At first I thought it was reminiscent of their "cube", but the tear-down cured me of that. They really veered from the typical PC layout with this thing.
You understand that there is a huge gulf between "hundreds of man-hours to cram square stuff into fun shapes" and bringing to market a mass-produced product? I have no idea what the price of the Mac Pro will be, but I'm fairly sure it will be more commercially viable than a hand-build one-off.
Yes, I have cell phone service, too. It's $30/month for 100 minutes and 5GB of high speed on T-Mobile. I usually use about $10-15 more at $0.10/minute, for a total cost of around $45/month. But that's my toy tax. My home phone is an OBI that hooks to Google Voice and makes and receives free calls. I pay CallCentric $1.50/month for 911. So even if you stretch the OBI price over a single year, I'm only paying $6/month. This time next year it will be $3.50/month. The economics are similar for the other "pay once" internet phone services.
Now I am of course neglecting my home internet service, so if you don't have that anyway the economics may no longer favor internet phones.
You can buy a Obi or Magic Jack or whatever and pay nothing at all after the initial purchase price. I'm unaware of anything like that in the cell phone world.
If you don't use your phone, then yeah you can go cheap, but $7/mo is still more than you will spend on a VOIP phone if you don't use it (in fact that will get you 500 minutes at a place like CallCentric).
If the software is potentially connected to the Internet, then it represents a security risk which becomes greater the longer people have to learn about it its bugs. If it is not maintained, the case is even stronger.
You have to understand that when people were writing these IE6 apps, they were often replacing old terminal interfaces. They viewed the web browser as a fancy terminal emulator. The fact that it is not holding up over time is obvious only in retrospect.
Well, I didn't really address the baggage issue - but if people were willing to part with their bags and get them later the airlines could do that today.
While your proposal is technically sound, it still suffers a massive weight penalty compared to an aircraft with only one skin. Given the amount of air fare that goes toward kerosene, I don't see the economics working out.
Again, not that I think this idea has any merit, but the scanners and other weighty things could be part of the fixed structure of the train - they do not need to be on the part that attaches to the plane.
Truck to train works because the additional weight and complexity is less expensive than the step of unloading and reloading, or of the additional fuel and manpower to just leave it in a truck.
I'm not sure the same economics hold for an airplane. This thing would need a reinforced mating surface on the bottom for train mode, one on the top for plane mode, and then hardware on the plane to accept the mount. That additional weight and complexity - not to mention design compromises that need to be made to accept the module - is going to make this plane more expensive to fly and maintain than a traditional plane. To be air-certified and maintained, the modules themselves will have to be considerably more expensive than normal rail cars.
Even in a best-case scenario, where everyone headed to a specific destination lives along the same train line, I don't see this working out economically.
please explain price of digital goods such as music, movies and e-books for which supply is close to illimited and people are "pirating" instead of buying because the prices don't go down...
That is the result of government regulation. Copyright is really just a government-granted monopoly. By definition, you are minimizing competition.
it's just because some economist found out that in my country people are statistically willing to pay a bit more than our neighbours.
Taking your facts at face value, there is still supply and demand. "Tablets" are the market, not "Nexus 4s". Are all the tablets more expensive right across the border? If so, then either you are correct about supply and demand being completely broken or there is another force at work.
I have a floppy in my PC, but the case I bought has no provision for it. It just sits in a spare 3.5" slot. Actually, I just replaced the motherboard and it is SATA only, so I'm betting that the floppy's not even hooked up anymore!
Yeah, if you remember, the iMac was dinged for its lack of floppy, and Apple's answer was that you should buy a USB floppy drive. This was ridiculed by many (particularly here on Slashdot).
To be honest, I don't know if USB 3.0 still relies on the CPU as heavily. It was certainly true with USB 2.0 - you could demonstrate it easily enough. In theory, it was a design goal, but I haven't seen any real-world tests.
USB largely came about (or finally became a utilized technology) because Apple made it the only way to hook stuff up to the iMac. The idea of using USB for external storage was laughable until USB 2.0.
Slashdot Mirror
At first I thought it was reminiscent of their "cube", but the tear-down cured me of that. They really veered from the typical PC layout with this thing.
You understand that there is a huge gulf between "hundreds of man-hours to cram square stuff into fun shapes" and bringing to market a mass-produced product? I have no idea what the price of the Mac Pro will be, but I'm fairly sure it will be more commercially viable than a hand-build one-off.
Yes, I have cell phone service, too. It's $30/month for 100 minutes and 5GB of high speed on T-Mobile. I usually use about $10-15 more at $0.10/minute, for a total cost of around $45/month. But that's my toy tax. My home phone is an OBI that hooks to Google Voice and makes and receives free calls. I pay CallCentric $1.50/month for 911. So even if you stretch the OBI price over a single year, I'm only paying $6/month. This time next year it will be $3.50/month. The economics are similar for the other "pay once" internet phone services.
Now I am of course neglecting my home internet service, so if you don't have that anyway the economics may no longer favor internet phones.
You can buy a Obi or Magic Jack or whatever and pay nothing at all after the initial purchase price. I'm unaware of anything like that in the cell phone world.
If you don't use your phone, then yeah you can go cheap, but $7/mo is still more than you will spend on a VOIP phone if you don't use it (in fact that will get you 500 minutes at a place like CallCentric).
Same here - I just run CAT6 whenever possible. A couple of hours of fishing cables beats recurring wireless hiccups any day.
And "landline" (or internet) phones are still waaaaay cheaper than cellular. Free, even.
Same here - I had actually switched from Firefox to Chrome, but came flying back when they abandoned their (awful) side tabs implementation.
If the software is potentially connected to the Internet, then it represents a security risk which becomes greater the longer people have to learn about it its bugs. If it is not maintained, the case is even stronger.
You have to understand that when people were writing these IE6 apps, they were often replacing old terminal interfaces. They viewed the web browser as a fancy terminal emulator. The fact that it is not holding up over time is obvious only in retrospect.
Well, I didn't really address the baggage issue - but if people were willing to part with their bags and get them later the airlines could do that today.
While your proposal is technically sound, it still suffers a massive weight penalty compared to an aircraft with only one skin. Given the amount of air fare that goes toward kerosene, I don't see the economics working out.
I like it! We're all turning sort of amorphously shaped anyway.
Again, not that I think this idea has any merit, but the scanners and other weighty things could be part of the fixed structure of the train - they do not need to be on the part that attaches to the plane.
Not that I think this idea has any merit at all, but you could do the security screening on the train portion of the journey.
Truck to train works because the additional weight and complexity is less expensive than the step of unloading and reloading, or of the additional fuel and manpower to just leave it in a truck.
I'm not sure the same economics hold for an airplane. This thing would need a reinforced mating surface on the bottom for train mode, one on the top for plane mode, and then hardware on the plane to accept the mount. That additional weight and complexity - not to mention design compromises that need to be made to accept the module - is going to make this plane more expensive to fly and maintain than a traditional plane. To be air-certified and maintained, the modules themselves will have to be considerably more expensive than normal rail cars.
Even in a best-case scenario, where everyone headed to a specific destination lives along the same train line, I don't see this working out economically.
please explain price of digital goods such as music, movies and e-books for which supply is close to illimited and people are "pirating" instead of buying because the prices don't go down ...
That is the result of government regulation. Copyright is really just a government-granted monopoly. By definition, you are minimizing competition.
it's just because some economist found out that in my country people are statistically willing to pay a bit more than our neighbours.
Taking your facts at face value, there is still supply and demand. "Tablets" are the market, not "Nexus 4s". Are all the tablets more expensive right across the border? If so, then either you are correct about supply and demand being completely broken or there is another force at work.
I have a floppy in my PC, but the case I bought has no provision for it. It just sits in a spare 3.5" slot. Actually, I just replaced the motherboard and it is SATA only, so I'm betting that the floppy's not even hooked up anymore!
Or those magneto-optical drives that were backward compatible (SuperDisk, I think).
Well, that's just brilliant...
Yeah, if you remember, the iMac was dinged for its lack of floppy, and Apple's answer was that you should buy a USB floppy drive. This was ridiculed by many (particularly here on Slashdot).
I never bought an iMac, but if you would like to point to a non-candy-themed USB peripheral from that time period I will have to reconsider my memory.
To be honest, I don't know if USB 3.0 still relies on the CPU as heavily. It was certainly true with USB 2.0 - you could demonstrate it easily enough. In theory, it was a design goal, but I haven't seen any real-world tests.
USB also uses the CPU for the heavy lifting, so it is cheaper to implement. Which is a plus or a minus, depending on the use case.
USB largely came about (or finally became a utilized technology) because Apple made it the only way to hook stuff up to the iMac. The idea of using USB for external storage was laughable until USB 2.0.
Why are you not required to wear one in a convertible?
Because if a 3000 lb car lands on you, you might as well be wearing goggles.
Then consider it a learning experience. Better a toy than something like a car or house.