Yes but not everyone agrees with such communist price fixing. Capitalism - in other words free competition - is widely accepted, outside "Old Europe" of course, to be best for all.
Actually solid-state does render vacuum tubes obsolete, to the rational mind. Once you've admitted that the sound you really like just involves lots of second order distortion it's no big deal to make a processor using opamps or discrete transistors to add that distortion to a reliable, efficient, cheap amplifier. As many manufacturers have done! Boss, Line 6, and Roland to name just 3.
You're also forgetting that the biggest contribution to the sound comes from the cabinet, speaker and transformer. Like I say, the valve just adds some nice distortion.
You're not one of these people who believes in gold-plated connectors and $2500 power cables too are you?
Five years ago you would have been right - but you're obviously not keeping up. Many mfrs now offer water cooling systems, there are even all-in-one systems from companies like Thermaltake - if you can install a conventional CPU cooler, you can install water cooling.
When high quality reasonably priced waterblocks became available from Danger Den, Swiftech etc. it became a complete waste of time to make your own unless you're unemployed and have nothing better to do.
Inside springs are a thing of the past (which is great, because it was hard to get the little buggers where you needed them), outside springs work very nicely - google on "coolsleeves". And if you use quality tubing, silicon or Tygon brand then they're not needed because only the most acute angles or twists will cause kinks.
Best solution today - Innovatek, using their convection radiators that mount outside the case, no fan required, and their 12V pump that just plugs into a drive connector. Very pricey but the best always is.
I don't think you really understand. A fan can only help a radiator bring coolant to ambient temperature. If this radiator already provide 200 times the required cooling then adding a fan isn't going to make it "much" cooler, probably not "any" cooler.
You're right - it's an excellent tool for firm pumpkin flesh, but nothing harder. I shudder every time I see someone talking about having modded their steel PC case with a Dremel toy^Hol.
A better question - who will buy it? I can only see one kind of customer:
- the person who only cares about "good enough", not "awesome" performance - Because you're not going to equal ATI or Nvidia's offerings. The newest games will run much faster with the latest proprietary solutions. And we're headed for another revolution in gaming cards if you hadn't been following along, the return of SLI using PCI-E and multiple relatively cheap graphics cards. You can't keep up with product cycles by seeing what's out there now and expecting to bring out the same in 6 months or so.
- and who doesn't expect it to be cheaper than mainstream offerings - You can't beat manufacturers who produce in huge volume in countries with low labor cost. It just can't be done, not even if your R&D all comes free from the community. Volume gets you discounts, sometimes spectacular discounts. It also gets you priority when parts allocations are made. Samsung (and distributors) won't really take much notice if you only want 10,000 3ns BGA memory parts but when PowerColor and Hercules ask for 10,000,000 that's another story.
- and who really really cares about the idealogical and hacky side of computing - Here's your only point of differentiation - your entire value proposition, in a nutshell. It's not produced by "big, evil company X" and all the registers are open. Well sadly that's a smallish market.
In short the whole project would be a charity. A bunch of people would have to do a lot of non-trivial work which they could be financially well rewarded for were they to do it for any of a number of commercial enterprizes.
You are sadly ignorant of what being an Apple developer gets you - and you are also lazy, because it is easy to find out. I'm also a little bit lazy so I won't cut and paste you a link, but I will tell you that it gets you a year of mailed updates (things like new OS releases, new i-software releases etc. and developer tools and documentation) and access to actual human developer support, and also a hardware discount that is worth up to about half of that $500 you pay to become a developer.
So is it worse value than the Microsoft offer? If you believe shovelware is worth more than a few really useful things, you might think so. I don't.
Here's a thought: America is a naughty boy who got caught doing something bad and won't stop because the others are still doing it.
Shame the idea of leadership and guidance over the rest of the world disappears when stimulating the arms industry and gaining domestic popularity isn't involved.
If it isn't obvious by now, "hoagy" has a shitload of money and good luck to him. His access to lots of quality hardware that has nothing better to do and enough leisure time to do this should have told you even if the slashdot-resistant hosting doesn't.
"A man will never admit that he is rich or that he is asleep" - Patrick O'Brian.
It's called payback - having Quicktime do the work of Real bloatware would see Real's lock on their share well and truly smashed - who would pay for a Real server if it offered DRM that could be undone by freely-downloadable software from Apple? If there existed some Open alternative that could play WMV and AVI and MPG and MOV and RM and OGG and every other format, who would ever bother with Quicktime, Windows Media Player, Real Player, etc.? Not many. If any.
I for one would love to see Real fucked in this way. Not that I'm a fan of Apple or anything, I just hate Real (cost me two reinstalls - stupid of me to try it a seond time I know) and will not consider any product of theirs ever again. Real contributes nothing - don't mention Helix as anything useful until it plays ALL the content without adding paid libraries- it's a trojan horse, looking all Open and friendly, but all it really does is let you think you can play.rm and tempt you into taking that one little extra step when you find you just need to add one more library. Not that the need arises much any more - most providers of useful content are not stupid enough to offer it exclusively in Real's formats.
I encourage all the Apple fans to stop thinking like Apple fans, and start thinking like consumers. Apple isn't a charity; Apple doesn't need your support in some kind of vendetta against Real. What YOU, as consumers need, is to avoid content and avoid doing business with companies like Real that want to prevent you from exercising your fair use rights.
The Mac may be foolproof but the Mac community produces a better class of fool.
Hell, I'd like one of these new machines myself, so much less crap on the desk, especially with the bluetooth keyboard. But no way would I buy 500, put them in front of everyone from engineers to MBAs and expect one part-time admin take care of the lot.
Right on - why the hell does it take a Brit (Jonathan Ive) to design an attractive electronic device?
GUIDELINES for MORON INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS:
1. Unneccessary curves are just that - unneccessary. They add manufacturing cost. They make it harder to hold, store or manipulate.
2. If you're going to copy something, just swalow your pride and copy it. Don't just copy the packaging.
3. Putting controls where they will be changed by rubbing against the inside of your pocket is stupid. Yes there can be a control lock, no it shouldn't be essential.
4. Don't mix fonts. If you have to stick a huge name on your device so that people will recognize it then you aren't doing your job right - but if the company insists, coordinate with the software people to use the same font as will be shown on the display.
Technically wow! Design? Yawn. Looks like a Saturn next to an Audi - trying much harder and achieving much less.
Sure you may post a comment, but you sure didn't read the article.
- small movements of the head towards the direction you want to look cause the onscreen view to move in that direction
- your eyes stay pointing at the screen, only your head tilts, and the amount you have to shift your head for a corresponding view shift is adjustable.
- the plane or car or whatever can be controlled with this system (so can anything taking mouse input) but usually it is only your view that changes.
A very clever troll! Congratulations! An appeal to the easily-outraged conservatives couched in patriotic language, and you even put in the line about probably being modded down, the sign of a true master. Now if only you had a UID under 100k.
Unfortunately not true. Try " review" and see if you can dig a real review out of the flood of amazon redirects and link farms. Google used to be great like that, but the scum have found a way around it as always. Just like they did when DARPA policy was supposed to keep the whole net non-commercial and useful.
(Are Canter & Siegel dead of flesh-eating cancer yet? Cause I've been wishing for it.)
Two years later, whitebox PC starts crashing because it has been used and abused solid for two years. It's also time for an upgrade because processors tripled in speed and memory got much cheaper in those two years. The cool part is that mainboard and processor and RAM cost just $300, and presto! current technology again.
Fortunately the Mac is still running fine - it's hardly been used. And that's fortunate because a speed bump of roughly 20% is going to cost 120% of the price of the original machine, because with a Mac you can't just upgrade a processor, you buy a whole new box.
Of course SomeGuy ignored the smug Mac user. He knows the guy is and always will be brainwashed in an extremely self-satisfied and irritating way. Happily under 5% of computer users suffer from this condition, which is rarely cured.
The truly sad thing is that some people believe apocryphal tales like yours and are infected with this terrible affliction. The first symptom is that they become endless bores about their Macintosh and how awesome it is...
Slashdot Mirror
Yes but not everyone agrees with such communist price fixing. Capitalism - in other words free competition - is widely accepted, outside "Old Europe" of course, to be best for all.
chelated iron from a garden store (and it won't corrode non-ferrous metals)
A reset is hardly catastrophic - it takes two, three seconds from power off to ready.
Perhaps later production units will reduce reset frequency if they take the opportunity to tweak the firmware?
Actually solid-state does render vacuum tubes obsolete, to the rational mind. Once you've admitted that the sound you really like just involves lots of second order distortion it's no big deal to make a processor using opamps or discrete transistors to add that distortion to a reliable, efficient, cheap amplifier. As many manufacturers have done! Boss, Line 6, and Roland to name just 3.
You're also forgetting that the biggest contribution to the sound comes from the cabinet, speaker and transformer. Like I say, the valve just adds some nice distortion.
You're not one of these people who believes in gold-plated connectors and $2500 power cables too are you?
Great - when can I get this coating on my glasses?
Five years ago you would have been right - but you're obviously not keeping up. Many mfrs now offer water cooling systems, there are even all-in-one systems from companies like Thermaltake - if you can install a conventional CPU cooler, you can install water cooling.
When high quality reasonably priced waterblocks became available from Danger Den, Swiftech etc. it became a complete waste of time to make your own unless you're unemployed and have nothing better to do.
Inside springs are a thing of the past (which is great, because it was hard to get the little buggers where you needed them), outside springs work very nicely - google on "coolsleeves". And if you use quality tubing, silicon or Tygon brand then they're not needed because only the most acute angles or twists will cause kinks.
Best solution today - Innovatek, using their convection radiators that mount outside the case, no fan required, and their 12V pump that just plugs into a drive connector. Very pricey but the best always is.
I don't think you really understand. A fan can only help a radiator bring coolant to ambient temperature. If this radiator already provide 200 times the required cooling then adding a fan isn't going to make it "much" cooler, probably not "any" cooler.
You're right - it's an excellent tool for firm pumpkin flesh, but nothing harder. I shudder every time I see someone talking about having modded their steel PC case with a Dremel toy^Hol.
A better question - who will buy it? I can only see one kind of customer:
- the person who only cares about "good enough", not "awesome" performance -
Because you're not going to equal ATI or Nvidia's offerings. The newest games will run much faster with the latest proprietary solutions. And we're headed for another revolution in gaming cards if you hadn't been following along, the return of SLI using PCI-E and multiple relatively cheap graphics cards. You can't keep up with product cycles by seeing what's out there now and expecting to bring out the same in 6 months or so.
- and who doesn't expect it to be cheaper than mainstream offerings -
You can't beat manufacturers who produce in huge volume in countries with low labor cost. It just can't be done, not even if your R&D all comes free from the community. Volume gets you discounts, sometimes spectacular discounts. It also gets you priority when parts allocations are made. Samsung (and distributors) won't really take much notice if you only want 10,000 3ns BGA memory parts but when PowerColor and Hercules ask for 10,000,000 that's another story.
- and who really really cares about the idealogical and hacky side of computing -
Here's your only point of differentiation - your entire value proposition, in a nutshell. It's not produced by "big, evil company X" and all the registers are open. Well sadly that's a smallish market.
In short the whole project would be a charity. A bunch of people would have to do a lot of non-trivial work which they could be financially well rewarded for were they to do it for any of a number of commercial enterprizes.
Which is fine if you can afford to do it...
You are sadly ignorant of what being an Apple developer gets you - and you are also lazy, because it is easy to find out. I'm also a little bit lazy so I won't cut and paste you a link, but I will tell you that it gets you a year of mailed updates (things like new OS releases, new i-software releases etc. and developer tools and documentation) and access to actual human developer support, and also a hardware discount that is worth up to about half of that $500 you pay to become a developer.
So is it worse value than the Microsoft offer? If you believe shovelware is worth more than a few really useful things, you might think so. I don't.
There will be mobile wireless OTHER than under the President's suit jacket?
Here's a thought: America is a naughty boy who got caught doing something bad and won't stop because the others are still doing it.
Shame the idea of leadership and guidance over the rest of the world disappears when stimulating the arms industry and gaining domestic popularity isn't involved.
If it isn't obvious by now, "hoagy" has a shitload of money and good luck to him. His access to lots of quality hardware that has nothing better to do and enough leisure time to do this should have told you even if the slashdot-resistant hosting doesn't.
"A man will never admit that he is rich or that he is asleep" - Patrick O'Brian.
Why would Apple do this?
.rm and tempt you into taking that one little extra step when you find you just need to add one more library. Not that the need arises much any more - most providers of useful content are not stupid enough to offer it exclusively in Real's formats.
It's called payback - having Quicktime do the work of Real bloatware would see Real's lock on their share well and truly smashed - who would pay for a Real server if it offered DRM that could be undone by freely-downloadable software from Apple? If there existed some Open alternative that could play WMV and AVI and MPG and MOV and RM and OGG and every other format, who would ever bother with Quicktime, Windows Media Player, Real Player, etc.? Not many. If any.
I for one would love to see Real fucked in this way. Not that I'm a fan of Apple or anything, I just hate Real (cost me two reinstalls - stupid of me to try it a seond time I know) and will not consider any product of theirs ever again. Real contributes nothing - don't mention Helix as anything useful until it plays ALL the content without adding paid libraries- it's a trojan horse, looking all Open and friendly, but all it really does is let you think you can play
I encourage all the Apple fans to stop thinking like Apple fans, and start thinking like consumers. Apple isn't a charity; Apple doesn't need your support in some kind of vendetta against Real. What YOU, as consumers need, is to avoid content and avoid doing business with companies like Real that want to prevent you from exercising your fair use rights.
The Mac may be foolproof but the Mac community produces a better class of fool.
Hell, I'd like one of these new machines myself, so much less crap on the desk, especially with the bluetooth keyboard. But no way would I buy 500, put them in front of everyone from engineers to MBAs and expect one part-time admin take care of the lot.
Right on - why the hell does it take a Brit (Jonathan Ive) to design an attractive electronic device?
GUIDELINES for MORON INDUSTRIAL DESIGNERS:
1. Unneccessary curves are just that - unneccessary. They add manufacturing cost. They make it harder to hold, store or manipulate.
2. If you're going to copy something, just swalow your pride and copy it. Don't just copy the packaging.
3. Putting controls where they will be changed by rubbing against the inside of your pocket is stupid. Yes there can be a control lock, no it shouldn't be essential.
4. Don't mix fonts. If you have to stick a huge name on your device so that people will recognize it then you aren't doing your job right - but if the company insists, coordinate with the software people to use the same font as will be shown on the display.
Technically wow! Design? Yawn. Looks like a Saturn next to an Audi - trying much harder and achieving much less.
Sure you may post a comment, but you sure didn't read the article.
- small movements of the head towards the direction you want to look cause the onscreen view to move in that direction
- your eyes stay pointing at the screen, only your head tilts, and the amount you have to shift your head for a corresponding view shift is adjustable.
- the plane or car or whatever can be controlled with this system (so can anything taking mouse input) but usually it is only your view that changes.
I think you'd find most married guys don't require "head tracking".
The rare occasions are easily remembered.
A very clever troll! Congratulations! An appeal to the easily-outraged conservatives couched in patriotic language, and you even put in the line about probably being modded down, the sign of a true master. Now if only you had a UID under 100k.
If only he had used HTML for Good, and not for Masturbation.
If you HATE websites that make a noise...
do not visit the website linked (DSLAM's blog) - it plays music.
You have been Informed.
Oh, well my pet peeve is when people misapply or misspell a common word or phrase.
Wa la!
pet PEAVE!
COULD care less!
One foul swoop!
web sight!
totally wrapped about something!
early adapters!
and I could go on much longer. Where does all this begin, MTV?
Unfortunately not true. Try " review" and see if you can dig a real review out of the flood of amazon redirects and link farms. Google used to be great like that, but the scum have found a way around it as always. Just like they did when DARPA policy was supposed to keep the whole net non-commercial and useful.
(Are Canter & Siegel dead of flesh-eating cancer yet? Cause I've been wishing for it.)
Two years later, whitebox PC starts crashing because it has been used and abused solid for two years. It's also time for an upgrade because processors tripled in speed and memory got much cheaper in those two years. The cool part is that mainboard and processor and RAM cost just $300, and presto! current technology again.
Fortunately the Mac is still running fine - it's hardly been used. And that's fortunate because a speed bump of roughly 20% is going to cost 120% of the price of the original machine, because with a Mac you can't just upgrade a processor, you buy a whole new box.
Of course SomeGuy ignored the smug Mac user. He knows the guy is and always will be brainwashed in an extremely self-satisfied and irritating way. Happily under 5% of computer users suffer from this condition, which is rarely cured.
The truly sad thing is that some people believe apocryphal tales like yours and are infected with this terrible affliction. The first symptom is that they become endless bores about their Macintosh and how awesome it is...
Get one from wiebetech.com and you don't even have to swap the disk - it's a unit that plugs right into the back of a bare IDE drive.