How is this "wild-eyed theory"? It should be fairly obvious.
Oh for Pete's sake! What should be obvious to even the most thickheaded observer of history and economics is that bad regimes DON'T lead to more educated and motivated people! You just have to look...
Your whole theory here is based on conjecture and some weird oversimplification. None of it has any grounding in what we have actually seen happen in this world. You think "If they have to make it or die, they'll do more to make it than we will" which sounds great and all....the only thing is, it's not true. We do not typically see bad regimes turn out great economies and highly-educated people! Open and free societies demonstrably educate their people better, and their populations clearly exhibit motivation (proxied by economic production) far in excess of their authoritarian counterparts. And while we're at it, at no point in the history of the world, since fucking Rurik, has the Russian population at large been as well educated as the population of western Europe or the post-colonial US. Your idea is based on what you think sounds like it ought to be right. Mine is based on the actual historical facts.
The sooner the so-called "First" world gets over the notion that people living in the "Third" world are "just like us, except poorer", the better.
While that has no bearing whatsoever on my post or its criticism of your first one, it's still a lot closer to the mark than your wild-eyed theory that bad regimes make for a smarter and more motivated populous. If you couldn't get that point the first time, there's probably not much left to talk about.
Well, the two of you have experiences that fit perfectly with mine. Having sold cell phones for 3 providers (years ago, thank heavens), it always seemed to me that there was a much greater difference in performance within a model of phone than there was between models. Of course, some models were poor all around, but more often I'd see a few lemons and a few star performers out of any given model that I sold many of.
Also, your note that the Treo meets all of GP's 'must haves' seems to be correct...which I assume is why he does indeed have it.
so please take your condescending feminist bullshit to Myspace where you can post a bulletin and all your 20-something retarded girlfriends can sit around further distancing themselves from the men they really want to be with. Hope I don't come off too confrontational
Yeah, intelligence isn't valued highly in North America. Nor is life any better for the smart. Only (barely-)ex-communist countries with shocking corruption under increasingly authoritarian rule could be so enlightened.
Sure enough, KDE and GNOME don't run well on 486 hardware. But if you aren't impressed with their abilities on modern machines, you probably just aren't cut out for modern desktop computing. That's cool...just have fun over there with your 32 xterms on windowmaker and leave the rest of us alone, OK?
Dude, put down the pipe. You don't get to choose who Microsoft sues; Microsoft does. They aren't going to happily sue the puppet entity you set up. They will continue their thuggery, going after big end-user companies with strong existing MS ties who are keener on the idea of paying a few million in license fees than they are on a long legal fight and loss of preferential treatment from MS. And even if they did sue your puppet company, the rest of the community wouldn't get off scot free if the puppet lost. On the contrary, that would set up a precedent whereby MS could much more easily sue everybody else.
Nice try. But I think you'll find that the legal system is surprisingly resistant to such "cheap tricks."
He wasn't. The story is clear on this; he was disciplined by the school. The police visited the house and his parents let them search his room, but they concluded that he hadn't done anything illegal. While I agree with most here that the school overreacted by sending him to the juvie-school for the rest of the semester, obviously the school-system has much more latitude here than the cops. I know I got a lot of detention for a lot of perfectly legal stuff...
Unfortunately the story submitter and the editors don't think this distinction is important. Too bad, it really colors the whole discussion all wrong.
No, they're not the same polyester and carbon fibers that are in an inexpensive fishing rod.
F1 bodies are made out of prepreg...
So, since they're made out of "prepreg" they're different fibers from the ones in the fishing rods? I see. In other news, your long and boring description of one-off panel manufacture in carbon fiber completely confirmed the parent poster's point, which is that the one-offness of the process is the expensive part, not the nature of carbon fiber. Under modern mass production, carbon fiber can be far less expensive. As inexpensive as steel? I dunno...
CVT's aren't so obscure. Everybody's doing them nowadays; off the top of my head I've seen them from Ford, Nissan, Audi, and Honda. The Audi A6 had a 5-speed auto, 6-speed manual, or CVT at one point (last I looked was at least a year or two ago) and the CVT gave the best 0-60 and gas mileage of the three. And without any shifting. No doubt, CVT is cool.
What I would really like to see is a diesel on a CVT. In a sports car. No, seriously...by modulating the transmission ratio rather than the throttle you'd have total access to that power and torque, which would be much higher pound-for-pound than a gas engine. Of course, it would be good to have diesel+cvt in normal passenger cars too (and hybrids...wtf? why aren't there diesel priuses!?) but I digress. Point is, diesel and CVT seem like a perfect match.
Why would it take less time to repair, rather than replace the tank?
Well, they got it from NewEgg, they're out-of-stock, so the RMA is backordered. They could go and do a manufacturer replacement, but that could take forever.
Only nine percent hydrogen by weight is success? How much fuel will it waste in transportation if there is nine times as much "pakaging" material as there is hydrogen.
Obviously you aren't very impressed with the 9% number. But what are you comparing it to? Octane is only 16% H by mass. This basically means that for an equivalent weight, this stuff will give you 56% as much energy as gas.
Unfortunately, there's a lot left out of the article. Two things come to mind immediately: 1)How much energy does it take to produce this stuff, and 2)What's the density? Then after that one starts to wonder what the process of releasing the energy looks like. Clearly, this is preliminary at best. But it's nice to think about the possibility of hydrogen-rich, easy-to-handle materials that don't use the carbon crutch.
This is a well-to-wheels comparison...I'm not sure which way changing it to pump-to-wheels would skew things, although my guess would be in favor of the diesel. But I think well-to-wheels is what we should really be interested in anyhow. In any case, the comparison naturally shows the company's own Tesla Roadster as far and away more efficient than the others in the list...and their argument is fairly convincing. But it also does show the Toyota Prius and Honda Civic VX (the two hybrids in the list) as slightly more efficient than the diesel Jetta. It is worth noting that the fuel-cell and natural-gas cars performed terribly.
If you haven't checked out Tesla's site, you should...it's really cool. Here's hoping that batteries get cheaper and their production ramps up as fast as they expect, so these can get into reasonable price ranges. Oh, and here's hoping the lithium doesn't run out;-)
Personally, if I could get my hands on a Power6 PC, and slap linux on it, I'd be all but done with x86. I'm personally surprised that IBM isn't doing this in lieu of the Apple switch to Intel.
My point wasn't that inflation doesn't exist, but rather that CE categories do not historically follow inflation.
This is entirely irrelevant when discussing a purchasing decision. I tried to allude to that previously, but apparently failed. It may (or may not) be true that CE values have not inflated over time. But one's decision to purchase a CE product is not based on the historical prices within that category; it is based on the current prices of all goods and services which one desires. Again, basic microeconomics. Deciding to purchase something is deciding not to purchase other things at the same point in time. It is not looking back and deciding how expensive something is relative to what existed 10 years ago.
But the bigger issue here is that if you want to say the iphone is expensive, you either mean that it is a substantial cost in terms of other things given up, or you mean that it is priced out of line with other devices in its class. This mumbo-jumbo about how it "feels" expensive and the "psychological" aspects of this price are just idle whining. I provided citations of other industry prices, comparisons to the amount of stuff given up in well-understood metrics, and my analysis was that it isn't out of line. You have responded to none of this. So I will simply say that the bulk of my argument still stands unanswered. I will, however, respond to some of the low points in your post.
Last week, I was at a concert (incidentally by a band that, as Apple's ads tell me, has an exclusive EP available at iTMS) and overheard some folks talking about their iPods. The iPhone came up: "hey, you hear they're gonna be making a phone?", "Yeah, but it's gonna be so expensive -- no way I can afford that."
Last week I was at a concert and heard two guys talking about the new Mercedes. One said that it looked cool, but he couldn't afford it. Yet apparently Daimler has sold several of them recently. I'm not entirely certain, but this experience has led me to believe that perhaps overhearing conversations at concerts is not a reliable market indicator.
On another, completely different line of thought, I would guess that the people you overheard didn't buy 1st-gen ipods either. Launch iPods cost $399 or $499 in 2001 dollars; that's $467 or $584 today. So, whether or not you believe in inflation, in 2001 these guys almost certainly concluded that they'd stick with their CD players for a while, just like they are currently sticking with their phone/ipod combos.
The street buzz is against it.
Well, more fuzzy impressions...for what it's worth, most folks I've spoken with are really stoked. Neither of our samples is useful. I took that to mean that neither of us should be here making proclamations about the "street buzz" and acting like they're simple, factual statements. Obviously, you took a different view...
The rest of the post is pure wild-eyed conspiracy craziness. The providers will be more than happy to let apple work its design muscles for them if it pushes adoption of expensive, high-margin data plans, like what will presumably be required to buy an iphone. The clashes over control are not world-changers...they are just normal negotiations with a hardware manufacturer with a bit more leverage than normal.
Pricing: it's not just absolute prices; it's relative prices. The iPhone is damn expensive however you cut it: and while inflation may be a factor, in electronics the "latest generation" seems to come in at about the same price tag: A top-of-the-line personal computer in 1980 would cost you about $2000, and you'd pay about $2000 today.
First off, do you really have no idea what inflation is? See, the measure of how much something costs is just a measure of how much other stuff you can't get because you got it. So if you could really get a top-of-the-line computer in 1980 for $2000 (btw, the original IBM PC went on sale in 1981 for $3000, before you started tricking it out) then that's a hell of a lot more than $2000 today. According to the same inflation calculator I used before, it's about $5400. That is to say, if you didn't buy the computer then, the extra money could have fed/clothed/car-paymented you for nearly three times as long as if you didn't buy the computer now. Sorry for the high-school econ lesson, but seriously, inflation really does matter.
Now, if you want to talk about the relative price of the device vs. others in its class, consider this: Cingular has two smartphones out right now that will cost you $400 with a 2-year agreement and after a mail-in-rebate. The before-rebate price of one of them is $500 ($450 for the other). Verizon has 4 of the $500-$100mir models. And there are certainly plenty of places to drop even more on the fancy-dancy unlocked jobs running around. In this kind of a field, I just don't see $500 as that appalling I guess.
Okay, just STOP. This is a LIE. The newton would allow you to install additional software, of your choice. The iPhone doesn't. That means the Newton was dramatically more capable for the actual user.
Uh, whatever. Could it make phone calls? Connect to hotspots and browse the web? Sorry, but 3rd-party software only means that it could conceivably be made more capable than it is. It doesn't automatically make it more capable than 1st-party-only platforms with larger feature sets. The Newton that "actual users" ended up with did not do nearly as much stuff as the iPhone is said to.
I don't know if it will spell doom, but the iPhone has its own set of more or less congruent problems: it is large for a phone, it has only an onscreen keyboard which is a feature in high demand for modern smartphones, and it too is in a new product category: semi-smartphone (since it doesn't let you install applications like every smartphone on the market.)
Well, you came up with your own, completely different list of congruent problems. They are a bit better than the author's choices, I guess...except that last one. Semi-smartphone? Are you kidding? Just because you're bitter that you don't get to write your own java apps (and keep your chin up, fer Christ's sake; it won't be out a month before you'll be able to, mark my words) doesn't mean suddenly it's not a smartphone. It still has tremendous capabilities, and I would expect more 1st-party apps to add to that as time passes. And if all else fails, it's got a pretty capable web-browser, so those java apps may be usable after all, albeit delivered somewhat differently.
Well, this is a mercifully short rant at least. Too bad it's totally disconnected and the points are each (separately) developed poorly. If his main point is really what it seems to be (that is, that Apple is making the same mistakes with iPhone as it did with Newton) then here's what I see wrong with it:
1)He compares the pricing of the two devices...but seems only to go as far as saying they both cost "too much." He doesn't seem to put together the fact that the Newton's $700 1993 price tag was almost exactly twice as expensive as the iPhone: $999.48 inflation adjusted. And that's for a much less capable device, with an untested interface that didn't work well.
2)He notes the real reasons why the Newton failed (large size, bad handwriting recognition, completely new product category), but doesn't attempt to claim that these will be problems for the iPhone. They won't, so he simply ignores them.
3)Evidently he considers competition to be a problem that the iPhone has in common with the Newton. This after he notes that the Newton was the first device of its kind, and therefore had absolutely no competition. Strong competition may or may not be problematic for the iPhone, but it certainly won't be a parallel to the Newton.
4)He totally misrepresents the only evidence he cites. Specifically, the study on how many people would buy at what prices. His link says "miniscule number." Yet the survey itself says 26% of respondents said they would be likely to buy it, and 1% of those would buy it at the launch price. Insofar as Apple itself has set a goal of only 1% market share, being able to sell a quarter of that volume for the launch price sounds extremely encouraging to me...imagine if a quarter of Sony's target market had thrown down $600 for a PS3. Also, the study makes specific note of the fact that they don't expect the price to stay that high; business as usual in the cell-phone world, but totally ignored by this author.
The PS2 lineup wasn't nearly as bad...a dozen or so titles IIRC. I got a launch unit, whichever Dead or Alive game that was (2? 3?), timesplitters (still in my opinion a great multiplayer shooter), and something else, but I'm not sure...maybe tekken tag? Anyway, I thought they were all great games. I didn't see a single title in the PS3 launch that I thought I would have bought under ordinary circumstances (that is, if I already owned the console and there was a large software library available).
Anyway, I fully expect the library to bulk up, and the price to come down. No idea how long it'll take.
Um, nice piece of completely unfounded conjecture. Also, it doesn't make logical sense even from a circumstantial point of view. The billionaires are investing in their foundations to "make money?" You do realize that they can't get it back out, right? The foundation makes money, true...which is good, as it allows it to spend way, way more money fixing problems. Assuming a fairly normal rate of return, the foundation should be able to spend its entire (current) endowment over the next 7 years and yet still have the same amount of money at the end of that time...meaning it can keep doing it. And this idea that Gates should just be sending us all a $100 check? Are you brain dead? First, since he is clearly more interested in third-world disease and poverty than he is with the home-grown (and comparatively less miserable) variety, we'd be talking about a few billion checks, not a couple hundred million. Which means the foundation's endowment would only be like $20 per recipient. But even if it was a hundred...you think everybody having a small bit of cash (which won't last) would be better than curing HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis, and working on better ways to get clean water and food to the third world? That's dumb as hell; the value of the foundation is having such a big pile of cash in one place where it can be spent in really big chunks on research and large-scale health projects. The benefit of these initiatives to the people they serve are many, many times greater than the per-capita amount spent to pursue them.
You seem to think that the foundation doesn't do anything important. This suggests you simply haven't made any attempt to find out what they are about. Add to this your complete lack of logic and your unfounded conclusions, and it comes off sounding really ignorant.
...anyone who wants to, can back up their DVD or play it on some other playback device, because the encryption scheme has been broken.
Well, not quite. Granted, nearly all of us use DeCSS to do our (fair use!) backups. But it is quite possible to back them up without any decryption at all, so saying the backups are possible "because" of the crack is not quite right.
Slashdot Mirror
How is this "wild-eyed theory"? It should be fairly obvious.
Oh for Pete's sake! What should be obvious to even the most thickheaded observer of history and economics is that bad regimes DON'T lead to more educated and motivated people! You just have to look...
Your whole theory here is based on conjecture and some weird oversimplification. None of it has any grounding in what we have actually seen happen in this world. You think "If they have to make it or die, they'll do more to make it than we will" which sounds great and all....the only thing is, it's not true. We do not typically see bad regimes turn out great economies and highly-educated people! Open and free societies demonstrably educate their people better, and their populations clearly exhibit motivation (proxied by economic production) far in excess of their authoritarian counterparts. And while we're at it, at no point in the history of the world, since fucking Rurik, has the Russian population at large been as well educated as the population of western Europe or the post-colonial US. Your idea is based on what you think sounds like it ought to be right. Mine is based on the actual historical facts.
The sooner the so-called "First" world gets over the notion that people living in the "Third" world are "just like us, except poorer", the better.
While that has no bearing whatsoever on my post or its criticism of your first one, it's still a lot closer to the mark than your wild-eyed theory that bad regimes make for a smarter and more motivated populous. If you couldn't get that point the first time, there's probably not much left to talk about.
Well, the two of you have experiences that fit perfectly with mine. Having sold cell phones for 3 providers (years ago, thank heavens), it always seemed to me that there was a much greater difference in performance within a model of phone than there was between models. Of course, some models were poor all around, but more often I'd see a few lemons and a few star performers out of any given model that I sold many of.
Also, your note that the Treo meets all of GP's 'must haves' seems to be correct...which I assume is why he does indeed have it.
so please take your condescending feminist bullshit to Myspace where you can post a bulletin and all your 20-something retarded girlfriends can sit around further distancing themselves from the men they really want to be with. Hope I don't come off too confrontational
No, not at all...
(That little rant is really modded insightful?)
Bwahaha.
Yeah, intelligence isn't valued highly in North America. Nor is life any better for the smart. Only (barely-)ex-communist countries with shocking corruption under increasingly authoritarian rule could be so enlightened.
(Dumbfuck.)
Sure enough, KDE and GNOME don't run well on 486 hardware. But if you aren't impressed with their abilities on modern machines, you probably just aren't cut out for modern desktop computing. That's cool...just have fun over there with your 32 xterms on windowmaker and leave the rest of us alone, OK?
Linux ships with 4 high level computer languages useable out of the box in the base install - perl, python, C and C++.
They've put compilers/interpreters in the kernel now? Jesus, Linux is getting bloated.
Dude, put down the pipe. You don't get to choose who Microsoft sues; Microsoft does. They aren't going to happily sue the puppet entity you set up. They will continue their thuggery, going after big end-user companies with strong existing MS ties who are keener on the idea of paying a few million in license fees than they are on a long legal fight and loss of preferential treatment from MS. And even if they did sue your puppet company, the rest of the community wouldn't get off scot free if the puppet lost. On the contrary, that would set up a precedent whereby MS could much more easily sue everybody else.
Nice try. But I think you'll find that the legal system is surprisingly resistant to such "cheap tricks."
This kid doesn't deserve to be arrested.
He wasn't. The story is clear on this; he was disciplined by the school. The police visited the house and his parents let them search his room, but they concluded that he hadn't done anything illegal. While I agree with most here that the school overreacted by sending him to the juvie-school for the rest of the semester, obviously the school-system has much more latitude here than the cops. I know I got a lot of detention for a lot of perfectly legal stuff...
Unfortunately the story submitter and the editors don't think this distinction is important. Too bad, it really colors the whole discussion all wrong.
No, they're not the same polyester and carbon fibers that are in an inexpensive fishing rod.
F1 bodies are made out of prepreg...
So, since they're made out of "prepreg" they're different fibers from the ones in the fishing rods? I see. In other news, your long and boring description of one-off panel manufacture in carbon fiber completely confirmed the parent poster's point, which is that the one-offness of the process is the expensive part, not the nature of carbon fiber. Under modern mass production, carbon fiber can be far less expensive. As inexpensive as steel? I dunno...
CVT's aren't so obscure. Everybody's doing them nowadays; off the top of my head I've seen them from Ford, Nissan, Audi, and Honda. The Audi A6 had a 5-speed auto, 6-speed manual, or CVT at one point (last I looked was at least a year or two ago) and the CVT gave the best 0-60 and gas mileage of the three. And without any shifting. No doubt, CVT is cool.
What I would really like to see is a diesel on a CVT. In a sports car. No, seriously...by modulating the transmission ratio rather than the throttle you'd have total access to that power and torque, which would be much higher pound-for-pound than a gas engine. Of course, it would be good to have diesel+cvt in normal passenger cars too (and hybrids...wtf? why aren't there diesel priuses!?) but I digress. Point is, diesel and CVT seem like a perfect match.
Why would it take less time to repair, rather than replace the tank?
Well, they got it from NewEgg, they're out-of-stock, so the RMA is backordered. They could go and do a manufacturer replacement, but that could take forever.
Only nine percent hydrogen by weight is success? How much fuel will it waste in transportation if there is nine times as much "pakaging" material as there is hydrogen.
Obviously you aren't very impressed with the 9% number. But what are you comparing it to? Octane is only 16% H by mass. This basically means that for an equivalent weight, this stuff will give you 56% as much energy as gas.
Unfortunately, there's a lot left out of the article. Two things come to mind immediately: 1)How much energy does it take to produce this stuff, and 2)What's the density? Then after that one starts to wonder what the process of releasing the energy looks like. Clearly, this is preliminary at best. But it's nice to think about the possibility of hydrogen-rich, easy-to-handle materials that don't use the carbon crutch.
Hey, as it happens, I recently saw just such a comparison!
c y.php
;-)
http://teslamotors.com/learn_more/energy_efficien
This is a well-to-wheels comparison...I'm not sure which way changing it to pump-to-wheels would skew things, although my guess would be in favor of the diesel. But I think well-to-wheels is what we should really be interested in anyhow. In any case, the comparison naturally shows the company's own Tesla Roadster as far and away more efficient than the others in the list...and their argument is fairly convincing. But it also does show the Toyota Prius and Honda Civic VX (the two hybrids in the list) as slightly more efficient than the diesel Jetta. It is worth noting that the fuel-cell and natural-gas cars performed terribly.
If you haven't checked out Tesla's site, you should...it's really cool. Here's hoping that batteries get cheaper and their production ramps up as fast as they expect, so these can get into reasonable price ranges. Oh, and here's hoping the lithium doesn't run out
The new drives are like hybrid cars in that the NAND flash memory works in conjunction with the spinning disk...
Oh...so that's how hybrid cars work...
Personally, if I could get my hands on a Power6 PC, and slap linux on it, I'd be all but done with x86. I'm personally surprised that IBM isn't doing this in lieu of the Apple switch to Intel.
They aren't?
Dammit! I'm too busy re-installing windows to get the damn hair plugs and laser-derm you insensitive clod!
Man, bum deal...I'm out getting all the chicks with my fancy spinning-cube desktop...
My point wasn't that inflation doesn't exist, but rather that CE categories do not historically follow inflation.
This is entirely irrelevant when discussing a purchasing decision. I tried to allude to that previously, but apparently failed. It may (or may not) be true that CE values have not inflated over time. But one's decision to purchase a CE product is not based on the historical prices within that category; it is based on the current prices of all goods and services which one desires. Again, basic microeconomics. Deciding to purchase something is deciding not to purchase other things at the same point in time. It is not looking back and deciding how expensive something is relative to what existed 10 years ago.
But the bigger issue here is that if you want to say the iphone is expensive, you either mean that it is a substantial cost in terms of other things given up, or you mean that it is priced out of line with other devices in its class. This mumbo-jumbo about how it "feels" expensive and the "psychological" aspects of this price are just idle whining. I provided citations of other industry prices, comparisons to the amount of stuff given up in well-understood metrics, and my analysis was that it isn't out of line. You have responded to none of this. So I will simply say that the bulk of my argument still stands unanswered. I will, however, respond to some of the low points in your post.
Last week, I was at a concert (incidentally by a band that, as Apple's ads tell me, has an exclusive EP available at iTMS) and overheard some folks talking about their iPods. The iPhone came up: "hey, you hear they're gonna be making a phone?", "Yeah, but it's gonna be so expensive -- no way I can afford that."
Last week I was at a concert and heard two guys talking about the new Mercedes. One said that it looked cool, but he couldn't afford it. Yet apparently Daimler has sold several of them recently. I'm not entirely certain, but this experience has led me to believe that perhaps overhearing conversations at concerts is not a reliable market indicator.
On another, completely different line of thought, I would guess that the people you overheard didn't buy 1st-gen ipods either. Launch iPods cost $399 or $499 in 2001 dollars; that's $467 or $584 today. So, whether or not you believe in inflation, in 2001 these guys almost certainly concluded that they'd stick with their CD players for a while, just like they are currently sticking with their phone/ipod combos.
The street buzz is against it.
Well, more fuzzy impressions...for what it's worth, most folks I've spoken with are really stoked. Neither of our samples is useful. I took that to mean that neither of us should be here making proclamations about the "street buzz" and acting like they're simple, factual statements. Obviously, you took a different view...
The rest of the post is pure wild-eyed conspiracy craziness. The providers will be more than happy to let apple work its design muscles for them if it pushes adoption of expensive, high-margin data plans, like what will presumably be required to buy an iphone. The clashes over control are not world-changers...they are just normal negotiations with a hardware manufacturer with a bit more leverage than normal.
Really, when Microsoft rolls over and just pays out the license fee for something, you should start thinking that you could be in the wrong.
You mean like when they paid SCO?
Pricing: it's not just absolute prices; it's relative prices. The iPhone is damn expensive however you cut it: and while inflation may be a factor, in electronics the "latest generation" seems to come in at about the same price tag: A top-of-the-line personal computer in 1980 would cost you about $2000, and you'd pay about $2000 today.
First off, do you really have no idea what inflation is? See, the measure of how much something costs is just a measure of how much other stuff you can't get because you got it. So if you could really get a top-of-the-line computer in 1980 for $2000 (btw, the original IBM PC went on sale in 1981 for $3000, before you started tricking it out) then that's a hell of a lot more than $2000 today. According to the same inflation calculator I used before, it's about $5400. That is to say, if you didn't buy the computer then, the extra money could have fed/clothed/car-paymented you for nearly three times as long as if you didn't buy the computer now. Sorry for the high-school econ lesson, but seriously, inflation really does matter.
Now, if you want to talk about the relative price of the device vs. others in its class, consider this: Cingular has two smartphones out right now that will cost you $400 with a 2-year agreement and after a mail-in-rebate. The before-rebate price of one of them is $500 ($450 for the other). Verizon has 4 of the $500-$100mir models. And there are certainly plenty of places to drop even more on the fancy-dancy unlocked jobs running around. In this kind of a field, I just don't see $500 as that appalling I guess.
Okay, just STOP. This is a LIE. The newton would allow you to install additional software, of your choice. The iPhone doesn't. That means the Newton was dramatically more capable for the actual user.
Uh, whatever. Could it make phone calls? Connect to hotspots and browse the web? Sorry, but 3rd-party software only means that it could conceivably be made more capable than it is. It doesn't automatically make it more capable than 1st-party-only platforms with larger feature sets. The Newton that "actual users" ended up with did not do nearly as much stuff as the iPhone is said to.
I don't know if it will spell doom, but the iPhone has its own set of more or less congruent problems: it is large for a phone, it has only an onscreen keyboard which is a feature in high demand for modern smartphones, and it too is in a new product category: semi-smartphone (since it doesn't let you install applications like every smartphone on the market.)
Well, you came up with your own, completely different list of congruent problems. They are a bit better than the author's choices, I guess...except that last one. Semi-smartphone? Are you kidding? Just because you're bitter that you don't get to write your own java apps (and keep your chin up, fer Christ's sake; it won't be out a month before you'll be able to, mark my words) doesn't mean suddenly it's not a smartphone. It still has tremendous capabilities, and I would expect more 1st-party apps to add to that as time passes. And if all else fails, it's got a pretty capable web-browser, so those java apps may be usable after all, albeit delivered somewhat differently.
Well, this is a mercifully short rant at least. Too bad it's totally disconnected and the points are each (separately) developed poorly. If his main point is really what it seems to be (that is, that Apple is making the same mistakes with iPhone as it did with Newton) then here's what I see wrong with it:
1)He compares the pricing of the two devices...but seems only to go as far as saying they both cost "too much." He doesn't seem to put together the fact that the Newton's $700 1993 price tag was almost exactly twice as expensive as the iPhone: $999.48 inflation adjusted. And that's for a much less capable device, with an untested interface that didn't work well.
2)He notes the real reasons why the Newton failed (large size, bad handwriting recognition, completely new product category), but doesn't attempt to claim that these will be problems for the iPhone. They won't, so he simply ignores them.
3)Evidently he considers competition to be a problem that the iPhone has in common with the Newton. This after he notes that the Newton was the first device of its kind, and therefore had absolutely no competition. Strong competition may or may not be problematic for the iPhone, but it certainly won't be a parallel to the Newton.
4)He totally misrepresents the only evidence he cites. Specifically, the study on how many people would buy at what prices. His link says "miniscule number." Yet the survey itself says 26% of respondents said they would be likely to buy it, and 1% of those would buy it at the launch price. Insofar as Apple itself has set a goal of only 1% market share, being able to sell a quarter of that volume for the launch price sounds extremely encouraging to me...imagine if a quarter of Sony's target market had thrown down $600 for a PS3. Also, the study makes specific note of the fact that they don't expect the price to stay that high; business as usual in the cell-phone world, but totally ignored by this author.
The PS2 lineup wasn't nearly as bad...a dozen or so titles IIRC. I got a launch unit, whichever Dead or Alive game that was (2? 3?), timesplitters (still in my opinion a great multiplayer shooter), and something else, but I'm not sure...maybe tekken tag? Anyway, I thought they were all great games. I didn't see a single title in the PS3 launch that I thought I would have bought under ordinary circumstances (that is, if I already owned the console and there was a large software library available).
Anyway, I fully expect the library to bulk up, and the price to come down. No idea how long it'll take.
Um, nice piece of completely unfounded conjecture. Also, it doesn't make logical sense even from a circumstantial point of view. The billionaires are investing in their foundations to "make money?" You do realize that they can't get it back out, right? The foundation makes money, true...which is good, as it allows it to spend way, way more money fixing problems. Assuming a fairly normal rate of return, the foundation should be able to spend its entire (current) endowment over the next 7 years and yet still have the same amount of money at the end of that time...meaning it can keep doing it. And this idea that Gates should just be sending us all a $100 check? Are you brain dead? First, since he is clearly more interested in third-world disease and poverty than he is with the home-grown (and comparatively less miserable) variety, we'd be talking about a few billion checks, not a couple hundred million. Which means the foundation's endowment would only be like $20 per recipient. But even if it was a hundred...you think everybody having a small bit of cash (which won't last) would be better than curing HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis, and working on better ways to get clean water and food to the third world? That's dumb as hell; the value of the foundation is having such a big pile of cash in one place where it can be spent in really big chunks on research and large-scale health projects. The benefit of these initiatives to the people they serve are many, many times greater than the per-capita amount spent to pursue them.
You seem to think that the foundation doesn't do anything important. This suggests you simply haven't made any attempt to find out what they are about. Add to this your complete lack of logic and your unfounded conclusions, and it comes off sounding really ignorant.
Well, not quite. Granted, nearly all of us use DeCSS to do our (fair use!) backups. But it is quite possible to back them up without any decryption at all, so saying the backups are possible "because" of the crack is not quite right.