we aren't talking about OEM deals, we are talking about retail sales price.
You were talking about the economics of pricing to cover development cost. Clearly, in the case of Windows, any such calculation must account for the fact that the vast bulk of their sales will be through OEM channels.
Therefore, the fact that most copies of Windows sell for less than $129, is perfectly valid when you are trying to make an argument like "[...] msft has sold hundreds of millions of copies of vista, and twice the price. So according to MSFT developing an OS is a multi billion dollar procedure."
All effects in Aero can be implemented using features present on cards several years old (vide Compiz). It just artificially requires DX10 compliance to boost sales of new GPUs and new systems, because you won't get all the bling when you install Vista on your old system. This was a wise move, because it boosts the OEM market where they are the strongest, but screws the users, because they are forced to upgrade.
This argument would make sense if the minimum requirement for Aero was a DX10 card.
However, it is not. Aero's minimum spec is a DX9-capable card (specifically, I think it needs something that supports Shader Model 2.0). These date from 2002-2003 (R300, NV30). Even Intel's GMA950 (2005) has all the necessary features for Aero.
OS X's Core Image has the same minimum requirements as Aero. Compiz does not per se, but presumably it would to be able to provide the same effect(s) that Core Image/Quartz and Aero do (which are, I believe, the "Ripple" and the window-border-blurring, respectively) - or, at least, provide them in the same way.
As I said earlier, the reasons why Microsoft didn't bother trying to make Aero work on older video cards should be fairly obvious, when one considers the hardware that most people using Vista would have.
I will start by saying I have not personally used Vista for more than 30 minutes... but I have not seen or heard about this "ripple" effect that you're talking about, can you describe it to me or tell me where it is used in Vista? I'm curious to see it.
It's not in Vista, it's the ripple effect in OS X when dropping Dashboard widgets. It requires specific hardware features and, as such, is only supported on video cards that have those features.
This is analagous to Aero. It requires specific hardware features to be present on the video card and, if they are not, cannot be used.
Regarding software emulation on Compiz/MacOS, as I understand it, Compiz doesn't do much rendering at all in software - it relies totally on OpenGL and the GPU to do most of the work. MacOS also uses OpenGL for much of its effects.
If the video hardware is incapable, OS X will emulate some (most) of the eye candy on the system's CPU(s). It does this because back when OS X was first released, the video hardware at the time was relatively pitiful. I don't know if Compiz does the same thing so it "degrades graefully", but I suspect it might.
With Vista, Microsoft didn't bother with that, because only a tiny minority of people would be running Vista on such old video cards.
Vista's problem perhaps lies in its use of the additional DirectX layer, rather than directly addressing the video hardware with OpenGL as Compiz and MacOS do.
DirectX sits at the same level in the stack that OpenGL does.
Bootup time is rarely significantly impacted by how "powerful" your hardware is.
I have never understood the obsession with bootup times. Leave the machine on and configure it to sleep or suspect if power usage (or noise) bothers you.
Aero shouldn't require a third of the resources that it does, and should run just fine on your laptop. The fact that it doesn't is indicative of Vista's poor design.
The fact it doesn't is indicative that it requires hardware features that weren't present in 2003-era video cards (and certainly not 2003-era non-discreet video cards).
OS X emulates these in software (or simply doesn't show them - eg: the ripple - which your Powerbook probably can't do). Compiz probably does the same.
The reason Microsoft didn't waste developer effort on making Aero run on video cards more than 3 years old should be obvious (and it has nothing to do with lack of ability) - but being Slashdot, it probably isn't.
That's raw space. You need to halve it for RAID10. Then, of course, you have the problem of accessing the data at a reasonable speed from other machines.
Well, the 300G velociraptors go for around $300. Let's say we fit 16 per 2U, that's 336 drives per rack or roughly $100k USD (not even factoring in the discounts that you get at those volumes). The remaining $100k would break down to only ~$5k per shelf, which admittedly is a bit low for beefy FC fabric. Still I wouldn't say I was off by a zero. Nodge the estimate up to $250k per shelf and we're good to go.:-)
Enterprise-level SAN disk is not off-the-shelf hardware. An EXP810 disk shelf (3U, 16x3.5" SAS or SATA drives), for example, runs about $20k with 1TB SATA drives and about $30k with 300G 15k RPM drives. A mid-range dual controller SAN head to sit in front of them runs around the $60k mark (and is probably too low-end for this kind of environment, so likely double that figure at least).
I am not trying to justify these prices (although to some degree they are justifiable), I'm just trying to highlight that with this kind of hardware, prices for somewhat similar off-the-shelf-hardware are not representative. A single 15k RPM, 300G fibre channel drive for an enterprise-level SAN is around $1700.
A rack full of enterprise-level (fibre channel, 15k RPM, 300G) drives would probably run around $500k each. That would be 13 drive shelves and a SAN head, all at 3U. You would have 208 spindles with a raw capacity of 62,400 GB. Knock off, say, 4 spindles for hot spares, account for GiB vs GB, account for RAID10 and you'll have a usable capacity (before filesystem overheads) of something in the ballpark of 28TB per rack. Four such racks and your 100TB of fast, enterprise-level disk has cost something in the regions of $2,000,000.
(All my prices are discounted, not list, and therefore at least somewhat realistic. Admittedly someone buying a couple of million bucks worth of disk will likely get a bigger discount than we do, but probably not hugely more. OTOH, my prices are less than 6 months old, whereas the hardware in question would have been bought several years ago. That two million figure is probably less than half of what was actually paid. Call it $5,000,000 for a nice round number.)
Then, once you've got the storage, you need the fibre channel fabric to run it over. More millions (for something on this scale). You'd be dropping a couple of grand per machine just for HBAs.
So one woman CEO at one company in the U.S. solves the world's sex discrimination problems?
Who said anything about that ? I was talking about salary comparisons.
Assuming men and women have equal opportunities, such an average is appropriate.
It is completely inappropriate. It does not account, for example, for the fact that women (on average) work significantly fewer hours than men both in short term (ie: a 40 hour week instead of a 50 hour week) and the long term (ie: taking several years off to raise a family).
(Whether this happens by choice or "discrimination" is irrelevant. It happens, and therefore any calculation which does not account for it is wrong, meaning conclusions drawn from those calculations are, similarly, wrong.)
This is just one of the more obvious and glaring bad assumptions that an overall average takes - there are several others (for example, that the distribution of males and females within any job will be normal).
The expected value for the sex of an employee should be roughly 51% female, because of the male/female ratio.
Only if you're working with unrealistic and broken assumptions. Real people with differences are not the same as simplistic equation people, who are identical.
I don't think you are correct. I remember reading a study a year ago that compared men and women's salaries for the same jobs and levels of education and experience and the results were women paid 15% less overall (25% less when one only looked at the private sector).
Then why aren't employers falling over themselves to save money by employing women ? Knocking 25% off your salary expenses (a significant part of any budget) would confer a substantial competitive advantage.
I don't recall who the study was by and Google does not turn it up right away. Do you have a source for your claim?
Not on hand (and they were in dead-tree format anyway).
I'd also like to note that even if there is reliable data showing men and women make the same amount for the same job (with the same qualifications, experience, hours, etc.) that does not necessarily indicate equality as it allows for it to be harder for women to get high paying jobs.
This is a different topic to "same work, same pay".
For example, if you look at all the people who are CFO's for fortune 500 companies and determine that the men and women make about the same, but 90% of those CFO's are men, that could very easily be an indication that it is harder for women to get those jobs because of discrimination. Alternately, it could indicate that for social reasons women are less likely to go into a career track that would lead them to such a position.
Or they just might not be interested because, you know, men and women are different.
The point being, same pay for the same job is not conclusive evidence of no gender discrimination.
Correlation != causation.
Or, to put it another way, "discrimination" in outcome is not evidence of "discrimination" in process. No-one seems to scream "discrimination" that a disproportionate number of high-level sprinters, for example, are black.
None on hand (and I'm certainly not going to waste time trying to dig it up for a Slashdot discussion, since it's usually obfuscated).
If you can, find some of these "studies" that include some raw data, or more than just a soundbite conclusion. Look through said data and be sure to normalise for factors such as shorter working hours. You will find that, for the same job, women are paid the same salary.
(After all, if women really did earn significantly less, employers would be falling over themselves to save money on staffing costs by employing them.)
I'd say $150-$200k ballpark which is a drop in the bucket for hollywood.
I think there's a zero missing here. $200k wouldn't buy you a rack full of SATA disk from, say, IBM, let alone the fast stuff (or the controllers to sit in front of it).
So, serving the stuff at 4 Gbit/s ain't so hard, *processing* it at that rate is a different story.
Indeed. In context, a completely saturated 4G fibre link would replay this at 2fps.
I think the human race, at least in the developed world, is selecting for intelligence.
A quick sample of the average TV show and current world leaders, would suggest your theory is, at best, questionable:).
Intelligent people have better health care and better resources making them more likely to reproduce and afford more children. I think this natural selection mixed with how our environment has changed is responsible for the increased incidence in asd.
There's a very clear inverse relationship between "intelligence" and offspring. Statistically speaking, "smarter" you are, the less kids you'll have. From memory, the reproduction rate of "smart" people isn't even at replacement levels.
When you compare the same jobs, same qualifications, same experience, same competency and same working hours, there is no meaningful difference between male and female salaries.
Note that most comparisons do *not* do this (eg: they frequently average salaries for men and women across the entire workforce), because they are trying to support an agenda.
The problem with this is how many copies of Vista came with new PC's?
Why is this a problem ? Most (non-corporate) users get a newer version of Windows with a new computer because, to most people, the computer and the OS are a single unit. On average, people replace PCs about every 3-4 years, which means Vista isn't going to be even close to a majority share before mid-2009.
Corporate users are beholden to their IT departments, who generally work on conservative, 3-5 year schedules. So no-one sane expected Vista to start appearing in large-scale corporate rollouts until *at least* 2009 and probably more like 2010-2011.
The above have been true of every version of Windows since Windows 95. Why anyone expects it to be different with Vista, is beyond me.
Emerging technologies are always a little extra expensive, except when their monetary cheapness is their main feature. Just saying that it's expensive alone isn't a good enough reason.
In a commodity market like computers, price is just about all that matters.
SSDs aren't just "a little more expensive", they're "a lot more expensive".
And even then, not too much more expensive: Last year [engadget.com] or This year [engadget.com]
A new, mainstream laptop today has a 160G or 250G drive in it. Upgrading that to a 64G SSD is on the order of $500 (and that's at somewhere cheap like Dell). A 30% - 50% price increase is in no way "not much more" (and that's before taking into account having less space).
I know laptop and servers are very different but still, if my laptop can run 2 or 3 hours on a battery (including the LCD), it should not be that difficult to use the same technology to power a server for a 5 minutes (with no screen needed).
What amazes me is that there isn't more of an awareness of (and outcry about) Vista's crap factor on the consumer level, or that business isn't more forceful with Microsoft about the issue. People just seem to accept it.
Have you considered the outrageous possibility that maybe it's not as bad as you think it is ?
Microsoft fundamentally changed the storage architecture in Vista, making it very wasteful in many respects (battery life, CPU usage, drive thrashing). This *might* have been worthwhile if it offered a significant performance increase, but it doesn't. XP's storage architecture is better in almost every way when it comes to real-world usage.
Details ?
The main problem is that MS is very secretive about proprietary code in their driver stacks, including storage & file system. You can't really blame SSD manufacturers for MS's complete lack of documentation.
I think you may be missing commentary for complaints. People have been talking about SSDs for several years now, and I've actually kind of wondered that, if they were so great, why aren't we seeing more of them in mainstream desktop use?
This is why.
No, it's because they're very expensive and for most people do not deliver benefits even remotely close to justifying it.
I am assuming that you are implying that the Dutch transport system is expensive. Clearly you have never been to the UK. I live an hour away from London by train, if I were to shop around a little and pick the budget airline flights I could fly to Schipol from Gatwick/Heathrow, get the train to Amsterdam Central and a tram to my hotel for a cheaper price than my train journey from my house to the airport!! It really is *that* bad.
Bollocks. I doubt you could fly to _anywhere_ from London without paying at least 30 quid or so in taxes, surcharges and fuel fines.
I've been living in Zurich for 6 months now, which is about as good as public transport gets, and I wouldn't say London's was especially bad.
Slashdot Mirror
we aren't talking about OEM deals, we are talking about retail sales price.
You were talking about the economics of pricing to cover development cost. Clearly, in the case of Windows, any such calculation must account for the fact that the vast bulk of their sales will be through OEM channels.
Therefore, the fact that most copies of Windows sell for less than $129, is perfectly valid when you are trying to make an argument like "[...] msft has sold hundreds of millions of copies of vista, and twice the price. So according to MSFT developing an OS is a multi billion dollar procedure."
All effects in Aero can be implemented using features present on cards several years old (vide Compiz). It just artificially requires DX10 compliance to boost sales of new GPUs and new systems, because you won't get all the bling when you install Vista on your old system. This was a wise move, because it boosts the OEM market where they are the strongest, but screws the users, because they are forced to upgrade.
This argument would make sense if the minimum requirement for Aero was a DX10 card.
However, it is not. Aero's minimum spec is a DX9-capable card (specifically, I think it needs something that supports Shader Model 2.0). These date from 2002-2003 (R300, NV30). Even Intel's GMA950 (2005) has all the necessary features for Aero.
OS X's Core Image has the same minimum requirements as Aero. Compiz does not per se, but presumably it would to be able to provide the same effect(s) that Core Image/Quartz and Aero do (which are, I believe, the "Ripple" and the window-border-blurring, respectively) - or, at least, provide them in the same way.
As I said earlier, the reasons why Microsoft didn't bother trying to make Aero work on older video cards should be fairly obvious, when one considers the hardware that most people using Vista would have.
I will start by saying I have not personally used Vista for more than 30 minutes... but I have not seen or heard about this "ripple" effect that you're talking about, can you describe it to me or tell me where it is used in Vista? I'm curious to see it.
It's not in Vista, it's the ripple effect in OS X when dropping Dashboard widgets. It requires specific hardware features and, as such, is only supported on video cards that have those features.
This is analagous to Aero. It requires specific hardware features to be present on the video card and, if they are not, cannot be used.
Regarding software emulation on Compiz/MacOS, as I understand it, Compiz doesn't do much rendering at all in software - it relies totally on OpenGL and the GPU to do most of the work. MacOS also uses OpenGL for much of its effects.
If the video hardware is incapable, OS X will emulate some (most) of the eye candy on the system's CPU(s). It does this because back when OS X was first released, the video hardware at the time was relatively pitiful. I don't know if Compiz does the same thing so it "degrades graefully", but I suspect it might.
With Vista, Microsoft didn't bother with that, because only a tiny minority of people would be running Vista on such old video cards.
Vista's problem perhaps lies in its use of the additional DirectX layer, rather than directly addressing the video hardware with OpenGL as Compiz and MacOS do.
DirectX sits at the same level in the stack that OpenGL does.
The hardware we have is powerful enough.
Bootup time is rarely significantly impacted by how "powerful" your hardware is.
I have never understood the obsession with bootup times. Leave the machine on and configure it to sleep or suspect if power usage (or noise) bothers you.
Aero shouldn't require a third of the resources that it does, and should run just fine on your laptop. The fact that it doesn't is indicative of Vista's poor design.
The fact it doesn't is indicative that it requires hardware features that weren't present in 2003-era video cards (and certainly not 2003-era non-discreet video cards).
OS X emulates these in software (or simply doesn't show them - eg: the ripple - which your Powerbook probably can't do). Compiz probably does the same.
The reason Microsoft didn't waste developer effort on making Aero run on video cards more than 3 years old should be obvious (and it has nothing to do with lack of ability) - but being Slashdot, it probably isn't.
and msft has sold hundreds of millions of copies of vista, and twice the price.
Most copies of Vista don't sell for anything close to $129.
The 48TB model is actually $62k.
That's raw space. You need to halve it for RAID10. Then, of course, you have the problem of accessing the data at a reasonable speed from other machines.
Well, the 300G velociraptors go for around $300. Let's say we fit 16 per 2U, that's 336 drives per rack or roughly $100k USD (not even factoring in the discounts that you get at those volumes). The remaining $100k would break down to only ~$5k per shelf, which admittedly is a bit low for beefy FC fabric. Still I wouldn't say I was off by a zero. Nodge the estimate up to $250k per shelf and we're good to go. :-)
Enterprise-level SAN disk is not off-the-shelf hardware. An EXP810 disk shelf (3U, 16x3.5" SAS or SATA drives), for example, runs about $20k with 1TB SATA drives and about $30k with 300G 15k RPM drives. A mid-range dual controller SAN head to sit in front of them runs around the $60k mark (and is probably too low-end for this kind of environment, so likely double that figure at least).
I am not trying to justify these prices (although to some degree they are justifiable), I'm just trying to highlight that with this kind of hardware, prices for somewhat similar off-the-shelf-hardware are not representative. A single 15k RPM, 300G fibre channel drive for an enterprise-level SAN is around $1700.
A rack full of enterprise-level (fibre channel, 15k RPM, 300G) drives would probably run around $500k each. That would be 13 drive shelves and a SAN head, all at 3U. You would have 208 spindles with a raw capacity of 62,400 GB. Knock off, say, 4 spindles for hot spares, account for GiB vs GB, account for RAID10 and you'll have a usable capacity (before filesystem overheads) of something in the ballpark of 28TB per rack. Four such racks and your 100TB of fast, enterprise-level disk has cost something in the regions of $2,000,000.
(All my prices are discounted, not list, and therefore at least somewhat realistic. Admittedly someone buying a couple of million bucks worth of disk will likely get a bigger discount than we do, but probably not hugely more. OTOH, my prices are less than 6 months old, whereas the hardware in question would have been bought several years ago. That two million figure is probably less than half of what was actually paid. Call it $5,000,000 for a nice round number.)
Then, once you've got the storage, you need the fibre channel fabric to run it over. More millions (for something on this scale). You'd be dropping a couple of grand per machine just for HBAs.
So one woman CEO at one company in the U.S. solves the world's sex discrimination problems?
Who said anything about that ? I was talking about salary comparisons.
Assuming men and women have equal opportunities, such an average is appropriate.
It is completely inappropriate. It does not account, for example, for the fact that women (on average) work significantly fewer hours than men both in short term (ie: a 40 hour week instead of a 50 hour week) and the long term (ie: taking several years off to raise a family).
(Whether this happens by choice or "discrimination" is irrelevant. It happens, and therefore any calculation which does not account for it is wrong , meaning conclusions drawn from those calculations are, similarly, wrong .)
This is just one of the more obvious and glaring bad assumptions that an overall average takes - there are several others (for example, that the distribution of males and females within any job will be normal).
The expected value for the sex of an employee should be roughly 51% female, because of the male/female ratio.
Only if you're working with unrealistic and broken assumptions. Real people with differences are not the same as simplistic equation people, who are identical.
I don't think you are correct. I remember reading a study a year ago that compared men and women's salaries for the same jobs and levels of education and experience and the results were women paid 15% less overall (25% less when one only looked at the private sector).
Then why aren't employers falling over themselves to save money by employing women ? Knocking 25% off your salary expenses (a significant part of any budget) would confer a substantial competitive advantage.
I don't recall who the study was by and Google does not turn it up right away. Do you have a source for your claim?
Not on hand (and they were in dead-tree format anyway).
I'd also like to note that even if there is reliable data showing men and women make the same amount for the same job (with the same qualifications, experience, hours, etc.) that does not necessarily indicate equality as it allows for it to be harder for women to get high paying jobs.
This is a different topic to "same work, same pay".
For example, if you look at all the people who are CFO's for fortune 500 companies and determine that the men and women make about the same, but 90% of those CFO's are men, that could very easily be an indication that it is harder for women to get those jobs because of discrimination. Alternately, it could indicate that for social reasons women are less likely to go into a career track that would lead them to such a position.
Or they just might not be interested because, you know, men and women are different.
The point being, same pay for the same job is not conclusive evidence of no gender discrimination.
Correlation != causation.
Or, to put it another way, "discrimination" in outcome is not evidence of "discrimination" in process. No-one seems to scream "discrimination" that a disproportionate number of high-level sprinters, for example, are black.
None on hand (and I'm certainly not going to waste time trying to dig it up for a Slashdot discussion, since it's usually obfuscated).
If you can, find some of these "studies" that include some raw data, or more than just a soundbite conclusion. Look through said data and be sure to normalise for factors such as shorter working hours. You will find that, for the same job, women are paid the same salary.
(After all, if women really did earn significantly less, employers would be falling over themselves to save money on staffing costs by employing them.)
I'd say $150-$200k ballpark which is a drop in the bucket for hollywood.
I think there's a zero missing here. $200k wouldn't buy you a rack full of SATA disk from, say, IBM, let alone the fast stuff (or the controllers to sit in front of it).
So, serving the stuff at 4 Gbit/s ain't so hard, *processing* it at that rate is a different story.
Indeed. In context, a completely saturated 4G fibre link would replay this at 2fps.
I never realized the sheer amount of compression that is going on between the raw footage and getting it into a DVD.
More impressive is the IO bandwidth necessary to play back the uncompressed source in realtime.
At 24fps = nearly 5GB/sec for playback.
That's a mighty impressive I/O subsystem (at every level).
(Assuming realtime, of course, which I doubt happens.)
Let's just assume the 100 TB figure is right: 100 * $150 = $15,000 (USD). Don't studios spend millions making movies?
Real Storage (tm) isn't a RAID0 of cheap & nasty SATA drives bought with mail-in rebates.
I think the human race, at least in the developed world, is selecting for intelligence.
A quick sample of the average TV show and current world leaders, would suggest your theory is, at best, questionable :).
Intelligent people have better health care and better resources making them more likely to reproduce and afford more children. I think this natural selection mixed with how our environment has changed is responsible for the increased incidence in asd.
There's a very clear inverse relationship between "intelligence" and offspring. Statistically speaking, "smarter" you are, the less kids you'll have. From memory, the reproduction rate of "smart" people isn't even at replacement levels.
Do you have data to back up that claim?
When you compare the same jobs, same qualifications, same experience, same competency and same working hours, there is no meaningful difference between male and female salaries.
Note that most comparisons do *not* do this (eg: they frequently average salaries for men and women across the entire workforce), because they are trying to support an agenda.
Anyone who doesn't care about the tiny number of people who custom-build Linux PCs ?
The problem with this is how many copies of Vista came with new PC's?
Why is this a problem ? Most (non-corporate) users get a newer version of Windows with a new computer because, to most people, the computer and the OS are a single unit. On average, people replace PCs about every 3-4 years, which means Vista isn't going to be even close to a majority share before mid-2009.
Corporate users are beholden to their IT departments, who generally work on conservative, 3-5 year schedules. So no-one sane expected Vista to start appearing in large-scale corporate rollouts until *at least* 2009 and probably more like 2010-2011.
The above have been true of every version of Windows since Windows 95. Why anyone expects it to be different with Vista, is beyond me.
Emerging technologies are always a little extra expensive, except when their monetary cheapness is their main feature. Just saying that it's expensive alone isn't a good enough reason.
In a commodity market like computers, price is just about all that matters.
SSDs aren't just "a little more expensive", they're "a lot more expensive".
And even then, not too much more expensive: Last year [engadget.com] or This year [engadget.com]
A new, mainstream laptop today has a 160G or 250G drive in it. Upgrading that to a 64G SSD is on the order of $500 (and that's at somewhere cheap like Dell). A 30% - 50% price increase is in no way "not much more" (and that's before taking into account having less space).
I know laptop and servers are very different but still, if my laptop can run 2 or 3 hours on a battery (including the LCD), it should not be that difficult to use the same technology to power a server for a 5 minutes (with no screen needed).
It's not. They're called UPSes.
What amazes me is that there isn't more of an awareness of (and outcry about) Vista's crap factor on the consumer level, or that business isn't more forceful with Microsoft about the issue. People just seem to accept it.
Have you considered the outrageous possibility that maybe it's not as bad as you think it is ?
Microsoft fundamentally changed the storage architecture in Vista, making it very wasteful in many respects (battery life, CPU usage, drive thrashing). This *might* have been worthwhile if it offered a significant performance increase, but it doesn't. XP's storage architecture is better in almost every way when it comes to real-world usage.
Details ?
The main problem is that MS is very secretive about proprietary code in their driver stacks, including storage & file system. You can't really blame SSD manufacturers for MS's complete lack of documentation.
Why would they need to know ?
I think you may be missing commentary for complaints. People have been talking about SSDs for several years now, and I've actually kind of wondered that, if they were so great, why aren't we seeing more of them in mainstream desktop use?
This is why.
No, it's because they're very expensive and for most people do not deliver benefits even remotely close to justifying it.
I am assuming that you are implying that the Dutch transport system is expensive. Clearly you have never been to the UK. I live an hour away from London by train, if I were to shop around a little and pick the budget airline flights I could fly to Schipol from Gatwick/Heathrow, get the train to Amsterdam Central and a tram to my hotel for a cheaper price than my train journey from my house to the airport!! It really is *that* bad.
Bollocks. I doubt you could fly to _anywhere_ from London without paying at least 30 quid or so in taxes, surcharges and fuel fines.
I've been living in Zurich for 6 months now, which is about as good as public transport gets, and I wouldn't say London's was especially bad.