The replica set was very far from an exact 1:1 duplicate. Just comparing pictures of it to the episodes themselves should illustrate that it's an approximation at best. Things are different colours, different shapes, in different places... The chairs stand out as particularly rough approximations, for example.
The problem is that this set is a rather poor reproduction of the original set. Much of that is intentional, as they built the thing for a different purpose than filming a TV series. Heck, even the doors aren't the right shape...
It makes me wonder if it wouldn't make more sense to just rebuild the thing from scratch.
No, I'm talking about their consumer chips. In the P4 era, and even into the Core 2 era, the high end consumer chips cost $1000, and now they cost less than a third that. Intel's pricing (on consumer parts, at least) is substantially better than it was a few years ago.
AMD still has a decent showing in the server market, it's the consumer market that their offerings are lackluster. The only bright spot has been their APUs, but those are only useful in scenarios where fast onboard graphics are more important than fast CPUs, and that's true in very few places. The majority of use cases, like office use, don't need the extra performance, and places that do need the extra performance tend to go discrete anyhow.
There might be a market for them in the mobile space, but AMD's poor performance-per-watt on the CPU side of things hurts the prospects of APUs there.
I don't think anybody can be blamed for 3DFX except 3DFX. They made a crappy product in the VSA-100 and bet the farm on it. The industry rejected the crappy product. nVidia picked up the pieces. I don't think you can blame them for the VSA-100 chip being crappy. The single-chip VSA-100 cards were simultaneously more expensive than the competition but slower in every way than the competition. Throwing multiple VSA-100 chips on a single card was just silly, and then you had the situation where the dual-chip voodoo 5 was outperformed by cheaper single-chip cards from their competitors.
The last decent product 3DFX put out was the Voodoo 2. The Voodoo 3 wasn't a bad product per-se, but it was a result of their moronic purchase of STB. It was the fastest card on the market for a while, but then the GeForce 256 came out and from that point on 3DFX never had any competitive products again.
but I could get a whole cpu + motherboard for $229! Not just the cpu.
I'm not sure what you're going for here... $58 for an ivy bridge compatible mobo, $100 for an ivy bridge processor (G2120), that's $158. That number is smaller than $229.
So, a few years ago the high-end processors from Intel cost $1000 a pop. Today, the high-end chips like the 3770 cost roughly $300... and that's probably their fastest consumer chip, except maybe last generation's hexacore sandy bridges... This seems like a pretty big improvement in price to me. Intel's pricing is better than it has been for many years. I certainly can't ever remember a time before the i-series era where Intel's fastest chips were selling for $300!
You're right, I missed the "per capita" in your comment.
Still, $300 million a year can go pretty far when a Falcon 9 launch (which will eventually be able to carry astronauts) costs $50 million... Let NASA blow all their money on ludicrously overpriced and bureaucratic lift capacity like Orion, Canada can get people into space on our own dime at a fraction the cost with private companies that don't have to build parts of their craft in every different state to get their budget past congress...
Because nobody in the world is offering any sort of commercial launch services, and certainly nobody in California is working on superheavy commercial launch vehicles that might have the capacity to take a probe to Mars...
No, it's not per household, it's per person. Unless every person in a household shares the same Apple ID, which would be ill-advised. If you personally own more than one mac, you can install it on them, but your significant other is going to be paying for their own copy.
And you can upgrade your 2001 installation of Windows XP to Windows 8 for $40 via the online ISO, what's your point? I'm saying they're not comparable.
You're comparing oranges to orangutans. Since 2001, there have been three major consumer releases of Windows (XP, Vista, 7) and nine major consumer releases of OS X (10.0 through 10.8). I'm not trying to say one is better than the other because of this, only that you're doing a direct price comparison between two very different release strategies. Microsoft releases big updates (new version of Windows) for a big cost and small updates for free (service pack), while Apple releases medium updates for a medium cost..
If you want to try to do a more direct comparison, the Win 7 -> Win 8 period for that $70 upgrade encompasses OS X 10.6 ->10.8 for a combined price of $79.
tl;dr: it took me over an hour to hail a cab in Brooklyn. Hailing a cab is impossible in the vast majority of NYC.
I was in NYC this past Sunday. I was in Brooklyn, and had an international flight out of LaGuardia two and a half hours later. Naturally, I assumed this was plenty of time, since it was a 20-30 minute cab ride to the airport. I started on a busy street corner (Nostrand and Fulton), and tried to hail a cab. Of all the many cars passing, virtually none were cabs, any cab that did pass was occupied. I tried calling 411 on my cellphone, and asked it for a taxi company, but that didn't give me anything useful. I tried calling the number of a taxi company a friend had given me, only to be told "We don't serve Brooklyn. Sorry, no, I don't know the number of a company who does." I tried walking into a deli and asking the cashier if he could give me the phone number for a cab, only to be told "No, no, just go and hail one, they will come."
I spent over an hour wandering around the area trying to find ANY unoccupied cab to hail, during which time it got dark making it hard to even tell what vehicle was a cab at all. Finally, I managed to snag one a few blocks away, but only because the driver had just dropped somebody off. I was extremely lucky, he told me, because Taxis don't go to Brooklyn to pick people up unless they're called to do so. I was more lucky than that, though, since the guy was sympathetic to my plight, and drove a bit more aggressively than normal, getting me there two minutes before my flight's cutoff. I gave him a hefty tip, and learned my lesson: don't think you can hail a cab in NYC if you're under time pressure.
PS: I was taking a cab rather than public transit because getting to LaGuardia from where I was would have taken an hour and a half on four separate vehicles including a bus, which is not something I was keen on doing in a foreign country where I had no data plan to help me figure out what to do if I missed a stop.
The entire launch is completely automated from T-10:00, with no human intervention. After that, the only human interaction that might occur would be to force an abort. While it's odd that they didn't remark about the issue (since it would definitely have been obvious from the telemetry), they would not have *called for* engine cut-off or a longer burn, those were automated decisions made by the on-board computer.
There are other costs in there. The quoted price for a Falcon 9 launch fully loaded is $54 million, while NASA is paying $133 million per launch. I suspect the extra costs involve extra requirements NASA has placed on the missions, as well as the inclusion and operation of Dragon. Considering the launch capacity of a v1.0 Falcon 9, which is lower than the weight of a fully loaded Dragon, they can lift (with Dragon) 10,581 lbs of cargo per launch, giving a potential cost to NASA of $12,601 per pound. The space shuttle ended up costing, in practice, about $20k per pound.
I don't know why this initial launch is using up so little of the maximum capacity. Perhaps they intend to ramp it up; they have to, actually, since that 12 launch contract requires a minimum of 44,000 lbs of cargo be lifted.
Furthermore, while the space shuttle was only ever going to get more and more expensive to launch as they became more and more decrepit, SpaceX will continue to get more efficient as they ramp up their production capacity, and introduce new versions of their spacecraft. Early next year, the Falcon 9 v1.1 will launch, increasing the rocket's payload capacity by more than 40% with similar overall launch costs. Later in the year, the Falcon Heavy should launch, increasing payload capacity from the current ~20,000 lbs to 120,000 lbs. Six times the payload capacity as today, but at an estimated cost of roughly 2-2.5x the cost of launching a Falcon 9, further reducing launch costs. The space shuttle, already more expensive, would have just continued to get increasingly expensive. There's a reason why NOBODY contracted NASA for commercial lift services for decades.
On top of that, the Falcon 9 will eventually be able to carry 7 crew into orbit, the same as the space shuttle, at a much lower cost per launch. What we might do with Falcon Heavy, which has multiple times the lift capacity of the space shuttle despite costing a fraction as much, is very exciting.
If the system won't boot because the system volume is the one wearing out, you're still going to need to put it into another machine, Windows or otherwise.
Initially, sure, as you fill it. But being able to cram more games from Steam on a hard disk doesn't mean you can play more than one game at the same time. It doesn't scale linearly to size.
Sure, Windows doesn't take kindly to critical system writes failing, but it's nice that the failure scenario does let you mount the drive on another machine read-only to pull your data off it.
And, of course, three years down the road, something immensely better for the price will be available.
Three years is roughly time timespan between my purchase of a 160GB Intel x25-m for $700, and my purchase of a 180GB Intel 330 for $140... And the 330 is, on top of being immensely cheaper, enormously faster in almost every respect. By the time your 256GB Samsung 830s wear out, you'll likely be able to get something much faster, cheaper, and more capacious.
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Wait, didn't they make that one Next Generation movie, the one with the borg, before deciding to never make any movies ever again?
The replica set was very far from an exact 1:1 duplicate. Just comparing pictures of it to the episodes themselves should illustrate that it's an approximation at best. Things are different colours, different shapes, in different places... The chairs stand out as particularly rough approximations, for example.
The problem is that this set is a rather poor reproduction of the original set. Much of that is intentional, as they built the thing for a different purpose than filming a TV series. Heck, even the doors aren't the right shape...
It makes me wonder if it wouldn't make more sense to just rebuild the thing from scratch.
I'm not sure how a chip can be the fastest consumer processor on the market and not be considered high-end...
No, I'm talking about their consumer chips. In the P4 era, and even into the Core 2 era, the high end consumer chips cost $1000, and now they cost less than a third that. Intel's pricing (on consumer parts, at least) is substantially better than it was a few years ago.
AMD still has a decent showing in the server market, it's the consumer market that their offerings are lackluster. The only bright spot has been their APUs, but those are only useful in scenarios where fast onboard graphics are more important than fast CPUs, and that's true in very few places. The majority of use cases, like office use, don't need the extra performance, and places that do need the extra performance tend to go discrete anyhow.
There might be a market for them in the mobile space, but AMD's poor performance-per-watt on the CPU side of things hurts the prospects of APUs there.
You've got an extra letter in "Nehalem".
I don't think anybody can be blamed for 3DFX except 3DFX. They made a crappy product in the VSA-100 and bet the farm on it. The industry rejected the crappy product. nVidia picked up the pieces. I don't think you can blame them for the VSA-100 chip being crappy. The single-chip VSA-100 cards were simultaneously more expensive than the competition but slower in every way than the competition. Throwing multiple VSA-100 chips on a single card was just silly, and then you had the situation where the dual-chip voodoo 5 was outperformed by cheaper single-chip cards from their competitors.
The last decent product 3DFX put out was the Voodoo 2. The Voodoo 3 wasn't a bad product per-se, but it was a result of their moronic purchase of STB. It was the fastest card on the market for a while, but then the GeForce 256 came out and from that point on 3DFX never had any competitive products again.
The Israeli team may not manufacture the current parts themselves, but the 22nm Intel fab in Israel certainly does.
Your own link shows a 22nm fab in Israel, so all current-generation Intel fabs are not in the US.
but I could get a whole cpu + motherboard for $229! Not just the cpu.
I'm not sure what you're going for here... $58 for an ivy bridge compatible mobo, $100 for an ivy bridge processor (G2120), that's $158. That number is smaller than $229.
So, a few years ago the high-end processors from Intel cost $1000 a pop. Today, the high-end chips like the 3770 cost roughly $300... and that's probably their fastest consumer chip, except maybe last generation's hexacore sandy bridges... This seems like a pretty big improvement in price to me. Intel's pricing is better than it has been for many years. I certainly can't ever remember a time before the i-series era where Intel's fastest chips were selling for $300!
You're right, I missed the "per capita" in your comment.
Still, $300 million a year can go pretty far when a Falcon 9 launch (which will eventually be able to carry astronauts) costs $50 million... Let NASA blow all their money on ludicrously overpriced and bureaucratic lift capacity like Orion, Canada can get people into space on our own dime at a fraction the cost with private companies that don't have to build parts of their craft in every different state to get their budget past congress...
Because nobody in the world is offering any sort of commercial launch services, and certainly nobody in California is working on superheavy commercial launch vehicles that might have the capacity to take a probe to Mars...
So, you're saying we spend twice as much per capita on our space program?
It installs just fine on a $599 mac mini.
No, it's not per household, it's per person. Unless every person in a household shares the same Apple ID, which would be ill-advised. If you personally own more than one mac, you can install it on them, but your significant other is going to be paying for their own copy.
And you can upgrade your 2001 installation of Windows XP to Windows 8 for $40 via the online ISO, what's your point? I'm saying they're not comparable.
You're comparing oranges to orangutans. Since 2001, there have been three major consumer releases of Windows (XP, Vista, 7) and nine major consumer releases of OS X (10.0 through 10.8). I'm not trying to say one is better than the other because of this, only that you're doing a direct price comparison between two very different release strategies. Microsoft releases big updates (new version of Windows) for a big cost and small updates for free (service pack), while Apple releases medium updates for a medium cost..
If you want to try to do a more direct comparison, the Win 7 -> Win 8 period for that $70 upgrade encompasses OS X 10.6 ->10.8 for a combined price of $79.
tl;dr: it took me over an hour to hail a cab in Brooklyn. Hailing a cab is impossible in the vast majority of NYC.
I was in NYC this past Sunday. I was in Brooklyn, and had an international flight out of LaGuardia two and a half hours later. Naturally, I assumed this was plenty of time, since it was a 20-30 minute cab ride to the airport. I started on a busy street corner (Nostrand and Fulton), and tried to hail a cab. Of all the many cars passing, virtually none were cabs, any cab that did pass was occupied. I tried calling 411 on my cellphone, and asked it for a taxi company, but that didn't give me anything useful. I tried calling the number of a taxi company a friend had given me, only to be told "We don't serve Brooklyn. Sorry, no, I don't know the number of a company who does." I tried walking into a deli and asking the cashier if he could give me the phone number for a cab, only to be told "No, no, just go and hail one, they will come."
I spent over an hour wandering around the area trying to find ANY unoccupied cab to hail, during which time it got dark making it hard to even tell what vehicle was a cab at all. Finally, I managed to snag one a few blocks away, but only because the driver had just dropped somebody off. I was extremely lucky, he told me, because Taxis don't go to Brooklyn to pick people up unless they're called to do so. I was more lucky than that, though, since the guy was sympathetic to my plight, and drove a bit more aggressively than normal, getting me there two minutes before my flight's cutoff. I gave him a hefty tip, and learned my lesson: don't think you can hail a cab in NYC if you're under time pressure.
PS: I was taking a cab rather than public transit because getting to LaGuardia from where I was would have taken an hour and a half on four separate vehicles including a bus, which is not something I was keen on doing in a foreign country where I had no data plan to help me figure out what to do if I missed a stop.
The entire launch is completely automated from T-10:00, with no human intervention. After that, the only human interaction that might occur would be to force an abort. While it's odd that they didn't remark about the issue (since it would definitely have been obvious from the telemetry), they would not have *called for* engine cut-off or a longer burn, those were automated decisions made by the on-board computer.
There are other costs in there. The quoted price for a Falcon 9 launch fully loaded is $54 million, while NASA is paying $133 million per launch. I suspect the extra costs involve extra requirements NASA has placed on the missions, as well as the inclusion and operation of Dragon. Considering the launch capacity of a v1.0 Falcon 9, which is lower than the weight of a fully loaded Dragon, they can lift (with Dragon) 10,581 lbs of cargo per launch, giving a potential cost to NASA of $12,601 per pound. The space shuttle ended up costing, in practice, about $20k per pound.
I don't know why this initial launch is using up so little of the maximum capacity. Perhaps they intend to ramp it up; they have to, actually, since that 12 launch contract requires a minimum of 44,000 lbs of cargo be lifted.
Furthermore, while the space shuttle was only ever going to get more and more expensive to launch as they became more and more decrepit, SpaceX will continue to get more efficient as they ramp up their production capacity, and introduce new versions of their spacecraft. Early next year, the Falcon 9 v1.1 will launch, increasing the rocket's payload capacity by more than 40% with similar overall launch costs. Later in the year, the Falcon Heavy should launch, increasing payload capacity from the current ~20,000 lbs to 120,000 lbs. Six times the payload capacity as today, but at an estimated cost of roughly 2-2.5x the cost of launching a Falcon 9, further reducing launch costs. The space shuttle, already more expensive, would have just continued to get increasingly expensive. There's a reason why NOBODY contracted NASA for commercial lift services for decades.
On top of that, the Falcon 9 will eventually be able to carry 7 crew into orbit, the same as the space shuttle, at a much lower cost per launch. What we might do with Falcon Heavy, which has multiple times the lift capacity of the space shuttle despite costing a fraction as much, is very exciting.
If the system won't boot because the system volume is the one wearing out, you're still going to need to put it into another machine, Windows or otherwise.
Initially, sure, as you fill it. But being able to cram more games from Steam on a hard disk doesn't mean you can play more than one game at the same time. It doesn't scale linearly to size.
Sure, Windows doesn't take kindly to critical system writes failing, but it's nice that the failure scenario does let you mount the drive on another machine read-only to pull your data off it.
And, of course, three years down the road, something immensely better for the price will be available.
Three years is roughly time timespan between my purchase of a 160GB Intel x25-m for $700, and my purchase of a 180GB Intel 330 for $140... And the 330 is, on top of being immensely cheaper, enormously faster in almost every respect. By the time your 256GB Samsung 830s wear out, you'll likely be able to get something much faster, cheaper, and more capacious.