Absolutely right. The average age of Playstation owners hit 21+ sometime in the mid-late 1990s. The average subscriber of "Official Playstation Magazine" is 24. For these people, a $100-$200 difference in initial launch price isn't going to be a dealbreaker. What will decide the fate of the console is whether it has the games people want to play. Microsoft's biggest problem is that their library isn't up to snuff. They had the same 1-year headstart in this generation that the PS2 had on the last generation. By this time in the PS2's lifecycle, it had built up a very decent head-start on the library front, and its sales were pulling even with the PS1s. Microsoft has not managed to do either of these things with the 360.
He does make a couple of mistakes. First, the 2.3 GHz G5 is comparable to a 2.0 GHz Opteron. I should know, I have one of each. Both outclass a 2.8 GHz Pentium-D hopelessly. Even in integer code, the G5's glaring weakspot, the 2.3 GHz is at least comparable to a 3.0 GHz Pentium 4. On floating-point, it's a competitor for the fastest P4s.
Also, the G5 can take ECC memory, which, if you're going to load the thing with 16GB, is a reasonable idea.
The cost of manufacture, for computers, is really a poor guide. A Core Solo probably costs $50 to fabricate. However, Intel also spent to the tune of a few hundred million dollars just designing the Core Duo/Solo, and another few hundred million developing the 65nm process on which its fabbed. Then there is the couple of billion dollars spent on the fab in which the thing is manufactured. All that factors in to the list price of the CPU.
Also, don't forget that the Mini is a custom-form factor machine. Those things are inherently expensive to make, because the relatively high one-time costs of designing and setting up the production of the PCB can't be amortized over a lot of units. Intel might amortize the cost of developing a motherboard over tens of millions of units, and pass that savings on to Dell (which uses their standard motherboards). Apple can't do that for the motherboards in the Mini.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Mini doesn't cost close to what Apple is selling it for. $500 cost for a $600 machine would be right in line with Apple's historical 20% margin.
What Apple seems to be doing currently is not changing their pricepoints, but upping the hardware while keeping the same pricepoints. The Mini aside, which has an SFF design you'll pay out the nose for in PC land, the Intel Macs don't have much of a price premium when you factor in the hardware. For example, I'm typing this on a $1700 2.0 GHz dual-core iMac, with 512MB of RAM, an X1600 Pro, and a 250GB HDD. A comparable XPS 400 from Dell has a 3.2 GHz dual-core Pentium 4, 1GB of RAM, GeForce 7300LE, and a 250GB HDD. The latter clocks in at $1727.
I think people often forget to price in some of the things Apple bundles with the machine. The iMac has Wifi, Bluetooth, a remote, and a webcam. I don't see any references to any of these things in the XPS 400. I think people also understate the quality of some of the accessories. I'm not going to argue that Apple uses higher quality internal parts*, but the accessors are quite solid. The airport cards get excellent range and are very good at keeping a connection. I went through three wifi adapters before I found one that could keep a connection on the third floor of our house, with the access point in the basement. The airport card in my Macbook, even with its internal antenna, never had a single problem in the same situation. Moreover, the webcam has a picture quality that beats the two $130 Logitech Orbit MPs in our house, by a good margin. They are as good as any PC webcam I've seen, at any price. Then, of course, there is the monitor. The 20" iMac uses the same LG Philips panel as Dell's 2005FPW, which is a $400 monitor, and a $200 option an the XPS 400.
That also convinces me that Apple will put Xeons in the Mac Pros. $2000-$3000 is quite a lot for a standard Conroe machine. However, it's a very good price range for a mid-range Xeon machine with a Blackford-chipset motherboard and FB-DIMM memory. By using a Xeon, Apple removes the Mac Pro from competition with consumer PCs, and puts it in a higher-margin market in which its pricing is quite reasonable, even affordable. This would fit right-in with their actions with the G5 Quad, which at $3300 was a bargain for a quad-core machine that could take 8 DIMMs worth of ECC DDR2 memory.
*) Apple's motherboards have usually been quite high quality. Then again, so have Intel's, which Dell uses in their machines. Outside that, both use mostly the same parts --- WD or Maxtor hard drives, Samsung or Micron memory, etc.
It's a viscous circle. ATI's OpenGL drivers aren't very good, which means that Linux workstation users (ILM, Disney, etc), use NVIDIA. That provides less incentive for ATI to improve their workstation drivers, etc.
Because I'm dumb. I calculated the RHS using the original poster's mistaken notion that there were two-threads per SPE, and the LHS using the actual SPE configuration.
Out of context. The slide was in a presentation about the RSX. "Local memory" here is the memory local to the RSX, not the memory local to the SPE. The slide shows that its slow to read GPU memory from the CPU --- you should have the GPU upload to main memory instead.
They are atonomous cores. Indeed, the best analogy for them is a node in a network. They've got their own non-coherent local memory, and are connected via a ring bus.
The programming model for the SPEs is fairly straightforward. You bundle some code and some data into an APUlet, and upload it via the ring bus to the SPE. The SPE runs that code for some amount of time, and can communicate with the rest of of the chip either by sending messages over the ringbus (using a mailbox mechanism), or doing DMAs.
[QUOTE]Why not have one coprocessor that supports 16 threads that maps onto as many virtual coprocessors as desired? Basically the same circuitry, but can dynamically remap to the problem being solved, as opposed to remapping the problem to the circuits provided.[/QUOTE]
It's not the same thing *at all*. CPUs are highly non-linear. 8 2-way processors are much simpler than 1 16-way processor. CPU structures tend to scale with the square of their width. A front-end capable of issuing 32-instructions per cycle would be gigantic. Heck, just consider the amount of register state in your 16-way processor. 8 SPEs x 128 registers/SPE = 2048 registers. To clock that register file at 3.2 GHz on a 90nm foundry process, you'd have like a dozen pipeline stages devoted to register read.
It's not really an "incredibly complex" architecture. It's different, but in practice, it's probably less complex in practice than symmetric multithreading. If you're programming specifically for Cell, it should be fairly straightforward to create pieces of code that you can run on the SPEs, while doing control logic on the PPE. What will be difficult will be porting existing code to the new architecture.
PS) Yes, I am a programmer. I think many discussions of Cell take it for granted that multithreaded programming is also very difficult, its just that most PC game developers are already very familiar with it. Cell has different parallelism models --- the SPEs can be organized in a producer/consumer arrangement, or in a pipeline, etc. An MPI programmer will probably feel right at home, though he might wish for more local memory in the SPEs. Myself, if given the choice between shared memory threading and message passing, I'd take the latter in a heartbeat.
Empancipation is not a concept generally applicable to all natural rights. It's one that restricts specific rights that a minor cannot reasonably exercise due to lack of maturity. Its something that makes sense for the restriction of the right to vote, but one that makes a whole lot less sense when applied to the right to be protected from unreasonable search and seizure. Moreover, the guardianship that parents have over non-empancipated minors does not transfer wholesale to schools. Schools may circumscribe certain students' rights in order to meet educational objectives, but cannot do so arbitrarily. Preventing students from shouting in class has an obvious educational benefit. Searching through their personal information is something substantially less obvious.
Moreover, your whole concept of "earning" rights is bullshit. You use the word "earn", obviously for its connotation, but the process you describe is actually delayed entitlement. A minor who works hard and displays maturity receives no rights over any other minor. Yet, as soon as they reach an arbitrary age, they are automatically entitled to their natural rights, even if they have done nothing to earn it.
Kids are allow to defend themselves. Basic human survival, not a rights.
Of the three classical natural rights: life, liberty, and property, children, legally, have all three to some degree or another. Children have the same right to life as anybody else, has certain libertiies that even parents cannot trample upon, and have extensive property rights, at least in western countries.
Kids are not allowed cellphones on the basis of 4.0 (potentially discrimination)
The whole idea of "earning" is based on discrimination! You discriminate against those who are undeserving of some benefit, by giving it to those who prove deserving of it. From a logical perspective, the whole reason people oppose cellphones in schools is because they allegedly interfere with learning. Kids who have 4.0s are obviously learning, so the whole reason for denying them access to cellphones is rendered irrelevent.
The irony of the camera thing is that cameras in your house would probably reveal a lot less sensitive information than wiretaps on your phone or on your network. What exactly could a dirty cop see if they had a camera in someone's house? They might see someone naked in the shower or having sex? How about eating, sleeping, watching TV? Big deal. Most regular people don't do anything interesting enough at home to be particularly exploitable if captured on camera. Meanwhile, if they had a phone-tap, or a network-tap, they could get all sorts of financial or business details.
Of course, I'm not going to, because I have to. Therein lies the rub. If programmers find it a pain to use your security mechanism, they won't. Telling them that they're stupid for not being able to figure it out is not a solution, not if your actual goal is security.
Those laws aren't a circumspection of the basic rights of people. For example, even adults can't drink and drive, for public safety reasons. They don't imply that children don't have the same basic rights all other people do, and there is certainly no precedence for the idea that children have to "earn" their rights.
PS) The ironic thing about the "children should earn their rights" statement is that in most cases, children *aren't* allowed to earn rights. A child who has never started a fight can never earn the right to defend himself against a bully. A child who keeps a 4.0 GPA can't earn the right to carry a cellphone. A child who volunteers every week doesn't earn the right not to have his car or locker searched randomly. That's unfair above and beyond the fact that they shouldn't have to earn these rights to begin with.
A spoiled brat whose now working on his PHD in aerospace engineering (and paying for grad school himself), because his parents had the sense to not let rules get in the way of learning and development.
I am sure that the founding fathers did not intend to have a kid for a ruler of nations. And these fathers have learned the history lesson well of kid-rulers' fiascos.
Did you go to school? Did you learn how to write proper English?
A nation without societal rules and guidelines is recipe for chaos. Kids who don't conform to our societies are the ones with excessive freedom. Freedom is earned (or in our case, taught, not a given... to kids.
That's a load of bullshit. The whole point of freedom is that its a given. There is no "excessive freedom" for kids --- they have the freedoms presented in the Constitution, period. If your kid is doing poorly in school because they're not studying, the solution is to take away their cellphone. The solution is not to take away everyone's right to privacy.
Schools already have mechanisms in place to contact students/pupils if necessary.
This is just false. Almost no schools continue to operate the administrative offices after official school hours. On the other hand, many, if not most, students still engage in school-related activities on school grounds after official school hours. From sports to clubs to theater, modern kids spend much more of their day in school than kids did in previous generations. For much of that time, the normal school infrastructure that allows children and parents to stay in contact is *not* present.
I've gotten to the point where I agree with you. I went to a public magnet school in Virginia, and I honestly thought it was someplace I'd be happy to send my own kids when I had them. However, from what I've heard in the last few years, it's gone downhill a lot. The principal, who was previously focused on actually making the school better, was replaced with one that just wants to make it compliant with regulations. They've started doing affirmative action, letting in minority (and by minority they mean black and hispanic --- apparently asians and indians aren't minorities...) students who would not otherwise pass the admissions process.
Now, I'm convinced that when it comes time to send my kids to school, I'm going to make a serious effort to send them to a private school. Public school politics has gotten too wonky for my taste, and ironically, has become a distraction from the actual process of learning.
What about "track practice got canceled yearly, and I need a ride?" A lot of kids do after-school activities at school, and the office is generally closed during those hours. There are pay-phones outside at some schools, but kids never have appropriate change.
Moreover, what's wrong with calling Suzy to ask if she likes you? When I go to work, I don't leave my humanity at the door, so why should students? My boss doesn't prevent me from socializing around coffee machine, or during my lunch-break, so why should students be prevented from socializing between classes and during lunch?
The only goal of school is to get kids to learn. If they aren't learning, for whatever reason, then address that problem then. Test them rigorously, and make sure they are really getting the information. If they are, then leave them the fuck alone.
It's not kids that elected our moron president. Young people don't generally vote, and those that do voted for the other guy. Bush was elected by middle-aged and old people. Generally, people who went to school before cellphones were even invented. Its popular to blame young people for a lot of things, and I don't think its entirely undeserved, but the simple fact is that young people don't have a lot of power, and as such, can't really fuck up anything big. The people who are really fucking things up these days is the baby-boomer generation, as well as their parents generation. Who do you think all those medicare bribes, corporate welfare, excessive government programs, etc, go to? You do you think masterminded domestic spying operations and ill-conceived wars on foreign soil? Parents today should be apologizing to their children for messing things up as badly as they have done.
Kids 50 years ago are not like kids today. They don't come home right after school, because they are often too busy doing sports and after-school clubs so they can put them on their college application. My younger brother just finished sophomore year in highschool. He commutes 20 miles to school every day, and gets home at 5pm on a normal day. That becomes 7pm when track is in season, and as late as 11pm when he has a Model UN conference or NHS activity. You can bet we're glad that he carries a cellphone in his backpack. Hell, I recently bought him a fancy new cellphone to congratulate him for maintaining his perfect GPA this year. So what if he uses it to store pictures of his friends in stupid poses? His job at school is to learn, and since he's obviously doing fine with that, he can do whatever the hell else he wants.
That's what really pisses me off about school administrators. Most don't realize that children are all different, and applying universal rules is usually just counter-productive. Our school district actually has a ban on cellphones in school (or even in cars on school property), because they're considered "drug paraphernalia". Luckily, the teachers in that school aren't idiots, and the unofficial policy in the school is to just look the other way. They have the sense to actually keep the focus on learning, instead of distracting the issue by wasting time with dress codes and cellphone regulation.
There is nothing in the constitution about rights applying only to adults. Moreover, if we teach our children to bend over to authority, we'll get exactly what we have now --- a populace so used to being controlled and manipulated, they don't even realize the freedoms to which they are entitled.
Regulations like these are not about helping kids learn. They're about about feeding the ego needs of school administrators. For unsurprising reasons, school administration tends to attract exactly the sort of folks that get hard-ons over controlling others.
I've had a PowerMac since October, and it hasn't crashed yet. Neither has my Macbook. That is not to say that your crashes aren't OS X's fault, but rather that it'd be worthwhile to pinpoint the cause, since that level of instability is not expected.
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Absolutely right. The average age of Playstation owners hit 21+ sometime in the mid-late 1990s. The average subscriber of "Official Playstation Magazine" is 24. For these people, a $100-$200 difference in initial launch price isn't going to be a dealbreaker. What will decide the fate of the console is whether it has the games people want to play. Microsoft's biggest problem is that their library isn't up to snuff. They had the same 1-year headstart in this generation that the PS2 had on the last generation. By this time in the PS2's lifecycle, it had built up a very decent head-start on the library front, and its sales were pulling even with the PS1s. Microsoft has not managed to do either of these things with the 360.
He does make a couple of mistakes. First, the 2.3 GHz G5 is comparable to a 2.0 GHz Opteron. I should know, I have one of each. Both outclass a 2.8 GHz Pentium-D hopelessly. Even in integer code, the G5's glaring weakspot, the 2.3 GHz is at least comparable to a 3.0 GHz Pentium 4. On floating-point, it's a competitor for the fastest P4s.
Also, the G5 can take ECC memory, which, if you're going to load the thing with 16GB, is a reasonable idea.
The cost of manufacture, for computers, is really a poor guide. A Core Solo probably costs $50 to fabricate. However, Intel also spent to the tune of a few hundred million dollars just designing the Core Duo/Solo, and another few hundred million developing the 65nm process on which its fabbed. Then there is the couple of billion dollars spent on the fab in which the thing is manufactured. All that factors in to the list price of the CPU.
Also, don't forget that the Mini is a custom-form factor machine. Those things are inherently expensive to make, because the relatively high one-time costs of designing and setting up the production of the PCB can't be amortized over a lot of units. Intel might amortize the cost of developing a motherboard over tens of millions of units, and pass that savings on to Dell (which uses their standard motherboards). Apple can't do that for the motherboards in the Mini.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Mini doesn't cost close to what Apple is selling it for. $500 cost for a $600 machine would be right in line with Apple's historical 20% margin.
What Apple seems to be doing currently is not changing their pricepoints, but upping the hardware while keeping the same pricepoints. The Mini aside, which has an SFF design you'll pay out the nose for in PC land, the Intel Macs don't have much of a price premium when you factor in the hardware. For example, I'm typing this on a $1700 2.0 GHz dual-core iMac, with 512MB of RAM, an X1600 Pro, and a 250GB HDD. A comparable XPS 400 from Dell has a 3.2 GHz dual-core Pentium 4, 1GB of RAM, GeForce 7300LE, and a 250GB HDD. The latter clocks in at $1727.
I think people often forget to price in some of the things Apple bundles with the machine. The iMac has Wifi, Bluetooth, a remote, and a webcam. I don't see any references to any of these things in the XPS 400. I think people also understate the quality of some of the accessories. I'm not going to argue that Apple uses higher quality internal parts*, but the accessors are quite solid. The airport cards get excellent range and are very good at keeping a connection. I went through three wifi adapters before I found one that could keep a connection on the third floor of our house, with the access point in the basement. The airport card in my Macbook, even with its internal antenna, never had a single problem in the same situation. Moreover, the webcam has a picture quality that beats the two $130 Logitech Orbit MPs in our house, by a good margin. They are as good as any PC webcam I've seen, at any price. Then, of course, there is the monitor. The 20" iMac uses the same LG Philips panel as Dell's 2005FPW, which is a $400 monitor, and a $200 option an the XPS 400.
That also convinces me that Apple will put Xeons in the Mac Pros. $2000-$3000 is quite a lot for a standard Conroe machine. However, it's a very good price range for a mid-range Xeon machine with a Blackford-chipset motherboard and FB-DIMM memory. By using a Xeon, Apple removes the Mac Pro from competition with consumer PCs, and puts it in a higher-margin market in which its pricing is quite reasonable, even affordable. This would fit right-in with their actions with the G5 Quad, which at $3300 was a bargain for a quad-core machine that could take 8 DIMMs worth of ECC DDR2 memory.
*) Apple's motherboards have usually been quite high quality. Then again, so have Intel's, which Dell uses in their machines. Outside that, both use mostly the same parts --- WD or Maxtor hard drives, Samsung or Micron memory, etc.
The 604e was quite a powerful CPU in its day, and the G5 was very competitive at release, when the 1.8 GHz Opteron was the fastest thing on the block.
It's a viscous circle. ATI's OpenGL drivers aren't very good, which means that Linux workstation users (ILM, Disney, etc), use NVIDIA. That provides less incentive for ATI to improve their workstation drivers, etc.
Because I'm dumb. I calculated the RHS using the original poster's mistaken notion that there were two-threads per SPE, and the LHS using the actual SPE configuration.
Out of context. The slide was in a presentation about the RSX. "Local memory" here is the memory local to the RSX, not the memory local to the SPE. The slide shows that its slow to read GPU memory from the CPU --- you should have the GPU upload to main memory instead.
They are atonomous cores. Indeed, the best analogy for them is a node in a network. They've got their own non-coherent local memory, and are connected via a ring bus.
The programming model for the SPEs is fairly straightforward. You bundle some code and some data into an APUlet, and upload it via the ring bus to the SPE. The SPE runs that code for some amount of time, and can communicate with the rest of of the chip either by sending messages over the ringbus (using a mailbox mechanism), or doing DMAs.
[QUOTE]Why not have one coprocessor that supports 16 threads that maps onto as many virtual coprocessors as desired? Basically the same circuitry, but can dynamically remap to the problem being solved, as opposed to remapping the problem to the circuits provided.[/QUOTE]
It's not the same thing *at all*. CPUs are highly non-linear. 8 2-way processors are much simpler than 1 16-way processor. CPU structures tend to scale with the square of their width. A front-end capable of issuing 32-instructions per cycle would be gigantic. Heck, just consider the amount of register state in your 16-way processor. 8 SPEs x 128 registers/SPE = 2048 registers. To clock that register file at 3.2 GHz on a 90nm foundry process, you'd have like a dozen pipeline stages devoted to register read.
It's not really an "incredibly complex" architecture. It's different, but in practice, it's probably less complex in practice than symmetric multithreading. If you're programming specifically for Cell, it should be fairly straightforward to create pieces of code that you can run on the SPEs, while doing control logic on the PPE. What will be difficult will be porting existing code to the new architecture.
PS) Yes, I am a programmer. I think many discussions of Cell take it for granted that multithreaded programming is also very difficult, its just that most PC game developers are already very familiar with it. Cell has different parallelism models --- the SPEs can be organized in a producer/consumer arrangement, or in a pipeline, etc. An MPI programmer will probably feel right at home, though he might wish for more local memory in the SPEs. Myself, if given the choice between shared memory threading and message passing, I'd take the latter in a heartbeat.
We're talking about the Cell in general, not what Sony decides to ship in the PS3.
Empancipation is not a concept generally applicable to all natural rights. It's one that restricts specific rights that a minor cannot reasonably exercise due to lack of maturity. Its something that makes sense for the restriction of the right to vote, but one that makes a whole lot less sense when applied to the right to be protected from unreasonable search and seizure. Moreover, the guardianship that parents have over non-empancipated minors does not transfer wholesale to schools. Schools may circumscribe certain students' rights in order to meet educational objectives, but cannot do so arbitrarily. Preventing students from shouting in class has an obvious educational benefit. Searching through their personal information is something substantially less obvious.
Moreover, your whole concept of "earning" rights is bullshit. You use the word "earn", obviously for its connotation, but the process you describe is actually delayed entitlement. A minor who works hard and displays maturity receives no rights over any other minor. Yet, as soon as they reach an arbitrary age, they are automatically entitled to their natural rights, even if they have done nothing to earn it.
Kids are allow to defend themselves. Basic human survival, not a rights.
Of the three classical natural rights: life, liberty, and property, children, legally, have all three to some degree or another. Children have the same right to life as anybody else, has certain libertiies that even parents cannot trample upon, and have extensive property rights, at least in western countries.
Kids are not allowed cellphones on the basis of 4.0 (potentially discrimination)
The whole idea of "earning" is based on discrimination! You discriminate against those who are undeserving of some benefit, by giving it to those who prove deserving of it. From a logical perspective, the whole reason people oppose cellphones in schools is because they allegedly interfere with learning. Kids who have 4.0s are obviously learning, so the whole reason for denying them access to cellphones is rendered irrelevent.
The irony of the camera thing is that cameras in your house would probably reveal a lot less sensitive information than wiretaps on your phone or on your network. What exactly could a dirty cop see if they had a camera in someone's house? They might see someone naked in the shower or having sex? How about eating, sleeping, watching TV? Big deal. Most regular people don't do anything interesting enough at home to be particularly exploitable if captured on camera. Meanwhile, if they had a phone-tap, or a network-tap, they could get all sorts of financial or business details.
Of course, I'm not going to, because I have to. Therein lies the rub. If programmers find it a pain to use your security mechanism, they won't. Telling them that they're stupid for not being able to figure it out is not a solution, not if your actual goal is security.
Those laws aren't a circumspection of the basic rights of people. For example, even adults can't drink and drive, for public safety reasons. They don't imply that children don't have the same basic rights all other people do, and there is certainly no precedence for the idea that children have to "earn" their rights.
PS) The ironic thing about the "children should earn their rights" statement is that in most cases, children *aren't* allowed to earn rights. A child who has never started a fight can never earn the right to defend himself against a bully. A child who keeps a 4.0 GPA can't earn the right to carry a cellphone. A child who volunteers every week doesn't earn the right not to have his car or locker searched randomly. That's unfair above and beyond the fact that they shouldn't have to earn these rights to begin with.
Spoken like a spoiled brat.
... to kids.
A spoiled brat whose now working on his PHD in aerospace engineering (and paying for grad school himself), because his parents had the sense to not let rules get in the way of learning and development.
I am sure that the founding fathers did not intend to have a kid for a ruler of nations. And these fathers have learned the history lesson well of kid-rulers' fiascos.
Did you go to school? Did you learn how to write proper English?
A nation without societal rules and guidelines is recipe for chaos. Kids who don't conform to our societies are the ones with excessive freedom. Freedom is earned (or in our case, taught, not a given
That's a load of bullshit. The whole point of freedom is that its a given. There is no "excessive freedom" for kids --- they have the freedoms presented in the Constitution, period. If your kid is doing poorly in school because they're not studying, the solution is to take away their cellphone. The solution is not to take away everyone's right to privacy.
Schools already have mechanisms in place to contact students/pupils if necessary.
This is just false. Almost no schools continue to operate the administrative offices after official school hours. On the other hand, many, if not most, students still engage in school-related activities on school grounds after official school hours. From sports to clubs to theater, modern kids spend much more of their day in school than kids did in previous generations. For much of that time, the normal school infrastructure that allows children and parents to stay in contact is *not* present.
I've gotten to the point where I agree with you. I went to a public magnet school in Virginia, and I honestly thought it was someplace I'd be happy to send my own kids when I had them. However, from what I've heard in the last few years, it's gone downhill a lot. The principal, who was previously focused on actually making the school better, was replaced with one that just wants to make it compliant with regulations. They've started doing affirmative action, letting in minority (and by minority they mean black and hispanic --- apparently asians and indians aren't minorities...) students who would not otherwise pass the admissions process.
Now, I'm convinced that when it comes time to send my kids to school, I'm going to make a serious effort to send them to a private school. Public school politics has gotten too wonky for my taste, and ironically, has become a distraction from the actual process of learning.
What about "track practice got canceled yearly, and I need a ride?" A lot of kids do after-school activities at school, and the office is generally closed during those hours. There are pay-phones outside at some schools, but kids never have appropriate change.
Moreover, what's wrong with calling Suzy to ask if she likes you? When I go to work, I don't leave my humanity at the door, so why should students? My boss doesn't prevent me from socializing around coffee machine, or during my lunch-break, so why should students be prevented from socializing between classes and during lunch?
The only goal of school is to get kids to learn. If they aren't learning, for whatever reason, then address that problem then. Test them rigorously, and make sure they are really getting the information. If they are, then leave them the fuck alone.
It's not kids that elected our moron president. Young people don't generally vote, and those that do voted for the other guy. Bush was elected by middle-aged and old people. Generally, people who went to school before cellphones were even invented. Its popular to blame young people for a lot of things, and I don't think its entirely undeserved, but the simple fact is that young people don't have a lot of power, and as such, can't really fuck up anything big. The people who are really fucking things up these days is the baby-boomer generation, as well as their parents generation. Who do you think all those medicare bribes, corporate welfare, excessive government programs, etc, go to? You do you think masterminded domestic spying operations and ill-conceived wars on foreign soil? Parents today should be apologizing to their children for messing things up as badly as they have done.
Kids 50 years ago are not like kids today. They don't come home right after school, because they are often too busy doing sports and after-school clubs so they can put them on their college application. My younger brother just finished sophomore year in highschool. He commutes 20 miles to school every day, and gets home at 5pm on a normal day. That becomes 7pm when track is in season, and as late as 11pm when he has a Model UN conference or NHS activity. You can bet we're glad that he carries a cellphone in his backpack. Hell, I recently bought him a fancy new cellphone to congratulate him for maintaining his perfect GPA this year. So what if he uses it to store pictures of his friends in stupid poses? His job at school is to learn, and since he's obviously doing fine with that, he can do whatever the hell else he wants.
That's what really pisses me off about school administrators. Most don't realize that children are all different, and applying universal rules is usually just counter-productive. Our school district actually has a ban on cellphones in school (or even in cars on school property), because they're considered "drug paraphernalia". Luckily, the teachers in that school aren't idiots, and the unofficial policy in the school is to just look the other way. They have the sense to actually keep the focus on learning, instead of distracting the issue by wasting time with dress codes and cellphone regulation.
There is nothing in the constitution about rights applying only to adults. Moreover, if we teach our children to bend over to authority, we'll get exactly what we have now --- a populace so used to being controlled and manipulated, they don't even realize the freedoms to which they are entitled.
Regulations like these are not about helping kids learn. They're about about feeding the ego needs of school administrators. For unsurprising reasons, school administration tends to attract exactly the sort of folks that get hard-ons over controlling others.
Blaster isn't an anecdotal datapoint. Millions of people go hit with it, because it was so stupidly easy to do so.
As for your hypothetical example --- that's what it is. We can talk about it when it actually happens.
I've had a PowerMac since October, and it hasn't crashed yet. Neither has my Macbook. That is not to say that your crashes aren't OS X's fault, but rather that it'd be worthwhile to pinpoint the cause, since that level of instability is not expected.