Go for Canon, Epson also has the same inflated ink prices, currently Canon is the deal for the day, fair ink prices compared with very good printers and generally a good company behind it, you cannot beat that combo.
HP currently is on a major decline with their printers over here in Europe (already second or third place and going down even more swiftly)
I am just guessing, but in the end this region coding decision probably will be considered to be HPs biggest mistake after 2000 and probably a big problem for the long term revenues of HP (as is HPs current ink pricing policy which drives people away)
No wonder Asian companies take over the markets of US companies, US companies have the tendencies to outgreed themselves out of any market they dominate.
Over here in Europe HP exaggerated too much with their price inflation regarding printer ink.
People currently are flocking away in masses from HP towards manufacturers with cheaper ink (you can see the trend in various printer forums)
HP cannot feel it now because many people still have HP printers, but those will be slowly phased out over the years and then HP will feel the wrath of the consumer over its gold ink.
I am currently giving HP another 2 years until the hit in sales can be seen in their quarterly revenue statistics, given the fact, that HP currently lives on overpriced ink fed into customers mouths.
Not if you want processing power without noise in a small formfactor... then you have to go the Pentium-M route and aPentium-M combined with a fitting motherboard is more expensive than the whole Apple...
The only way you can be cheaper than the apple is if you go the C3 self building route, but the C3 is slow.
If you go for an Effizeon with a decent mobo you are still slower than Apple but you reach the same pricerange
(I am not counting the soft in, because you can use Linux)
Actually it is not that hard, openoffice is very modular and well designed, the origins (Starview classlib and StarOffice) were multiplatform also covering Apple.
The main problem about a new apple port is the lack of developers. Apple does not do it, there is not enough developers willing to port the UI classes to Cocoa from the community and Sun won't do it either.
Sure a first port could not cover the ui guidelines to 100% but at least it would be without X and would access the finder and printer dialog.
The ECMA standard only supports 10% of the core APIs of.net, Microsoft is holding several patents on other API parts so it is questionable on how long Mono can be able to clone the parts outside of ECMA.
It is not replacing that Cruft. Since Microsoft roots lots of the api back into Win32 it is more like putting another easier accessable OO Layer on top of it and mixing lots of C# code into it as well.
Apple has been there since the good ole NeXT days and KDE also is there, as well as there was BeOS.
What Microsoft currently is doing is, they kick out COM which was overly complicated and lousy and replace it with another component technology which is easier to use and easier to access (and even more bound to Windows than Com was)
Apple has had that since the good ole NeXT days with OpenStep (now called cocoa) it is pretty much the same except that the main implementation language for the objects is ObjectiveC, but currently you can use java as well to access and or implement those (see the similarity)
KDE has that with KParts and bindings in both directions into many languages although C++ is the preferred language of choice there.
Ditto for Beos. Microsoft tried it in the early to mid nineties with Com and basically failed because they shot over the top with their implementation and never really could get it that stable to base the whole API on top of it. (The original plan was that Windows should become a set of many components where you only had to glue your app together, like NeXT showed that it can work and later KDE and even before Microsoft OpenOffice/StarOffice (yes StarOffice really is that old) showed. IBM and Apple back then wanted to go that way with Taligent and failed due to whatever reasons and Microsoft failed because they shot themselves into the foot with their programming model they chose for Com (and never admitted that)
So what Microsoft is doing currently is catching up to most other systems in this regard by moving the API into a component layer which is easier to access and basically tying everything stronger than ever into windows than they used to (they basically force you to move your development process to C# and make the app unportable into other systems)
Sitting behind a firewall and having a virus scanner and whatever and then using IE and Outlook is like having a seatbelt but not using it hoping that the airbag will save the life anyway.
Ha... plug a USB pad into that thing... hook it onto TV add SNES, ZSNES or any other emulator fetch out the roms (you legally own of course) and you have the best gaming brick ever made....
100 for a good mini itx case, you have to go for the cheapest C3 to be fanless then you are already around 200, add 50 for a CD rom, another 25-50 for ram, then you are already on 300, add to that a suitable power supply, a notebook harddisk (which is around 100) you are already on 400. Well you are a tad cheaper than apple, but this configuration is slow as molasses. To get the same speed, you have to bypass Efficeon itx boards, which start at around 300+ (with this price you already are above Apple if you add the components) and go for Centrino with a shared mem. Then you are from the board and processor alone above the Apple offer and then you have a processor which is faster than the apple offering at the same clockspeed, but a graphics chip which is way slower. The board processor combo in miniATX formfactor should be obtainable at around 500+ if you can get it even at that price (we are speaking of small volumes here)
Face it the Apple offering is the best bang for the buck you can get currently in the small/silent PC arena. With an Efficeon or Centrino Board, depending on your needs (should it be cheaper or faster) the second option, but both options are already more expensive if xou add all the parts even if you build the system for yourself.
Dont even start to talk about run of the mill prebuilt silent systems with small formfactor decent ones on the PC side of things without any software basically around 700 and more, same goes for ARM based offerings (PDAs aside which miss connectivity)
It is indeed, even if you go for the self building route on the mini form factor / mini itx formfactor you end up pretty much at the same price using the worst components in existence currently for the PC...
Have been looking into various miniITX solutions for the last year, if you go for prebuilt you can call yourself lucky if you can get barebone hardware with a good thermal design for less than 800USD if you need something at the same speed at the new Mac you pay around 1000-1200 for the hardware alone on the PC side.
The instant I saw the price tag of this thing and saw that a G4 was in there I hit the buy button. All the screamers face it, the mini Mac currently is one of the cheapest silent PC solutions on the market currently in existence and also one of the fastest (only Centrino based ones are faster)
Look at the machine. Really small form factor. USB2.0 and Firewire, good Unix per default, Linux runs well on it, it has a really low power consumption and it is basically noiseless (hopefully but the pics indicate it)
You know what this thing basically screams silent PC and Homeserver all over it.
Is it really that overpriced. I would say no, there are similar silent PC machines on the PC side of things. If you go for the 500-600 USD pricerange you end up mostly with something massively slower (C3 based) and lot less ports.
Or even more expensive, you cannot find anything from Hush PC at that price and most of that stuff has huge heatpipes into the back to cope with thermal issues
If you want something decent on the PC side of things in this area with around the same ram and hd configs you spend much more (Centrino based industrial solution which you cannot get that easy)
There also are several vendors which sell stuff based on arm, that stuff is 700USD+ (looked into those options recently as well)
Sorry to say that, but I have been looking into various options for such sleek homeservers which are silent and dont drain lots of energy and never though that apple would deliver one day the best bang for the buck.
Of course if you want to have a run of the mill our fans are louder than the one of the other company computer which has labeled GHz monster all over it, you might be better off with a standard PC solution, but those beasts are dead awful if you either want something small and/or something which does not take a lot of power, basically something you want to turn into a home/fileserver with some extra duties.
But not a comparable Dell, which makes less noise has less power consumption and the same form factor and connectivity. I dont know why many criers dont see the benefits of this machine, if you go for silent low power computing on the pc side of things, you end up spending significantly more.
It actually helped Sony to become #1 in the market and it helped Microsoft to get a foot into the market.
Face it every console is doomed to fail, because it cannot reach critical mass if it cannot please the hardcore users.
Nintendo constantly refused to see this angle of console business whereas Sony saw that from day 1.
I rather doubt that the speed gain would be that significant, history has shown again and again, vm based solutions once you leave out the garbage collections and other performance drainers like boundary checks and once you add decent runtime optimization is pretty much up to par to native compilation.
Not really MacOSX uses a Mac Microkernel which has a BSD personality on top of it and some drivers on top of bsd and some on top of Mach.
WindowsNT started as a plain Microkernel but in later incarnations some of the multimedia stuff was moved to the kernel layer (but not into the kernel) to reduce latency times (and decreased stability)
Which if you follow the original posting is quite right.
a) the original 0.x kernel was not very well designed and programmed
b) a microkernel approach still is the better approach
Actually people would want their stuff as a replacment for VIA in their home theatre boxes and other stuff, basically the market Via has had dominate for years now.
Transmeta simply overlooked the importance of self builders and system builders as the first step of getting into the consumer chain.
Sad to say that, but Transmeta marketing is to blame.
Face it, Transmeta could have had the market via now has with their C3 and Intel partially holds with their Pentium-M Centrino.
The main problem was, that Transmeta went from day 1 to the manufacturers only, and were leaving the early adopters hardcore system builders out. Add to that an emerging home theatre pc market which Transmeta failed to cover that way (nobody bought at the early stages a HTPC from a manufacturer and most people still dont do due to DRM and other nastyness)
and a VIA which just said to the people, we are not fast, but they can handle the stuff you want to do with your HTPCs self made routers, firewalls, fileservers (you name it), we are cheap you can buy our stuff from the next vendor on the net and we will support you, and Transmeta was on a losing ground.
On one hand there was ARM which only sold cores and they did need less power, on the other hand there was VIA with the mentality you can buy our stuff even as a private person, and on the Notebook computer segment there were the Heavyweights Intel and AMD crushing Transmeta left and right.
So where did Transmeta stand there, basically nowhere because they refused people (and there were thousands who wanted to buy that stuff at an affordable price) the hardware, by selling only reference designs and not having others selling decent boards to an affordable price. Add to that that in Europa and other markets you basically could not get the stuff and that interested people were complaining in forums about that situation for years and you have a company doomed from day 1.
Now they want to concentrate on the core selling business, I wish them good luck they will need it, between a very good ARM on one side and VIA which still also sells boards to people if they need them on the other side and an Intel with a very good low to medium power solution on the server/notebook corner of things.
Also IBM is in the business or at least other companies selling cores on the based PowerPC design.
Guess it is time to say to Transmeta, goodbye it was nice knowing you.
(Hopefully not but there is a high chance)
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Go for Canon, Epson also has the same inflated ink prices, currently Canon is the deal for the day, fair ink prices compared with very good printers and generally a good company behind it, you cannot beat that combo. HP currently is on a major decline with their printers over here in Europe (already second or third place and going down even more swiftly)
I am just guessing, but in the end this region coding decision probably will be considered to be HPs biggest mistake after 2000 and probably a big problem for the long term revenues of HP (as is HPs current ink pricing policy which drives people away)
No wonder Asian companies take over the markets of US companies, US companies have the tendencies to outgreed themselves out of any market they dominate.
Over here in Europe HP exaggerated too much with their price inflation regarding printer ink. People currently are flocking away in masses from HP towards manufacturers with cheaper ink (you can see the trend in various printer forums) HP cannot feel it now because many people still have HP printers, but those will be slowly phased out over the years and then HP will feel the wrath of the consumer over its gold ink. I am currently giving HP another 2 years until the hit in sales can be seen in their quarterly revenue statistics, given the fact, that HP currently lives on overpriced ink fed into customers mouths.
And is loud as hell and sucks energy like a motor
Standard Fujitsu Laptop HD... Basically the whole Mac mini has the same performance and speed as an iBook.
Not if you want processing power without noise in a small formfactor... then you have to go the Pentium-M route and aPentium-M combined with a fitting motherboard is more expensive than the whole Apple... The only way you can be cheaper than the apple is if you go the C3 self building route, but the C3 is slow. If you go for an Effizeon with a decent mobo you are still slower than Apple but you reach the same pricerange (I am not counting the soft in, because you can use Linux)
Actually it is not that hard, openoffice is very modular and well designed, the origins (Starview classlib and StarOffice) were multiplatform also covering Apple. The main problem about a new apple port is the lack of developers. Apple does not do it, there is not enough developers willing to port the UI classes to Cocoa from the community and Sun won't do it either.
Sure a first port could not cover the ui guidelines to 100% but at least it would be without X and would access the finder and printer dialog.
The ECMA standard only supports 10% of the core APIs of .net, Microsoft is holding several patents on other API parts so it is questionable on how long Mono can be able to clone the parts outside of ECMA.
It is not replacing that Cruft. Since Microsoft roots lots of the api back into Win32 it is more like putting another easier accessable OO Layer on top of it and mixing lots of C# code into it as well. Apple has been there since the good ole NeXT days and KDE also is there, as well as there was BeOS. What Microsoft currently is doing is, they kick out COM which was overly complicated and lousy and replace it with another component technology which is easier to use and easier to access (and even more bound to Windows than Com was) Apple has had that since the good ole NeXT days with OpenStep (now called cocoa) it is pretty much the same except that the main implementation language for the objects is ObjectiveC, but currently you can use java as well to access and or implement those (see the similarity) KDE has that with KParts and bindings in both directions into many languages although C++ is the preferred language of choice there. Ditto for Beos. Microsoft tried it in the early to mid nineties with Com and basically failed because they shot over the top with their implementation and never really could get it that stable to base the whole API on top of it. (The original plan was that Windows should become a set of many components where you only had to glue your app together, like NeXT showed that it can work and later KDE and even before Microsoft OpenOffice/StarOffice (yes StarOffice really is that old) showed. IBM and Apple back then wanted to go that way with Taligent and failed due to whatever reasons and Microsoft failed because they shot themselves into the foot with their programming model they chose for Com (and never admitted that) So what Microsoft is doing currently is catching up to most other systems in this regard by moving the API into a component layer which is easier to access and basically tying everything stronger than ever into windows than they used to (they basically force you to move your development process to C# and make the app unportable into other systems)
Sitting behind a firewall and having a virus scanner and whatever and then using IE and Outlook is like having a seatbelt but not using it hoping that the airbag will save the life anyway.
All they have to do is to give up the IE and Outlook, or even better abandon Windows at all.
The X-Box is not portable and you have to hack it open to do all those things....
Ha... plug a USB pad into that thing... hook it onto TV add SNES, ZSNES or any other emulator fetch out the roms (you legally own of course) and you have the best gaming brick ever made....
100 for a good mini itx case, you have to go for the cheapest C3 to be fanless then you are already around 200, add 50 for a CD rom, another 25-50 for ram, then you are already on 300, add to that a suitable power supply, a notebook harddisk (which is around 100) you are already on 400. Well you are a tad cheaper than apple, but this configuration is slow as molasses. To get the same speed, you have to bypass Efficeon itx boards, which start at around 300+ (with this price you already are above Apple if you add the components) and go for Centrino with a shared mem. Then you are from the board and processor alone above the Apple offer and then you have a processor which is faster than the apple offering at the same clockspeed, but a graphics chip which is way slower. The board processor combo in miniATX formfactor should be obtainable at around 500+ if you can get it even at that price (we are speaking of small volumes here)
Face it the Apple offering is the best bang for the buck you can get currently in the small/silent PC arena. With an Efficeon or Centrino Board, depending on your needs (should it be cheaper or faster) the second option, but both options are already more expensive if xou add all the parts even if you build the system for yourself.
Dont even start to talk about run of the mill prebuilt silent systems with small formfactor decent ones on the PC side of things without any software basically around 700 and more, same goes for ARM based offerings (PDAs aside which miss connectivity)
It is indeed, even if you go for the self building route on the mini form factor / mini itx formfactor you end up pretty much at the same price using the worst components in existence currently for the PC...
Have been looking into various miniITX solutions for the last year, if you go for prebuilt you can call yourself lucky if you can get barebone hardware with a good thermal design for less than 800USD if you need something at the same speed at the new Mac you pay around 1000-1200 for the hardware alone on the PC side.
The instant I saw the price tag of this thing and saw that a G4 was in there I hit the buy button. All the screamers face it, the mini Mac currently is one of the cheapest silent PC solutions on the market currently in existence and also one of the fastest (only Centrino based ones are faster)
Look at the machine. Really small form factor. USB2.0 and Firewire, good Unix per default, Linux runs well on it, it has a really low power consumption and it is basically noiseless (hopefully but the pics indicate it) You know what this thing basically screams silent PC and Homeserver all over it.
Is it really that overpriced. I would say no, there are similar silent PC machines on the PC side of things. If you go for the 500-600 USD pricerange you end up mostly with something massively slower (C3 based) and lot less ports.
Or even more expensive, you cannot find anything from Hush PC at that price and most of that stuff has huge heatpipes into the back to cope with thermal issues
If you want something decent on the PC side of things in this area with around the same ram and hd configs you spend much more (Centrino based industrial solution which you cannot get that easy)
There also are several vendors which sell stuff based on arm, that stuff is 700USD+ (looked into those options recently as well)
Sorry to say that, but I have been looking into various options for such sleek homeservers which are silent and dont drain lots of energy and never though that apple would deliver one day the best bang for the buck.
Of course if you want to have a run of the mill our fans are louder than the one of the other company computer which has labeled GHz monster all over it, you might be better off with a standard PC solution, but those beasts are dead awful if you either want something small and/or something which does not take a lot of power, basically something you want to turn into a home/fileserver with some extra duties.
But not a comparable Dell, which makes less noise has less power consumption and the same form factor and connectivity. I dont know why many criers dont see the benefits of this machine, if you go for silent low power computing on the pc side of things, you end up spending significantly more.
I wanted to buy the mac mini... guess not anymore...
It actually helped Sony to become #1 in the market and it helped Microsoft to get a foot into the market. Face it every console is doomed to fail, because it cannot reach critical mass if it cannot please the hardcore users. Nintendo constantly refused to see this angle of console business whereas Sony saw that from day 1.
When the marketing people discovered this internet thing and learned that a computer exists...
Real life, you even can get sex... But be warned dying is final (unless you are Buddhist of course)
I rather doubt that the speed gain would be that significant, history has shown again and again, vm based solutions once you leave out the garbage collections and other performance drainers like boundary checks and once you add decent runtime optimization is pretty much up to par to native compilation.
Not really MacOSX uses a Mac Microkernel which has a BSD personality on top of it and some drivers on top of bsd and some on top of Mach. WindowsNT started as a plain Microkernel but in later incarnations some of the multimedia stuff was moved to the kernel layer (but not into the kernel) to reduce latency times (and decreased stability)
Which if you follow the original posting is quite right. a) the original 0.x kernel was not very well designed and programmed b) a microkernel approach still is the better approach
Actually people would want their stuff as a replacment for VIA in their home theatre boxes and other stuff, basically the market Via has had dominate for years now. Transmeta simply overlooked the importance of self builders and system builders as the first step of getting into the consumer chain.
Sad to say that, but Transmeta marketing is to blame. Face it, Transmeta could have had the market via now has with their C3 and Intel partially holds with their Pentium-M Centrino. The main problem was, that Transmeta went from day 1 to the manufacturers only, and were leaving the early adopters hardcore system builders out. Add to that an emerging home theatre pc market which Transmeta failed to cover that way (nobody bought at the early stages a HTPC from a manufacturer and most people still dont do due to DRM and other nastyness)
and a VIA which just said to the people, we are not fast, but they can handle the stuff you want to do with your HTPCs self made routers, firewalls, fileservers (you name it), we are cheap you can buy our stuff from the next vendor on the net and we will support you, and Transmeta was on a losing ground.
On one hand there was ARM which only sold cores and they did need less power, on the other hand there was VIA with the mentality you can buy our stuff even as a private person, and on the Notebook computer segment there were the Heavyweights Intel and AMD crushing Transmeta left and right.
So where did Transmeta stand there, basically nowhere because they refused people (and there were thousands who wanted to buy that stuff at an affordable price) the hardware, by selling only reference designs and not having others selling decent boards to an affordable price. Add to that that in Europa and other markets you basically could not get the stuff and that interested people were complaining in forums about that situation for years and you have a company doomed from day 1.
Now they want to concentrate on the core selling business, I wish them good luck they will need it, between a very good ARM on one side and VIA which still also sells boards to people if they need them on the other side and an Intel with a very good low to medium power solution on the server/notebook corner of things. Also IBM is in the business or at least other companies selling cores on the based PowerPC design.
Guess it is time to say to Transmeta, goodbye it was nice knowing you. (Hopefully not but there is a high chance)