Symmetric doesn't really have any deeper implications. It just implies the processors are similar. There's no underlying implications about synchronization. When writing code for SMP machines, not only is it not possible to accidentally depend on the processors being synchronized, it's impossible to explicitly depend on synchronization.
Spin-locks or not, cores running at different clockspeeds aren't going to expose any more race conditions than regular usage. Even on a current SMP system, the processors will almost always be asymetrically loaded, so threads of an app won't really see the two processors running at the same speed anyway.
That's impressive, though *very* unusual for a radio. As I said, 20-30 MHz is pushing it for traditional radio applications, particularly in licensed bands, where the logistics of spectrum allocation with that kind of bandwidth are difficult. A 500 Mhz radio definitely qualifies as UWB, even if its not as wide as it can go.
What're you talking about? 4.224 to 4.752 GHz is a 528 MHz bandwidth. 20-30 MHz is very wideband for a radio, so 528 MHz definitely qualifies as "ultra wideband". Not to mention that it meets the FCC's definition of UWB, which specifies a bandwidth of greater than 500 MHz.
NetBSD also has a ridiculously clean codebase. That means if you're porting the OS to a new architecture, or doing some sort of OS research, the NetBSD code is a much better place to start than the FreeBSD or Linux code.
What planet are you from? Linux hasn't been "Hamm Radio" for quite awhile now. It's got comparable desktop marketshare to Apple now, not as the result of geeks installing it on their machines, but as the result of large rollouts in government offices and educational institutions. Not to mention the server market, where multiple billion dollar companies are targetting Linux as their primary platform in large swaths of the market.
As for usability, have you used a late-model edition of Ubuntu? On good hardware, it's ease of use is better than XP's, and perhaps a little worse than OS X's. The UI was enormously simplified in GNOME 2.x, with the remaining difficulties being mainly in the domain of software/hardware integration and configuration (eg: software suspend, etc). Using good hardware is key here. Intel stuff tends to be the best-supported in Linux, and on an all-Intel system (Intel CPU, Intel chipset, Intel NIC, Intel Wifi, Intel GPU), pretty much everything should be detected and configured automagically.
2) Here i will have to agree with you on the fact that the future 360 games will look better (at least i hope so!). Without upgrading the computer, if you started with a highend video card, it should be adaquate for 3 yrs at least.
A three year old high-end card today is a GeForce FX series. What cutting-edge games does that run out of box, adequately and with no tweeking?
Also in five years, the 360 will most likely be replaced also. (although i've very curious to see how far they can go with the 360)
Yes, and right up to that point, it'll be as good a gaming system as the day you bought it. The PS2 is on its sixth year, and there are still a bunch of great PS2 games in the pipeline. How many comparably old PCs still make such good gaming machines?
3) I for one do (vid editing), i have several friends who do also. The gaming pc is going to be able to edit vids with little problem.
I know many gamers, none of which do video editing. I'd argue that my experience is by far more common than yours.
doesn't need in a computer. I'm talking purely POTENTIAL in a purchase. I'm stating that a $1000 gaming machine CAN do more than a Mac and console.
People don't buy computers for potential. They buy them for what they need to do. Most people don't do enough with their PCs to warrent a serious machine. Of the minority that do, most of those are gamers, who only need the power for gaming. Thus, for the vast majority of people, even gamers, $1000 is better spent on a sensible computer and a console than on a gaming computer. The console will get you a lot more gaming for the money*, and the Mac Mini will be a much nicer, quieter, friendlier surfing/work machine.
*) Unless, of course, you're into RTS or FPS, in which case a PC is really your only option.
1) Regular people don't buy their computers from local shops that will build a custom one. Moreover, such computers are almost always more expensive than a comparably-specced machine from a major manufacturer.
2) A $1000 computer may match the first-gen 360 games. It won't match the second-gen 360 games, because those games will be more optimized for the 360, while contemporary PC games won't be as optimized for your year-old computer. Five years from now, when good-looking games are still coming out for the 360, your PC will be pretty much worthless for gaming.
3) How many gamers do you know who do video editing or 3D rendering on their machines? Almost all gamers buy a lot more computer than they need for their other tasks, just so they can use it for gaming. My argument is that its a lot cheaper and a lot simpler to buy as much computer you need for non-gaming purposes, and buy a console for gaming. $1000 will buy you a Mac Mini and a console that'll be just fine for their respective uses for the next several years. Without the additional cost of upgrades, a $1000 PC isn't going to be nearly as good a gaming machine in three years as a current-gen console.
Console games can have framerate problems (and unfortunately its getting more frequent), but they're usually small hiccups. In contrast, I have yet to encounter a PC game that ran as smoothly as a console game does out of box (with no tweeking!) on all but the highest-end machine.
As for the 360 versus your computer, two points: First, your graphics card alone costs more than a 360. Yet, three years from now, the 360 will still play 360 games perfectly out of the box, (and a Mini will still surf and rip CDs and whatnot just great), while playing games on your 7900GTX is going to either require an upgrade or extensive tweeking. Second, there is no way that your PC has already eclipsed the 360. Developers are just scratching the surface of what the 360 can do. That's where the "more optimized" aspect comes in. Over the next couple of years, 360 games will continue to get better looking while running at the same speed on the same machine. That won't be true for PC games, which can't be optimized nearly as heavily for a specific set of hardware. That's why there are still games coming out for the PS2 that look quite good (though they lack the fancy shader effects and high-resolution of current PC games), even though almost no new PC games run well on a PC graphics card of comprable vintage (ie: a GeForce 2).
The Mini is a low-price computer, but its a high-quality one, and absolutely perfect for the tasks most non-gamers use their PCs for other than gaming. And unlike almost all gamer PCs, it'll do those non-gaming tasks quietly and with minimal power and space usage.
As for custom-built computers, when did they come into play? We're talking about a $700 Mini + a $300 console replacing a $1000 gaming PC. Even most gamers aren't capable of properly building their own machines. Heck, as someone who has built his own machines (including a dozen nodes of a cluster for work), I can say whole-heartedly that I won't do it again if I can help it.
PC gaming probably isn't dying, but its not a growing industry either, based on flat sales statistics the last year or two. To be fair, to a certain extent, neither is console gaming. Wireless and web-based (eg: flash) gaming is the big up-and coming industry, and is projected to overtake PC gaming in the not-too-distant future.
Of course, there are reasons to be more optimistic about the prospects of console gaming than the prospects of PC gaming. It doesn't seem likely that masses of regular people will suddenly decide to give up their consoles and futz with drivers, patches, and the constant upgrade cycle to get into PC gaming. At the same time, computers are becoming more commoditized, and the resulting hardware (remember, Intel integrated graphics is now the #1 GPU out there) is not as capable as relatively cheap consoles of playing the latest games.
The Mac has the video camera integrated, with no drivers to install. I haven't encountered a webcam yet that didn't require drivers in XP, but I'll assume you found one. Drivers aside, the discoverability of video chat features is substantially better on the Mac. First of all, iChat is a big, obvious icon on the dock, while MSN Messenger is either buried in the Start Menu with a zillion other things, or an inconspicuous tiny icon in the system tray (which, on most machines, even out of the box, is chock-full of other stuff to the point where the MSN icon gets hidden*). Second, it wouldn't have occurred to my mom to go to the menu to start a video chat. In fact, she wasn't even aware of the fact that iChat could do video chat. She discovered it because iChat puts a big video camera icon next to the buddy icons of people who have a video camera. That's UI design at its finest --- creating an interface that allows people to do things they didn't even know they could do.
Discoverability is a feature that's pervasive in OS X, and one that Microsoft has yet to master. Just compare iTunes and WMP. As of WMP9, anyway, ripping or creating CDs was non-intuitive even for myself (a programmer). Meanwhile, my mom rips CDs and syncs her iPod quite easily using iTunes.
*) Hiding things is another weakness of Windows. Ever since Win2K introduced the inane feature to hide infrequently-used menu entries, my parents have had trouble with it. It's something that goes against half a dozen principles of good HI design, yet Microsoft still hasn't gotten rid of it. The same is true for hiding stuff in the systray, or entries in the taskbar.
By "decent", I mean "I can buy any game I want off the shelf and never have to change a setting to see little-to-no lag". That's a mean feat for a PC, and its not cheap.
In an case, why doesn't the Mini count? A mini and a cheapo 17" monitor can be put together for $700 total. For surfing, listening to music, homework (ie: the stuff most gamers use their PC for when not gaming), it's just great. Certainly, the $1000 gaming machine won't be noticably better for such lightweight stuff, and the Mini will offer a better experience for such tasks, as it has a minimal noise and space footprint.
The new Intel machines are all very well priced. They're quite well-equipped, as Apple isn't trying to compete with eMachines and the like, but the price is fair given what's under the hood. I paid $1300 for my Macbook, and finding a comparable machine from a top-tier manufacturer isn't easy. The standard features on the Macbook (dual-core processor, camera, etc), all jack up the price significantly on the PC side, and if you're looking for comparable durability, you'll be looking at Thinkpads that actually cost as much or more.
And of course, the new Mac Pros are an absolute steal for what you get. $2.5k will buy you a quad 2.66 Xeon machine with 1GB of FB-DIMM, shipped. That's a pair of $700 procs on a $400 (minimum) motherboard, with $200 RAM. The case itself is worth at least $200 (the sides and handles, which make up the frame, are 1/8th inch solid aluminum plate, the thing weighs a ton), and in the remaining $300, you've got to cover an HDD, optical drive, graphics card, heatsinks, case fans, mouse, keyboard, and shipping. You might be able to hit $2500 if you build it yourself (maybe), and only if you don't factor in the cost of your labor or the lack of a warrenty on the resultant machine.
A comparable BOXX machine (which is Apple's competition with the Mac Pro), will start at over $4k, for equivalent hardware. Even then, the BOXX won't run OS X, while the Mac Pro will run OS X and XP.
The problem with your reasoning is that FPS and RTS are actually relatively small segments. The largest FPS blockbusters on the PC (Half-Life) sell comparably to the largest FPS blockbusters on the consoles (Halo, GoldenEye), but not compared to the largest console blockbusters.
The simple fact is that console gaming is 4x larger than PC gaming, and that figure has remained relatively static. PC gamers like to deride the sports, racing, fighting, JRPG, and platformer genres, but these are the meat of the gaming industry. For example, each of the last 4 Final Fantasy games would've placed in the list of highest selling PC games ever. Almost every yearly rehash of Madden sells about as many copies as blockbuster PC FPSs like UT or HL2 (with HL1 being an exception). Even high profile PC FPSs like Doom III don't even compare to the sales of merely popular (rather than blockbuster) console games, and the Preys and other smaller titles on the PC are a blip on the rader in console terms.
I'm gonna come right out and say it. One of the greatest things about using a Mac is that there aren't any gamers. Sure, the Mac community has its share of newbies, cultural elitists, artsy-guys who buy foof bags for their macbook, etc, but I never log on to macnn and have to deal with a gamer.
Eh, not really. A decent gaming PC will run you 1k plus, at least if you want one that's powerful enough so that you never have to tweek settings (like on a console). If you don't otherwise need a powerful PC, you could easily get a Mac Mini and a 360, and end up with two machines that are optimized for their particular role.
Most of your post is innane overanalysis of what is really a fairly straightforward and quite funny set of ads. One point does, however, stick out.
I have yet to see anything done on a Mac that I can't do on a Windows machine.
A given user might be able to do a lot of things on a Mac that they can't on Windows. My mom figured out how to video conference with me on her Mac, but could never have done it on Windows. Not because Windows lacks video conferencing software, but because video-conferencing in OS X is drop-dead simple, and requires little to no configuration. The same thing with photo magement. My mom could never do photo management in Windows, because she'd have to install Picasa or something like that, which is beyond her grasp. In OS X, she plugs in her digital camera, and up pops iPhoto, again with no configuration required. The same applies for music management too. iTunes makes ripping CDs and syncing with her iPod doable in way that WMP never could.
Well that's fine and good, but most people aren't like you. The association of income with worth in American culture is both pervasive and very well-documented.
Here we agree completely. This is a solvable problem, however.
Yes it is. Yet, most men are too lazy to want to solve it. Most lack the perspective to even realize that there is a problem.
Only on so-called sitcoms
My mother sells furniture. She has told stories on numerous occasions of men who grumble about money while their wives pick out items. This is perhaps a situational phenomenon, men are unlikely to complain about such matters off-hand, but in situations where they do complain, they reveal thinking that underscores their interactions with their wives, whether they realize it or not.
I disagree. The gender pay gap demonstrates that in general women doing the same job as men tend to be paid less. Does that mean that her contribution is worth less to the company (or the family?)
In a nutshell, yes. The price of anything in a free market, including labor, directly reflects its value to society. Our society values the contribution of women less than the contributions of men, and it shows up explicitly in their salaries.
I agree that there's a misunderstanding of what a workday is like, but frankly that's unrelated to time in the workplace. My wife's comment to this idea of yours was "and women and men experience the workplace in the same way?" To her, that seems laughable.
I can't vouch for the way women experience the workplace, but what I can vouch for is that those who do not work really miss a certain amount of perspective of what work entails. When I was a kid, my mother would express envy regarding my father, who would take business trips to exotic locations around the world. Of course, he always stated (and its a fact that I've since experienced to be true), that business trips are not only unglamerous, but usually grueling 16-hour a day affairs in unfamiliar and uncomfortable circumstances. The stresses of office politics, the pressure of deadlines, etc, are things that are really hard to appreciate without experiencing them firsthand. Women might not experience these factors in exactly the same way, but I don't see any reason why they'd experience them differently enough so as not to gain any perspective regarding her partner's cirumstances.
Of course, dedicated people can gain this perspective without first-hand experience, but that kind of dedication is not something commonplace among people.
1. What about the additional stress in the relationship caused by having less time to allocate to chores and relating to your spouse?
Yes, there is additional stress as a result of these things (though, back to the original money argument --- spending some to hire people to take care of chores makes a substantial difference), but the stress is of a different nature. Because both people in the couple have work-related responsibilities, there is a forced sharing of chores, and thus a distribution of stress onto both parties. As a result, marital tension doesn't arise from perceived inequities in the allocation of housework. If the wife doesn't work, its very easy for the husband to fall into a "I make the money, why should I do housework" mindset.
What about PARENTING? When the wife is in the workplace, who is raising the children? Certainly not the people who are busy at the office!
The children aren't even home for most of the workday. Most schools I know off don't let out until 3pm, and the two hours a day the kids are unsupervised or in day care (or at a school-sponsored after-school activity!) realy isn't going to have an adverse effect on their development.
I'm a father of five, and I can tell you that there's no amount of money you could PAY me to do what I need to do as a dad!
I don't have any experience with larger families, and it very well may be t
Re:Got any data to back up that stupid idea?
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I'm not saying that it can't work out for some (even many) people. Especially if there is some sort of support network there in the form of family, friends, etc. However, lots of people don't have that support network in place, many husbands aren't so flexible as to make sure their wives have "time off", and many people just aren't wired to find keeping a home satisfying. If you took a women at random from the population, the chances are good that at least one of these important elements is missing in her life. Thus, in common circumstances, a women is usually better-off working than staying at home.
Regarding the contorted relationship, I disgree. The wife working outside the home changes the dynamics of the marriage substantially. The thing about homemaking is that its an unpaid profession, and we, especially Americans, are programmed to associate worth with salary. As a result, marital tensions arise from ambiguity about the contribution of each person in the couple to the family unit. This is complicated by the fact that most men do not really understand what's involved in keeping a home, and don't do the calculation of the actual equivalent monetary value of the services provided by the housewife. How many times have you heard a man complain that his wife is wasting "his" money. This is precisely that phenomenon at work. When the women works, the value of her contribution is made explicit, and an avenue for potential conflict is shut down. Being outside the home also changes the perceptions of women. Housewives often have a distorted view of what men consider "the real world" --- ie: the workplace in which the man spends most of his day. Working gives women some perspective on how the man lives, which reduces the potential for conflict resulting from differences in perspective.
There is no feminist media at work here. The fact that this is news is the result of the fact that its novel to people. The world is not what you seem to think it is. If it were truely equal, then it wouldn't be news at all. If the probability of a space tourist (or founder of a tech company or benefactor of scientific a scientific prize, for that matter) being a women was an even 50%, then nobody would report this, because nobody would find it interesting. But it's not. It's quite rare for a women to do any of these things*, and as a result, it makes for interesting news.
*) Now, you can argue on why it rare, but that's orthogonal to this discussion. You don't seem to think its the result of innate differences between men and women (a stance which is probably more than a bit naive), in which case you must admit that its the result of social constraints which guide women away from these roles. Either way, it's something worth highlighting, and hence something that is newsworthy.
I grew up in Northern VA, and I can't say I see what you're saying. When I was younger, I lived in a $150k house in Vienna. When I went to college, I lived in a $1.3m house in Great Falls. I can't say the ratio of happy/unhappy people was any different in the two places.
In the real world, money has a lot of benefits. It's documented that a lot of marital strains are the result of financial issues. Sure, some of that is the result of a materialistic bent, but what the hell, humans are materialistic. Life is just a lot easier when the answer to "so, where should we eat tonight?" is based on "do we want Italian or Mexican?" rather than "gosh, that new Italian place is pretty expensive". As for working moms, its an almost universally good thing. Staying at home results in psychological pathologies, especially in our modern social structure where women don't congregate in the large social groups they do in more traditional societies. It's a loney, stressful, and largely unrewarding experience for many people, and results in an often contorted relationship between husband and wife.
Seaking from personal experience, I have to say that there is no conflict between modern values and tight family bonds. My parents and my brother and I are all very success-oriented type-A people, and more than a bit materialistic. Even though all of us spend most of our time working, we still have an extremely close bond. Creating that bond doesn't require changing your lifestyle, it just requires committment. When I still lived at home, we ate dinner together most every night. You have to eat dinner anyway, it's not a huge step to do it together. I spent a non-insubstantial amount of time as a kid talking with my dad while helping him with household work like fixing sinks or cleaning gutters. I'd spend a lot of time talking with my mom over breakfast before she left for work, or when I was on vacation, going out with her to lunch on her days off. To this day, even when I work 70 hour weeks, I still know everything my brother does, because I ping him now and then on AIM, or call him during lunch or dinner. All these things don't add up to a whole lot of time, but it doesn't take that much to stay involved in each others' lives.
Science can indeed make a lie out of religion, to the extent that religions traditionally make numerous claims about the nature of the material world. For example, its quite clear that all of humanity is not descended from a single couple, even though the Bible says so. Some religions (eg: Catholicism), have learned that its pointless to fight science, and have indeed shifted the boundary of their influence to contain only the metaphysical, moral, and ehtical realms. Other religions, notably most brands of Protestantism as well as Islam, have not been so wise.
This seems a very naive, "outside looking-in" statement to me. Who says there is no debate within the evolutionary community? I'm not a biologist, but I'm sure there is quite heated debate within the community, though to outsiders it may not be obvious. It's true that few scientists contend that evolution is a fundementally flawed theory, and that most contention is about the details of the mechanisms. That doesn't make the theory "dogma", it just makes it a pretty good theory. It's like fluid dynamics. Very few people will come out and say "the Navier-Stokes equations are wrong!" Does that make it a dogma? Does that mean there is no more debate? Of course not. There's lots of debate about the exact mechanics of phenomena like turbulence. However, there's not a lot of debate about the basic principles of the field, because most people believe them to be sound.
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9/11 victim jokes are funny :)
Once you start finding funny things not funny, then the terrorists win!
Symmetric doesn't really have any deeper implications. It just implies the processors are similar. There's no underlying implications about synchronization. When writing code for SMP machines, not only is it not possible to accidentally depend on the processors being synchronized, it's impossible to explicitly depend on synchronization.
Spin-locks or not, cores running at different clockspeeds aren't going to expose any more race conditions than regular usage. Even on a current SMP system, the processors will almost always be asymetrically loaded, so threads of an app won't really see the two processors running at the same speed anyway.
That's impressive, though *very* unusual for a radio. As I said, 20-30 MHz is pushing it for traditional radio applications, particularly in licensed bands, where the logistics of spectrum allocation with that kind of bandwidth are difficult. A 500 Mhz radio definitely qualifies as UWB, even if its not as wide as it can go.
What're you talking about? 4.224 to 4.752 GHz is a 528 MHz bandwidth. 20-30 MHz is very wideband for a radio, so 528 MHz definitely qualifies as "ultra wideband". Not to mention that it meets the FCC's definition of UWB, which specifies a bandwidth of greater than 500 MHz.
NetBSD also has a ridiculously clean codebase. That means if you're porting the OS to a new architecture, or doing some sort of OS research, the NetBSD code is a much better place to start than the FreeBSD or Linux code.
The Mac Mini costs $700. For a dual-core machine, that's a great price.
What planet are you from? Linux hasn't been "Hamm Radio" for quite awhile now. It's got comparable desktop marketshare to Apple now, not as the result of geeks installing it on their machines, but as the result of large rollouts in government offices and educational institutions. Not to mention the server market, where multiple billion dollar companies are targetting Linux as their primary platform in large swaths of the market.
As for usability, have you used a late-model edition of Ubuntu? On good hardware, it's ease of use is better than XP's, and perhaps a little worse than OS X's. The UI was enormously simplified in GNOME 2.x, with the remaining difficulties being mainly in the domain of software/hardware integration and configuration (eg: software suspend, etc). Using good hardware is key here. Intel stuff tends to be the best-supported in Linux, and on an all-Intel system (Intel CPU, Intel chipset, Intel NIC, Intel Wifi, Intel GPU), pretty much everything should be detected and configured automagically.
2) Here i will have to agree with you on the fact that the future 360 games will look better (at least i hope so!). Without upgrading the computer, if you started with a highend video card, it should be adaquate for 3 yrs at least.
A three year old high-end card today is a GeForce FX series. What cutting-edge games does that run out of box, adequately and with no tweeking?
Also in five years, the 360 will most likely be replaced also. (although i've very curious to see how far they can go with the 360)
Yes, and right up to that point, it'll be as good a gaming system as the day you bought it. The PS2 is on its sixth year, and there are still a bunch of great PS2 games in the pipeline. How many comparably old PCs still make such good gaming machines?
3) I for one do (vid editing), i have several friends who do also. The gaming pc is going to be able to edit vids with little problem.
I know many gamers, none of which do video editing. I'd argue that my experience is by far more common than yours.
doesn't need in a computer. I'm talking purely POTENTIAL in a purchase. I'm stating that a $1000 gaming machine CAN do more than a Mac and console.
People don't buy computers for potential. They buy them for what they need to do. Most people don't do enough with their PCs to warrent a serious machine. Of the minority that do, most of those are gamers, who only need the power for gaming. Thus, for the vast majority of people, even gamers, $1000 is better spent on a sensible computer and a console than on a gaming computer. The console will get you a lot more gaming for the money*, and the Mac Mini will be a much nicer, quieter, friendlier surfing/work machine.
*) Unless, of course, you're into RTS or FPS, in which case a PC is really your only option.
Three points:
1) Regular people don't buy their computers from local shops that will build a custom one. Moreover, such computers are almost always more expensive than a comparably-specced machine from a major manufacturer.
2) A $1000 computer may match the first-gen 360 games. It won't match the second-gen 360 games, because those games will be more optimized for the 360, while contemporary PC games won't be as optimized for your year-old computer. Five years from now, when good-looking games are still coming out for the 360, your PC will be pretty much worthless for gaming.
3) How many gamers do you know who do video editing or 3D rendering on their machines? Almost all gamers buy a lot more computer than they need for their other tasks, just so they can use it for gaming. My argument is that its a lot cheaper and a lot simpler to buy as much computer you need for non-gaming purposes, and buy a console for gaming. $1000 will buy you a Mac Mini and a console that'll be just fine for their respective uses for the next several years. Without the additional cost of upgrades, a $1000 PC isn't going to be nearly as good a gaming machine in three years as a current-gen console.
Console games can have framerate problems (and unfortunately its getting more frequent), but they're usually small hiccups. In contrast, I have yet to encounter a PC game that ran as smoothly as a console game does out of box (with no tweeking!) on all but the highest-end machine.
As for the 360 versus your computer, two points: First, your graphics card alone costs more than a 360. Yet, three years from now, the 360 will still play 360 games perfectly out of the box, (and a Mini will still surf and rip CDs and whatnot just great), while playing games on your 7900GTX is going to either require an upgrade or extensive tweeking. Second, there is no way that your PC has already eclipsed the 360. Developers are just scratching the surface of what the 360 can do. That's where the "more optimized" aspect comes in. Over the next couple of years, 360 games will continue to get better looking while running at the same speed on the same machine. That won't be true for PC games, which can't be optimized nearly as heavily for a specific set of hardware. That's why there are still games coming out for the PS2 that look quite good (though they lack the fancy shader effects and high-resolution of current PC games), even though almost no new PC games run well on a PC graphics card of comprable vintage (ie: a GeForce 2).
The Mini is a low-price computer, but its a high-quality one, and absolutely perfect for the tasks most non-gamers use their PCs for other than gaming. And unlike almost all gamer PCs, it'll do those non-gaming tasks quietly and with minimal power and space usage.
As for custom-built computers, when did they come into play? We're talking about a $700 Mini + a $300 console replacing a $1000 gaming PC. Even most gamers aren't capable of properly building their own machines. Heck, as someone who has built his own machines (including a dozen nodes of a cluster for work), I can say whole-heartedly that I won't do it again if I can help it.
PC gaming probably isn't dying, but its not a growing industry either, based on flat sales statistics the last year or two. To be fair, to a certain extent, neither is console gaming. Wireless and web-based (eg: flash) gaming is the big up-and coming industry, and is projected to overtake PC gaming in the not-too-distant future.
Of course, there are reasons to be more optimistic about the prospects of console gaming than the prospects of PC gaming. It doesn't seem likely that masses of regular people will suddenly decide to give up their consoles and futz with drivers, patches, and the constant upgrade cycle to get into PC gaming. At the same time, computers are becoming more commoditized, and the resulting hardware (remember, Intel integrated graphics is now the #1 GPU out there) is not as capable as relatively cheap consoles of playing the latest games.
The Mac has the video camera integrated, with no drivers to install. I haven't encountered a webcam yet that didn't require drivers in XP, but I'll assume you found one. Drivers aside, the discoverability of video chat features is substantially better on the Mac. First of all, iChat is a big, obvious icon on the dock, while MSN Messenger is either buried in the Start Menu with a zillion other things, or an inconspicuous tiny icon in the system tray (which, on most machines, even out of the box, is chock-full of other stuff to the point where the MSN icon gets hidden*). Second, it wouldn't have occurred to my mom to go to the menu to start a video chat. In fact, she wasn't even aware of the fact that iChat could do video chat. She discovered it because iChat puts a big video camera icon next to the buddy icons of people who have a video camera. That's UI design at its finest --- creating an interface that allows people to do things they didn't even know they could do.
Discoverability is a feature that's pervasive in OS X, and one that Microsoft has yet to master. Just compare iTunes and WMP. As of WMP9, anyway, ripping or creating CDs was non-intuitive even for myself (a programmer). Meanwhile, my mom rips CDs and syncs her iPod quite easily using iTunes.
*) Hiding things is another weakness of Windows. Ever since Win2K introduced the inane feature to hide infrequently-used menu entries, my parents have had trouble with it. It's something that goes against half a dozen principles of good HI design, yet Microsoft still hasn't gotten rid of it. The same is true for hiding stuff in the systray, or entries in the taskbar.
By "decent", I mean "I can buy any game I want off the shelf and never have to change a setting to see little-to-no lag". That's a mean feat for a PC, and its not cheap.
In an case, why doesn't the Mini count? A mini and a cheapo 17" monitor can be put together for $700 total. For surfing, listening to music, homework (ie: the stuff most gamers use their PC for when not gaming), it's just great. Certainly, the $1000 gaming machine won't be noticably better for such lightweight stuff, and the Mini will offer a better experience for such tasks, as it has a minimal noise and space footprint.
The new Intel machines are all very well priced. They're quite well-equipped, as Apple isn't trying to compete with eMachines and the like, but the price is fair given what's under the hood. I paid $1300 for my Macbook, and finding a comparable machine from a top-tier manufacturer isn't easy. The standard features on the Macbook (dual-core processor, camera, etc), all jack up the price significantly on the PC side, and if you're looking for comparable durability, you'll be looking at Thinkpads that actually cost as much or more.
And of course, the new Mac Pros are an absolute steal for what you get. $2.5k will buy you a quad 2.66 Xeon machine with 1GB of FB-DIMM, shipped. That's a pair of $700 procs on a $400 (minimum) motherboard, with $200 RAM. The case itself is worth at least $200 (the sides and handles, which make up the frame, are 1/8th inch solid aluminum plate, the thing weighs a ton), and in the remaining $300, you've got to cover an HDD, optical drive, graphics card, heatsinks, case fans, mouse, keyboard, and shipping. You might be able to hit $2500 if you build it yourself (maybe), and only if you don't factor in the cost of your labor or the lack of a warrenty on the resultant machine.
A comparable BOXX machine (which is Apple's competition with the Mac Pro), will start at over $4k, for equivalent hardware. Even then, the BOXX won't run OS X, while the Mac Pro will run OS X and XP.
The problem with your reasoning is that FPS and RTS are actually relatively small segments. The largest FPS blockbusters on the PC (Half-Life) sell comparably to the largest FPS blockbusters on the consoles (Halo, GoldenEye), but not compared to the largest console blockbusters.
The simple fact is that console gaming is 4x larger than PC gaming, and that figure has remained relatively static. PC gamers like to deride the sports, racing, fighting, JRPG, and platformer genres, but these are the meat of the gaming industry. For example, each of the last 4 Final Fantasy games would've placed in the list of highest selling PC games ever. Almost every yearly rehash of Madden sells about as many copies as blockbuster PC FPSs like UT or HL2 (with HL1 being an exception). Even high profile PC FPSs like Doom III don't even compare to the sales of merely popular (rather than blockbuster) console games, and the Preys and other smaller titles on the PC are a blip on the rader in console terms.
I'm gonna come right out and say it. One of the greatest things about using a Mac is that there aren't any gamers. Sure, the Mac community has its share of newbies, cultural elitists, artsy-guys who buy foof bags for their macbook, etc, but I never log on to macnn and have to deal with a gamer.
Eh, not really. A decent gaming PC will run you 1k plus, at least if you want one that's powerful enough so that you never have to tweek settings (like on a console). If you don't otherwise need a powerful PC, you could easily get a Mac Mini and a 360, and end up with two machines that are optimized for their particular role.
Most of your post is innane overanalysis of what is really a fairly straightforward and quite funny set of ads. One point does, however, stick out.
I have yet to see anything done on a Mac that I can't do on a Windows machine.
A given user might be able to do a lot of things on a Mac that they can't on Windows. My mom figured out how to video conference with me on her Mac, but could never have done it on Windows. Not because Windows lacks video conferencing software, but because video-conferencing in OS X is drop-dead simple, and requires little to no configuration. The same thing with photo magement. My mom could never do photo management in Windows, because she'd have to install Picasa or something like that, which is beyond her grasp. In OS X, she plugs in her digital camera, and up pops iPhoto, again with no configuration required. The same applies for music management too. iTunes makes ripping CDs and syncing with her iPod doable in way that WMP never could.
Clearly I'm not included in that "we."
Well that's fine and good, but most people aren't like you. The association of income with worth in American culture is both pervasive and very well-documented.
Here we agree completely. This is a solvable problem, however.
Yes it is. Yet, most men are too lazy to want to solve it. Most lack the perspective to even realize that there is a problem.
Only on so-called sitcoms
My mother sells furniture. She has told stories on numerous occasions of men who grumble about money while their wives pick out items. This is perhaps a situational phenomenon, men are unlikely to complain about such matters off-hand, but in situations where they do complain, they reveal thinking that underscores their interactions with their wives, whether they realize it or not.
I disagree. The gender pay gap demonstrates that in general women doing the same job as men tend to be paid less. Does that mean that her contribution is worth less to the company (or the family?)
In a nutshell, yes. The price of anything in a free market, including labor, directly reflects its value to society. Our society values the contribution of women less than the contributions of men, and it shows up explicitly in their salaries.
I agree that there's a misunderstanding of what a workday is like, but frankly that's unrelated to time in the workplace. My wife's comment to this idea of yours was "and women and men experience the workplace in the same way?" To her, that seems laughable.
I can't vouch for the way women experience the workplace, but what I can vouch for is that those who do not work really miss a certain amount of perspective of what work entails. When I was a kid, my mother would express envy regarding my father, who would take business trips to exotic locations around the world. Of course, he always stated (and its a fact that I've since experienced to be true), that business trips are not only unglamerous, but usually grueling 16-hour a day affairs in unfamiliar and uncomfortable circumstances. The stresses of office politics, the pressure of deadlines, etc, are things that are really hard to appreciate without experiencing them firsthand. Women might not experience these factors in exactly the same way, but I don't see any reason why they'd experience them differently enough so as not to gain any perspective regarding her partner's cirumstances.
Of course, dedicated people can gain this perspective without first-hand experience, but that kind of dedication is not something commonplace among people.
1. What about the additional stress in the relationship caused by having less time to allocate to chores and relating to your spouse?
Yes, there is additional stress as a result of these things (though, back to the original money argument --- spending some to hire people to take care of chores makes a substantial difference), but the stress is of a different nature. Because both people in the couple have work-related responsibilities, there is a forced sharing of chores, and thus a distribution of stress onto both parties. As a result, marital tension doesn't arise from perceived inequities in the allocation of housework. If the wife doesn't work, its very easy for the husband to fall into a "I make the money, why should I do housework" mindset.
What about PARENTING? When the wife is in the workplace, who is raising the children? Certainly not the people who are busy at the office!
The children aren't even home for most of the workday. Most schools I know off don't let out until 3pm, and the two hours a day the kids are unsupervised or in day care (or at a school-sponsored after-school activity!) realy isn't going to have an adverse effect on their development.
I'm a father of five, and I can tell you that there's no amount of money you could PAY me to do what I need to do as a dad!
I don't have any experience with larger families, and it very well may be t
I'm not saying that it can't work out for some (even many) people. Especially if there is some sort of support network there in the form of family, friends, etc. However, lots of people don't have that support network in place, many husbands aren't so flexible as to make sure their wives have "time off", and many people just aren't wired to find keeping a home satisfying. If you took a women at random from the population, the chances are good that at least one of these important elements is missing in her life. Thus, in common circumstances, a women is usually better-off working than staying at home.
Regarding the contorted relationship, I disgree. The wife working outside the home changes the dynamics of the marriage substantially. The thing about homemaking is that its an unpaid profession, and we, especially Americans, are programmed to associate worth with salary. As a result, marital tensions arise from ambiguity about the contribution of each person in the couple to the family unit. This is complicated by the fact that most men do not really understand what's involved in keeping a home, and don't do the calculation of the actual equivalent monetary value of the services provided by the housewife. How many times have you heard a man complain that his wife is wasting "his" money. This is precisely that phenomenon at work. When the women works, the value of her contribution is made explicit, and an avenue for potential conflict is shut down. Being outside the home also changes the perceptions of women. Housewives often have a distorted view of what men consider "the real world" --- ie: the workplace in which the man spends most of his day. Working gives women some perspective on how the man lives, which reduces the potential for conflict resulting from differences in perspective.
There is no feminist media at work here. The fact that this is news is the result of the fact that its novel to people. The world is not what you seem to think it is. If it were truely equal, then it wouldn't be news at all. If the probability of a space tourist (or founder of a tech company or benefactor of scientific a scientific prize, for that matter) being a women was an even 50%, then nobody would report this, because nobody would find it interesting. But it's not. It's quite rare for a women to do any of these things*, and as a result, it makes for interesting news.
*) Now, you can argue on why it rare, but that's orthogonal to this discussion. You don't seem to think its the result of innate differences between men and women (a stance which is probably more than a bit naive), in which case you must admit that its the result of social constraints which guide women away from these roles. Either way, it's something worth highlighting, and hence something that is newsworthy.
I grew up in Northern VA, and I can't say I see what you're saying. When I was younger, I lived in a $150k house in Vienna. When I went to college, I lived in a $1.3m house in Great Falls. I can't say the ratio of happy/unhappy people was any different in the two places.
In the real world, money has a lot of benefits. It's documented that a lot of marital strains are the result of financial issues. Sure, some of that is the result of a materialistic bent, but what the hell, humans are materialistic. Life is just a lot easier when the answer to "so, where should we eat tonight?" is based on "do we want Italian or Mexican?" rather than "gosh, that new Italian place is pretty expensive". As for working moms, its an almost universally good thing. Staying at home results in psychological pathologies, especially in our modern social structure where women don't congregate in the large social groups they do in more traditional societies. It's a loney, stressful, and largely unrewarding experience for many people, and results in an often contorted relationship between husband and wife.
Seaking from personal experience, I have to say that there is no conflict between modern values and tight family bonds. My parents and my brother and I are all very success-oriented type-A people, and more than a bit materialistic. Even though all of us spend most of our time working, we still have an extremely close bond. Creating that bond doesn't require changing your lifestyle, it just requires committment. When I still lived at home, we ate dinner together most every night. You have to eat dinner anyway, it's not a huge step to do it together. I spent a non-insubstantial amount of time as a kid talking with my dad while helping him with household work like fixing sinks or cleaning gutters. I'd spend a lot of time talking with my mom over breakfast before she left for work, or when I was on vacation, going out with her to lunch on her days off. To this day, even when I work 70 hour weeks, I still know everything my brother does, because I ping him now and then on AIM, or call him during lunch or dinner. All these things don't add up to a whole lot of time, but it doesn't take that much to stay involved in each others' lives.
Science can indeed make a lie out of religion, to the extent that religions traditionally make numerous claims about the nature of the material world. For example, its quite clear that all of humanity is not descended from a single couple, even though the Bible says so. Some religions (eg: Catholicism), have learned that its pointless to fight science, and have indeed shifted the boundary of their influence to contain only the metaphysical, moral, and ehtical realms. Other religions, notably most brands of Protestantism as well as Islam, have not been so wise.
This seems a very naive, "outside looking-in" statement to me. Who says there is no debate within the evolutionary community? I'm not a biologist, but I'm sure there is quite heated debate within the community, though to outsiders it may not be obvious. It's true that few scientists contend that evolution is a fundementally flawed theory, and that most contention is about the details of the mechanisms. That doesn't make the theory "dogma", it just makes it a pretty good theory. It's like fluid dynamics. Very few people will come out and say "the Navier-Stokes equations are wrong!" Does that make it a dogma? Does that mean there is no more debate? Of course not. There's lots of debate about the exact mechanics of phenomena like turbulence. However, there's not a lot of debate about the basic principles of the field, because most people believe them to be sound.