending it over IM)
now, you could have a an automatic program to upload to a web server, but in this case, the owner used a subscription service from apple to gain control of the camera remotely, and snap a picture, ironically, the laptop starts a timer , and he tried to raise his hand to obscure the camera, but apparently, the picture is taken too fast for a person to realize what's going on.
just the picture the cops said would have been useful in catching the crook (they would have given copies to the places that fence stolen stuff, and they'd call the cops while 'figuring out the value' of the goods before they knew what was happening... it's a crime to purchase stolen goods after all) but in this case, the person was an acquaintance of their roommate, so they went to the cops to tell then who had the stuff, before they had even fenced the goods.
so apparently, you should fence your stolen laptops without hooking them to the internet. (and with automatic wireless networking and people with open networks, that might be hard in some cities if you even turn it on)
"Also, if enough people stare at the code and use it, they will find the bugs that matter."
In this case it's not a matter of staring at code until your eyes bleed, you could stare at the 4.2 BSD code all week and not ever notice how this bug got triggered.
In this case, you have to USE the program, Detect when the bug happens, and then Reproduce the bug. That last part was where everyone else failed. They could create a program that created and deleted files, and did seeking the nodes, and detect the bug, but then the next time that ran the code, the bug didn't show up, or it showed up in a different place every time.
the lack of consistency was why no one staring at the code could figure out what was happening... looking at the code of a half dozen basic operating system functionality source files without knowing why the problem was happening would have been useless..
"But that's exactly my point, isn't it? The bug was only "visible" through its behavior, not its manifestation in code."
No, actually it was quite easy to identify from it's code. the problem wasn't that it wasn't visible in the code, it was you had to look at the code of 2 different programs to figure out why what was happening was happening. Since the problem was first noticed in very large directories (250,000+ entries) it was hard to reproduce and track what was happening.
but this guy came along and found something out, if you made 28 files, deleted file 25, then seeked file 26 you'd get file 27!
the reason why it always did this is simple, block 25 is the first entry of the second block (24 entries per block) but until this guy had done all this work, figuring out how to reproduce problem (without 250,000 files) nobody had thought of looking at the code of 2 different programs and how they 'didn't work together' it was a really simple rewrite, he just added a 'if called from subcall' function that fixed the automatic skipping of the first entry code.
So really the hard part was looking at 2 pieces of code and how they work together, neither code had a bug, the bug was only triggered when a specific call, called on a piece of code that tried to always skip the first entry of every block.
the annoying thing is that while this bug was 25 years old anyone complaining about it got to play the 'prove that this bug is real' conundrum, and it's really hard if you don't know the 'trick' that this guy found to make it reproducible.
Frankly, this kind of bug is easy to code, you write a function to work a certain way, then a different function calls it and uses it differently than normal, and create a hard to track down bug. with windows, this bug might never get caught, because reproducing it's hard, and Microsoft will just dump the code a few years later, with all the bugs still in tact, for those using an 'unofficially supported' operating system.
With open source, there are very few reasons to abandon old source code, so hard to reproduce bugs (or hard for the people who've noticed the bug) will take the kind of person willing to write programs to try and reproduce the bug to actually pin down where the bug is being triggered, when it's not immediately 'obvious' where in the code the bug is. It would be nice if there were MORE of these pedantic types, willing to spend a couple days messing around with code trying to trigger a bug in a reproducible way..
but unless more people use open source, these pedantic types won't be exposed to the problems that others just gave up on reproducing.
I remember coding old irc scripts 'around' bugs in various versions of mirc, it really annoyed me because those kind of bugs wound up being fixed in later version of mirc, which would break my code, that depended on things working the way i had noticed things worked(regardless of how they were documented)... so eventually i stopped upgrading mirc, and then finally gave up on mirc entirely and then my coding script days ended.
i find it kind of ironic that the samba developers, rather than finding the code, and fixing it, coded a workaround instead.
I realize, that they got the whole 'we know about this bug and it's not a priority' business, but this guy came a long and fixed the bug... even though it's been know about since 2003, and samba wrote a work around in 2005, and now in 2008 someone finally wrote a fix for it...
what was so special about this code that the samba developers couldn't have just written a patch rather than a work around?
If we're putting the hot water back in the oceans directly, we create 'heat islands' it takes 4x as much energy to cool water by 1 degree, so for ever 4 degrees you cool the 'air' you're 'heating' the water by 1 degree. if the temperature is 110F and you have the air set to 70F that means your water is going up 10 degrees. if Everyone in LA does this then for a 5-10 mile Island off the coast of LA is going to go up By 10-20 degrees, depending on how well that water moves back out into the sea.
But water cooling does save a vast amount of electricity, although personally the only places where I Know such a heat island wouldn't affect the environment are on the great lakes, since they freeze solid every winter, they never truly get warm in the summer. In this case, heat islands might actually cause more aquatic life to live in the great lakes... and a city the size of Toronto can save about 400 MWs of electricity by using water cooling, so the real energy savings are there in water cooling, but their system has problems they didn't anticipate, at one point in the line (2 actually) they have giant centrifuges to separate cold and hot water! if they weren't already saving tons of energy, those giant centrifuges would be eating energy like no tomorrow.
the oceans in general already have hot and cold water currents, but they only freeze near the poles... and the deep ocean life are adjusted to the levels of heat that exist there... I'm still standing by the creating of massive 'heat islands' in the oceans near major cities would harm aquatic life. smaller sized projects might make little difference, though. As i recall, nuclear power plants that use the ocean water for cooling are only allowed to change the water temp of their outflow line to go up by one or 2 degrees, due to environmental concerns.. pumping enough water to only heat the ocean by 1 or 2 degrees, would be hard for a massive city wide program in LA but smaller cities might be able to build effective systems that don't overly heat the water, and even in LA a few small projects rather than a massive citywide program might work fine.
"when they see that a certain manufacturer offers a 24" widescreen for $350 and another 24" widescreen for $700"
What drives me nuts is that you can get a 40" display for about $1,000 eg: a HDTV... why would a person spend $750 for a 24" monitor, when for $250 more dollars they can get a monitor AND a next gen TV set all rolled into one? AFAIK all the HDTV sets are 24-bit color, and they're still a better value than a normal monitor.
an efficient operating system should have 0% load on the CPU when it's doing nothing so the power savings circuitry on chip should be able to power it down to nothing, the HD as well should be able to spun down with no disc activity, and modern fan controls can spin down the fans to 'power saving mode'
I mean of course this means you're not using windows... but from personal experience, when i switched one of my computers from windows to FreeBSD (and this was in 1996) i was saving over $5 a month in electric bills! just from switching OSes, at the time i never shut off any of my computers ever, because boot ups i felt took too long.
now modern CPUs and fans and power supplies all have great power saving technologies.. I imagine now switching a 24/7 PC from windows to linux/freebsd would save me $10-15 a month in electric bills.
So your logic is that, 'since we're using all this energy, what we need to do is heat up the oceans, instead of the atmosphere, because it takes less electricity to do that, thus making us use 5% less energy making us 5% more environmentally friendly'
the difference is huge though, if we heat up the atmosphere, it radiates into space (if it didn't LA would be about 6000 degrees Fahrenheit at noon)
If we heat up the oceans, less CO2 and less O pass through the membrane, and certain life forms that are considered parasitic tend to benefit from the warming of the ocean as well...
so basically, not only are we killing off ocean life, we're hitting ocean life with a 3 pronged attack 1. less algae can propagate, because tho ocean is warming in that 'heat island' 2. parasitic life forms are propagating fast, killing off other aquatic life. and 3. because there is less algae, and the disruption in the food chain means there is now less food in the ocean for all aquatic life.
Sure it takes more energy to heat air than to take cold water and make it warm, but most of that heat radiates away from earth, without causing harm, if everybody within a mile of water used bodies of water for cooling to 'save electricity' there would be a horrendous mass extinction even in the oceans, much like the one occurring on land by human action.
there Is a half way solution though, it's called 'evaporative cooling' water as it evaporates takes energy into the earths atmosphere, where it can then radiate into space, and eventually the water falls back to earth as rain... problem is, because so many plants and animals rely on evaporative cooling, and because heat creates humidity from wet things, evaporative cooling only works constantly in a dry climate.
you can also take cold water, and heat it all the way to steam, which can be done no matter the humidity level, but then you loose a lot of the energy savings that you were aiming for in the first place.
I know you personally feel that using less energy does less harm to the environment, but in this situation you're comparing apples to oranges. heating up air and heating up water have different effects and different consequences... if they didn't everyone would be using seawater today, since it's been in use at least 20 years if not longer.
it's much easier to just run a pipe, and draw in fresh water from a nearby waterway/the ocean.
the former WTC IIRC was using seawater to cool the building.. you don't need to build underwater, which would be impractically expensive compared to cheaply piping cold water in and piping hot water out.
and yes environmentalists are against this for a lot of reasons (one is that warm water doesn't let oxygen or CO2 in our out the way cold water does, has to do with total available surface area)... but that really hasn't stopped people from using water for cooling.
it would be more interesting to me if people were using fresh (city water) to cool buildings, get it hot enough with heat exchangers, and store it and then sell the hot water back for residential or commercial use (eg: hot showers, doing laundry, washing dishes, etc) it might actually work in a city the size of LA or New York providing you could find the customers... but then not everyone could do it, there would be a glut in the market... still, some could so it that way, while the rest pissed off the environmentalists by heating up seawater.
that's because most PC titles at best are meant to be played by one person with any human opponents or allies being hooked up via the internet... PCs only have one keyboard, and usually only one mouse, they don't have a 'controller port' that you can hook 4 controllers into, the controller port of the past has long been replaced by USB, but even then, other than emulators i've yet to see any other games on the PC* that were fully playable from a 10-14 button usb controller..
With PCs it's expected that all your friends stay at home, and you all hook up on the internet to play together...
*= i've never played the PC versions of halo, as i think halo sucks, besides it's on the xbox...
"How can they possibly know that it will work or what other patents are required in order to impliment said patent if all they did was to sit around a table and discuss ideas found in other papers?"
Well if another company named 'thorium power' had been developing a way to make thorium/uranium/plutonium rods... the plutonium to activate the thorium the thorium to create energy and activate the uranium, which creates energy and keeps the thorium going..
and they didn't patent every single idea that was possible(who could do that ins a small startup), and along came a patent troll reads their patents and comes up with a solution to problems they've been working on over the past 2 years, and patents it... well you've got a problem.
and in this case it sounds exactly like that is what's been going on...
a company by the name of thorium power, is designing a real thorium based fuel that would run in a conventional Russian atomic reactor, and along comes this patent troll company trying to eat up the US thorium reactor patents... which will mean Russia and China may be using thorium reactors while America finds itself unable to because 'the patent troll drove the cost too high'
the 1950s called they want their promises of unlimited free energy from hydrogen fusion back.
sorry, but right now hydrogen fusion draws more power than it produces, it's kinda hard to call anything that takes more energy to keep it hot enough, because you can't make it big enough to do the fusion randomly at naturally occurring temperatures... a 'future' energy source.
50 years of research later and we're only using fusion to perform research... because you can't get energy from hydrogen fusion when you need 2.7 million degree plasma to even try and force fusion at the pressure levels that we can realistically contain.
there are 2 things that would make fusion realistic. 1. the ability for a container to be compressed to a million times higher pressure than the core of the sun. or 2. some really obscure use of elemental isotopes that can cause fusion at a reasonable temperature. eg: cold fusion (note that 'cold' fusion also refers to say as high as 1500 degrees C, even though we wouldn't call that cold, it's cold compared to 1 million degrees C that 'hot' fusion works at now.)
If i were you i wouldn't hold out on any form of cold fusion with both isotopes as hydrogen, because people have tried, and it didn't work.
i also wouldn't hold my breath on super high pressure fusion, because we have 4 basic problems to overcome 1. containment 2. adding more fuel 3. extracting waste mater 4. collecting heat and converting to electricity. that's a huge huge problem that at best, might be solved with nano-technology, and at worst will never exist.
just imagine having to craft a core made of 12 million layers of nano-constructed material designed to contain hydrogen at 1 million times the pressure of the sun, with millions of hydrogen inlet nano-pressurization valves, and millions of gradual decompression valves that only remove helium... and the hopes that such a system would consume less power than it outputs, both in terms of cost to build and cost to run...
insane pressure nano-machinery is probably the last best chance of real hydrogen fusion that creates more energy than consumed... and even that is at best a science fiction plot..
real fusion energy is a pipedream, if it could be done with normal technology we'd have it now.
wow, apple is overpriced, it's not like Alienware isn't overpriced either. That's why my custom built Gaming rig (if i had the money to build it today) would costs me about $2053 or so. Add in the 46" HDTV to be it's primary display, and the cost goes up to about $3600 but that's with a 46" screen... 46 beautiful inches.
fulls specs in my journal here, but it's got a Black Phenom, 640 total graphic processing streams with 1GB of video ram, and 4GB of 3-4-3-9 system ram, and 1 TB of HDD. I'm still worried it's underpowered for vista, but that's what dual booting is for right.
What Mac is targeted to people who want to game with their friends on a 32 inch television?
There isn't one. Which windows PC fills that niche? PC games aren't known for simultaneous multiplayer. If that's the need you're looking fill, I would recommend a console. I have several and they work well for that purpose.
Umm... 32" HDTV? or 32" SDTV? if it's HDTV, I'm custom building myself one for use with albeit a 46" Full HD system. It is using crossfire, because crossfire is about $70 cheaper than the X2 card, and it has faster ram on the cheaper crossfire config, plus, the crossfire cards are factory Overclocked. why noit use nvidia SLI? I'm a long time fan of ATI, and besides, the phenom board i was looking at supported crossfire. (see my journal for full specs)
alienware and other gamer tailored PC sites definitely sell boxes capable of full HD output, so you don't have to custom build... BTW if you go el cheapo and can live with 720p you can probably custom build a PC + buy a 32" HDTV for under $1800. 720P is way less intense on the GPU than 1080P, so you can get buy with just a single GPU (depending on the game of course)
It really does bother me that newbs think they need to buy a whole new computer to play games when the 'stock' graphic card was underpowered. i mean seriously, that's why they have a graphic card expansion slot, it's because the 'stock' configurations is always geared towards your typical user, who doesn't run games on a PC, and doesn't develop 3-d graphics, and thus has no reason to have a powerful 3-d board installed.
PC gaming is a REALLY SMALL market, it's tiny, tiny tiny... I mean I've been a serious PC gamer for over 14 years, I've seen everything that's happened to PCs through all those years, and nothing i mean nothing has excited me more than the ability to pair a full-HD TV (40" or better) set (1920x1080) with dual, crossfire/SLI graphic cards with (320 or 640 or 1280* stream processors) or 256 or 512 Stream processor units (nvidia, but for the numbers Nvidia is faster, some say that ATI cards are 'prettier' and SLI/crossfire configs can push great framerates even at 1080P)
why does this new tech excite me? simply, this, I've never run a 'standard' pc with a 20" or smaller monitor at any resolution above 1024x768, there was never any compelling reason too, because i couldn't see crap at those 'high' resolutions on a tiny 20" screen... but a 40" screen... sexy, I'll run a 40" screen at it's full resolution any day of the week. the sad thing is that 40" or larger full HD sets aren't that badly priced when you consider that they can also be used for hooking in video game consoles, cable tv, etc AND be your primary gaming rig monitor.
*= 1280 SPUs with crossfire of 3870 X2 boards quad card crossfire/sli ruins performance since quad PCI-e 2.0 x16 doesn't exists in any chipset i've heard of.
Blizzard didn't move from directx to OpenGL because they were pissed, it is most likely because they saw how horribly broken DX 10 is in vista.
the vast majority of vista crashes are related to a. nvidia b. ati and c. Microsoft and guess what, it's almost all related to directx 10.
when one company is drowning in an inferno of having the least stable graphic programming interface ever, and you generally have been writing an opengl interface for all your games anyways, it's easy to see why they'd switch.
Microsoft has a legacy of releasing broken products, or missing release dates to release slightly less broken software...
which is why it's crazy that OEMs keep supporting MS and their lack of a clue, when they could for less money invest in open source, or gradually pressure parts suppliers to write open source drivers, etc for linux, and when the drivers are good enough, bail on microsoft for good and save your company 400-800 million dollars a year in the microsoft tax (that's based on dell's market share, times a $10-20 oem volume pricing from windows.)
OpenGL is good enough and robust enough now that blizzard sees no reason to use DirectX that's a good thing. If more companies followed their lead, apple or linux would quickly become the target platform of choice rather than MS, simply because their software is designed by people with brains, not committees who delegate what features are absolutely necessary, at any cost.
"If it wasn't for the iPod they would have been edged out by now."
Which computer company has the strongest 1st quarter PC sales? you know the post Christmas, not yet tax refund season when people are swimming in Christmas debt?
Apple computer, they are usually within 1 million units or so of their 4th quarter (the strongest quarter for any PC maker) numbers in the 1st quarter... what does that spell to me or to you or to anyone else?
There are people who because they couldn't get an apple computer for Christmas tucked that money away and bought it in the 1st quarter. There are enough of these people who couldn't get it in Christmas, that the 1st quarter sales for apple are insanely high.
So what if anything does the I pod having 75% of the mp3 player market have anything to do with the massive massive popular demand for new apple products since Steve Jobs took back control of apple?
basically, nothing. if the apple computers weren't so popular they'd have abysmal 1st quarters just like everyone else in the PC sector. But they Don't.
Keep in mind that a significant percentage of 'total' annual computer sales are purchased by businesses, almost none of which buy apple, because they're looking for the most stripped down and cheapest PCs they can deploy for their companies employees. Apple has the strongest consumer market out there as demonstrated by how many apple purchasers buy in the 1st quarter because they simply couldn't buy what they wanted in the 4th quarter.
Doing good when all your competitors are doing bad is a strong sign of having a good consumer brand. Ipods definitely affect apples bottom line though, and they definitely saw the company through some lean years, but they have nothing to do with apple's 1st quarter PC sales.
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what about the wonder swan sure it never made it anywhere but japan...
and one thing i hate, is the way 'Blu-ray' adoption rates "Don't Count PS3s, because they're console sales" even though every website I googled said 'PS3 is the best Blu-ray movie player, PS3 is the Only Blu-Ray Player to support BDJava, yada yada yada..'
Why would anyone pay $400 for a Blu-ray stand alone when the PS3 is $400? and furthermore, $200 'BD-rom drives' aren't Blu-ray players even though you can buy plenty of HD movie playback software for M$ windows. $250 in 'upgrade' costs is a lot less than $400, especially if your PC is already hooked to you HDTV because you didn't want to pay $1400 for a crappy 30" PC monitor display when a 42" HDTV with PC in was $1000
anyways, consoles aren't all used to play games, and not all PCs come with a graphic card capable of playing a video game. http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/card-wars/intel-graphics-business-still-champ-but-nvidia-is-showing-rockys-pluck-257035.php at least 37% of the market have intel graphics and intel graphics don't even run 'aero' much less video games, and nvidia and AMD sell tons of graphic cards that don't play video games (any nvidia card below 'X,500' won't play modern games at any frame rate and ATI doesn't have a convenient scheme to determine which cards play games, but as intel has shown the lions share of the market is in cheap chipsets. but that's because something like 60% of the PC market is aimed at businesses most of which (graphic artists aside) want the cheapest chip available...
and then about 20% of the market are people who want 'internet capable' machines, with maybe 20% who want a multi use game capable machine, of those only 25% are serious gamers who will spend more than $200 on a graphic solution just to be able to play modern games at full frame rates (in less than HD resolution) and an even smaller set of those will buy $400+ for full HD capable graphic solutions rather than running on a PC monitor at a 'lower resolution' to get acceptable framerates...
personally, I've decided to go SLI/crossfire, and all told will spent almost 4 grand on my next gaming PC plus the TV set, and i should be able to run games for many years to come, without needing new graphic cards or a new PC... but I'm a serious gamer, and i spend thousands of hours playing games. and I expect my gaming rig to handle any game i throw at it for 4 years... if Full HD isn't the end of graphic card evolution...
(of course physics engines etc might some day go beyond a quad core CPU, and newer computer setups might save significant electric consumption)
but for at least the next 4 years I plan on being able to play anything i buy at the stores, when i build my next gaming rig.
"It's unrealistically limiting to imagine that you can know ahead of time what every file on a computer should be"
it's not though, linux creates a database of the checksums of every file, where it should be installed etc, rpm has a simple way of verifying every file based on this DB, the debian package manager doesn't but it's trivial to use the database files created to independently verify every file on the system... except user created files, or files downloaded from the internet (pictures etc) but compromised 'picture' files are easy to scan for, because they target specific flaws in specific image loading libraries, having an over sized 'comment' section in your jpeg with binary code after 2048 bytes of 'new lines' is trivial to detect, compromises that target 'file extraction' vulnerabilities are a little harder, because most file extraction tools are licensing the same extraction libraries as everyone else, especially on the linux side of things...
if it's so easy for linux to create a database of checksums, then why doesn't windows have a sane, automatic verification of files? because it wasn't a 'selling' feature microsoft only looked at what features people wanted, and were willing to pay for, that were easily promised, or easily produced. anything that was too hard to implement, was scrapped despite any promises they had used to kill competitors. Anything 'extra' that they didn't think would make them money was scratched.
Root Kits can lie, yes, they can, but it's trivial to build a bootable CD-rom in linux, and as Bart's PE shows it can even be done, to an extent for windows... and such a boot media, should be able to detect any type of shenanigans that a rootkit is using to make itself 'invisible.'
(pe, requires legitimate boot media, to create a bootable windows disk, and normal AV scanners aren't designed to run with PE, even normal root kit scanners don't always run from PE, but that's a windows problem...)
Linux can also be locked down as tight as you want it, so that even root can't install programs, so that the only directory where anyone can modify a singe file is in the user's own personal folder... it's not the best way to secure a linux system, but in practice some people have found that level of lock-down essential.
"I'm pretty sure it was trojaned game mods"
don't be so sure... there have been numerous security warnings about 'copy protection schemes' incorporated into video games, that allow an 'infected' user to 'infect' new users while playing online video games with the 'infected' basically, you play the video game, the trojan infects through the update vector of the 'anti-piracy' scheme, by pretending to be an "updated 'no-cd hack' detector", which allows them to put and run any kind of executable into anyone in the same game with them (they get the IPs from being in game with them, and the infection spreads from gamer to gamer)
Playing Video games online means your computer will be hacked, it's gotten so bad on battle.net that they removed the protection scheme from warcraft 3 The frozen throne, from online play so as to remove the 'vector' of attack.
"But on a more serious note, I think these new super stealth rootkits are going to be the beginning of the end for the AV industry. IMHO we are going to have to end up with whitelisting at the OS level as the never ending tidal wave of viruses will simply become too hard for the AV industry to keep up with without overloading the systems with the constant scanning and updating. And in this day and age IMHO it is kind of silly that I can't simply make a list of the two dozen or so programs that I use and have them be the only things that are allowed to run. And with all the legacy systems out there running older MSFT OSes some company could make some good money with an easy to use system that lets a user specify the couple of dozen programs he uses and refuse to run the rest. Anyway that is my 02c,YMMV."
I had to dig deep, but the company that did the test, tested software that was released in 2005-2006. They weren't even testing what had been released in the past 2 years, only stuff that was known in security circles in 05-06!!!
they tested security suites as well as specialized removal tools, the sad part was that
3 of the rootkits were on COMMERCIAL PRESSED CD/DVDs I guess, only the likes of sony gets sued over offering rootkits on DVDs/CDs.
white-listing might help, but clueless users are going to override white lists because of the 'dancing pigs problem' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_pigs
I knew about this problem, but my experience was even worse, I couldn't find a single scanner that could even detect the trace files in a zipfile, other than google's g-mail scanner...
once again the rootkit came to infect my systems around 2006, or possibly earlier, but it could re-infect from CD-rs and DVD-rs I'm basically in a situation now where i am being forced to use linux to read those discs and salvage what data i can, and never even dare let that data go near a windows machine again... not a practical solution, but i couldn't find a single scanner that could detect the problem from it's source... so all my old cd-r and dvd-r are now suspect... because the virus can add on to any disc not 'finalized' and there isnt' a single detection program i can run (sending files through g-mail only works when you have small files, and a lot of free time)
but yeah, security firms aren't keeping up anymore. if they can't even keep up with 'known' rootkits, then frankly we should all switch to linux, and never never install anything not in a repository... (essentially white listing ourselves)
"They were looking for the most recent Visible super nova."
not quite...
But I'm a little confused, TMM's quote couldn't be found by me on any of the links here on slashdot... apparently someone decided to edit the data on the web page to make it astronomically correct..
"The original supernova explosion was not seen in optical light about 140 years ago because it occurred close to the center of the Galaxy, and is embedded in a dense field of gas and dust"
They saw it with x-ray and radio telescopes, it wasn't visible at all. Unless you're a Kryptonian and can see in X-rays
"ReleaseForge takes away some of the pain."
well, it's a nice gui, but it doesn't look like it's scriptable... is there anything that does what release forge does, that can be scripted, and perhaps automatically fill in values that (this gui) asks you to fill in?
in this case, the 'victim' had her IM automatically sign in whenever the laptop went online, and she got a call from a good friend, congratulating her on getting her laptop back. But the thing is, the laptop owner was paying '$99 a year' for the 'ability' from any 'mac' to sign in and control the computer from anywhere (including, taking a photo and sending it over IM)
now, you could have a an automatic program to upload to a web server, but in this case, the owner used a subscription service from apple to gain control of the camera remotely, and snap a picture, ironically, the laptop starts a timer , and he tried to raise his hand to obscure the camera, but apparently, the picture is taken too fast for a person to realize what's going on.
just the picture the cops said would have been useful in catching the crook (they would have given copies to the places that fence stolen stuff, and they'd call the cops while 'figuring out the value' of the goods before they knew what was happening... it's a crime to purchase stolen goods after all) but in this case, the person was an acquaintance of their roommate, so they went to the cops to tell then who had the stuff, before they had even fenced the goods.
so apparently, you should fence your stolen laptops without hooking them to the internet. (and with automatic wireless networking and people with open networks, that might be hard in some cities if you even turn it on)
"Also, if enough people stare at the code and use it, they will find the bugs that matter."
In this case it's not a matter of staring at code until your eyes bleed, you could stare at the 4.2 BSD code all week and not ever notice how this bug got triggered.
In this case, you have to USE the program, Detect when the bug happens, and then Reproduce the bug. That last part was where everyone else failed.
They could create a program that created and deleted files, and did seeking the nodes, and detect the bug, but then the next time that ran the code, the bug didn't show up, or it showed up in a different place every time.
the lack of consistency was why no one staring at the code could figure out what was happening... looking at the code of a half dozen basic operating system functionality source files without knowing why the problem was happening would have been useless..
"But that's exactly my point, isn't it? The bug was only "visible" through its behavior, not its manifestation in code."
No, actually it was quite easy to identify from it's code. the problem wasn't that it wasn't visible in the code, it was you had to look at the code of 2 different programs to figure out why what was happening was happening. Since the problem was first noticed in very large directories (250,000+ entries) it was hard to reproduce and track what was happening.
but this guy came along and found something out, if you made 28 files, deleted file 25, then seeked file 26 you'd get file 27!
the reason why it always did this is simple, block 25 is the first entry of the second block (24 entries per block) but until this guy had done all this work, figuring out how to reproduce problem (without 250,000 files) nobody had thought of looking at the code of 2 different programs and how they 'didn't work together' it was a really simple rewrite, he just added a 'if called from subcall' function that fixed the automatic skipping of the first entry code.
So really the hard part was looking at 2 pieces of code and how they work together, neither code had a bug, the bug was only triggered when a specific call, called on a piece of code that tried to always skip the first entry of every block.
the annoying thing is that while this bug was 25 years old anyone complaining about it got to play the 'prove that this bug is real' conundrum, and it's really hard if you don't know the 'trick' that this guy found to make it reproducible.
Frankly, this kind of bug is easy to code, you write a function to work a certain way, then a different function calls it and uses it differently than normal, and create a hard to track down bug. with windows, this bug might never get caught, because reproducing it's hard, and Microsoft will just dump the code a few years later, with all the bugs still in tact, for those using an 'unofficially supported' operating system.
With open source, there are very few reasons to abandon old source code, so hard to reproduce bugs (or hard for the people who've noticed the bug) will take the kind of person willing to write programs to try and reproduce the bug to actually pin down where the bug is being triggered, when it's not immediately 'obvious' where in the code the bug is. It would be nice if there were MORE of these pedantic types, willing to spend a couple days messing around with code trying to trigger a bug in a reproducible way..
but unless more people use open source, these pedantic types won't be exposed to the problems that others just gave up on reproducing.
I remember coding old irc scripts 'around' bugs in various versions of mirc, it really annoyed me because those kind of bugs wound up being fixed in later version of mirc, which would break my code, that depended on things working the way i had noticed things worked(regardless of how they were documented)... so eventually i stopped upgrading mirc, and then finally gave up on mirc entirely and then my coding script days ended.
i find it kind of ironic that the samba developers, rather than finding the code, and fixing it, coded a workaround instead.
I realize, that they got the whole 'we know about this bug and it's not a priority' business, but this guy came a long and fixed the bug... even though it's been know about since 2003, and samba wrote a work around in 2005, and now in 2008 someone finally wrote a fix for it...
what was so special about this code that the samba developers couldn't have just written a patch rather than a work around?
I'd like to point something out, heat islands.
If we're putting the hot water back in the oceans directly, we create 'heat islands' it takes 4x as much energy to cool water by 1 degree, so for ever 4 degrees you cool the 'air' you're 'heating' the water by 1 degree. if the temperature is 110F and you have the air set to 70F that means your water is going up 10 degrees. if Everyone in LA does this then for a 5-10 mile Island off the coast of LA is going to go up By 10-20 degrees, depending on how well that water moves back out into the sea.
But water cooling does save a vast amount of electricity, although personally the only places where I Know such a heat island wouldn't affect the environment are on the great lakes, since they freeze solid every winter, they never truly get warm in the summer. In this case, heat islands might actually cause more aquatic life to live in the great lakes... and a city the size of Toronto can save about 400 MWs of electricity by using water cooling, so the real energy savings are there in water cooling, but their system has problems they didn't anticipate, at one point in the line (2 actually) they have giant centrifuges to separate cold and hot water! if they weren't already saving tons of energy, those giant centrifuges would be eating energy like no tomorrow.
the oceans in general already have hot and cold water currents, but they only freeze near the poles... and the deep ocean life are adjusted to the levels of heat that exist there... I'm still standing by the creating of massive 'heat islands' in the oceans near major cities would harm aquatic life. smaller sized projects might make little difference, though. As i recall, nuclear power plants that use the ocean water for cooling are only allowed to change the water temp of their outflow line to go up by one or 2 degrees, due to environmental concerns.. pumping enough water to only heat the ocean by 1 or 2 degrees, would be hard for a massive city wide program in LA but smaller cities might be able to build effective systems that don't overly heat the water, and even in LA a few small projects rather than a massive citywide program might work fine.
"when they see that a certain manufacturer offers a 24" widescreen for $350 and another 24" widescreen for $700"
What drives me nuts is that you can get a 40" display for about $1,000 eg: a HDTV... why would a person spend $750 for a 24" monitor, when for $250 more dollars they can get a monitor AND a next gen TV set all rolled into one? AFAIK all the HDTV sets are 24-bit color, and they're still a better value than a normal monitor.
an efficient operating system should have 0% load on the CPU when it's doing nothing so the power savings circuitry on chip should be able to power it down to nothing, the HD as well should be able to spun down with no disc activity, and modern fan controls can spin down the fans to 'power saving mode'
I mean of course this means you're not using windows... but from personal experience, when i switched one of my computers from windows to FreeBSD (and this was in 1996) i was saving over $5 a month in electric bills! just from switching OSes, at the time i never shut off any of my computers ever, because boot ups i felt took too long.
now modern CPUs and fans and power supplies all have great power saving technologies.. I imagine now switching a 24/7 PC from windows to linux/freebsd would save me $10-15 a month in electric bills.
'The environmentalists would have a hissy fit'
"Only the stupid ones."
So your logic is that, 'since we're using all this energy, what we need to do is heat up the oceans, instead of the atmosphere, because it takes less electricity to do that, thus making us use 5% less energy making us 5% more environmentally friendly'
the difference is huge though, if we heat up the atmosphere, it radiates into space (if it didn't LA would be about 6000 degrees Fahrenheit at noon)
If we heat up the oceans, less CO2 and less O pass through the membrane, and certain life forms that are considered parasitic tend to benefit from the warming of the ocean as well...
so basically, not only are we killing off ocean life, we're hitting ocean life with a 3 pronged attack 1. less algae can propagate, because tho ocean is warming in that 'heat island' 2. parasitic life forms are propagating fast, killing off other aquatic life. and 3. because there is less algae, and the disruption in the food chain means there is now less food in the ocean for all aquatic life.
Sure it takes more energy to heat air than to take cold water and make it warm, but most of that heat radiates away from earth, without causing harm, if everybody within a mile of water used bodies of water for cooling to 'save electricity' there would be a horrendous mass extinction even in the oceans, much like the one occurring on land by human action.
there Is a half way solution though, it's called 'evaporative cooling' water as it evaporates takes energy into the earths atmosphere, where it can then radiate into space, and eventually the water falls back to earth as rain... problem is, because so many plants and animals rely on evaporative cooling, and because heat creates humidity from wet things, evaporative cooling only works constantly in a dry climate.
you can also take cold water, and heat it all the way to steam, which can be done no matter the humidity level, but then you loose a lot of the energy savings that you were aiming for in the first place.
I know you personally feel that using less energy does less harm to the environment, but in this situation you're comparing apples to oranges. heating up air and heating up water have different effects and different consequences... if they didn't everyone would be using seawater today, since it's been in use at least 20 years if not longer.
it's much easier to just run a pipe, and draw in fresh water from a nearby waterway/the ocean.
the former WTC IIRC was using seawater to cool the building.. you don't need to build underwater, which would be impractically expensive compared to cheaply piping cold water in and piping hot water out.
and yes environmentalists are against this for a lot of reasons (one is that warm water doesn't let oxygen or CO2 in our out the way cold water does, has to do with total available surface area)... but that really hasn't stopped people from using water for cooling.
it would be more interesting to me if people were using fresh (city water) to cool buildings, get it hot enough with heat exchangers, and store it and then sell the hot water back for residential or commercial use (eg: hot showers, doing laundry, washing dishes, etc) it might actually work in a city the size of LA or New York providing you could find the customers... but then not everyone could do it, there would be a glut in the market... still, some could so it that way, while the rest pissed off the environmentalists by heating up seawater.
that's because most PC titles at best are meant to be played by one person with any human opponents or allies being hooked up via the internet... PCs only have one keyboard, and usually only one mouse, they don't have a 'controller port' that you can hook 4 controllers into, the controller port of the past has long been replaced by USB, but even then, other than emulators i've yet to see any other games on the PC* that were fully playable from a 10-14 button usb controller..
With PCs it's expected that all your friends stay at home, and you all hook up on the internet to play together...
*= i've never played the PC versions of halo, as i think halo sucks, besides it's on the xbox...
"How can they possibly know that it will work or what other patents are required in order to impliment said patent if all they did was to sit around a table and discuss ideas found in other papers?"
Well if another company named 'thorium power' had been developing a way to make thorium/uranium/plutonium rods... the plutonium to activate the thorium the thorium to create energy and activate the uranium, which creates energy and keeps the thorium going..
and they didn't patent every single idea that was possible(who could do that ins a small startup), and along came a patent troll reads their patents and comes up with a solution to problems they've been working on over the past 2 years, and patents it... well you've got a problem.
and in this case it sounds exactly like that is what's been going on...
"So how are they making their money? By litigation. So they're not actually helping progress, they're hindering it."
evidence to this light is found here: http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/348
a company by the name of thorium power, is designing a real thorium based fuel that would run in a conventional Russian atomic reactor, and along comes this patent troll company trying to eat up the US thorium reactor patents... which will mean Russia and China may be using thorium reactors while America finds itself unable to because 'the patent troll drove the cost too high'
the 1950s called they want their promises of unlimited free energy from hydrogen fusion back.
sorry, but right now hydrogen fusion draws more power than it produces, it's kinda hard to call anything that takes more energy to keep it hot enough, because you can't make it big enough to do the fusion randomly at naturally occurring temperatures... a 'future' energy source.
50 years of research later and we're only using fusion to perform research... because you can't get energy from hydrogen fusion when you need 2.7 million degree plasma to even try and force fusion at the pressure levels that we can realistically contain.
there are 2 things that would make fusion realistic. 1. the ability for a container to be compressed to a million times higher pressure than the core of the sun. or 2. some really obscure use of elemental isotopes that can cause fusion at a reasonable temperature. eg: cold fusion (note that 'cold' fusion also refers to say as high as 1500 degrees C, even though we wouldn't call that cold, it's cold compared to 1 million degrees C that 'hot' fusion works at now.)
If i were you i wouldn't hold out on any form of cold fusion with both isotopes as hydrogen, because people have tried, and it didn't work.
i also wouldn't hold my breath on super high pressure fusion, because we have 4 basic problems to overcome 1. containment 2. adding more fuel 3. extracting waste mater 4. collecting heat and converting to electricity. that's a huge huge problem that at best, might be solved with nano-technology, and at worst will never exist.
just imagine having to craft a core made of 12 million layers of nano-constructed material designed to contain hydrogen at 1 million times the pressure of the sun, with millions of hydrogen inlet nano-pressurization valves, and millions of gradual decompression valves that only remove helium... and the hopes that such a system would consume less power than it outputs, both in terms of cost to build and cost to run...
insane pressure nano-machinery is probably the last best chance of real hydrogen fusion that creates more energy than consumed... and even that is at best a science fiction plot..
real fusion energy is a pipedream, if it could be done with normal technology we'd have it now.
wow, apple is overpriced, it's not like Alienware isn't overpriced either. That's why my custom built Gaming rig (if i had the money to build it today) would costs me about $2053 or so. Add in the 46" HDTV to be it's primary display, and the cost goes up to about $3600 but that's with a 46" screen... 46 beautiful inches.
fulls specs in my journal here, but it's got a Black Phenom, 640 total graphic processing streams with 1GB of video ram, and 4GB of 3-4-3-9 system ram, and 1 TB of HDD. I'm still worried it's underpowered for vista, but that's what dual booting is for right.
There isn't one. Which windows PC fills that niche? PC games aren't known for simultaneous multiplayer. If that's the need you're looking fill, I would recommend a console. I have several and they work well for that purpose.
Umm... 32" HDTV? or 32" SDTV? if it's HDTV, I'm custom building myself one for use with albeit a 46" Full HD system. It is using crossfire, because crossfire is about $70 cheaper than the X2 card, and it has faster ram on the cheaper crossfire config, plus, the crossfire cards are factory Overclocked. why noit use nvidia SLI? I'm a long time fan of ATI, and besides, the phenom board i was looking at supported crossfire. (see my journal for full specs)alienware and other gamer tailored PC sites definitely sell boxes capable of full HD output, so you don't have to custom build... BTW if you go el cheapo and can live with 720p you can probably custom build a PC + buy a 32" HDTV for under $1800. 720P is way less intense on the GPU than 1080P, so you can get buy with just a single GPU (depending on the game of course)
It really does bother me that newbs think they need to buy a whole new computer to play games when the 'stock' graphic card was underpowered. i mean seriously, that's why they have a graphic card expansion slot, it's because the 'stock' configurations is always geared towards your typical user, who doesn't run games on a PC, and doesn't develop 3-d graphics, and thus has no reason to have a powerful 3-d board installed.
PC gaming is a REALLY SMALL market, it's tiny, tiny tiny... I mean I've been a serious PC gamer for over 14 years, I've seen everything that's happened to PCs through all those years, and nothing i mean nothing has excited me more than the ability to pair a full-HD TV (40" or better) set (1920x1080) with dual, crossfire/SLI graphic cards with (320 or 640 or 1280* stream processors) or 256 or 512 Stream processor units (nvidia, but for the numbers Nvidia is faster, some say that ATI cards are 'prettier' and SLI/crossfire configs can push great framerates even at 1080P)
why does this new tech excite me? simply, this, I've never run a 'standard' pc with a 20" or smaller monitor at any resolution above 1024x768, there was never any compelling reason too, because i couldn't see crap at those 'high' resolutions on a tiny 20" screen... but a 40" screen... sexy, I'll run a 40" screen at it's full resolution any day of the week. the sad thing is that 40" or larger full HD sets aren't that badly priced when you consider that they can also be used for hooking in video game consoles, cable tv, etc AND be your primary gaming rig monitor.
*= 1280 SPUs with crossfire of 3870 X2 boards quad card crossfire/sli ruins performance since quad PCI-e 2.0 x16 doesn't exists in any chipset i've heard of.
"It was Between Jobs as CEO"
there fixed that for you.
Blizzard didn't move from directx to OpenGL because they were pissed, it is most likely because they saw how horribly broken DX 10 is in vista.
the vast majority of vista crashes are related to a. nvidia b. ati and c. Microsoft and guess what, it's almost all related to directx 10.
when one company is drowning in an inferno of having the least stable graphic programming interface ever, and you generally have been writing an opengl interface for all your games anyways, it's easy to see why they'd switch.
Microsoft has a legacy of releasing broken products, or missing release dates to release slightly less broken software...
which is why it's crazy that OEMs keep supporting MS and their lack of a clue, when they could for less money invest in open source, or gradually pressure parts suppliers to write open source drivers, etc for linux, and when the drivers are good enough, bail on microsoft for good and save your company 400-800 million dollars a year in the microsoft tax (that's based on dell's market share, times a $10-20 oem volume pricing from windows.)
OpenGL is good enough and robust enough now that blizzard sees no reason to use DirectX that's a good thing. If more companies followed their lead, apple or linux would quickly become the target platform of choice rather than MS, simply because their software is designed by people with brains, not committees who delegate what features are absolutely necessary, at any cost.
"If it wasn't for the iPod they would have been edged out by now."
Which computer company has the strongest 1st quarter PC sales? you know the post Christmas, not yet tax refund season when people are swimming in Christmas debt?
Apple computer, they are usually within 1 million units or so of their 4th quarter (the strongest quarter for any PC maker) numbers in the 1st quarter... what does that spell to me or to you or to anyone else?
There are people who because they couldn't get an apple computer for Christmas tucked that money away and bought it in the 1st quarter. There are enough of these people who couldn't get it in Christmas, that the 1st quarter sales for apple are insanely high.
So what if anything does the I pod having 75% of the mp3 player market have anything to do with the massive massive popular demand for new apple products since Steve Jobs took back control of apple?
basically, nothing. if the apple computers weren't so popular they'd have abysmal 1st quarters just like everyone else in the PC sector. But they Don't.
Keep in mind that a significant percentage of 'total' annual computer sales are purchased by businesses, almost none of which buy apple, because they're looking for the most stripped down and cheapest PCs they can deploy for their companies employees. Apple has the strongest consumer market out there as demonstrated by how many apple purchasers buy in the 1st quarter because they simply couldn't buy what they wanted in the 4th quarter.
Doing good when all your competitors are doing bad is a strong sign of having a good consumer brand. Ipods definitely affect apples bottom line though, and they definitely saw the company through some lean years, but they have nothing to do with apple's 1st quarter PC sales.