Not really sure what this has to do with the article since you mentioned nothing about power efficiency, but your problems with the intel computer have absolutely nothing to do with the processor and are entirely related to the motherboard / chipset being used in your HP.
Any of the carriers will allow you to port your phone number to a different service if you switch. By "port" I mean that they will let you keep your phone number from another service. As I understand it, there is a law forcing them to do that. FYI.
Things aren't quite as clear cut as you're trying to make them sound. First off, your random computer from the trash may be simple to install linux on (assuming it's modern enough to support bootable CD's, but let's not make Windows out to be perfect here. First, a home license of Windows will allow you to install it on a single computer, and even then only once. Want to remove it and install it on a different computer? Guess what, you'll be talking to Microsoft about that. Want to rdesktop into Windows? Well it only allows one connection at a time. Windows supports only two platforms for general consumption, that being the 64 and 32bit x86 varieties and even there your driver situation may or may not be satisfied for your hardware. Linux? Well while we're on the topic of illegal . . . let's point out that for the population in US it is illegal to use play MP3's and DVD's freely in linux, but you may be ok in the driver arena if your hardware isn't too obscure and you don't mind a little hunting. You say that mac hardware and software are not "worth the hassle" when I think most people would agree that the point to choosing Mac is to avoid hassles. No driver hunting, very little sofware hunting, and hell it's preinstalled on the computer when you get it. Lastly, let's take a look at your last sentence, regarding price. I don't care to do the searching but comparable systems are definitely not separated by a 3x price gap.
To stay on topic a bit, ZFS, while feature laden, is, as most people have described, not yet ready for primetime installation on 22 million computers as the default filesystem. Though Apple has made no comments thus far to exclude or include the possibility of it becoming that in the near future.
Well I'm not at a computer with Steam installed on it, but I'm pretty damn sure their license agreement spells out what they can and cannot monitor using Steam. Your lack of "knowledge" comes from blindly clicking buttons labeled "OK" or "NEXT".
There are some other advantages to the Steam platform that helps Valve out if you can get over the paranoia of them "spying" on you. One example I can think of was that, through Steam, Valve was looking at the load times for HL2 on different users computers and noted that the time was highly affected by the fragmentation of the game files. As a result, they now defragment the game files in the background without the user noticing or having to run Disk Defragmenter on their own. They also use the system to identify parts of maps where players get stuck for long periods of time to help them in designing levels. All of these sorts of things are "good" for the consumer.
I also agree with another child post that the ability to enter your game key once and never have to touch the CD's/DVD's again is a major plus. Now each time I switch computers or upgrade, I just log on to steam and it downloads and installs all of my games overnight.
I think you make a good point. The reason that HL1 and HL2 took so long and felt so open ended was because it was up to you to figure out where to go, even if that meant stumbling around the same room for a half hour to find out you were supposed to jump out of some window on the third floor. Episode 1 went much quicker cause you had a companion with you who helped to keep you on the right track. I agree that the game was over too soon, but I appreciated avoiding the embarrasment and boredom of wandering around the map tirelessly looking for the exit point to go to the next stage. Episode 2 might end up being the exact opposite where you could get lost for hours and maybe Episode 3 will find the balance. Either way, I do appreciate the attention to detail that episodic gaming allows them to achieve and I appreciate not having to wait 6 years between releases.
I used to think like you do, forsaking the Apple hardware and preaching that I'd install OSX if only they'd let me do it on my self-made box. However, having now had my hands on a dozen Apple machines from Mac Minis to Mac Pros and Macbooks to Macbook Pro's, I can say without a doubt that the "bang for your buck" is there for the hardware. Granted I still won't pay full price for an Apple computer, but if you pick up one from their refurbished site you get the exact same warranty as a new box, on top of a ~15% or more discount. The upsides? Guaranteed support for your components and very high quality components (their LCD's and case designs are top notch). Now I understand that you can get a Dell laptop for half the price, but speaking from personal experience, that laptop's CD-ROM drive vibrates enough to be heard in another room, the sticky feet have all fallen off, LCD has been replaced once, motherboard twice, and the touchpad is finicky.
RAID 1 doesn't protect you from user error, such as deleting your home directory accidentally or file system corruption. Nothing replaces the need for backup solutions, whether they're user initiated or scheduled incremental backups.
$20K really isn't THAT much money when you start weighing in the possible shortcomings that the article points out. In billable man/woman-time, $20k is about 2 months of work. As someone who runs the IT department for a small company, I can say without a doubt that I've spent that much time just researching and trying the different available linux options, figuring out how to configure network settings on each (yup, it's quite different between RedHat and Ubuntu), trying to get printers to work right (good luck on non-postcript network printers), etc. We don't run Windows because it's not efficient for the development work we do, but for a lot of companies with no current Linux experience, that $20k will get burned up in a hurry.
It is when you consider how complicated GIMP is to use for someone who has never been exposed to it. Just about anyone can open Paint and figure out how to do basic operations. GIMP, on the other hand, has a very unintuitive interface where almost everything is accomplished through right mouse clicks and floating toolbars. It feels out of place on every desktop, though it might be more intuitive to Photoshop users.
RTFC, at no point did I promote/encourage/favor the unethical treatment of said convict's posterior. Secondly, you added the "violent" part all on your own. Sweet dreams.
A poetic response, so concise that I can't even comment about spelling or grammar. Anyhow, nice to see the world must be coming to an end if Slashdot's frontpage makes reference to a Linux box being hacked.
Regardless, as a former residential network admin at my college, I fully understand the position of the university. All students on my previous campus, anyway, were made to sign a use agreement prior to connecting their computers to the network. That agreement ensured the university's authority in maintaining a safe and legal network for all connected computers which included being able to shut down hackers, file sharers, etc. It is interesting to see that this sort of information can be submitted in a court case though. I still have no pity for this kid and hope he spends a lot of time in jail trying to build a computer from toothpicks and creamed corn. Watch your "backdoor" kid.
What's funny, is it's the attitude of "I'll just download the music for free" that got us where we are today. Everyone has been up in arms for the last couple of years about DRM this, and DRM that. Why did we get DRM in the first place? Because music pirating was taking place at a rate of illegality that even a 2-year-old would tell, "that's not right . ..". So the same people that were engaged in illegal copyright exploiting led to the development of DRM and now use the creation of which to justify their further piracy. Seems funny to me. But I guess it's not unexpected, someone always has to ruin a good thing.
As far as Apple/EMI is concerned, I'm very happy about this announcement. It's a great thing for the consumer, without any drawbacks. Consumers get the option to get DRM free music, higher quality music, and for the most part the price is unchanged. Sure tracks cost a little bit more, but albums are the same price. AAC is a superior format, as everyone has already commented, sure it's an open format as everyone has commented, and sure 90+ % of media players on the market handle it. If the other record companies follow suit then we could see the day, and it could be soon, when DRM is a thing of the past, and that should help iTunes move to the #1 music retailer spot. Good for Apple and good for the consumer. And if sales go up because of it, good for the music business.
Or, they'll take away DRM, a bunch of spoiled self-righteous hooligans will get their hands on the music and start spreading it across the net and we'll go straight back to DRM hell. Time will tell, I won't hold my breath.
MOST operating systems have poor support for NUMA and this includes Linux where poor system management cuases processes to be swapped back and forth between processors regardless of the location in memory where the program resides. For instance, my engineering company runs a program that uses about 3 GB of resident memory during its 48 hours of execution. Our dual processor Opteron boxes have 4 GB of memory attached to the first processor and 1-2GB on the second, but Linux will move the process back and forth between the two processors, hurting memory performance. So pointing out the Windows has a poor NUMA implementation can be extended to include most other operating systems. It's a complex memory management topology and it's one that's hard to get right.
HPC is a loose term that can't just be thrown around to encompass everything. What we do is HPC and Intel's latest processors are cleaning up when compared to our Opteron based systems, while running 30 to 50 degrees cooler. AMD's technology has room to grow, in terms of available bandwidth, but the fundamental processor architecture has changed little from the original K5 design while Intel's new design is nearly a complete rewrite. The newer generation is only increasing the gap and it has nothing to do with Intel replicating AMD's technology. The newer Intel lines use shared caches, dual independent front side buses running at over 1.33 GHz per bus, and they combine that with some fancy caching algorithms.
Another flaw in the Opteron architecture is the fact that only a single processor (at least in IBM and Tyan's impelementations) connects directly to the PCI bus. Maybe this was solved in newer implementations based on AM2 or something, but in the systems we have here, the first processor basically needs to halt every time the second processor needs access to the network or hard drives. This is not a trivial performance hit when both processors are running disk intensive programs that each read/write to 4+ GB scratch files.
There are more issues than just those though. One is that the different desktop environments have different schemes for loading applications on startup (which presumably you would want Google Desktop to do). Secondly, and there's lots of complaints regarding this, there is no standardization for toolbar integration. Things are getting better, but they're not perfect. Third is knowing how and where important files are located for indexing. You probably don't want Google Desktop indexing 10,000+ thumbnail cache files generated by Nautilus. I admit that a lot of these seem trivial and in many instances would work plenty fine with just minor annoyances (like the gaim dock icon in KDE having a background that doesn't match the rest of the toolbar). But given that Google has ported over all of its other apps (at least Picasa and Google Earth) to Linux, there must be some good reason for not having ported Google Desktop yet.
Well, you are luckier than met at least, in a town of 15,000 I actually have no stores that sell used CD's. And I didn't mean to imply that the whole CD would finish in 20 seconds, but the first song would which would be the point at which I could start listening to the CD. As a matter of doing a math exercise, given a 12-song CD at 4MB per track (for 128k encoding) would be about 50 MB (sure 48 but let's round). I'm on a cable internet connection with a theoretical peak of 8 Mbps. iTunes rarely maxes that out so let's choose a much more reasonble 3Mbps, or let's just approximate to a nice 300 KB/s. That's 1 MB in roughly 3 seconds, let's just round to 4. That's 15 MB per minute, and the whole CD would finish in . . . . about 3.3 minutes. Add another 45 seconds to launch iTunes, search for album and click purchase and we're looking at a total time expenditure from start-to-finish of about 4 minutes. We'll even double that for that new 256k encoding. And we'll add another 2 minutes for slow people. So now we're at 10 minutes start to finish. Which, for us unlucky people with no 5-minute walking distance used CD stores, is well worth not having to drive 10 miles each way to get to one, which at 20 miles, even on a decent car would use almost a gallon of gas which is currently about $2.50 at the cheapest (where I am) meaning the used CD would have to be $7.50 or less and in good condition to offset the costs involved.
Before the age of the online music store and even before the widespread adoption of MP3's, I used to love going through the aisles upon aisles of used CD's at Rasputin in the Bay Area collecting old gems in the $2 to $5 range.
1) Used CD may have scratches, faded/bent/abused liner notes/art 2) To find/buy Used CD would take time. Even if it was online I'd have to sort through different online stores to find a used copy, wait 3-5 days minimum for shipping, etc. If it was from a physical store I'd have to drive to the store, spend time looking through the used CD section to find the CD, but it and drive back. Gas alone would probably cost me between $1 and $2 plus upwards of an hour of my time. After obtaining the CD, I would have to rip it to the computer. In most cases the album art and track information would already be taken care of for me, but there's the off chance that it's a CD with incorrect/incomplete infromation in the CDDB so I have to do that by hand.
To buy it on iTunes for $9.99 would take about . . . 20 seconds. I would start listening to the CD about . . . 20 seconds after that. I could then sync it to my iPod, stream it to an apple TV, and burn a hard copy CD to play in my stereo before you've even made it to the store. There's a reason that the iTunes music store is in the top 3 music suppliers in the US, and it has nothing to do with having good album art, higher quality sound, or being cheapest. It's convenient, and that's it.
Wow, paying to watch re-runs on TV must piss you off . . .
It's simple and complicated at the same time but it's something the consumer has to deal with and it goes like this: you're not buying a license and you're not buying a free distributable item, you're buying an instance of a licensed product. You've paid a small price for the physical item an an additional price on top of that for the license. The problem you're having is that you can't buy one without the other. It's like that with any copyrighted product that I can think of. How about books? Artist prints? If it's not an original, then it's just a duplicate, so the additional cost for each new item is mostly just in material costs. But I'm having trouble thinking of anything in the world that is like that. If you lose your book, you buy a new one.
So in short, they will continue to re-sell things you've already listened to. And consumers will continue to pay for it. If consumers weren't like that then you wouldn't see tv-series being sold on DVD. People wouldn't buy the DVD after seeing the movie in the theater, and cable companies wouldn't show re-runs.
I'd mod you up if I had any points. I think you hit the nail on the head. There are people (they seem to frequent the slashdot site) that cannot be pleased by any means. People are getting "twice" as much product (double the size, double the bit-rate), plus non-DRM for FREE! Yet they complain that a single cost an extra 30 cents. They complain that Apple uses AAC (which I've gotten to play on every OS) and which also has a very decent reputation for great sound quality. They complain that iTunes only runs on Windows and Mac (covering what, 95% of the user market). But luckily for the rest of us, that hasn't stopped Apple/Jobs from continuing to do great things for consumers.
2 more weeks and you should have an 8-core Mac Pro as well as a new version of OSX released. Here's to hoping the rumors surrounding the April 15 NAB conference are true.
I'm not sure what reviews you've been looking at but AMD is not nearly "keeping pace" with Intel, not for the last year anyway. http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx? i=2879 clearly shows the intel architecture shining, with many benchmarks having the slowest Intel core beating the fastest AMD. At the same time, Intel is acheiving twice the performance per watt, and these are cores, some of which have been on the market for 6-12 months. Intel has also already released their dual-chip, eight core server line which is slated to make its way into a Mac Pro within 3 weeks. AMD's "hold" on the 4-way market exists because of the conditions 2 years ago when those servers were built. If you want a true comparison (as you claim to be striving for) then you need to look at what new servers are being sold and what the sales numbers are like (I don't have that information). But since the 8-core Intel is again using less than half of the thermal power an 8-core AMD offering, I would wager that an informed IT department wouldn't be choosing the Opteron route.
AMD is capable of great things but Intel has set their minds on dominating the processor world for at least the next 5 years and it will take nothing short of a major evolutionary step from AMD to bring things back into equilibrium. Whilst AMD struggles to get their full line onto the 65nm production scheme, Intel has already started ramping up the 45nm, and that's something that AMD won't quickly be able to compete with.
Intel's latest announcement of modular chip designs and further chipset integration are interesting but I'll reserve judgement until some engineering samples have been evaluated. I'm not ready to say that an on-board memory controllers is hands-down the best solution, but I do agree that this is a great step towards mobile hardware (think smart phones / pda's / tablets ) using less energy and having more processing power while fititng in a smaller form factor.
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Not really sure what this has to do with the article since you mentioned nothing about power efficiency, but your problems with the intel computer have absolutely nothing to do with the processor and are entirely related to the motherboard / chipset being used in your HP.
Any of the carriers will allow you to port your phone number to a different service if you switch. By "port" I mean that they will let you keep your phone number from another service. As I understand it, there is a law forcing them to do that. FYI.
Things aren't quite as clear cut as you're trying to make them sound. First off, your random computer from the trash may be simple to install linux on (assuming it's modern enough to support bootable CD's, but let's not make Windows out to be perfect here. First, a home license of Windows will allow you to install it on a single computer, and even then only once. Want to remove it and install it on a different computer? Guess what, you'll be talking to Microsoft about that. Want to rdesktop into Windows? Well it only allows one connection at a time. Windows supports only two platforms for general consumption, that being the 64 and 32bit x86 varieties and even there your driver situation may or may not be satisfied for your hardware. Linux? Well while we're on the topic of illegal . . . let's point out that for the population in US it is illegal to use play MP3's and DVD's freely in linux, but you may be ok in the driver arena if your hardware isn't too obscure and you don't mind a little hunting. You say that mac hardware and software are not "worth the hassle" when I think most people would agree that the point to choosing Mac is to avoid hassles. No driver hunting, very little sofware hunting, and hell it's preinstalled on the computer when you get it. Lastly, let's take a look at your last sentence, regarding price. I don't care to do the searching but comparable systems are definitely not separated by a 3x price gap.
To stay on topic a bit, ZFS, while feature laden, is, as most people have described, not yet ready for primetime installation on 22 million computers as the default filesystem. Though Apple has made no comments thus far to exclude or include the possibility of it becoming that in the near future.
Well I'm not at a computer with Steam installed on it, but I'm pretty damn sure their license agreement spells out what they can and cannot monitor using Steam. Your lack of "knowledge" comes from blindly clicking buttons labeled "OK" or "NEXT".
There are some other advantages to the Steam platform that helps Valve out if you can get over the paranoia of them "spying" on you. One example I can think of was that, through Steam, Valve was looking at the load times for HL2 on different users computers and noted that the time was highly affected by the fragmentation of the game files. As a result, they now defragment the game files in the background without the user noticing or having to run Disk Defragmenter on their own. They also use the system to identify parts of maps where players get stuck for long periods of time to help them in designing levels. All of these sorts of things are "good" for the consumer.
I also agree with another child post that the ability to enter your game key once and never have to touch the CD's/DVD's again is a major plus. Now each time I switch computers or upgrade, I just log on to steam and it downloads and installs all of my games overnight.
I think you make a good point. The reason that HL1 and HL2 took so long and felt so open ended was because it was up to you to figure out where to go, even if that meant stumbling around the same room for a half hour to find out you were supposed to jump out of some window on the third floor. Episode 1 went much quicker cause you had a companion with you who helped to keep you on the right track. I agree that the game was over too soon, but I appreciated avoiding the embarrasment and boredom of wandering around the map tirelessly looking for the exit point to go to the next stage. Episode 2 might end up being the exact opposite where you could get lost for hours and maybe Episode 3 will find the balance. Either way, I do appreciate the attention to detail that episodic gaming allows them to achieve and I appreciate not having to wait 6 years between releases.
I used to think like you do, forsaking the Apple hardware and preaching that I'd install OSX if only they'd let me do it on my self-made box. However, having now had my hands on a dozen Apple machines from Mac Minis to Mac Pros and Macbooks to Macbook Pro's, I can say without a doubt that the "bang for your buck" is there for the hardware. Granted I still won't pay full price for an Apple computer, but if you pick up one from their refurbished site you get the exact same warranty as a new box, on top of a ~15% or more discount. The upsides? Guaranteed support for your components and very high quality components (their LCD's and case designs are top notch). Now I understand that you can get a Dell laptop for half the price, but speaking from personal experience, that laptop's CD-ROM drive vibrates enough to be heard in another room, the sticky feet have all fallen off, LCD has been replaced once, motherboard twice, and the touchpad is finicky.
Actually, the article TITLE says 352 but the text in the article mentions 253 a couple of times.
RAID 1 doesn't protect you from user error, such as deleting your home directory accidentally or file system corruption. Nothing replaces the need for backup solutions, whether they're user initiated or scheduled incremental backups.
I completely agree. Picasa from Google is a decent photo manager/editor that allows you to do things like that, and it is available for Linux.
$20K really isn't THAT much money when you start weighing in the possible shortcomings that the article points out. In billable man/woman-time, $20k is about 2 months of work. As someone who runs the IT department for a small company, I can say without a doubt that I've spent that much time just researching and trying the different available linux options, figuring out how to configure network settings on each (yup, it's quite different between RedHat and Ubuntu), trying to get printers to work right (good luck on non-postcript network printers), etc. We don't run Windows because it's not efficient for the development work we do, but for a lot of companies with no current Linux experience, that $20k will get burned up in a hurry.
It is when you consider how complicated GIMP is to use for someone who has never been exposed to it. Just about anyone can open Paint and figure out how to do basic operations. GIMP, on the other hand, has a very unintuitive interface where almost everything is accomplished through right mouse clicks and floating toolbars. It feels out of place on every desktop, though it might be more intuitive to Photoshop users.
Except that this does nothing to protect you from drive failure.
RTFC, at no point did I promote/encourage/favor the unethical treatment of said convict's posterior. Secondly, you added the "violent" part all on your own. Sweet dreams.
A poetic response, so concise that I can't even comment about spelling or grammar. Anyhow, nice to see the world must be coming to an end if Slashdot's frontpage makes reference to a Linux box being hacked.
Regardless, as a former residential network admin at my college, I fully understand the position of the university. All students on my previous campus, anyway, were made to sign a use agreement prior to connecting their computers to the network. That agreement ensured the university's authority in maintaining a safe and legal network for all connected computers which included being able to shut down hackers, file sharers, etc. It is interesting to see that this sort of information can be submitted in a court case though. I still have no pity for this kid and hope he spends a lot of time in jail trying to build a computer from toothpicks and creamed corn. Watch your "backdoor" kid.
What's funny, is it's the attitude of "I'll just download the music for free" that got us where we are today. Everyone has been up in arms for the last couple of years about DRM this, and DRM that. Why did we get DRM in the first place? Because music pirating was taking place at a rate of illegality that even a 2-year-old would tell, "that's not right . . .". So the same people that were engaged in illegal copyright exploiting led to the development of DRM and now use the creation of which to justify their further piracy. Seems funny to me. But I guess it's not unexpected, someone always has to ruin a good thing.
As far as Apple/EMI is concerned, I'm very happy about this announcement. It's a great thing for the consumer, without any drawbacks. Consumers get the option to get DRM free music, higher quality music, and for the most part the price is unchanged. Sure tracks cost a little bit more, but albums are the same price. AAC is a superior format, as everyone has already commented, sure it's an open format as everyone has commented, and sure 90+ % of media players on the market handle it. If the other record companies follow suit then we could see the day, and it could be soon, when DRM is a thing of the past, and that should help iTunes move to the #1 music retailer spot. Good for Apple and good for the consumer. And if sales go up because of it, good for the music business.
Or, they'll take away DRM, a bunch of spoiled self-righteous hooligans will get their hands on the music and start spreading it across the net and we'll go straight back to DRM hell. Time will tell, I won't hold my breath.
MOST operating systems have poor support for NUMA and this includes Linux where poor system management cuases processes to be swapped back and forth between processors regardless of the location in memory where the program resides. For instance, my engineering company runs a program that uses about 3 GB of resident memory during its 48 hours of execution. Our dual processor Opteron boxes have 4 GB of memory attached to the first processor and 1-2GB on the second, but Linux will move the process back and forth between the two processors, hurting memory performance. So pointing out the Windows has a poor NUMA implementation can be extended to include most other operating systems. It's a complex memory management topology and it's one that's hard to get right.
HPC is a loose term that can't just be thrown around to encompass everything. What we do is HPC and Intel's latest processors are cleaning up when compared to our Opteron based systems, while running 30 to 50 degrees cooler. AMD's technology has room to grow, in terms of available bandwidth, but the fundamental processor architecture has changed little from the original K5 design while Intel's new design is nearly a complete rewrite. The newer generation is only increasing the gap and it has nothing to do with Intel replicating AMD's technology. The newer Intel lines use shared caches, dual independent front side buses running at over 1.33 GHz per bus, and they combine that with some fancy caching algorithms.
Another flaw in the Opteron architecture is the fact that only a single processor (at least in IBM and Tyan's impelementations) connects directly to the PCI bus. Maybe this was solved in newer implementations based on AM2 or something, but in the systems we have here, the first processor basically needs to halt every time the second processor needs access to the network or hard drives. This is not a trivial performance hit when both processors are running disk intensive programs that each read/write to 4+ GB scratch files.
There are more issues than just those though. One is that the different desktop environments have different schemes for loading applications on startup (which presumably you would want Google Desktop to do). Secondly, and there's lots of complaints regarding this, there is no standardization for toolbar integration. Things are getting better, but they're not perfect. Third is knowing how and where important files are located for indexing. You probably don't want Google Desktop indexing 10,000+ thumbnail cache files generated by Nautilus. I admit that a lot of these seem trivial and in many instances would work plenty fine with just minor annoyances (like the gaim dock icon in KDE having a background that doesn't match the rest of the toolbar). But given that Google has ported over all of its other apps (at least Picasa and Google Earth) to Linux, there must be some good reason for not having ported Google Desktop yet.
Well, you are luckier than met at least, in a town of 15,000 I actually have no stores that sell used CD's. And I didn't mean to imply that the whole CD would finish in 20 seconds, but the first song would which would be the point at which I could start listening to the CD. As a matter of doing a math exercise, given a 12-song CD at 4MB per track (for 128k encoding) would be about 50 MB (sure 48 but let's round). I'm on a cable internet connection with a theoretical peak of 8 Mbps. iTunes rarely maxes that out so let's choose a much more reasonble 3Mbps, or let's just approximate to a nice 300 KB/s. That's 1 MB in roughly 3 seconds, let's just round to 4. That's 15 MB per minute, and the whole CD would finish in . . . . about 3.3 minutes. Add another 45 seconds to launch iTunes, search for album and click purchase and we're looking at a total time expenditure from start-to-finish of about 4 minutes. We'll even double that for that new 256k encoding. And we'll add another 2 minutes for slow people. So now we're at 10 minutes start to finish. Which, for us unlucky people with no 5-minute walking distance used CD stores, is well worth not having to drive 10 miles each way to get to one, which at 20 miles, even on a decent car would use almost a gallon of gas which is currently about $2.50 at the cheapest (where I am) meaning the used CD would have to be $7.50 or less and in good condition to offset the costs involved.
Before the age of the online music store and even before the widespread adoption of MP3's, I used to love going through the aisles upon aisles of used CD's at Rasputin in the Bay Area collecting old gems in the $2 to $5 range.
1) Used CD may have scratches, faded/bent/abused liner notes/art
2) To find/buy Used CD would take time. Even if it was online I'd have to sort through different online stores to find a used copy, wait 3-5 days minimum for shipping, etc. If it was from a physical store I'd have to drive to the store, spend time looking through the used CD section to find the CD, but it and drive back. Gas alone would probably cost me between $1 and $2 plus upwards of an hour of my time. After obtaining the CD, I would have to rip it to the computer. In most cases the album art and track information would already be taken care of for me, but there's the off chance that it's a CD with incorrect/incomplete infromation in the CDDB so I have to do that by hand.
To buy it on iTunes for $9.99 would take about . . . 20 seconds. I would start listening to the CD about . . . 20 seconds after that. I could then sync it to my iPod, stream it to an apple TV, and burn a hard copy CD to play in my stereo before you've even made it to the store. There's a reason that the iTunes music store is in the top 3 music suppliers in the US, and it has nothing to do with having good album art, higher quality sound, or being cheapest. It's convenient, and that's it.
Wow, paying to watch re-runs on TV must piss you off . . .
It's simple and complicated at the same time but it's something the consumer has to deal with and it goes like this: you're not buying a license and you're not buying a free distributable item, you're buying an instance of a licensed product. You've paid a small price for the physical item an an additional price on top of that for the license. The problem you're having is that you can't buy one without the other. It's like that with any copyrighted product that I can think of. How about books? Artist prints? If it's not an original, then it's just a duplicate, so the additional cost for each new item is mostly just in material costs. But I'm having trouble thinking of anything in the world that is like that. If you lose your book, you buy a new one.
So in short, they will continue to re-sell things you've already listened to. And consumers will continue to pay for it. If consumers weren't like that then you wouldn't see tv-series being sold on DVD. People wouldn't buy the DVD after seeing the movie in the theater, and cable companies wouldn't show re-runs.
I'd mod you up if I had any points. I think you hit the nail on the head. There are people (they seem to frequent the slashdot site) that cannot be pleased by any means. People are getting "twice" as much product (double the size, double the bit-rate), plus non-DRM for FREE! Yet they complain that a single cost an extra 30 cents. They complain that Apple uses AAC (which I've gotten to play on every OS) and which also has a very decent reputation for great sound quality. They complain that iTunes only runs on Windows and Mac (covering what, 95% of the user market). But luckily for the rest of us, that hasn't stopped Apple/Jobs from continuing to do great things for consumers.
2 more weeks and you should have an 8-core Mac Pro as well as a new version of OSX released. Here's to hoping the rumors surrounding the April 15 NAB conference are true.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc .aspx?i=2955 provides a much more detailed look at the new processor architectures coming from Intel. A little better than the PR blurb at ars'.
I'm not sure what reviews you've been looking at but AMD is not nearly "keeping pace" with Intel, not for the last year anyway. http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx? i=2879 clearly shows the intel architecture shining, with many benchmarks having the slowest Intel core beating the fastest AMD. At the same time, Intel is acheiving twice the performance per watt, and these are cores, some of which have been on the market for 6-12 months. Intel has also already released their dual-chip, eight core server line which is slated to make its way into a Mac Pro within 3 weeks. AMD's "hold" on the 4-way market exists because of the conditions 2 years ago when those servers were built. If you want a true comparison (as you claim to be striving for) then you need to look at what new servers are being sold and what the sales numbers are like (I don't have that information). But since the 8-core Intel is again using less than half of the thermal power an 8-core AMD offering, I would wager that an informed IT department wouldn't be choosing the Opteron route.
AMD is capable of great things but Intel has set their minds on dominating the processor world for at least the next 5 years and it will take nothing short of a major evolutionary step from AMD to bring things back into equilibrium. Whilst AMD struggles to get their full line onto the 65nm production scheme, Intel has already started ramping up the 45nm, and that's something that AMD won't quickly be able to compete with.
Intel's latest announcement of modular chip designs and further chipset integration are interesting but I'll reserve judgement until some engineering samples have been evaluated. I'm not ready to say that an on-board memory controllers is hands-down the best solution, but I do agree that this is a great step towards mobile hardware (think smart phones / pda's / tablets ) using less energy and having more processing power while fititng in a smaller form factor.