Correction: In the last paragraph, "median income of the average American family" is a non-sensical statement. It should be "median family income in the United States."
I'm not going to say anything about the "smart versus stupid bit" (though, many studies show a correlation between family income and academic performance), but the "military recruits are poor" point is quite accurate.
"Now, in terms of median income, for whites -- now again, this is enlisted versus -- and this is against the entire civilian population, so it's not quite the right comparison. But for whites, the median total gross household income in 1999 for our enlisted population was about $33,500, versus $44,400 for the civilian population. Again, that omits officers from the DOD numbers --"
The situation is similar for blacks:
"For African Americans, however, the total gross household income of our active duty personnel, their parents, that is, was $32,000 versus $27,900 for the population at large".
The guy kinda spins it by saying that the family of the average black recruit is richer than the average black family, but that's a weird way to look at it. A total household income of $32,000 is low-income, whether you're black or white. It's a full $10,000 less than the median income of the average American family in 1999 (the year the statistics in the press briefing were taken from).
CDE, Enightenment, NeXTStep, etc, are not desktops from a statistical point of view. Basically, when GNOME and KDE were young, there were two desktop OSs: Mac and Windows. KDE went with the Windows order (the historical *NIX order), and GNOME went with the Mac order. There is no particular reason to consider either order better, though when in doubt, copying the Mac can't hurt...
Why do all that reading when you don't have to? It's about efficiency. If you can get the same thing across with little text and well-chosen button labels, why not do it?
The problem is with your asinine definition of "non-competitive" markets.
It's the standard economic definition.
You claim, with a straight face, that the iPod is NOT an MP3 player. What is your basis for that?
Leave aside the technical definition. Think about the market definition. If two products are in the same market, they must be competing. If they are competing, one must be taking away sales from the other. Do you think entempos take away many sales from iPods? Do you think iPods take away many sales from entempos? No! Advertising has created a situation where two technically similar products are competing in different markets. Advertising differentiates the products, placing them in different markets.
Think about it this way: are BMW and Kia cars in the same market? They're both cars, they both get you from point A to point B, etc, etc. But nobody shopping has a comparison shopping list that includes both a Kia and a BMW. Kia doesn't worry about BMW taking its sales, and BMW doesn't worry about Kia taking its sales. The products are in completely different markets.
Sure there are differences, but there are ALWAYS differences between products.
In a perfectly competitive market, the products are identical. Milk or eggs are good examples. In a non-competitive market, the products are highly differentiated from products they would be competing with. Macs are a good example. The PC market is closer to the former type, with the differences between PCs being so minimal that people will buy a different brand to save a few bucks. That's what drives PC prices through the floor, and makes margins on them so slim.
I pointed out the price differences between ATI cards, and how they had nothing to do with the underlying costs, and you claimed that ATI has a monopoly on ATI cards.
I never claimed that. I pointed out that the true cost of a card is not just the parts that go into it. While an X800XL may be identical, physically, to an X800Pro, there is a margin in the X800 Pro that is there to pay for R&D. Companies like ATI and NVIDIA know that low-end cards will quickly have their prices brought down, so they increase the margins on their high-end cards to compensate for R&D. In any case, ATI and NVIDIA are rather differentiated. A gamer who plays only Doom III or other OpenGL games will buy an NVIDIA card, for example.
But that's easy to do, since according to your definition, EVERY product is a monopoly in itself!
A company is only a monopoly if it dominates its market. It's a sliding scale, the more the company resembles a monopoly, the more leeway it has to set prices. Product differentiation narrows markets. That narrowing of the market means that certain products will dominate the newly narrowed market. Take, for example the OS market. Why is Microsoft a monopoly when there are hundreds of other OSs around? I mean, they all do the same thing, disk I/O, a user interface, etc. Because those other OSs aren't desktop OSs that run popular desktop applications! Microsoft is a monopoly in the desktop OS market because their product is so highly differentiated from those of its competitors. Likewise, Microsoft can set prices on its product that are commensurate with its monopoly status.
You're either incredibly stupid.
God dammit. I'm through with this conversation. Go to the fucking library and pick up a fucking economics textbook and read up on how markets are defined. There will be a quiz afterwards...
These days, debate period is leftist. The conservatives seem to have headed off this deep end where they don't even feel they need to argue their points anymore, they just wave their hands and grunt a lot. To be fair, there are a few conservatives that still represent the intellectual brand of conservatism, but their numbers are dwindling.
The same thing could be said of the Americans with respect to the native Americans. If "hasn't killed lots of innocent people and occupied their land" is a prerequisite for feeling sympathy towards a country, then very few countries in existance today deserve sympathy.
Yes it is. It's about hope, about believing that something will come about without any evidence that suggests the conclusion.
Now, then again, there is nothing wrong with that. But in the end, believing that something like Star Trek may come about isn't really any less silly than believing in the second coming.
I proved both Pianoman and you wrong time and time again
You only think you "proved" us wrong because you don't understand basic economics. You don't understand competitive versus non-competitive markets, and you don't understand the idea that costs encompass much more than just the hardware that goes into a product.
and the best you can say is that my examples are somehow "bad." Bad in the sense they prove you wrong?
Your examples are bad because the markets you used as examples are different types of markets than the PC market, which is what we were talking about. You're trying to categorize markets based on superficial resemblances between the products, rather than on the underlying dynamics. The MP3 player thing is a perfect example. The MP3 player market is competitive. You know why? Because the iPod isn't an MP3 player! Very few people will be torn between an Entempo and an iPod. People who buy the former are shopping for MP3 players. People who buy the latter say: "I want an iPod". There is a single supplier of iPods, and the result is that the margin on iPods is huge. There are many suppliers of MP3 players, and the margins on those are thin.
Once again, go to Dell.com and go to Alienware.com. Alienware will sell similar systems for a LOT more money than Dell, but yet the costs are nearly identical.
Alienware doesn't sell the same product Dell does. They spend more on making pretty cases, providing better support for "enthusiasts", and securing cutting-edge components sooner than anybody else (eg: they've already got Athlon X2s). All of this costs money. They also give you pretty good terms if you're doing stuff like upgrading your machine or installing your own parts. All of this costs money, and the cost of the machine is a lot more than the cost of its parts.
The market sets prices, not costs. The market sets prices, not costs. The market sets prices, not costs.
Only in non-competitive markets. This is the thing you don't seem to understand. So let me give you some examples. The PC market is competitive. There is little product-differentiation. People say "I'm in the market for a new PC for my office". The Mac market is non-competitive. There is ton's of product-differentiation. The vast majority of Mac buyers are people who say "I need a Mac", not people who say "I need a new computer", then decide on a Mac. The low-end car market is competitive. People say "I want a new commuter car", then choose among Kia, Hyundai, Ford, etc. The high-end market is non-competitive. People don't say "I'm looking for a new luxury car...", they say "I want a Ferrari!".
I'll repeat: in competitive markets, there is little product differentiation, margins are thin, and prices are close to costs. In non-competitive markets, there is high product differentiation, margins are fat, and prices are set by what the market can bear. We were talking about the PC market. The PC market is of the former type. In the PC market, prices are set by costs.
It kind of does. Because sci-fi geeks generallly tend to think they are "better than" the people who believe in God, ghosts, etc. The word "science" lends it an air of credibility that it doesn't deserve. What bugs me most is that most sci-fi geeks don't really realize that their entertainment is every bit a fantasy as a little girl's movie about princesses and castles.
Modern Sci-Fi has very little science in it. Somebody, I don't remember who, remarked of Star Wars: "it's not really sci-fi, it's a cowboy western set in space." Perhaps what pisses me off the most is the "geek culture" that's arisen around sci-fi. It is at once ignorant (most sci-fi "geeks" know jack shit about real science), and arrogant (most sci-fi "geeks" think sci-fi is better than, say, cowboy westerns). The superior attitude a lot of people have about sci-fi reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend about comic books. We came to the conclusion that comics like the X-Men are fundementally little different than soap operas. Sure, the plot lines are completely different, but both focus mainly on the characters, their growth, and how they cope with the world around them. Really, the main difference between "Apartment 3G" and "The X-Men" is that Cyclops gets mopey and emotional about a completely different set of problems.
There is no load balancing between the CPU and the GPU. The two always do the same part of the work. If one can't keep up, the other doesn't take over the work. Instead, the slower part just becomes a bottleneck. At 640x480, you're testing how fast the CPU can feed the graphics card data. At 1600x1200, the graphics card becomes the bottleneck, and as long as the CPU can feed the graphics card fast enough, they'll get the same results.
While that is sometimes true, it is not always true. Sometimes things are expensive even though they cost hardly anything.
Yes, because those products are in non-competitive markets. But we weren't talking about non-competitive markets, we were talking about competitive ones.
The REAL reason things cost more is because people are willing to pay more. That's where pricing really comes from.
Only in non-competitive markets. Competitive markets naturally set the price at something lower than what the market is "willing to pay". If you consider each firms curve of price versus the number of people that'll buy at that price, you get a point where their profit is maximal. Ie: the loss from fewer people buying due to a higher price is balanced against the increased profits from the higher price. However, only monopolies can set their price at this level. In a competitive market, the price gets set at a much lower level.
And do you really think that prices in the computer realm are "very close to costs"? You really believe that?
Pardon me if I wasn't clear. I meant the actual PC market. As in the beige box you have sitting on your desk. The margins on those things are in the single-digits.
First, how in the heck could Microsoft be making 80% profit margins off of Office and Windows if they were selling those products "close to costs"?!
Microsoft isn't selling close to cost. It's selling at the nice point in the curve I mentioned earlier. But it can only do that because it is a monopoly.
And do you really think an X800XT ATI Radeon Video card costs $164 more to produce than the X800XL version of the same card.
The graphics card market is a rather poor example, because again, it's not fully competitive. You've only got two major firms (ATI and NVIDIA), and the products are not identical (ie: marketing and features differentiate the products). So ATI can get away with pushing its price pointer to a nicer point of the above-mentioned curve, but not as much as Microsoft can. Though, the difference isn't as big as you'd think. The R&D cost in the video-card market is astronomical. How much do you think it costs ATI and NVIDIA to release new cards every 6 months? They have to have two or three generations of parts under development simultaniously! The volume parts (the X700's or X300's) are sold at not too much higher than cost, while the margins on the higher-end products pay for the R&D.
And look at MP3 players. You can buy an Etempo Spirit 20 gig player for 99 bucks. Or you could buy a 20 gig iPod for $300. Do you REALLY believe the iPod costs three times as much to produce?! Really? Or could it be that people are willing to pay more for the iPod, for whatever reason?
The iPod is a bad example, because marketing and branding differentiate the product. The iPod isn't "an MP3 player", it's an "iPod". However, if you look at the MP3 player market in general, you've got lot's of smaller companies producing products for essentially the same price. There are lot's of no-name 20GB players on the market, and you can bet that those are sold at not too much higher than cost.
Now that is a $160 just for the case, No power supply. Now build a PC up like this, choosing quality components for each system and I think you will discover that Apple pricing won't be that far off the mark.
I just did, and yes it is. I got the P180 case (for $115), high-quality low-latency memory (for $267 for 2GB), a good motherboard (DFI NForce4 Ultra for $130), a Seagate SATA hard drive with 5yr warrenty (for $120), an MSI SATA combo drive, a Seasonic power supply ($50), and a Thermalright heatsink ($40). Throw in a fast Athlon X2 (which still hasn't arrived yet, but was a good deal at $580), and I got a system as fast as Apple's middle PowerMac model (quite a bit faster if you overclock it like Apple does with the top PowerMac model), using higher quality parts than the Apple system at a price $1000 less than a similarly-configured Apple system.
What stringent hardware standards? Apple uses the same generic Maxtor and Western Digital crap that Dell does. The same cheap OEM memory, etc. And now with the Intel x86, they'll use the same cheap Intel CPU and the same cheap Intel motherboards.
The PC market is quite different from the markets you just mentioned. The PC market is a competitive market (in the economic sense). The result of that is that over time, an equillibrium is reached where prices become very close to costs. Now, the market for diamonds and printer ink are not competitive. They are monopolized markets. In such markets, the monopoly can set the price. In the equillibrium for this market, the price goes to a value that maximizes profit for the monopoly (per-unit profit versus volume). This latter price is much higher than the cost.
Not really. The backend execution core is the exact same between the two processors. There are significant differences: the P-M uses the P4's branch predictor, the P4's bus, and his some microarchitectural improvements (deeper buffers, improved decoder, longer pipelines, improved reorder buffer, more optimized circuits), but they re all incremental improvements.
Indeed, it's fair to say that the differences between the P-M and the PPro aren't significantly bigger than the differences between the Athlon and the Athlon64. Meanwhile, the Pentium and the PPro are completely different architectures, and indeed, completely different in their principle of operation. The Pentium is an in-order CISC processor, while the PPro is an out-of-order RISC chip with an x86 frontend.
It's pretty incredible how capable the PPro architecture has proven to be. The original PPro, introduced 10 years ago, ran at less than 200Mhz and was built on a 600nm process. In comparison, the Yonah processors coming out next year will run at 2GHz+ and be built on a 65nm process.
That's true, but multi-stage compressors deal with transonic air much better than single-stage fans. Plus, low-flow intakes for supersonic turbojets are more efficient (have higher pressure recovery) than high-flow intakes for supersonic turbofans.
The basic thing I was trying to get at (at the beginning of the post), is that turbofans are not always more efficient than turbojets. The original poster implied that a supersonic transport would be more efficient if it used turbofan engines, which is generally not true in the mach 2-3 speed regime. Turbojets are more efficient than turbofans in that regime. If you look at NASA's mixed-flow turbofan, you'll note that they point out that its a compromise. It compromises some of a turbojet's supersonic cruise efficiency to reduce noise during takeoff.
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Correction: In the last paragraph, "median income of the average American family" is a non-sensical statement. It should be "median family income in the United States."
I'm not going to say anything about the "smart versus stupid bit" (though, many studies show a correlation between family income and academic performance), but the "military recruits are poor" point is quite accurate.
From a DoD press briefing:
"Now, in terms of median income, for whites -- now again, this is enlisted versus -- and this is against the entire civilian population, so it's not quite the right comparison. But for whites, the median total gross household income in 1999 for our enlisted population was about $33,500, versus $44,400 for the civilian population. Again, that omits officers from the DOD numbers --"
The situation is similar for blacks:
"For African Americans, however, the total gross household income of our active duty personnel, their parents, that is, was $32,000 versus $27,900 for the population at large".
The guy kinda spins it by saying that the family of the average black recruit is richer than the average black family, but that's a weird way to look at it. A total household income of $32,000 is low-income, whether you're black or white. It's a full $10,000 less than the median income of the average American family in 1999 (the year the statistics in the press briefing were taken from).
The cases are the same as used in the G5s. How is the style any different?
CDE, Enightenment, NeXTStep, etc, are not desktops from a statistical point of view. Basically, when GNOME and KDE were young, there were two desktop OSs: Mac and Windows. KDE went with the Windows order (the historical *NIX order), and GNOME went with the Mac order. There is no particular reason to consider either order better, though when in doubt, copying the Mac can't hurt...
And by "every operating system", you mean Windows. Certainly, the only other major desktop OS, the Mac, does it it like GNOME does.
Why do all that reading when you don't have to? It's about efficiency. If you can get the same thing across with little text and well-chosen button labels, why not do it?
The problem is with your asinine definition of "non-competitive" markets.
It's the standard economic definition.
You claim, with a straight face, that the iPod is NOT an MP3 player. What is your basis for that?
Leave aside the technical definition. Think about the market definition. If two products are in the same market, they must be competing. If they are competing, one must be taking away sales from the other. Do you think entempos take away many sales from iPods? Do you think iPods take away many sales from entempos? No! Advertising has created a situation where two technically similar products are competing in different markets. Advertising differentiates the products, placing them in different markets.
Think about it this way: are BMW and Kia cars in the same market? They're both cars, they both get you from point A to point B, etc, etc. But nobody shopping has a comparison shopping list that includes both a Kia and a BMW. Kia doesn't worry about BMW taking its sales, and BMW doesn't worry about Kia taking its sales. The products are in completely different markets.
Sure there are differences, but there are ALWAYS differences between products.
In a perfectly competitive market, the products are identical. Milk or eggs are good examples. In a non-competitive market, the products are highly differentiated from products they would be competing with. Macs are a good example. The PC market is closer to the former type, with the differences between PCs being so minimal that people will buy a different brand to save a few bucks. That's what drives PC prices through the floor, and makes margins on them so slim.
I pointed out the price differences between ATI cards, and how they had nothing to do with the underlying costs, and you claimed that ATI has a monopoly on ATI cards.
I never claimed that. I pointed out that the true cost of a card is not just the parts that go into it. While an X800XL may be identical, physically, to an X800Pro, there is a margin in the X800 Pro that is there to pay for R&D. Companies like ATI and NVIDIA know that low-end cards will quickly have their prices brought down, so they increase the margins on their high-end cards to compensate for R&D. In any case, ATI and NVIDIA are rather differentiated. A gamer who plays only Doom III or other OpenGL games will buy an NVIDIA card, for example.
But that's easy to do, since according to your definition, EVERY product is a monopoly in itself!
A company is only a monopoly if it dominates its market. It's a sliding scale, the more the company resembles a monopoly, the more leeway it has to set prices. Product differentiation narrows markets. That narrowing of the market means that certain products will dominate the newly narrowed market. Take, for example the OS market. Why is Microsoft a monopoly when there are hundreds of other OSs around? I mean, they all do the same thing, disk I/O, a user interface, etc. Because those other OSs aren't desktop OSs that run popular desktop applications! Microsoft is a monopoly in the desktop OS market because their product is so highly differentiated from those of its competitors. Likewise, Microsoft can set prices on its product that are commensurate with its monopoly status.
You're either incredibly stupid.
God dammit. I'm through with this conversation. Go to the fucking library and pick up a fucking economics textbook and read up on how markets are defined. There will be a quiz afterwards...
These days, debate period is leftist. The conservatives seem to have headed off this deep end where they don't even feel they need to argue their points anymore, they just wave their hands and grunt a lot. To be fair, there are a few conservatives that still represent the intellectual brand of conservatism, but their numbers are dwindling.
Justice is not a result, it is a process.
The same thing could be said of the Americans with respect to the native Americans. If "hasn't killed lots of innocent people and occupied their land" is a prerequisite for feeling sympathy towards a country, then very few countries in existance today deserve sympathy.
Yes it is. It's about hope, about believing that something will come about without any evidence that suggests the conclusion.
Now, then again, there is nothing wrong with that. But in the end, believing that something like Star Trek may come about isn't really any less silly than believing in the second coming.
I proved both Pianoman and you wrong time and time again
You only think you "proved" us wrong because you don't understand basic economics. You don't understand competitive versus non-competitive markets, and you don't understand the idea that costs encompass much more than just the hardware that goes into a product.
and the best you can say is that my examples are somehow "bad." Bad in the sense they prove you wrong?
Your examples are bad because the markets you used as examples are different types of markets than the PC market, which is what we were talking about. You're trying to categorize markets based on superficial resemblances between the products, rather than on the underlying dynamics. The MP3 player thing is a perfect example. The MP3 player market is competitive. You know why? Because the iPod isn't an MP3 player! Very few people will be torn between an Entempo and an iPod. People who buy the former are shopping for MP3 players. People who buy the latter say: "I want an iPod". There is a single supplier of iPods, and the result is that the margin on iPods is huge. There are many suppliers of MP3 players, and the margins on those are thin.
Once again, go to Dell.com and go to Alienware.com. Alienware will sell similar systems for a LOT more money than Dell, but yet the costs are nearly identical.
Alienware doesn't sell the same product Dell does. They spend more on making pretty cases, providing better support for "enthusiasts", and securing cutting-edge components sooner than anybody else (eg: they've already got Athlon X2s). All of this costs money. They also give you pretty good terms if you're doing stuff like upgrading your machine or installing your own parts. All of this costs money, and the cost of the machine is a lot more than the cost of its parts.
The market sets prices, not costs. The market sets prices, not costs. The market sets prices, not costs.
Only in non-competitive markets. This is the thing you don't seem to understand. So let me give you some examples. The PC market is competitive. There is little product-differentiation. People say "I'm in the market for a new PC for my office". The Mac market is non-competitive. There is ton's of product-differentiation. The vast majority of Mac buyers are people who say "I need a Mac", not people who say "I need a new computer", then decide on a Mac. The low-end car market is competitive. People say "I want a new commuter car", then choose among Kia, Hyundai, Ford, etc. The high-end market is non-competitive. People don't say "I'm looking for a new luxury car...", they say "I want a Ferrari!".
I'll repeat: in competitive markets, there is little product differentiation, margins are thin, and prices are close to costs. In non-competitive markets, there is high product differentiation, margins are fat, and prices are set by what the market can bear. We were talking about the PC market. The PC market is of the former type. In the PC market, prices are set by costs.
It kind of does. Because sci-fi geeks generallly tend to think they are "better than" the people who believe in God, ghosts, etc. The word "science" lends it an air of credibility that it doesn't deserve. What bugs me most is that most sci-fi geeks don't really realize that their entertainment is every bit a fantasy as a little girl's movie about princesses and castles.
Modern Sci-Fi has very little science in it. Somebody, I don't remember who, remarked of Star Wars: "it's not really sci-fi, it's a cowboy western set in space." Perhaps what pisses me off the most is the "geek culture" that's arisen around sci-fi. It is at once ignorant (most sci-fi "geeks" know jack shit about real science), and arrogant (most sci-fi "geeks" think sci-fi is better than, say, cowboy westerns). The superior attitude a lot of people have about sci-fi reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend about comic books. We came to the conclusion that comics like the X-Men are fundementally little different than soap operas. Sure, the plot lines are completely different, but both focus mainly on the characters, their growth, and how they cope with the world around them. Really, the main difference between "Apartment 3G" and "The X-Men" is that Cyclops gets mopey and emotional about a completely different set of problems.
There is no load balancing between the CPU and the GPU. The two always do the same part of the work. If one can't keep up, the other doesn't take over the work. Instead, the slower part just becomes a bottleneck. At 640x480, you're testing how fast the CPU can feed the graphics card data. At 1600x1200, the graphics card becomes the bottleneck, and as long as the CPU can feed the graphics card fast enough, they'll get the same results.
Intel uses dual-channel DDR as well. Same as AMD. Their problem is that their memory latency is about 2x as high as AMD's.
While that is sometimes true, it is not always true. Sometimes things are expensive even though they cost hardly anything.
Yes, because those products are in non-competitive markets. But we weren't talking about non-competitive markets, we were talking about competitive ones.
The REAL reason things cost more is because people are willing to pay more. That's where pricing really comes from.
Only in non-competitive markets. Competitive markets naturally set the price at something lower than what the market is "willing to pay". If you consider each firms curve of price versus the number of people that'll buy at that price, you get a point where their profit is maximal. Ie: the loss from fewer people buying due to a higher price is balanced against the increased profits from the higher price. However, only monopolies can set their price at this level. In a competitive market, the price gets set at a much lower level.
And do you really think that prices in the computer realm are "very close to costs"? You really believe that?
Pardon me if I wasn't clear. I meant the actual PC market. As in the beige box you have sitting on your desk. The margins on those things are in the single-digits.
First, how in the heck could Microsoft be making 80% profit margins off of Office and Windows if they were selling those products "close to costs"?!
Microsoft isn't selling close to cost. It's selling at the nice point in the curve I mentioned earlier. But it can only do that because it is a monopoly.
And do you really think an X800XT ATI Radeon Video card costs $164 more to produce than the X800XL version of the same card.
The graphics card market is a rather poor example, because again, it's not fully competitive. You've only got two major firms (ATI and NVIDIA), and the products are not identical (ie: marketing and features differentiate the products). So ATI can get away with pushing its price pointer to a nicer point of the above-mentioned curve, but not as much as Microsoft can. Though, the difference isn't as big as you'd think. The R&D cost in the video-card market is astronomical. How much do you think it costs ATI and NVIDIA to release new cards every 6 months? They have to have two or three generations of parts under development simultaniously! The volume parts (the X700's or X300's) are sold at not too much higher than cost, while the margins on the higher-end products pay for the R&D.
And look at MP3 players. You can buy an Etempo Spirit 20 gig player for 99 bucks. Or you could buy a 20 gig iPod for $300. Do you REALLY believe the iPod costs three times as much to produce?! Really? Or could it be that people are willing to pay more for the iPod, for whatever reason?
The iPod is a bad example, because marketing and branding differentiate the product. The iPod isn't "an MP3 player", it's an "iPod". However, if you look at the MP3 player market in general, you've got lot's of smaller companies producing products for essentially the same price. There are lot's of no-name 20GB players on the market, and you can bet that those are sold at not too much higher than cost.
Now that is a $160 just for the case, No power supply. Now build a PC up like this, choosing quality components for each system and I think you will discover that Apple pricing won't be that far off the mark.
I just did, and yes it is. I got the P180 case (for $115), high-quality low-latency memory (for $267 for 2GB), a good motherboard (DFI NForce4 Ultra for $130), a Seagate SATA hard drive with 5yr warrenty (for $120), an MSI SATA combo drive, a Seasonic power supply ($50), and a Thermalright heatsink ($40). Throw in a fast Athlon X2 (which still hasn't arrived yet, but was a good deal at $580), and I got a system as fast as Apple's middle PowerMac model (quite a bit faster if you overclock it like Apple does with the top PowerMac model), using higher quality parts than the Apple system at a price $1000 less than a similarly-configured Apple system.
What stringent hardware standards? Apple uses the same generic Maxtor and Western Digital crap that Dell does. The same cheap OEM memory, etc. And now with the Intel x86, they'll use the same cheap Intel CPU and the same cheap Intel motherboards.
The PC market is quite different from the markets you just mentioned. The PC market is a competitive market (in the economic sense). The result of that is that over time, an equillibrium is reached where prices become very close to costs. Now, the market for diamonds and printer ink are not competitive. They are monopolized markets. In such markets, the monopoly can set the price. In the equillibrium for this market, the price goes to a value that maximizes profit for the monopoly (per-unit profit versus volume). This latter price is much higher than the cost.
Not really. The backend execution core is the exact same between the two processors. There are significant differences: the P-M uses the P4's branch predictor, the P4's bus, and his some microarchitectural improvements (deeper buffers, improved decoder, longer pipelines, improved reorder buffer, more optimized circuits), but they re all incremental improvements.
Indeed, it's fair to say that the differences between the P-M and the PPro aren't significantly bigger than the differences between the Athlon and the Athlon64. Meanwhile, the Pentium and the PPro are completely different architectures, and indeed, completely different in their principle of operation. The Pentium is an in-order CISC processor, while the PPro is an out-of-order RISC chip with an x86 frontend.
It's pretty incredible how capable the PPro architecture has proven to be. The original PPro, introduced 10 years ago, ran at less than 200Mhz and was built on a 600nm process. In comparison, the Yonah processors coming out next year will run at 2GHz+ and be built on a 65nm process.
That's not really the point. It's just obvious that Paul Graham is not a spammer.
Paul Graham has a significant number of articles on fighting spam, and has done work on improving Bayesian spam filtering.
That's true, but multi-stage compressors deal with transonic air much better than single-stage fans. Plus, low-flow intakes for supersonic turbojets are more efficient (have higher pressure recovery) than high-flow intakes for supersonic turbofans.
The basic thing I was trying to get at (at the beginning of the post), is that turbofans are not always more efficient than turbojets. The original poster implied that a supersonic transport would be more efficient if it used turbofan engines, which is generally not true in the mach 2-3 speed regime. Turbojets are more efficient than turbofans in that regime. If you look at NASA's mixed-flow turbofan, you'll note that they point out that its a compromise. It compromises some of a turbojet's supersonic cruise efficiency to reduce noise during takeoff.