The USA was only 30 minutes away. The missiles took the closest path...across the pole.
You are preoccupied with the only scenario that mattered to the Americans: a missile attack. What was a real threat to the Europeans was a ground war in Europe that did not involve any direct hostilities between the US and the USSR. And that was a fairly likely scenario: the US and USSR knew that it would have been the end of both countries to send off their missiles, but a ground war in Europe would have been acceptable to both.
along with the point that the USA repeatedly put its ass on the line for Europe, only to receive lukewarm thanks at best,
And why do you think the US did that? Out of nobility? Out of humanitarian instincts? I don't think so. The US got involved in Europe because if Europe had fallen to the Nazis or to the Soviet Union, the US would have been in very deep trouble, economically and politically.
While Americans have delusions of grandeur because of a huge military-industrial complex, the reality of it all is that the US needs Europe at least as much as Europe needs the US. And until American politicians and voters come to appreciate that, there will be a lot more "hostility" because 600 million Europeans don't like having their foreign and defense policy dictated to them by 300 million US voters. That was vaguely acceptable in the decades after WWII, but it is coming to an end now. You'll just have to deal with it.
European militaries still persist with this outdated tradition for some strange reason.
The "strange reason" is that European militaries stopped engaging in extraterritorial adventures. It makes perfect sense to use draftees to defend your own country, and you don't have to worry about "atrocities" either when your military is only defending your own territory.
But, you are right, for the kinds of actions the US military engages in, you do need a professional military; you couldn't do it with draftees. Draftees would not be well enough trained to handle it, and US voters wouldn't go along with wars like those in Iraq if they knew that their sons and daughters might just get drafted, sent over there, and killed.
Of course, if the conscript troops had spotted any submarines, the Swedish would have probably just blamed America.
To Europeans, US involvement in Europe was both a gamble and a mixed blessing. The gamble worked and resulted in great wealth and freedom for Europeans, but if it had failed, it would have turned Europe into a nuclear wasteland. To Americans, sitting comfortably in their living rooms thousands of miles away, that threat was much less immediate.
That would be one way of financing the space program: set things up so that the only way the RIAA could stop P2P file sharing is by sending manned spacecraft or very intelligent probes to Mars.
So, what about it? Let's put a solar-powered P2P node on Mars with 100G worth of MP3s and some simple defensive capabilities. Then, let's see how long it will take th RIAA to launch a 20 man crew to Mars to track down and kill the thing.
Why are electric vehicles considered zero emission?
Probably because the vehicles don't have any emissions (duh).
You burn fossil fuels to make electricity, then transfer that power into chemical energy in the batteries, then turn that energy back into electricity later to turn an electric motor to drive to the store... how is this not causing emmissions? Oh, and don't forget that according to the 2nd law of thermodynamics, you've lost energy at every step in that process, so you are probably not as efficient as a good gasoline engine (by good, I mean efficient - not a V-12 Dodge monster).
The point of zero emission is not to conserve energy or to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it is to improve air quality in crowded cities.
However, electric vehicles may, as a side-benefit, with both. Regenerative braking and other features mean that EVs can operate more efficiently in city traffic. Furthermore, centralizing power generation makes it easier to clean emissions and to choose among a wide variety of renewable fuels.
With gas-powered vehicles, every vehicle needs to contain emission control equipment, and changing from one fuel to another is next to impossible because so many private owners have to replace their vehicles.
why is it that asking people to give their real name before posting something is against free speech ?
Because, apart from governmental repercussions, there is peer pressure and societal disapproval for unpopular speech. If you force people to use their real names, you will get much less disagreement. Which is, of course, just what repressive governments like.
think about it. maybe a society where no one has to hide behind pseudonyms to speak their mind is more "pro-free-speech" than one where people feel the need not to compromise themselves or something by saying their opinion.
People have thought about this for a couple of thousand years. Many great works of literature, social criticism, reportage, and political science have been published under pseudonyms. Pseudonyms are essential for free speech.
If you want to get rid of the need for pseudonyms, you have to change human nature (peer pressure, retaliation, flaming, all that) first. Good luck.
As for the Sharp, I don't have the exact specs, but it has no spindle and it fits into your hand. It seems to be comparable to the big Sony Clies.
What is this obsession with iBook size anyway? The iBook is 4.5 pounds, has two spindles, has a battery life of about 4h, and a 12" diagonal. That's a hefty, big, power-hungry laptop. In the PC world, you can get a 2.5 pound, 1 spindle laptop with an 8h battery life that is considerably smaller, too.
i mean, if china and the us, or china and taiwan, or pakistan and india, or any other country with a well-developed technical base started seriously getting pissed off with another, you can BET the websites in each other's countries would have a SERIOUS problem
"SERIOUS problem"? Like what? People get a slow response from the Taiwanese tourism site? No more Taiwanese posts to Slashdot? What is this "serious trouble"?
Anybody who wants to cause that kind of trouble can achieve it more easily by overloading phone lines, putting white powder into envelopes, or spreading rumors about SARS.
holier than thou, no corporate geek is smarter than me false sense of security is just as dangerous as false alarmism, no?
All I know is that Symantec has never caught a virus on my PC, but it has caused numerous software to fail, sometimes in very mysterious ways that were difficult to track down. Regardless of whether there is a problem to be fixed in the first place, Symantec is not the company to fix it.
While the article has a number of glaring errors, the general point the author is making is right that in terms of raw computer performance, Java has become quite fast.
But that's not really a good thing. Sun pushed on the JIT on the theory that that would address performance problems. It didn't. The Perl and Python runtimes are much slower than Java's, but Perl and Python applications generally start up much faster and are considerably more responsive.
Java is as sluggish as ever, and more bloated than it has ever been. What is really responsible for Java's poor performance for real-world applications is its class loading, memory footprint, and just plain awful library design and implementation.
I think you missed my point. My point wasn't that Qt is easier or harder than wxWindows or Gtk+. Investing six months of time in any toolkit is six months of time, no matter how much return you get on that.
If you invest that time in Qt, you just spent six months of your life learning something that you then have to pay $2000 to actually use commercially. If you spend the sme six months on Gtk+ or wxWindows, you can use your resulting skills commercially without paying anybody anything.
It is possible that Qt is easier to learn than Gtk+ (although I found Gtk+ pretty straightforward), but the point is that whatever time you spend on Gtk+ teaches you about something you can use commercially.
As far as my employers go, spending an amount of money lesser than or equal to the cost of having me spending the extra time necessary without the material said amount would have bought, has not been a problem.
First of all, this isn't a management issue, it's tax and accounting.
More importantly, however, who establishes that you are "spending an amount of money lesser or equal to the cost of having [you spend] the extra time necessary without the material"? You may claim that regular deliveries of chocolate sundaes by scantily clad women enhances your productivity, but that doesn't make it so. Most companies think that Microsoft Office and VisualStudio enhance their productivity, but that doesn't necessarily make it so. "Better productivity" is the rallying cry of any company that wants to sell you something really expensive. It's such a great claim because nobody ever verifies it.
That, I can't really argue with:) I'm sure that's the most common way, yes. The reason I did mention the no-cost license was for non corporate driven open source development. I'm sorry I didn't state that clearer.
I and most other people were clear about what the license says. We disagree about what it means and what the consequences are. So, don't apologize: your view is the same view as Troll Tech marketing. I just happen to think that that's not a useful position for most actual users.
Perhaps I am old fashioned, but I enjoy cooking and the results of cooking
Cooking as a hobby isn't "old fashioned" at all; it's a new-fangled hobby for rich folks. And, yes, some hobbies are harder to pursue living in cities.
I'd just like to point out that if you have any C++ experience whatsoever, learning Qt will take you much less time than "months". You can be productive with Qt within several days of starting to use it, if not several _hours_.
It's naive to think that you can learn and understand any GUI library consisting of hundreds of classes and thousands of methods within "hours". After a few hours, you can start producing code, but you'll have to refer constantly to the documentation.
The cost of a QT license amounts to roughly the same money it takes to have a decent developer working for a week or two.
That's not how budgets work in real companies: salaries, benefits, expenses, and capital are all different pots of money. $2000 for software is a huge expense, and you can't trade it off against salaries.
And this is ONLY if you're going to sell the end result
In real companies, the decision to open source something comes at the end of the development process, not at the beginning. That means that even companies that often produce open source software (like ours) would end up having to buy commercial Qt licenses for everybody anyway, since Troll Tech requires you to buy the commercial license when you start development.
Just keep in mind that if you develop for KDE/Qt, you spend months learning Qt and tooling up for it. Then you end up paying thousands of dollars to them if you actually want to create a product.
Using Qt would make a lot of sense if this was still the early 1980's and there were no good C/C++ toolkits around. But today, there are plenty of good toolkits. You get the entire Microsoft Enterprise developer suite for less money than a Qt developer license. And you can use Gtk+/Gtkmm and wxWindows for free, even for commercial applications.
Is Qt that much better to justify its steep price? I don't think so. But you have to decide for yourself. Just be aware of the price before you invest the time learning it.
Yes, living in NYC is expensive. But that's not necessarily related to the presence or absence of cars--it's just a great place to live. After all, owning a car in NYC is perfectly feasible, it just costs even more.
What is the actual annual minimal cost for a car?
If you are going to be a frugal, do-it-yourself car owner, compare it to frugal non-car ownership, which might mean things like bicycling, ride sharing, and walking.
I'm pretty frugal when it comes to my car, and my annual expenses are almost twice as much. And if I had a regular car (as opposed to a really old Japanese car), it would be even more. You can get a lot of delivery and public transport for $6000+/year.
If I found a good job there, I'd move to NYC without hesitation.
Obviously, you didn't get the hang of living in NYC:-)
Everyday life is a hassle. Going grocery shopping is a hassle.
Why in the world would you go "grocery shopping", in the suburban sense? Eating out is cheaper and better. Delivery takes a few minutes. Grocery shopping for most Manhattanites means "olives for the Martini" or maybe "a gourmet salad for after the show/party".
Purchasing anything that you can't carry easily in your arms is a hassle.
That's what delivery and doormen are for.
Taxis? Always available?! HA. Try catching a taxi anywhere in midtown around 11 to midnight on weekends when the theaters let out. Try catching a taxi anywhere during rush hours.
It's all in the wrist.
but nothing--nothing--NYC has beats the convenience of getting in your car, pulling right into a parking spot 100ft from the store
There are plenty of things that beat that, like letting other people do the work for you: delivery, handymen, restaurants, cab drivers, etc.
Seriously, you complaints sound about as quaint as if you had said "Life in NYC is so hard: lugging up all those containers full of soil to my balcony for my potatoes, and the chicken I keep in my bathtub keep me up all night. It's a wonder New Yorkers haven't all starved yet."
Well, you're tall, and you might have been a body builder (hard to tell on/.:-).
But american society (I won't speak to any I don't know) seems to value freedom of movement over efficiency...
I find that "freedom" somewhat illusory. At least where I live (Bay Area), there are many places I can't easily go because either the bridge I need to cross is completely backed up and because I have no convenient place to leave the car when I get there. I actually found living in NYC and Europe without a car to actually give me more freedom. Public transportation, to me, is actually about convenience and freedom.
Many cities have managed to convert parts to car-free zones. A combination of subways, tunnels, bicycle lanes, slow-moving electric vehicles, after-hour delivery time windows, and careful planning of limited access roads has made it possible. City streets make nice, spacious pedestrian areas afer such conversions.
All it takes to move via car is a relatively flat piece of land.
In the real world, it also takes insurance, traffic police, highway patrols, traffic courts, road cleaning, snow removal, over- and under-passes, gas stations, refineries, planning offices, car junkyards, emergency roadside assistance, fast-responding emergency medical services, helicopters, traffic surveillance, traffic computers,and on and on. Many of those costs are much lower or non-existent for public transportation, and you do pay for them, through taxes, fees, association memberships, auto and medical insurance, etc., expenses you may not associate with cars but expenses that are nevertheless very real.
And those are only direct, easily quantifiable costs. When you add in costs for maintaining a presence in the Persian Gulf, for respiratory diseases caused by pollution, for lost productivity due to traffic jams, for ecological damage from paving over large parts of the country, and other such effects, the costs are even worse.
As an exercise, just total up what you pay in terms of gas, insurance, license fees, interest, amortized purchase price, amortized disposal fees, and other car related expenses per year. I think you'll be surprised how expensive driving it, and that only accounts for a fraction of the costs mentioned above.
Oh, by the way, I don't know whether you are in good shape or not, but if you drive less, chances are you would also be in better shape than you are now (and save on medical bills, too).
Just the manufacturing of cars takes out lots of resources. Parking lots and roads cause enormous environmental damage just by covering up land. And cars themselves clog city streets. Pollution is an important aspect of the problems cars cause, but probably not even the major one at this point.
NYC is one of the best cities for public transportation in the US. The subway system alone is extensive.
But what many people overlook is that a large fraction of the cars are taxis and limousines. And taxis are fairly affordable.
You can get by without a car in NYC because you can just flag down a cab any time, day or night. Widespread availability of taxis is an important part of a city free of (personal) automobiles. If other cities had a taxicab system as good as that in NYC, far fewer people would need cars. As a bonus, it is politically and practically much easier to convert taxi fleets to new standards (natural gas, hydrogen, electricity) than personal automobiles.
Hey, YOU keep saying that SPEC scores are the bee's knees.
And what does that have to do with anything? SPEC scores can be measured with many different compilers, and, obviously, I prefer to use SPEC scores that don't rely on weird compilers like the Intel compiler.
But even if people use Intel compilers for benchmarking, that still tells us a lot. For the comparisons you seem to be obsessed with, the P3/G4, the gcc and Intel scores for the P3 are similar. P4 systems beat G4 systems both in terms of top performance and price/performance even using gcc. And the Opteron outperforms the Xeon even if you compare gcc-compiled Opteron code against Intel-compiled Xeon code.
Face it, PPC is just behind in the performance and in the price/performance curve. I sure wish some manufacturer would step up to the plate and deliver an affordable high performance processor not based on x86. But gimmicks like AltiVec are not the answer and they only delay the release of processors like the 970 to the point where it, too, will be behind the curve.
BMW is not a software shop. I don't know if they hired in programmers for the apps their cars use, but I wouldn't take their difficulty writing software for platform X as an indication of how crappy platform X is.
And I didn't, if you actually bothered to read what I wrote.
But Microsoft's supposedly big advantage for Windows CE over more mature, and standards-based systems like QNX is that Windows CE is familiar to Windows programmers and comes with Microsoft's really easy-to-use development environments. Supposedly, with Windows CE, regular Windows programmers can produce great embedded code because it's so easy.
What this (and other CE problems) suggest is that regular Windows programmers writing code for CE produce regular Windows software: software that crashes far too much. Only, that in a car that matters a whole lot more than on a desktop.
Slashdot Mirror
The USA was only 30 minutes away. The missiles took the closest path...across the pole.
You are preoccupied with the only scenario that mattered to the Americans: a missile attack. What was a real threat to the Europeans was a ground war in Europe that did not involve any direct hostilities between the US and the USSR. And that was a fairly likely scenario: the US and USSR knew that it would have been the end of both countries to send off their missiles, but a ground war in Europe would have been acceptable to both.
along with the point that the USA repeatedly put its ass on the line for Europe, only to receive lukewarm thanks at best,
And why do you think the US did that? Out of nobility? Out of humanitarian instincts? I don't think so. The US got involved in Europe because if Europe had fallen to the Nazis or to the Soviet Union, the US would have been in very deep trouble, economically and politically.
While Americans have delusions of grandeur because of a huge military-industrial complex, the reality of it all is that the US needs Europe at least as much as Europe needs the US. And until American politicians and voters come to appreciate that, there will be a lot more "hostility" because 600 million Europeans don't like having their foreign and defense policy dictated to them by 300 million US voters. That was vaguely acceptable in the decades after WWII, but it is coming to an end now. You'll just have to deal with it.
European militaries still persist with this outdated tradition for some strange reason.
The "strange reason" is that European militaries stopped engaging in extraterritorial adventures. It makes perfect sense to use draftees to defend your own country, and you don't have to worry about "atrocities" either when your military is only defending your own territory.
But, you are right, for the kinds of actions the US military engages in, you do need a professional military; you couldn't do it with draftees. Draftees would not be well enough trained to handle it, and US voters wouldn't go along with wars like those in Iraq if they knew that their sons and daughters might just get drafted, sent over there, and killed.
Of course, if the conscript troops had spotted any submarines, the Swedish would have probably just blamed America.
To Europeans, US involvement in Europe was both a gamble and a mixed blessing. The gamble worked and resulted in great wealth and freedom for Europeans, but if it had failed, it would have turned Europe into a nuclear wasteland. To Americans, sitting comfortably in their living rooms thousands of miles away, that threat was much less immediate.
There are plenty of bus-powered USB drives for use with laptops. That's the lowest-powered external drive you are likely going to find.
Don't bother with Ethernet-attached storage; those are not usually designed with low power in mind.
That would be one way of financing the space program: set things up so that the only way the RIAA could stop P2P file sharing is by sending manned spacecraft or very intelligent probes to Mars.
So, what about it? Let's put a solar-powered P2P node on Mars with 100G worth of MP3s and some simple defensive capabilities. Then, let's see how long it will take th RIAA to launch a 20 man crew to Mars to track down and kill the thing.
Why are electric vehicles considered zero emission?
Probably because the vehicles don't have any emissions (duh).
You burn fossil fuels to make electricity, then transfer that power into chemical energy in the batteries, then turn that energy back into electricity later to turn an electric motor to drive to the store... how is this not causing emmissions? Oh, and don't forget that according to the 2nd law of thermodynamics, you've lost energy at every step in that process, so you are probably not as efficient as a good gasoline engine (by good, I mean efficient - not a V-12 Dodge monster).
The point of zero emission is not to conserve energy or to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it is to improve air quality in crowded cities.
However, electric vehicles may, as a side-benefit, with both. Regenerative braking and other features mean that EVs can operate more efficiently in city traffic. Furthermore, centralizing power generation makes it easier to clean emissions and to choose among a wide variety of renewable fuels.
With gas-powered vehicles, every vehicle needs to contain emission control equipment, and changing from one fuel to another is next to impossible because so many private owners have to replace their vehicles.
Because, apart from governmental repercussions, there is peer pressure and societal disapproval for unpopular speech. If you force people to use their real names, you will get much less disagreement. Which is, of course, just what repressive governments like.
think about it. maybe a society where no one has to hide behind pseudonyms to speak their mind is more "pro-free-speech" than one where people feel the need not to compromise themselves or something by saying their opinion.
People have thought about this for a couple of thousand years. Many great works of literature, social criticism, reportage, and political science have been published under pseudonyms. Pseudonyms are essential for free speech.
If you want to get rid of the need for pseudonyms, you have to change human nature (peer pressure, retaliation, flaming, all that) first. Good luck.
What is this obsession with iBook size anyway? The iBook is 4.5 pounds, has two spindles, has a battery life of about 4h, and a 12" diagonal. That's a hefty, big, power-hungry laptop. In the PC world, you can get a 2.5 pound, 1 spindle laptop with an 8h battery life that is considerably smaller, too.
"SERIOUS problem"? Like what? People get a slow response from the Taiwanese tourism site? No more Taiwanese posts to Slashdot? What is this "serious trouble"?
Anybody who wants to cause that kind of trouble can achieve it more easily by overloading phone lines, putting white powder into envelopes, or spreading rumors about SARS.
holier than thou, no corporate geek is smarter than me false sense of security is just as dangerous as false alarmism, no?
All I know is that Symantec has never caught a virus on my PC, but it has caused numerous software to fail, sometimes in very mysterious ways that were difficult to track down. Regardless of whether there is a problem to be fixed in the first place, Symantec is not the company to fix it.
But that's not really a good thing. Sun pushed on the JIT on the theory that that would address performance problems. It didn't. The Perl and Python runtimes are much slower than Java's, but Perl and Python applications generally start up much faster and are considerably more responsive.
Java is as sluggish as ever, and more bloated than it has ever been. What is really responsible for Java's poor performance for real-world applications is its class loading, memory footprint, and just plain awful library design and implementation.
If you invest that time in Qt, you just spent six months of your life learning something that you then have to pay $2000 to actually use commercially. If you spend the sme six months on Gtk+ or wxWindows, you can use your resulting skills commercially without paying anybody anything.
It is possible that Qt is easier to learn than Gtk+ (although I found Gtk+ pretty straightforward), but the point is that whatever time you spend on Gtk+ teaches you about something you can use commercially.
First of all, this isn't a management issue, it's tax and accounting.
More importantly, however, who establishes that you are "spending an amount of money lesser or equal to the cost of having [you spend] the extra time necessary without the material"? You may claim that regular deliveries of chocolate sundaes by scantily clad women enhances your productivity, but that doesn't make it so. Most companies think that Microsoft Office and VisualStudio enhance their productivity, but that doesn't necessarily make it so. "Better productivity" is the rallying cry of any company that wants to sell you something really expensive. It's such a great claim because nobody ever verifies it.
That, I can't really argue with :) I'm sure that's the most common way, yes. The reason I did mention the no-cost license was for non corporate driven open source development. I'm sorry I didn't state that clearer.
I and most other people were clear about what the license says. We disagree about what it means and what the consequences are. So, don't apologize: your view is the same view as Troll Tech marketing. I just happen to think that that's not a useful position for most actual users.
Cooking as a hobby isn't "old fashioned" at all; it's a new-fangled hobby for rich folks. And, yes, some hobbies are harder to pursue living in cities.
It's naive to think that you can learn and understand any GUI library consisting of hundreds of classes and thousands of methods within "hours". After a few hours, you can start producing code, but you'll have to refer constantly to the documentation.
Not at all. wxWindows has C++ classes for I/O, networking, threading, network protocols, and other facilities. So, for that matter, does Gtk+.
That's not how budgets work in real companies: salaries, benefits, expenses, and capital are all different pots of money. $2000 for software is a huge expense, and you can't trade it off against salaries.
And this is ONLY if you're going to sell the end result
In real companies, the decision to open source something comes at the end of the development process, not at the beginning. That means that even companies that often produce open source software (like ours) would end up having to buy commercial Qt licenses for everybody anyway, since Troll Tech requires you to buy the commercial license when you start development.
Using Qt would make a lot of sense if this was still the early 1980's and there were no good C/C++ toolkits around. But today, there are plenty of good toolkits. You get the entire Microsoft Enterprise developer suite for less money than a Qt developer license. And you can use Gtk+/Gtkmm and wxWindows for free, even for commercial applications.
Is Qt that much better to justify its steep price? I don't think so. But you have to decide for yourself. Just be aware of the price before you invest the time learning it.
What is the actual annual minimal cost for a car?
If you are going to be a frugal, do-it-yourself car owner, compare it to frugal non-car ownership, which might mean things like bicycling, ride sharing, and walking.
I'm pretty frugal when it comes to my car, and my annual expenses are almost twice as much. And if I had a regular car (as opposed to a really old Japanese car), it would be even more. You can get a lot of delivery and public transport for $6000+/year.
If I found a good job there, I'd move to NYC without hesitation.
Obviously, you didn't get the hang of living in NYC :-)
Everyday life is a hassle. Going grocery shopping is a hassle.
Why in the world would you go "grocery shopping", in the suburban sense? Eating out is cheaper and better. Delivery takes a few minutes. Grocery shopping for most Manhattanites means "olives for the Martini" or maybe "a gourmet salad for after the show/party".
Purchasing anything that you can't carry easily in your arms is a hassle.
That's what delivery and doormen are for.
Taxis? Always available?! HA. Try catching a taxi anywhere in midtown around 11 to midnight on weekends when the theaters let out. Try catching a taxi anywhere during rush hours.
It's all in the wrist.
but nothing--nothing--NYC has beats the convenience of getting in your car, pulling right into a parking spot 100ft from the store
There are plenty of things that beat that, like letting other people do the work for you: delivery, handymen, restaurants, cab drivers, etc.
Seriously, you complaints sound about as quaint as if you had said "Life in NYC is so hard: lugging up all those containers full of soil to my balcony for my potatoes, and the chicken I keep in my bathtub keep me up all night. It's a wonder New Yorkers haven't all starved yet."
Well, you're tall, and you might have been a body builder (hard to tell on /. :-).
But american society (I won't speak to any I don't know) seems to value freedom of movement over efficiency...
I find that "freedom" somewhat illusory. At least where I live (Bay Area), there are many places I can't easily go because either the bridge I need to cross is completely backed up and because I have no convenient place to leave the car when I get there. I actually found living in NYC and Europe without a car to actually give me more freedom. Public transportation, to me, is actually about convenience and freedom.
Many cities have managed to convert parts to car-free zones. A combination of subways, tunnels, bicycle lanes, slow-moving electric vehicles, after-hour delivery time windows, and careful planning of limited access roads has made it possible. City streets make nice, spacious pedestrian areas afer such conversions.
In the real world, it also takes insurance, traffic police, highway patrols, traffic courts, road cleaning, snow removal, over- and under-passes, gas stations, refineries, planning offices, car junkyards, emergency roadside assistance, fast-responding emergency medical services, helicopters, traffic surveillance, traffic computers,and on and on. Many of those costs are much lower or non-existent for public transportation, and you do pay for them, through taxes, fees, association memberships, auto and medical insurance, etc., expenses you may not associate with cars but expenses that are nevertheless very real.
And those are only direct, easily quantifiable costs. When you add in costs for maintaining a presence in the Persian Gulf, for respiratory diseases caused by pollution, for lost productivity due to traffic jams, for ecological damage from paving over large parts of the country, and other such effects, the costs are even worse.
As an exercise, just total up what you pay in terms of gas, insurance, license fees, interest, amortized purchase price, amortized disposal fees, and other car related expenses per year. I think you'll be surprised how expensive driving it, and that only accounts for a fraction of the costs mentioned above.
Oh, by the way, I don't know whether you are in good shape or not, but if you drive less, chances are you would also be in better shape than you are now (and save on medical bills, too).
Just the manufacturing of cars takes out lots of resources. Parking lots and roads cause enormous environmental damage just by covering up land. And cars themselves clog city streets. Pollution is an important aspect of the problems cars cause, but probably not even the major one at this point.
But what many people overlook is that a large fraction of the cars are taxis and limousines. And taxis are fairly affordable.
You can get by without a car in NYC because you can just flag down a cab any time, day or night. Widespread availability of taxis is an important part of a city free of (personal) automobiles. If other cities had a taxicab system as good as that in NYC, far fewer people would need cars. As a bonus, it is politically and practically much easier to convert taxi fleets to new standards (natural gas, hydrogen, electricity) than personal automobiles.
And what does that have to do with anything? SPEC scores can be measured with many different compilers, and, obviously, I prefer to use SPEC scores that don't rely on weird compilers like the Intel compiler.
But even if people use Intel compilers for benchmarking, that still tells us a lot. For the comparisons you seem to be obsessed with, the P3/G4, the gcc and Intel scores for the P3 are similar. P4 systems beat G4 systems both in terms of top performance and price/performance even using gcc. And the Opteron outperforms the Xeon even if you compare gcc-compiled Opteron code against Intel-compiled Xeon code.
Face it, PPC is just behind in the performance and in the price/performance curve. I sure wish some manufacturer would step up to the plate and deliver an affordable high performance processor not based on x86. But gimmicks like AltiVec are not the answer and they only delay the release of processors like the 970 to the point where it, too, will be behind the curve.
And I didn't, if you actually bothered to read what I wrote.
But Microsoft's supposedly big advantage for Windows CE over more mature, and standards-based systems like QNX is that Windows CE is familiar to Windows programmers and comes with Microsoft's really easy-to-use development environments. Supposedly, with Windows CE, regular Windows programmers can produce great embedded code because it's so easy.
What this (and other CE problems) suggest is that regular Windows programmers writing code for CE produce regular Windows software: software that crashes far too much. Only, that in a car that matters a whole lot more than on a desktop.