No, I say that they don't prove what you claim they do. What they show is a very minor improvement in some measures in the midst of the more than decade-long debacle that Hoover and Roosevelt inflicted on the country.
What they also show is your astounding emotional attachment to a preposterous position. Try to work it out in therapy.
The key difference between businesses and governments when it comes to accumulating money, is that businesses obtain money from people who give it to them voluntarily. (Excepting of course, those businesses which use the government to prohibit competition for their products, or even get direct transfers of stolen money like the current round of bailouts.)
It's really not that hard to do. I've gotten "flamebait", "funny", "troll", "Informative" and "insightful" all on the same post before. So have a lot of other people.
Government is not a productive enterprise. There's no such thing as "government money", it's all taxed, borrowed or inflated away from the people who earn it.
I'm sure that's near the top of the list of considerations when they're making the build or buy decision. If they can get the same kind of product life cycle out of a new architecture that Sun got out of SPARC, it's probably worth doing.
Will the cost of in-house designed chips create a real 'apple tax'?
I would expect that the cost of doing their own designs would be offset by not having to pay the profit margins on Intel, NVidia and AMD parts. Those vendors don't sell Apple parts at cost.
No, I was speaking of their software GL renderer. They've put rather more effort into it than one would expect, given that all Macs sold today have some kind of GPU. By maintaining and improving their software implementation, they've got a starting point to put it on any new architecture that they might develop.
AMD was not a riskier prospect, AMD was a backup plan while intel was the lowest bidder. Or, so I would speculate.
Your speculation is wrong. AMD had arguably better parts; Apple didn't choose them because they weren't confident in AMDs ability to maintain their performance edge over Intel, or deliver sufficient quantities to meet Apple's schedules. They weren't about to go through all the pain of switching to land right back in the same situation they'd had with IBM.
Apple dropped IBM's POWER series for Intel marketing dollars and Intel x86 familiar developers.
Wrong on both counts. Intel had been offering money to Apple for years to make the switch, that wasn't a deciding factor. As for x86 familiarity, Apple had no shortage of developers on the platform before the switch.
The question is, would Apple seriously get into developing their own CPUs?
That would depend on what advantages they thought they could gain from it. They can certainly afford to do it, they've got about 37 billion dollars in cash on hand, they've got most of the talent they'd need for such a project, and they could easily recruit anyone else they might need. Building a whole new architecture isn't an opportunity that comes along that often for a hardware designer these days.
Given how competitive the CPU market is and how hard AMD have to work to even compete with Intel
That's the market for commodity parts. It doesn't apply to vertically integrated companies like IBM with their POWER CPUs or Sun with the SPARC. The question for Apple isn't whether a new CPU would fly with other users, it would be whether it works for Apple's needs. Outside OEM sales would be gravy.
Another thing to keep in mind here is that Apple's very big on recruiting the top talent in any area they go into, and you don't get the best chip designers by offering them run-of-the-mill projects to work on.
SJ stood on a stage a promised a 3GHZ G5 in one year (because IBM had promised it to Apple), and IBM let him down. That, together with IBM's decision not to develop a low-power G5 suitable for laptops is what closed the book on Apple's PPC machines.
They switched to Intel instead of AMD because they had had quite enough of vendor disappointments. AMD was a far riskier prospect.
If they build everything in house, they don't have to deal with 'leaks' from other companies
That would be a major factor, but not as big as whatever advantages they could realize from having parts made entirely to their specs. Another major factor would be that if their products are built around their own parts, cloning becomes infeasible.
Apple is not going to waste money developing their own chips just for bragging rights.
That's right, they won't do it just for bragging rights. They'll do it for a compelling performance, power consumption, and/or cost advantage. Right now, they pay Intel, Nvidia, and AMD a hell of a lot of money for CPUs and GPUs, and I'm sure they'll do their homework before making the next build or buy decision.
When Apple moves into a new area, they go and hire the people they need to do it right. They knew nothing about retailing, so they hired Ron Johnson. When they decided to make the iPod, they hired Tony Fadell, who had a lot of experience in portable devices.
Apple now employs Dan Dobberpuhl , who was the lead architect of the DEC Alpha, and the StrongARM. He was the founder of PA Semi. One of their more recent hires was a GPU designer at ATI and AMD, who also happens to have worked on the Pixar Image Computer back before Pixar became a movie studio.
The way I read the writing on the wall is Apple's going to start making their own CPUs, and possibly their own GPUs as well. Whatever they come up with, I expect it to fit in very well with the work they're doing on LLVM and their software OpenGL implementation.
COBOL's a hell of a lot simpler than C++ or Java, and training people to read it well enough to rewrite legacy apps in a modern language just isn't that hard.
Rothbard's work has been debunked over and over again,
No, it's just been sneered at as you are doing here. Murray was right, you are wrong, and the present collapse of our economy at the end of yet another central-bank fiat money bubble is only the latest proof. We were regulated into this mess, and more regulation, more debt, and more inflation will not help. The house is on fire, dousing it with gasoline is not a solution.
There are economic laws that can't be wished away. You can pretend all you want that Roosevelt helped us out of the great depression, but the facts are that it continued right through his administration and didn't end until his policies were abandoned.
Slashdot Mirror
Red Hat has a higher P/E ratio because their growth prospects are better than sun's. Nothing illogical about that.
-jcr
At #1, I'd put a board of directors that not only gave Schwartz the top job, but let him keep it after losing the bulk of their market cap.
-jcr
You say the graphs don't prove anything.
No, I say that they don't prove what you claim they do. What they show is a very minor improvement in some measures in the midst of the more than decade-long debacle that Hoover and Roosevelt inflicted on the country.
What they also show is your astounding emotional attachment to a preposterous position. Try to work it out in therapy.
-jcr
All recent MacBooks, from what I saw last time I browsed their features to buy one for my wife.
Apple dropped the IrDA port from their laptops when they were still called PowerBooks. The IR sensor on the MacBooks isn't IrDA.
-jcr
The same goes for businesses
The key difference between businesses and governments when it comes to accumulating money, is that businesses obtain money from people who give it to them voluntarily. (Excepting of course, those businesses which use the government to prohibit competition for their products, or even get direct transfers of stolen money like the current round of bailouts.)
-jcr
It's not a 'claim' since I backed it up with graphs PROVING it.
Your graphs proved nothing of the kind. If the Great Depression was over in three years, then we wouldn't even call it the great depression.
-jcr
Did you know the MS Visio is a sad copy of Schwartz's Diagram!
Did Schwartz tell you that he wrote Diagram?
Lighthouse designs produced some very impressive NeXTSTEP apps in their day, but I never heard anyone there say that Scwartz wrote any code.
-jcr
It's a /. hat trick!
It's really not that hard to do. I've gotten "flamebait", "funny", "troll", "Informative" and "insightful" all on the same post before. So have a lot of other people.
-jcr
not YOUR money, GOVERNMENT money
Government is not a productive enterprise. There's no such thing as "government money", it's all taxed, borrowed or inflated away from the people who earn it.
-jcr
Another question is how will this effect prices?
I'm sure that's near the top of the list of considerations when they're making the build or buy decision. If they can get the same kind of product life cycle out of a new architecture that Sun got out of SPARC, it's probably worth doing.
Will the cost of in-house designed chips create a real 'apple tax'?
I would expect that the cost of doing their own designs would be offset by not having to pay the profit margins on Intel, NVidia and AMD parts. Those vendors don't sell Apple parts at cost.
-jcr
Aren't you more concerned that it's not on an isolated network?
That's another major problem. Hard to say which is worse.
-jcr
. It doesn't look like NVidia or ATI are going to invert that priority any time soon, so why not make their own that suits OpenGL well?
This ship has probably sailed, but I'd love to see Apple make some hardware optimized for RenderMan. ;-)
-jcr
I guess you mean OpenCL
No, I was speaking of their software GL renderer. They've put rather more effort into it than one would expect, given that all Macs sold today have some kind of GPU. By maintaining and improving their software implementation, they've got a starting point to put it on any new architecture that they might develop.
-jcr
During the great depression, the economy recovered to the same level it was at, pre-recession, in less than three years.
Wow, that's a far bolder claim that Roosevelt's own propagandists ever made. Probably because it's absolute bullshit.
-jcr
AMD was not a riskier prospect, AMD was a backup plan while intel was the lowest bidder. Or, so I would speculate.
Your speculation is wrong. AMD had arguably better parts; Apple didn't choose them because they weren't confident in AMDs ability to maintain their performance edge over Intel, or deliver sufficient quantities to meet Apple's schedules. They weren't about to go through all the pain of switching to land right back in the same situation they'd had with IBM.
-jcr
Apple dropped IBM's POWER series for Intel marketing dollars and Intel x86 familiar developers.
Wrong on both counts. Intel had been offering money to Apple for years to make the switch, that wasn't a deciding factor. As for x86 familiarity, Apple had no shortage of developers on the platform before the switch.
PPC was abandoned because IBM let them down.
-jcr
The question is, would Apple seriously get into developing their own CPUs?
That would depend on what advantages they thought they could gain from it. They can certainly afford to do it, they've got about 37 billion dollars in cash on hand, they've got most of the talent they'd need for such a project, and they could easily recruit anyone else they might need. Building a whole new architecture isn't an opportunity that comes along that often for a hardware designer these days.
Given how competitive the CPU market is and how hard AMD have to work to even compete with Intel
That's the market for commodity parts. It doesn't apply to vertically integrated companies like IBM with their POWER CPUs or Sun with the SPARC. The question for Apple isn't whether a new CPU would fly with other users, it would be whether it works for Apple's needs. Outside OEM sales would be gravy.
Another thing to keep in mind here is that Apple's very big on recruiting the top talent in any area they go into, and you don't get the best chip designers by offering them run-of-the-mill projects to work on.
-jcr
Does it bother anyone else that "critical medical equipment" was running Windows NT or 2000?
Of course it does. Building any medical equipment around an intrinsically unreliable system is about as irresponsible a decision as anyone could make.
-jcr
SJ stood on a stage a promised a 3GHZ G5 in one year (because IBM had promised it to Apple), and IBM let him down. That, together with IBM's decision not to develop a low-power G5 suitable for laptops is what closed the book on Apple's PPC machines.
They switched to Intel instead of AMD because they had had quite enough of vendor disappointments. AMD was a far riskier prospect.
-jcr
I cited Java as an example of a complicated language that a lot of people use; I don't advocate it as a replacement when porting large COBOL systems.
-jcr
If they build everything in house, they don't have to deal with 'leaks' from other companies
That would be a major factor, but not as big as whatever advantages they could realize from having parts made entirely to their specs. Another major factor would be that if their products are built around their own parts, cloning becomes infeasible.
-jcr
Apple is not going to waste money developing their own chips just for bragging rights.
That's right, they won't do it just for bragging rights. They'll do it for a compelling performance, power consumption, and/or cost advantage. Right now, they pay Intel, Nvidia, and AMD a hell of a lot of money for CPUs and GPUs, and I'm sure they'll do their homework before making the next build or buy decision.
-jcr
When Apple moves into a new area, they go and hire the people they need to do it right. They knew nothing about retailing, so they hired Ron Johnson. When they decided to make the iPod, they hired Tony Fadell, who had a lot of experience in portable devices.
Apple now employs Dan Dobberpuhl , who was the lead architect of the DEC Alpha, and the StrongARM. He was the founder of PA Semi. One of their more recent hires was a GPU designer at ATI and AMD, who also happens to have worked on the Pixar Image Computer back before Pixar became a movie studio.
The way I read the writing on the wall is Apple's going to start making their own CPUs, and possibly their own GPUs as well. Whatever they come up with, I expect it to fit in very well with the work they're doing on LLVM and their software OpenGL implementation.
-jcr
COBOL's a hell of a lot simpler than C++ or Java, and training people to read it well enough to rewrite legacy apps in a modern language just isn't that hard.
-jcr
Rothbard's work has been debunked over and over again,
No, it's just been sneered at as you are doing here. Murray was right, you are wrong, and the present collapse of our economy at the end of yet another central-bank fiat money bubble is only the latest proof. We were regulated into this mess, and more regulation, more debt, and more inflation will not help. The house is on fire, dousing it with gasoline is not a solution.
There are economic laws that can't be wished away. You can pretend all you want that Roosevelt helped us out of the great depression, but the facts are that it continued right through his administration and didn't end until his policies were abandoned.
-jcr