Most companies adjust their prices as the exchange rate fluctuates, instead of trying to pick a number and sticking with it for the long term. Of course, this is Apple and they do love their price points, so go figure.
The answer is even simpler than that. Amazingly enough, you can pay off debt without increasing the supply in credit. Do Slashdot mods really think you have to magic a dollar bill (or, pre fiat money, a gold coin) out of thin air to pay interest? That interest may not be paid from existing credit or debt? And once it gets paid, the token of exchange disappears forever? Stupid!
Yes, that is the case. We literally owe more money in debt than actually exists. We simply cannot pay it all back even if we used every dollar in existance to do it. The reason for this is because the banks are allowed to create money - when you take out a loan the bank does not give you money it has on hand from depositors, it simply creates the money out of thin air (nowadays it's just modifying a few bits on a computer). It would not be such a big deal except that the banks demand more money back than they lent to you (in other words, interest), and the fact that almost the entire money supply has been created in this fashion (actual "money", tokens such as coins and bills are an insignificant part of the total amount of money out there). That's how we owe more money than actually exists, and thus to service today's debt and to keep the system running the only choice we have is run to banks to have them create us some more money, in the form of more debt for tomorrow. So yes, the system really is supported by willing dollars into existance. And as such, it's not hard to see how the money supply (and the debt) expands exponentially over time.
Even physical items like gold isn't immune to this, though the system is much more stable. If the gold lenders (banks) demand you give them back more gold than they lent to you in the first place (in other words, they charge interest), they will eventually own all the gold if there is a fixed amount available. The only way to stop this is to keep mining more gold and increasing the money supply.
The thing with the Atom though, is that you only really need to match the performance of hardware from a few years ago to make most people happy. People right now are fairly satisfied with single core P4's in the 2.4-3.0Ghz range for what they want to do. If the Atom can match that level of performance, then I can see it being a big hit. Of course, a lot of people may be swayed by the "for a few dollars more" argument and go with something like a Celeron, but at these price levels you may be talking $200 vs. $250, so it can end up being a big difference in price.
Though you're right, the Atom 330 is more like a dual P3 1Ghz more than anything more modern like a Core 2 processor, but the level of performance is not that far behind where it needs to be.
Most of it has to do with timing. USB is a shared bus, so you can't guarentee the timing depending on how the time slices get alotted. That means sending a command can take 15ms once time and 50ms the next time, which can be pretty annoying if timing is critical (though if it's really critical I suggest using GPIB and not RS-232, at least as instrumentation goes). Another problem is that USB devices can't initiate a transfer (unlike RS-232), which means that the host (PC) has to periodically poll the adaptor to see if something is trying to talk to it, which once again messes with the timing. Plus, some just seem to drop data - the worst of the ones I played around with seem to be about 0.2-0.3% of the time, so it's intermittent enough to be annoying but not perioditic enough so that the problem is obvious. At least until I wrote a quick program where I had a serial device echo back what cammands I sent to it, and found that 20-30 times out of a thousand something happened so the PC didn't get back what I sent (with no errors reported back by the OS, which made trapping this somewhat tricky). Running the same program using the onboard serial resulted in a 100% success rate.
Then some devices, for reasons I don't fully understand, simply refuse to work with the USB serial adaptors. Maybe it has to do with the timing, I'm not sure. Though I have seen the opposite a few times (the device works on a USB adaptor but not the onboard on certain PCs), so maybe some devices just suck too.
So I would bet that Atom and other underpowered cpus are a fad. They will not look very good next to a mobile Core i7 that is 20x faster when all cores are used.
Why do you think they are a fad? They obviously aren't going to be much use for what you do, but the vast majority of people can do what they want to do with with fairly low powered hardware. For them, a cheap Atom-based computer may be hard to pass up. The Atom 330 is a dual core 1.6Ghz processor with Hyperthreading. That's a fairly respectable amount of power for a computer used for browsing the internet, viewing photos, and managing a music collection. You can buy an Atom 330 CPU/board combo for $80 by the way.
Even so, Intel just released a 3.5Ghz Core 2 Duo chip. So while the Prescott P4 still holds the record for fastest clocked x86 CPU at 3.8Ghz, it will probably be eclipsed by something in about a year or so. We'll probably have 4Ghz in a couple of years, potentially sooner if Intel starts to feel threatened by AMD again.
It's not so much the price of fuel itself, but all the extra surcharges and prices increases that came about because of the high fuel prices. The price of gas has come down, but my grocery bills are still as high as ever, the shipping rates for packages haven't come down, and the airlines are still tacking all kinds of surcharges and fees onto tickets.
Besides, the last time oil was $40 a barrel, gasoline was was more like $1.50 per gallon, so that's something you might want to consider.
I dread the day that modems and RS-232 cease to be available on computers.
We might be at that point for RS-232 and laptops. I haven't seen a new laptop with a serial port for a while now, which is a bummer because those USB-Serial adaptors suck.
If it's anything like mine, you can customize how they work with the included utility. I have my Trackpoint set up as the mouse, and the touchpad as kind of a 2D scrollwheel of sorts, which works well as you don't have to worry about how imprecise touchpads are when you're just using them to scroll around.
Working with a standard 15" notebook screen is like drafting on a napkin with a magic marker. Its good for making notes. but not for serious detailed work.
It's not so bad if you can find one with a 1920x1200 resolution screen. You'd have to move to 24" screen on a desktop to get the same resolution. Though admittedly, the 1280x800 15" screens on many cheap laptops are pretty much crap.
He just said 3.2Ghz, but not anything else. It's probably a Pentium D, that would be about right for 2 years ago, and the 3.2Ghz version was very popular.
Maybe he's refering to the pop up advertisements and banners that pop up over the show, and how they now squish the credits down to a corner of the screen to show even more ads? Plus the animated, opaque, full color water marks? I could very well believe that some channels have some kind of ad or branding on the screen more time than not nowadays.
It's the introduction of eBooks that have finally made the mass-pirating of books possible, as they can be easily copied and transmitted across the planet. Before eBooks, it was simply cheaper and easier to buy the real physical book than it try to copy it.
Right. And when a company goes bankrupt, and doesn't pay your last two weeks of wages, nothing was taken from you either. You still have all your material possessions. Oh wait. They've stolen your labor haven't they? Well the same is true for the novelist.
No, the closest equilivent analogy would be for me to steal the novelist's completed manuscript then publish it as my novel. Copyright infringement is something else.
It was over taken by a shoddy implementation of the flash plugin in Safari. Not to rain on the parade, but OS X is incredibly secure.
Actually, Vista running IE7 in a sandbox is a better design than OSX, hands down. I guess you could argue that Microsoft's implementation isn't the best, but the Mac still got hacked first.
Also, if I remember the contest right, no one was able to hack any of the OSes until the rules were changed to allow for having the computer load [potentially] malicious websites.
Not to mention that most of the boy racers I have seen who are willing to spend a bit more money on a car get themselves a Subaru. Not to say that there aren't tricked out VW's out there, but they aren't common.
That's true, but the Z6 Corvette is still unlikely to impress the Germans - it's just the way it is. Even with the trash they're willing to slap a VW badge on nowadays.
You lose speed with the smaller pixels though. Cutting it down from 10 to 5MP would double the pixel size if the rest of the physical dimensions remained the same, and would give you an extra stop worth of light gathering capability with the same amount of noise. Probably something you'll want, especially if it lacks a flash.
And MS make minimal profit from each EEE/XP. They make almost nothing on XP itself, and most people who buy an EEE won't install Office on it (too difficult to do, as EEEs have no CDROM drive).
How can they make no profit on it, unless they are literally giving away XP? It's not like it costs them anything to create a new XP license, and the development costs for XP are well behind them. Since it's an OEM license, the support issues go to Asus. They still have to patch it, but they've already committed to patching XP until 2014, so all a new XP license means is a bit more bandwidth used on Windows Update. I'm guessing they aren't making bank on XP licenses for netbooks, but I'm sure there's still money in it.
I believe that the law in some states says that if one party is openly recording the conversation, you can legally start recording the conversation too. If you're workplace has security cameras, it could be as simple as making sure the conversation is near the camera. Though I'm not sure how well this would hold up in court, so don't blame me if this somehow goes horribly wrong.
Then Apple switched to 64-bit Intel. In something as complex as an operating environment that matters more than you might think. I'm not microprocessor architecture guy, but I can look around and see how these things go.
Actually, Apple switched to 32bit Intel, then very soon after to 64bit Intel. I always thought that was a bit strange, as Apple has to now support 32bit Intel in addition to 64bit Intel, 64bit PPC, and 32bit PPC.
Opera still supports all the way back to Windows 95, which may be your only choice for a browser that's still being actively maintained. Otherwise, there is Firefox 2 which was maintained all the way to December 2008 so it's still fairly up to date. IE6 is still supported on Windows 2000 but I think 98/ME are S.O.L. as far as that goes.
Common sense would dictate that a benchmark tool for OS X would be completely useless for benchmarking IE7 which only runs on Windows, which then puts us right back at "What is iBench?"
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Most companies adjust their prices as the exchange rate fluctuates, instead of trying to pick a number and sticking with it for the long term. Of course, this is Apple and they do love their price points, so go figure.
Yes, that is the case. We literally owe more money in debt than actually exists. We simply cannot pay it all back even if we used every dollar in existance to do it. The reason for this is because the banks are allowed to create money - when you take out a loan the bank does not give you money it has on hand from depositors, it simply creates the money out of thin air (nowadays it's just modifying a few bits on a computer). It would not be such a big deal except that the banks demand more money back than they lent to you (in other words, interest), and the fact that almost the entire money supply has been created in this fashion (actual "money", tokens such as coins and bills are an insignificant part of the total amount of money out there). That's how we owe more money than actually exists, and thus to service today's debt and to keep the system running the only choice we have is run to banks to have them create us some more money, in the form of more debt for tomorrow. So yes, the system really is supported by willing dollars into existance. And as such, it's not hard to see how the money supply (and the debt) expands exponentially over time.
Even physical items like gold isn't immune to this, though the system is much more stable. If the gold lenders (banks) demand you give them back more gold than they lent to you in the first place (in other words, they charge interest), they will eventually own all the gold if there is a fixed amount available. The only way to stop this is to keep mining more gold and increasing the money supply.
You might find this (admittedly long at 47 minutes) video helpful:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9050474362583451279
The thing with the Atom though, is that you only really need to match the performance of hardware from a few years ago to make most people happy. People right now are fairly satisfied with single core P4's in the 2.4-3.0Ghz range for what they want to do. If the Atom can match that level of performance, then I can see it being a big hit. Of course, a lot of people may be swayed by the "for a few dollars more" argument and go with something like a Celeron, but at these price levels you may be talking $200 vs. $250, so it can end up being a big difference in price.
Though you're right, the Atom 330 is more like a dual P3 1Ghz more than anything more modern like a Core 2 processor, but the level of performance is not that far behind where it needs to be.
Most of it has to do with timing. USB is a shared bus, so you can't guarentee the timing depending on how the time slices get alotted. That means sending a command can take 15ms once time and 50ms the next time, which can be pretty annoying if timing is critical (though if it's really critical I suggest using GPIB and not RS-232, at least as instrumentation goes). Another problem is that USB devices can't initiate a transfer (unlike RS-232), which means that the host (PC) has to periodically poll the adaptor to see if something is trying to talk to it, which once again messes with the timing. Plus, some just seem to drop data - the worst of the ones I played around with seem to be about 0.2-0.3% of the time, so it's intermittent enough to be annoying but not perioditic enough so that the problem is obvious. At least until I wrote a quick program where I had a serial device echo back what cammands I sent to it, and found that 20-30 times out of a thousand something happened so the PC didn't get back what I sent (with no errors reported back by the OS, which made trapping this somewhat tricky). Running the same program using the onboard serial resulted in a 100% success rate.
Then some devices, for reasons I don't fully understand, simply refuse to work with the USB serial adaptors. Maybe it has to do with the timing, I'm not sure. Though I have seen the opposite a few times (the device works on a USB adaptor but not the onboard on certain PCs), so maybe some devices just suck too.
Why do you think they are a fad? They obviously aren't going to be much use for what you do, but the vast majority of people can do what they want to do with with fairly low powered hardware. For them, a cheap Atom-based computer may be hard to pass up. The Atom 330 is a dual core 1.6Ghz processor with Hyperthreading. That's a fairly respectable amount of power for a computer used for browsing the internet, viewing photos, and managing a music collection. You can buy an Atom 330 CPU/board combo for $80 by the way.
Even so, Intel just released a 3.5Ghz Core 2 Duo chip. So while the Prescott P4 still holds the record for fastest clocked x86 CPU at 3.8Ghz, it will probably be eclipsed by something in about a year or so. We'll probably have 4Ghz in a couple of years, potentially sooner if Intel starts to feel threatened by AMD again.
It's not so much the price of fuel itself, but all the extra surcharges and prices increases that came about because of the high fuel prices. The price of gas has come down, but my grocery bills are still as high as ever, the shipping rates for packages haven't come down, and the airlines are still tacking all kinds of surcharges and fees onto tickets.
Besides, the last time oil was $40 a barrel, gasoline was was more like $1.50 per gallon, so that's something you might want to consider.
We might be at that point for RS-232 and laptops. I haven't seen a new laptop with a serial port for a while now, which is a bummer because those USB-Serial adaptors suck.
If it's anything like mine, you can customize how they work with the included utility. I have my Trackpoint set up as the mouse, and the touchpad as kind of a 2D scrollwheel of sorts, which works well as you don't have to worry about how imprecise touchpads are when you're just using them to scroll around.
It's not so bad if you can find one with a 1920x1200 resolution screen. You'd have to move to 24" screen on a desktop to get the same resolution. Though admittedly, the 1280x800 15" screens on many cheap laptops are pretty much crap.
He just said 3.2Ghz, but not anything else. It's probably a Pentium D, that would be about right for 2 years ago, and the 3.2Ghz version was very popular.
Maybe he's refering to the pop up advertisements and banners that pop up over the show, and how they now squish the credits down to a corner of the screen to show even more ads? Plus the animated, opaque, full color water marks? I could very well believe that some channels have some kind of ad or branding on the screen more time than not nowadays.
It's the introduction of eBooks that have finally made the mass-pirating of books possible, as they can be easily copied and transmitted across the planet. Before eBooks, it was simply cheaper and easier to buy the real physical book than it try to copy it.
No, the closest equilivent analogy would be for me to steal the novelist's completed manuscript then publish it as my novel. Copyright infringement is something else.
Actually, Vista running IE7 in a sandbox is a better design than OSX, hands down. I guess you could argue that Microsoft's implementation isn't the best, but the Mac still got hacked first.
Also, if I remember the contest right, no one was able to hack any of the OSes until the rules were changed to allow for having the computer load [potentially] malicious websites.
Not to mention that most of the boy racers I have seen who are willing to spend a bit more money on a car get themselves a Subaru. Not to say that there aren't tricked out VW's out there, but they aren't common.
That's true, but the Z6 Corvette is still unlikely to impress the Germans - it's just the way it is. Even with the trash they're willing to slap a VW badge on nowadays.
You lose speed with the smaller pixels though. Cutting it down from 10 to 5MP would double the pixel size if the rest of the physical dimensions remained the same, and would give you an extra stop worth of light gathering capability with the same amount of noise. Probably something you'll want, especially if it lacks a flash.
How can they make no profit on it, unless they are literally giving away XP? It's not like it costs them anything to create a new XP license, and the development costs for XP are well behind them. Since it's an OEM license, the support issues go to Asus. They still have to patch it, but they've already committed to patching XP until 2014, so all a new XP license means is a bit more bandwidth used on Windows Update. I'm guessing they aren't making bank on XP licenses for netbooks, but I'm sure there's still money in it.
You're telling me that most people don't know about Wordpad? I mean, it's right there in the Start Menu.
I believe that the law in some states says that if one party is openly recording the conversation, you can legally start recording the conversation too. If you're workplace has security cameras, it could be as simple as making sure the conversation is near the camera. Though I'm not sure how well this would hold up in court, so don't blame me if this somehow goes horribly wrong.
Actually, Apple switched to 32bit Intel, then very soon after to 64bit Intel. I always thought that was a bit strange, as Apple has to now support 32bit Intel in addition to 64bit Intel, 64bit PPC, and 32bit PPC.
Instead of Radio Shack, you could help support slashdot with this:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/travelpower/77e6/
Opera still supports all the way back to Windows 95, which may be your only choice for a browser that's still being actively maintained. Otherwise, there is Firefox 2 which was maintained all the way to December 2008 so it's still fairly up to date. IE6 is still supported on Windows 2000 but I think 98/ME are S.O.L. as far as that goes.
Common sense would dictate that a benchmark tool for OS X would be completely useless for benchmarking IE7 which only runs on Windows, which then puts us right back at "What is iBench?"