I'd honestly be surprised if we ever saw a mac priced below $500, and four years ago I wouldn't have thought we'd even see them as "cheap" as they are now.
I remember hearing during the boom days that Apple was looking for someone to acquire or merge with but there wasn't any companies interested in any meaningful way, which isn't too surprising considering what a niche market Apple is in, the trick is that niche happens be a fairly well paying one. Apple gets to sell hardware at comfortable profit margins which they have repeatedly in the past said that they see no problem in doing and have no desire competing in the bargain segment of the market.
Cringley here seems to be arguing in market share for market share's sake, even though it would be a large market share in an area that Apple has never had any desire to woo. He also seems to have a couple gaps in their logic. The iTunes Music Store operates on relatively little profit margin, especially compared to other Apple Products, and is largely used to encourage sales on the much higher margin iPod, and the market the lower-priced Macs are being looked at are people that already own an iPod and probably are already purchasing songs on iTunes. Why take a loss on a product in hopes that they'll spend more money that they're already spending on iTunes anyways?
The lower priced mac is supposedly already going to come with a full suite of applications. Your usual iPhoto, iMovie, etc. and AppleWorks. Odds are they won't be buying many more applications from Apple to run on that mac, at which point you're hoping they'll spend the $120 a year on a OS Upgrade when they wouldn't even buy a Mac at a higher price in the first place.
But of course the better point is there's already people that can't wait to buy the new "headless" iMacs at $500. I would be surprised if they had problems selling all they could make at that price point. Going lower though would have a negative impact, it would set a lower profit margin that Apple would be expected to live up to in the future. It will hurt the sales of their current "low-end" products, namely the eMac, especially when they're selling a version sans-monitor that otherwise has the same hardware. If that's the case why go lower?
Well last time around the polls were showing Bush up 5 points...
On top of that they were worried that Bush would win the popular vote and then lose the electoral vote.
And then Gore won the popular vote and lost Florida because the Supreme Court told them to stop counting votes with 96,000 votes remaining uncounted, and included in the ruling "this only applies in the one instance." Despite them having no constitutional basis for doing such.
As for Desktop chips based off of the Pentium-M if you take a look at Intel's short-range road maps you'll notice that they don't have them. Pentium-M right now is geared heavily towards low energy and will take some serious retooling before they can get it up to performance levels that Intel is comfortable with, after all there was a noticable gap inbetween the PIII being replace by the P4 and Intel releasing the Centrino/Pentium-M, a gap of several (being two) years. It will be about two years until you see Pentium-M based chips as serious performance-based options in the Desktop market, that Intel truly is comfortable with, and would be in a postion to replace the current P4s, however flawed they might be. And considering Intel's recent track record on launches and yeilds, probably longer.
I wasn't expressedly talking about Football players, but I did use a Football player in my example.
Its also possible to get scholarships in Track, Gymnastics, Water Polo, Tennis, whatever.
And most of these people have little to no aspirations of doing these sports professionally. So yes, its helpful, I just wouldn't so readily condemn a system that does have its merits, even though not everyone takes advantage of them doesn't mean it should be taken away from those who do.
Not everyone in College Sports will go on to the professional leagues. In sports like Basketball most of them won't, and the rest of the sports your odds are relatively low.
The collegiate sports system in the US however does give people the opportunity to go to college that otherwise might of not been able to or been able to afford it, and not every single college athlete comes out with a Phys Ed degree, especially if they're not expecting to go on to the professional leagues they often get a real degree, and even some that go pro do. Steve Young, who played for the 49ers for quite a while also managed to get a law degree in college.
This still does not address the massive power consumption problem seen in the P4s, especially the "Prescott" version of the P4s. While heat is a problem, when you're already using +1 lb heatsinks more active cooling is just a temporary fix. Not to mention that Intel, while it can give recomendations it can't ensure that every OEM to produce machines to their specs. I've opened up a number of Dell boxes only to find below-spec power supplies and such.
Prescott in general has had more then its fair share of problems. Prescott is a massive CPU with a 31 stage pipeline, compared to the older P4's 20 and the Athlon XP's 12. I'm not sure off the top of my head how many stages the Athlon 64 has.
All this extra complexity is supposed to make it easier to clock up the processor, and was the same trick Intel used to gain clock speed from the PIII to the P4, so the marketing folks said "Do it again."
Of course the biggest reason why Intel doesn't show many (or any) speed increases is they've scrapped all their future P4/Prescott based designs, even projects that were closed to or already completed because of the problems they have had with Prescott. Intel's plan is to rework their Centrino/Pentium-M core into a desktop chip, but that will take several years.
If I remember correctly the reason why the Athlon and P4 have different sockets is because the two use radically different FSB technology, and between the Athlon 64 and P4 it would be nearly impossible.
Moving to their own socket was perhaps one of the best decisions AMD made for the Athlon, it allowed them to create their own technology instead of having to follow Intel's lead as far as motherboard design goes.
Of course to top it all off Intel claims that all of its bus technology is "proprietary", this is why nVidia hasn't made an nForce chipset for the P4 yet. AMD on the other hand has a much more open policy and actively encourages 3rd party motherboard and chipset makers. A policy which has worked very well for AMD to date.
I, as an upper-middle-class white boy with moderate-to-leftward political leanings had this discussion with one of my upper-middle-class asian super-liberal friends.
His point was that "[blacks and hispanics] feel disadvantaged because of their social upbringing." And therefore we're obligated to set up special programs like tuition funds and Affirmative Action for these groups.
Its scary when you look at how close the rhetoric of the far left and the far right is. They're both a step away from saying, "Its because they're [insert race here.]"
So evidently his explanation would be that we are culturally indebted to try to eliminate the racial gap via racism, but its good racism, and therefore in the realm of politically correctness, fair. In reality is it fair? And his answer to this was more or less a repeat of the above. Circular arguments, because something was unfair we've got to swing it the other way to try to balance out the unfairness, creating a cyclical cycle, etc. etc.
But to answer your question, no, it isn't inherently fair.
Well as seen in previous episodes of SG-1 it takes a lot more power to create a wormhole to another galaxy then they have readily available at the SGC. The one time they did it, and I feel like such a dork for knowing this, was in the episode "The Fifth Race" where O'Neill had the Ancient's Library uploaded into his mind. He created a device, that was subsequently destroyed upon use, that allowed the gate to dial up one of the Asgard worlds.
So as they don't have the power readily available in the Pegasus Galaxy to be able to get a wormhole back to Earth they're stuck, for the time being.
If you want to find out more information you can go to GateWorld and start reading their spoilers. The Episodes, "The Fifth Race", "Ascension", "Meridian", "Frozen", "Maternal Instinct" and "Absolute Power" should give you a rough idea, although not necesarily in that order. I'm sure I left out a couple too.
While not gratuitous I do remember some use of 'fuck' by one of the soldiers if I remember right.
While in my opinion that's not the best reason for an 'R' rating its usually enough. Although this film did deserve an R for the very graphic images they showed, its not the sort of stuff for kids, not that kids would want to go to a documentary either.
"Ok. Let's nitpick: It's not "Here here". It's "Hear, hear". Why do I bring this up? Because so many people here are saying that yes, you need math and problem solving skills. No one mentions that being able to communicate effectively (and correctly) is also very important"
I thought we were talking about CS Majors not English Majors;)
I took the AP test last year, and the AB test did in fact go over them. Although its more use of. Many teachers also go over how to write your own ADTs for stack, queues, etc.
I right now am taking a Data Structures course in college that's covering many things that was covered in my HS's AP course, however the applications tend to be more rigerous, and while AP was done in C++ last year, my college is still using C for most of their fundamental programming courses.
AMD also has fabs in Sunnyvale, CA and Austin, TX. Although Sunnyvale is largely used for research from what I hear.
I don't think either Intel or AMD use anything that could be considered close to "sweatshop" labor. Afterall the vast majority of their equipment require skilled labor to operate.
And while I'm not completely sure, but it wouldn't surprise me if Intel had a fab somewhere in Europe too.
No, they can't tell this by simply observing the number of people in the section of a park, the number of people that ride a ride each day compared to the capacity, how many people are in what lines where and how long they stand around at various sections of the park! It simply can't be done unless you strap tracking devices!
If you haven't noticed most parks already have areas geared towards specific age groups, afterall they're not putting the "Super-Ultra-Puker-Coaster" next to "Barney's Putt Putt Merry-Go-Round". Little tracking devices would simply give them more asccurate statistics but nothing that they don't already know and haven't been acting on for a long time now.
ADB Nubus The stupid little mac-monitor connecter, new and old versions of it....
I'm sure if you gave me more time I could come up with a really nice long list of Apple proprietary hardware. My all time favorite though was when they altered their standard-compliant SCSI CD-Rom drivers so they would no longer work with non-Apple CD-ROMs.
When it comes to following standards Apple is worse then Microsoft. I've yet to see Microsoft alter their drivers specifically to not work with a competitors hardware.
And then you go to the software argument... You can still run most of the new software coming out on Win98 SE, with few exceptions, you can hardly say that about Mac OS 9. Try saying the same about MacOS. Mac-enthusiasts like to tout the "longevity" of Mac Hardware but that simply isn't true when you can't even run the latest applications on them, and that's not even touching the gaming space.
Its a lot easier when it includes things like your drivers license which has things like your address on it, not to mention its easier for the police to look up information on someone. Whereas a credit card has a name and a account number, and lets say you're "Bob Jones." How many Bob Jonses there are in the city, county, state, country could be quite numerous. Not to mention the credit card company is more likely to trust the police.
If I remember right DishNetwork (And DirecTV along with all cable providers) are required by law to carry all the major local networks, or none at all, as it wouldn't be fair for them to carry NBC and Fox but not CBS and ABC, or at least that's how the logic goes.
I'd have to look it up to be any more sure. But I know that when these games have been played in the past they never lasted long because both sides are scared of the FCC stepping in and dictating terms.
I would say that it wouldn't be too hard for them to recap some of the story from the series in a movie if need be (think flashbacks). Because as you correctly assumed, the back story didn't get that deep.
And as for there not being a big enough fanbase, I'm not sure how to argue that one way or another, but evidently there was a big enough fanbase to warrant a DVD release. Which as a fan myself I quickly snapped up.
I honestly do hope they follow up on the River thread that they were running in the series, it would be a shame if they abandoned all the gruntwork they had just started to bloom before the series was tragically cut short.
Intel traditionally helped Microsoft with the driver development in each Windows release, however this time around Intel isn't as motivated to help, and from what I've read in varying reports that biggest problem spot right now is the driver support. Beyond not having Intel writing x86-64 drivers some harware vendors, like ATi, aren't either.
Your average Xeon costs about three times more then your average P4 at the same clockspeed, with the exception of the Extreme Editions, which by and large are just remarketed Xeons. This is hardly just a "few more dollars." Although "just a few dollars more" may be accurate on describing the production cost between your average P4 and Xeon.
Ratemyteachers.com is mostly High and Middle schools, TeacherReviews had quite a few colleges, and I had seen a couple of my professors link to it too.
I have a friend who has Tivo + Digital Cable, I have DirecTivo. He couldn't believe the quality difference, then again neither could I. I couldn't believe someone would pay money for the incredibly poor quality of Comcast Digital Cable. Not to mention that whenever Comcast changed their cable lineup it would bork his Tivo box, and select channels (like SciFi) wouldn't work.
Not to mention that occasionally his digital cable reciever box would hang up and get confused and be on the wrong channel. And despite all of this Digital Cable is more expensive then you're average DirecTV with local channels package.
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I'd honestly be surprised if we ever saw a mac priced below $500, and four years ago I wouldn't have thought we'd even see them as "cheap" as they are now.
I remember hearing during the boom days that Apple was looking for someone to acquire or merge with but there wasn't any companies interested in any meaningful way, which isn't too surprising considering what a niche market Apple is in, the trick is that niche happens be a fairly well paying one. Apple gets to sell hardware at comfortable profit margins which they have repeatedly in the past said that they see no problem in doing and have no desire competing in the bargain segment of the market.
Cringley here seems to be arguing in market share for market share's sake, even though it would be a large market share in an area that Apple has never had any desire to woo. He also seems to have a couple gaps in their logic. The iTunes Music Store operates on relatively little profit margin, especially compared to other Apple Products, and is largely used to encourage sales on the much higher margin iPod, and the market the lower-priced Macs are being looked at are people that already own an iPod and probably are already purchasing songs on iTunes. Why take a loss on a product in hopes that they'll spend more money that they're already spending on iTunes anyways?
The lower priced mac is supposedly already going to come with a full suite of applications. Your usual iPhoto, iMovie, etc. and AppleWorks. Odds are they won't be buying many more applications from Apple to run on that mac, at which point you're hoping they'll spend the $120 a year on a OS Upgrade when they wouldn't even buy a Mac at a higher price in the first place.
But of course the better point is there's already people that can't wait to buy the new "headless" iMacs at $500. I would be surprised if they had problems selling all they could make at that price point. Going lower though would have a negative impact, it would set a lower profit margin that Apple would be expected to live up to in the future. It will hurt the sales of their current "low-end" products, namely the eMac, especially when they're selling a version sans-monitor that otherwise has the same hardware. If that's the case why go lower?
Well last time around the polls were showing Bush up 5 points...
On top of that they were worried that Bush would win the popular vote and then lose the electoral vote.
And then Gore won the popular vote and lost Florida because the Supreme Court told them to stop counting votes with 96,000 votes remaining uncounted, and included in the ruling "this only applies in the one instance." Despite them having no constitutional basis for doing such.
A PIII with a power supply rated under 200w.
As for Desktop chips based off of the Pentium-M if you take a look at Intel's short-range road maps you'll notice that they don't have them. Pentium-M right now is geared heavily towards low energy and will take some serious retooling before they can get it up to performance levels that Intel is comfortable with, after all there was a noticable gap inbetween the PIII being replace by the P4 and Intel releasing the Centrino/Pentium-M, a gap of several (being two) years. It will be about two years until you see Pentium-M based chips as serious performance-based options in the Desktop market, that Intel truly is comfortable with, and would be in a postion to replace the current P4s, however flawed they might be. And considering Intel's recent track record on launches and yeilds, probably longer.
I wasn't expressedly talking about Football players, but I did use a Football player in my example.
Its also possible to get scholarships in Track, Gymnastics, Water Polo, Tennis, whatever.
And most of these people have little to no aspirations of doing these sports professionally. So yes, its helpful, I just wouldn't so readily condemn a system that does have its merits, even though not everyone takes advantage of them doesn't mean it should be taken away from those who do.
Not everyone in College Sports will go on to the professional leagues. In sports like Basketball most of them won't, and the rest of the sports your odds are relatively low.
The collegiate sports system in the US however does give people the opportunity to go to college that otherwise might of not been able to or been able to afford it, and not every single college athlete comes out with a Phys Ed degree, especially if they're not expecting to go on to the professional leagues they often get a real degree, and even some that go pro do. Steve Young, who played for the 49ers for quite a while also managed to get a law degree in college.
Nothing wrong with setting asperations high.
This still does not address the massive power consumption problem seen in the P4s, especially the "Prescott" version of the P4s. While heat is a problem, when you're already using +1 lb heatsinks more active cooling is just a temporary fix. Not to mention that Intel, while it can give recomendations it can't ensure that every OEM to produce machines to their specs. I've opened up a number of Dell boxes only to find below-spec power supplies and such.
Prescott in general has had more then its fair share of problems. Prescott is a massive CPU with a 31 stage pipeline, compared to the older P4's 20 and the Athlon XP's 12. I'm not sure off the top of my head how many stages the Athlon 64 has.
All this extra complexity is supposed to make it easier to clock up the processor, and was the same trick Intel used to gain clock speed from the PIII to the P4, so the marketing folks said "Do it again."
Of course the biggest reason why Intel doesn't show many (or any) speed increases is they've scrapped all their future P4/Prescott based designs, even projects that were closed to or already completed because of the problems they have had with Prescott. Intel's plan is to rework their Centrino/Pentium-M core into a desktop chip, but that will take several years.
If I remember correctly the reason why the Athlon and P4 have different sockets is because the two use radically different FSB technology, and between the Athlon 64 and P4 it would be nearly impossible.
Moving to their own socket was perhaps one of the best decisions AMD made for the Athlon, it allowed them to create their own technology instead of having to follow Intel's lead as far as motherboard design goes.
Of course to top it all off Intel claims that all of its bus technology is "proprietary", this is why nVidia hasn't made an nForce chipset for the P4 yet. AMD on the other hand has a much more open policy and actively encourages 3rd party motherboard and chipset makers. A policy which has worked very well for AMD to date.
I, as an upper-middle-class white boy with moderate-to-leftward political leanings had this discussion with one of my upper-middle-class asian super-liberal friends.
His point was that "[blacks and hispanics] feel disadvantaged because of their social upbringing." And therefore we're obligated to set up special programs like tuition funds and Affirmative Action for these groups.
Its scary when you look at how close the rhetoric of the far left and the far right is. They're both a step away from saying, "Its because they're [insert race here.]"
So evidently his explanation would be that we are culturally indebted to try to eliminate the racial gap via racism, but its good racism, and therefore in the realm of politically correctness, fair. In reality is it fair? And his answer to this was more or less a repeat of the above. Circular arguments, because something was unfair we've got to swing it the other way to try to balance out the unfairness, creating a cyclical cycle, etc. etc.
But to answer your question, no, it isn't inherently fair.
So as they don't have the power readily available in the Pegasus Galaxy to be able to get a wormhole back to Earth they're stuck, for the time being.
If you want to find out more information you can go to GateWorld and start reading their spoilers. The Episodes, "The Fifth Race", "Ascension", "Meridian", "Frozen", "Maternal Instinct" and "Absolute Power" should give you a rough idea, although not necesarily in that order. I'm sure I left out a couple too.
I don't seem to see where he connected school children with monkeys. After all there are monkeys in africa.
While not gratuitous I do remember some use of 'fuck' by one of the soldiers if I remember right.
While in my opinion that's not the best reason for an 'R' rating its usually enough. Although this film did deserve an R for the very graphic images they showed, its not the sort of stuff for kids, not that kids would want to go to a documentary either.
"Ok. Let's nitpick: It's not "Here here". It's "Hear, hear". Why do I bring this up? Because so many people here are saying that yes, you need math and problem solving skills. No one mentions that being able to communicate effectively (and correctly) is also very important"
;)
I thought we were talking about CS Majors not English Majors
I took the AP test last year, and the AB test did in fact go over them. Although its more use of. Many teachers also go over how to write your own ADTs for stack, queues, etc.
I right now am taking a Data Structures course in college that's covering many things that was covered in my HS's AP course, however the applications tend to be more rigerous, and while AP was done in C++ last year, my college is still using C for most of their fundamental programming courses.
AMD also has fabs in Sunnyvale, CA and Austin, TX. Although Sunnyvale is largely used for research from what I hear.
I don't think either Intel or AMD use anything that could be considered close to "sweatshop" labor. Afterall the vast majority of their equipment require skilled labor to operate.
And while I'm not completely sure, but it wouldn't surprise me if Intel had a fab somewhere in Europe too.
No, they can't tell this by simply observing the number of people in the section of a park, the number of people that ride a ride each day compared to the capacity, how many people are in what lines where and how long they stand around at various sections of the park! It simply can't be done unless you strap tracking devices!
If you haven't noticed most parks already have areas geared towards specific age groups, afterall they're not putting the "Super-Ultra-Puker-Coaster" next to "Barney's Putt Putt Merry-Go-Round". Little tracking devices would simply give them more asccurate statistics but nothing that they don't already know and haven't been acting on for a long time now.
ADB ...
Nubus
The stupid little mac-monitor connecter, new and old versions of it.
I'm sure if you gave me more time I could come up with a really nice long list of Apple proprietary hardware. My all time favorite though was when they altered their standard-compliant SCSI CD-Rom drivers so they would no longer work with non-Apple CD-ROMs.
When it comes to following standards Apple is worse then Microsoft. I've yet to see Microsoft alter their drivers specifically to not work with a competitors hardware.
And then you go to the software argument... You can still run most of the new software coming out on Win98 SE, with few exceptions, you can hardly say that about Mac OS 9. Try saying the same about MacOS. Mac-enthusiasts like to tout the "longevity" of Mac Hardware but that simply isn't true when you can't even run the latest applications on them, and that's not even touching the gaming space.
Its a lot easier when it includes things like your drivers license which has things like your address on it, not to mention its easier for the police to look up information on someone. Whereas a credit card has a name and a account number, and lets say you're "Bob Jones." How many Bob Jonses there are in the city, county, state, country could be quite numerous. Not to mention the credit card company is more likely to trust the police.
... HDM as a stage play...
Something turns in my mind, I think its a strange mix of revulsion and a curiosity to see such a monstrousity. Got a link handy?
I'm not sure how extactly you would do "portal to an alternate dimension" on stage, or a number of other things. At least its not a musical.
If I remember right DishNetwork (And DirecTV along with all cable providers) are required by law to carry all the major local networks, or none at all, as it wouldn't be fair for them to carry NBC and Fox but not CBS and ABC, or at least that's how the logic goes.
I'd have to look it up to be any more sure. But I know that when these games have been played in the past they never lasted long because both sides are scared of the FCC stepping in and dictating terms.
I would say that it wouldn't be too hard for them to recap some of the story from the series in a movie if need be (think flashbacks). Because as you correctly assumed, the back story didn't get that deep.
And as for there not being a big enough fanbase, I'm not sure how to argue that one way or another, but evidently there was a big enough fanbase to warrant a DVD release. Which as a fan myself I quickly snapped up.
I honestly do hope they follow up on the River thread that they were running in the series, it would be a shame if they abandoned all the gruntwork they had just started to bloom before the series was tragically cut short.
Rumor has it that Microsoft told Intel to make an x86-64 chip as they weren't all too keen on losing the investment put into x86 code.
Intel traditionally helped Microsoft with the driver development in each Windows release, however this time around Intel isn't as motivated to help, and from what I've read in varying reports that biggest problem spot right now is the driver support. Beyond not having Intel writing x86-64 drivers some harware vendors, like ATi, aren't either.
You need to take a look at Pricewatch my friend:
http://www.pricewatch.com/menus/m3.htm
Your average Xeon costs about three times more then your average P4 at the same clockspeed, with the exception of the Extreme Editions, which by and large are just remarketed Xeons. This is hardly just a "few more dollars." Although "just a few dollars more" may be accurate on describing the production cost between your average P4 and Xeon.
Ratemyteachers.com is mostly High and Middle schools, TeacherReviews had quite a few colleges, and I had seen a couple of my professors link to it too.
So as such they don't quite overlap.
I have a friend who has Tivo + Digital Cable, I have DirecTivo. He couldn't believe the quality difference, then again neither could I. I couldn't believe someone would pay money for the incredibly poor quality of Comcast Digital Cable. Not to mention that whenever Comcast changed their cable lineup it would bork his Tivo box, and select channels (like SciFi) wouldn't work.
Not to mention that occasionally his digital cable reciever box would hang up and get confused and be on the wrong channel. And despite all of this Digital Cable is more expensive then you're average DirecTV with local channels package.