One of the nice things about Wikipedia is that users can edit the entries. That will make it especially useful on concepts that are still evolving, such as Operating System.
Why people don't buy Macs: $$$
Yes I know that a "similarly" equipped Dell will cost you pretty close to the same as a Mac, but people don't buy the similarly equipped Dell either. They buy the $300 Dell. With free 15" LCD and free DVD burner upgrade and free printer, etc. Even "power" users with bigger budgets do similar things. They get a computer with less features but more power (CPU/RAM/HDD) than any Mac. It's the same reason that "base" models of cars sell the most, even though salesmen will push hard for the "higher" models with all the options. The higher models here are Macs.
Why people don't buy Linux: Because nobody sells Linux.
Ok, I know that Walmart may have Linspires out there, but that is negligible. Most people are not going to buy a computer and then have to re-install all the software. Only "computer people" will do this.
Nice try, but no dice. First off the article is wrong. The guy got screwed by HBO, but he could have been aware of this possibility when he bought the media center and when he subscribed to HBO. Such awareness would have obviously decreased the value of the media center, and he should make the evaluation "is it worth it?" If he was only buying the media center to record and archive HBO shows, then clearly the answer would have been no. Caveat emptor indeed. If nobody buys these media centers, then certainly the vendors will change their feature sets or stop making them.
Now your claim that you cannot buy from another vendor in a non-commodity market is also wrong. It's only true in a real monopoly situation where this in no possible substitute effect on the good. A vendor can have a unique good (thus a mini-monopoly on that exact good) but if there are other goods that can have substitute value, then it is not a true monopoly and the consumer can ideed buy from another vendor.
In the Apple music case, this means that if the only way to buy music was from iTMS, then people would have no choice but to buy music from Apple. Thus they could also only buy an iPod if they wanted a music player that they could download music to from their computer. However, this is clearly not the case. Indeed people have an enumerable number of choices when it comes to buying music. They can buy new CDs from many differents stores or order them online. They can buy used CDs. They can also buy other digital versions, from vendors like Yahoo, Napster, and Urge. Not to mention that most digital music is downloaded over P2P networks currently. Any of these options allow people to use any portable digital music player they like, not just an iPod.
Or just use del.icio.us and its Firefox extension.
Re:Useless to all but theoraticians
on
The Art of SQL
·
· Score: 1
SQL is implemented differently in all of the environments I have encountered
You confuse syntax vs. execution. Your statement is equivalent to saying that since C++ and PHP have different syntaxes, there is no point in studying algorithms or design patterns. Would you agree with this statement as well?
All relational databases rely on predicate calculus at the end of the day. Understanding how relations work is fundamental to understanding what happens when you write something like "select A.x, B.y from A.B where A.z=B.z" Similarly understanding things like b-trees and hashing functions will aid you in both schema design and query optimization. Understanding the theory helps you make the right kind of design. Your design may be implemented differently on different DBs, but simply having knoweldge of a particular DBs syntax will not help you make the right design choices.
As a corporation I trust google much more then I trust ebay/paypal or MS or even Visa for that matter.
What a typical/. comment. Of course you trust Google more, because you've been told to do just that. And of course you don't trust Microsoft. You should think twice about this though.
Microsoft wants you to buy their software and they try to give you little choice in this. That can be annoying, but at least it's straightforward and obvious.
Google on the other hand doesn't want your money. But they want to know everything about you so they can market to you better and get advertisers' money.
So when you see speculation about a Google service that would be similar to PayPal, you better think twice about the idea here. Sure PayPal makes money, and maybe you think Google just wants a piece of that pie. That would be harmless enough, compettition is always good.
But not so fast! Think about the bigger picture. Right now you have transactions that start with Google, i.e. they start with a consumer clicking on an targeted ad. Now the same transaction can end with Google, by having that consumer pay for the advertised product using a Google payment system. Suddenly Google has knowledge of which ads not only lead to clicks, but lead to purchases. But it gets even better. Because they are able to identify you when you make the purchase, they can tie all the information they have on you to both the click-through and the purchase. Right now they can charge more for selling ad words that are more likely to generate searches, but imagine if they could charge more for advertising to people who are more likely to click-through and make purchases. They're not just selling the words anymore, they're selling you!
Of course the people at Google are very smart. So smart that they're actual plan for how to use this data could be far more sinister than what I've come up with in five minutes. The point is that this service would yield them even more valuable data about internet users and that their business model is all about using data about users to make money off advertising.
Serious runners don't wear Nikes anyways. Their main audience are people who want to wear "running" shoes with their jeans, not people running 20+ miles per week.
Yeah but now the other houses can't prank Fleming by messing with the cannon. So it really does affect everybody. I know that was always a popular target when I was there (Page House '97.)
No, what made the Gamecube's controller awesome was its ergonomics. The controller just fit better in your hand. The different sized buttons were also great. It's great having the over-sized A button since that's what you press the most, at least in most games. I remember picking up the Gamecube's controller for the first time, and then picking up the Xbox's controller. It was like comparing a modern cell phone with one from the early 90's.
Technology catching up with ideas? Oh please. There's no revolutionary technology out there. You think Google is somehow enabling a micropayment system and calling that a technological breakthrough? First of all, there have been micropayment systems going on for years, just look at iTunes (which makes very little profit, but helps the sale of iPods) or any of its many clones. Even if that wasn't the case, this would hardly be a technological breakthrough. The barriers for this have always been around transaction fees from banks on credit cards. There's nothing technological about that. As for premium content... there's still nobody out there buying it. The content that is "premium" is free peer content like blogs. Online advertising most certainly does work, just ask Yahoo. As for investment in social websites... Not sure what you're talking about there. The big social site out there is MySpace. It was bought last year, there's no VC money going into it.
Does anyone know if discs using ICT will play through DVI? I've always heard it as "maybe." The article on Sony only talks about how analog will be allowed, since it is of little concern in the piracy arena. DVI is digital, not analog. Of course if analog works, then you can just use that, but it would be nice to know if my DVI equipped (but not HDMI equipped) TV will work with ICT.
Not your personal views. Elections are about voting according to what is best for America, not what is best for just you personally.
I could not disagree more with your statement. You know who would agree with such a statement? People like Hitler, Stalin, etc. For you to vote for "what is best for America" means that you actually know what is best for America! What a terribly arrogant and equally flawed idea! As soon as you start thinking that you know what's best for everybody, that's when you stop caring about democracy and freedom. After all, democracy and freedom can easily get in the way of doing what is best for America. It's going to be frustrating when other people are voting for selfish reason instead of voting for what's best for America. What can you do except take away their votes, silence their dissent, or maybe even throw them in jail. All in the name of what's best for America...
Also, if you knew anything at all then you would know that liberal vs. conservative is a marketing gimmick. You could say that most of the Democrats' platform aligns with what is known as progressivism. The Republicans platform is a mix of classical liberalism (that's right) and religious fundamentalism. The current administration has concentrated much more and latter part of that, which is why there are soaring deficits and a lot of dissension among the ex-Reaganites that helped elect Bush.
This is a good point. Concurrent development of a framework and apps that run on that framework is extremely difficult and can cause a lot of internal frustrations.
I switched too. I replaced my first gen G5 PowerMac with a dual core Athlon64 running XP Pro. I still have my old G3 iBook, but rarely use it anymore and instead use a Centrino based Dell as my primary notebook.
Competition in the economic sense and as the justification of and reason for the efficiency of a capitalistic free market economy is narrow competition with quality and price, driving efficiency of resource allocation.
Ahh, yet another person to try and apply macroeconomic principles to microeconomic entities. Individual entities (compettitors) have no knowledge and have no obligation to overall macroeconomic trends. The compettitors only obligation is to their own best interest, i.e. to "beat their opponent." Intel's only obligation is to beat AMD. The overall efficiency of the market is not Intel's concern.
That being said, the aggregation of individual actors, all pursuing their own best interest, will generally lead to greater (approaching optimum) macroeconomic benefit. That's the beauty of the free market. Each person involved doesn't have to worry about the overall economy. Instead they just do whatever is best for them.
Don't worry, a lot of people smarter than you have made the same mistake you made. Hence all the anti-trust legislation that has been passed over the years, not to mention all the government regulations of business that are justified by the aforementioned anti-trust laws. Go take a look at your phone bill or cell phone bill one day to see the net result of people trying to force individual companies to act in the "best interest" of the economy.
Re:If you replace enough files...
on
OSx86 Cracked Again
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Apple may never release a standalone copy of Mac OS X (Intel) that you can actually buy without purchasing a machine.
Umm, you're talking about Apple here. They release a new version of their OS every ~18 months. They always make a big production about it, praising its new features, better performance, etc. so that all the Mac users will go out and shell out $120+ for the new OS. They've been doing this for years. If they stopped selling retail versions of their new OS, it would be a huge loss of revenue.
Competition is making a better product or doing it for a cheaper price. Anti-competition is forcing people to use your product by artificially limiting another product that people want to only work with yours.
I undersand your sentiment, but you're completely wrong. Competition implies that you are competing with one or more compettitors. The goal of compettition is to beat the other compettitors. One way to do that might be to make a better product or a cheaper product, but there's nothing inherent to compettition that says "you must do it this way." No, the only thing inherent is that you are trying to beat your compettitors. It's up to you to decide on how to do that.
Now it may be that the activity that you are competing in has rules and this would place restrictions on what you do to beat your compettition. The only real rules of business are those created by the government. One might say that if you break those rules, then you are being anti-compettitive, but really you are just being criminal. So the question becomes, is Skype/Intel breaking the law? If not, then Intel is simply being compettitive. They are simply trying to beat AMD. They are not limited to beating them by simply producing better/cheaper processors. They owe it to their shareholders to pursue any legal means of gaining a competitive edge over AMD.
You know this same thought crossed my mind too. However, on one hand Oracle has an app server and Oracle has a EJB3-compliant O/R technology. I'm not really sure how well their app server compares to JBoss, but Toplink certainly compares pretty well to Hibernate. Hibernate does have more mindshare than JBoss, but if you compared all the technologies in Oracle's middleware suite to JBoss equivalents, it seems like the one place where Oracle would stand up best is Toplink vs. Hibernate. Maybe what would be more valuable to them would be having the Hibernate guys, particularly Gavin King, as part of Oracle. That would give them a lot more influence on the future of EJB persistence and even JDBC.
Oracle will not practically own EJB3 persistence however. Don't forget about Kodo, a recent acquisition of BEA. They've had the best JDO implementation and now have an EJB3 implementation based on it.
You can flag items just as you suggest. Some of the options are "miscategorized", "spam", "prohibited", and "best of." If enough people do it, then it gets removed.
Eh, maybe. But I don't think so. As many have pointed out, Google increased their font size on the AdWord listings just after Christmas. This was considered a good way to increase AdWord related revenue, but its timing was curious. At the time, it was widely speculated that it was done because their revenues were lagging Wall Street projections. This speculation grew even stronger when Yahoo reported lower earnings than expected. Yesterday's earnings announcements by Google certainly suggests that this was indeed the reasoning for the change. After all if they had planned to do this all along, they should have done it at the start of the holiday shopping season, not at the end. So it sure looks like they are doing anything but ignoring stock market pressures. It's just like the China debacle. More of Google's mystique is being debunked as they demonstrate that they really are just like any other company.
If your site is just intended for recreation, then I think the answer is that you should not care if IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft all start offering free databases. You have a free database that suits your needs and you (presumably) already have a good understanding of how to develop with it and administer it.
I work on a startup company on the side. Our application also uses MySQL (4.1.) Right now our database runs on a modest machine (P4 3.4 with 2 GB RAM.) We have had a few instabilities, and they seem to be MySQL related. I've considered switching either to a new version of MySQL, Postgres, or one of those free-ish commercial databases. Everything was written using O/R mapping (Hibernate) so it should be pretty easy to switch from MySQL to whatever. Obviously if our traffic took off and/or these instabilities worsened, switching to something like this free DB2 might be very attractive.
So if I want to sell my iPod, I have to remove the music/videos/etc. first? What if I'm just lazy and don't want to erase it. Why do I have to do this to sell it? What if I'm too stupid to know how to erase my iPod? I don't see an "Erase iPod" button in iTunes after all. If I put it up on eBay without erasing, when does it become illegal? If the price exceeds the retail price? If the price exceeds the average price of a similarly used iPod?
What about computers? Do I have to erase the hard drive? What about USB drives? I have a 512 MB SD card for my camera. Do I have to erase it if I want to sell it?
I could see eBay wanting to protect themselves by adding some clause about clearing content from digital storage devices being sold on eBay. They do seem to employ a lot of people to police their site, so maybe they would put pre-loaded iPods on their hit list. However, it would seem very difficult to actually convict somebody of copyright infringement for selling an iPod with a couple of thousand songs on it.
This comparison really makes me wonder about the Intel-based PowerMac replacement. What kind of processor are they going to put into that? The logical choice would seem to be the Conroe.
There are rumors of a 3.3 GHz dual-cores being sent out later this month. Intel claims that Conroe will outperform Core Duo 2-1 on a performance-per-watt basis. So a 3.3 GHz Conroe might be as much as 3.6 times as fast (pure performance, it's ok for a desktop chip to consume twice as much juice as a laptop, right?) as a Core Duo. So if you take the iMac comparisons against the current G5s and extrapolate... well a PowerMac based on a Conroe could be a mighty beast. Give it 4 GB of RAM like the PowerMac in the comparison, and it should easily outperform the PowerMac (at least on non-Altivec tasks, but that's a different story.) Of course it's still going to have the stupid front side bus, albeit running at 1.0+ GHz with 4 MB of L2 cache.
Another possibility would be for Apple to wait for the Extreme Edition of the Conroe, the Kentsfield. That would give them four cores, like the current PowerMacs. It won't be out until 2007, and Apple seems anxious to switch everything over ASAP. So they could go with Woodcrest, basically Conroe for servers. This might let them put together a dual-cpu/dual-core setup like they have with the current PowerMacs. This kind of setup was demonstrated by Intel last fall. There were also rumors last year of Apple pressuring Intel to give them Woodcrest chips ahead of schedule.
And of course there's the more mundane question of what will they call the PowerMac replacement? They seem to want to get away from the Power prefix, while stressing the Pro tie-in to their Pro apps. So maybe Mac Pro? Seems too short. Maybe bring out the whole name, Macintosh Pro. Whatever it is, can it make people as upset as "MacBook" did?
Slashdot Mirror
One of the nice things about Wikipedia is that users can edit the entries. That will make it especially useful on concepts that are still evolving, such as Operating System.
It's really much simpler...
Why people don't buy Macs: $$$
Yes I know that a "similarly" equipped Dell will cost you pretty close to the same as a Mac, but people don't buy the similarly equipped Dell either. They buy the $300 Dell. With free 15" LCD and free DVD burner upgrade and free printer, etc. Even "power" users with bigger budgets do similar things. They get a computer with less features but more power (CPU/RAM/HDD) than any Mac. It's the same reason that "base" models of cars sell the most, even though salesmen will push hard for the "higher" models with all the options. The higher models here are Macs.
Why people don't buy Linux: Because nobody sells Linux.
Ok, I know that Walmart may have Linspires out there, but that is negligible. Most people are not going to buy a computer and then have to re-install all the software. Only "computer people" will do this.
Nice try, but no dice. First off the article is wrong. The guy got screwed by HBO, but he could have been aware of this possibility when he bought the media center and when he subscribed to HBO. Such awareness would have obviously decreased the value of the media center, and he should make the evaluation "is it worth it?" If he was only buying the media center to record and archive HBO shows, then clearly the answer would have been no. Caveat emptor indeed. If nobody buys these media centers, then certainly the vendors will change their feature sets or stop making them.
Now your claim that you cannot buy from another vendor in a non-commodity market is also wrong. It's only true in a real monopoly situation where this in no possible substitute effect on the good. A vendor can have a unique good (thus a mini-monopoly on that exact good) but if there are other goods that can have substitute value, then it is not a true monopoly and the consumer can ideed buy from another vendor.
In the Apple music case, this means that if the only way to buy music was from iTMS, then people would have no choice but to buy music from Apple. Thus they could also only buy an iPod if they wanted a music player that they could download music to from their computer. However, this is clearly not the case. Indeed people have an enumerable number of choices when it comes to buying music. They can buy new CDs from many differents stores or order them online. They can buy used CDs. They can also buy other digital versions, from vendors like Yahoo, Napster, and Urge. Not to mention that most digital music is downloaded over P2P networks currently. Any of these options allow people to use any portable digital music player they like, not just an iPod.
Or just use del.icio.us and its Firefox extension.
You confuse syntax vs. execution. Your statement is equivalent to saying that since C++ and PHP have different syntaxes, there is no point in studying algorithms or design patterns. Would you agree with this statement as well?
All relational databases rely on predicate calculus at the end of the day. Understanding how relations work is fundamental to understanding what happens when you write something like "select A.x, B.y from A.B where A.z=B.z" Similarly understanding things like b-trees and hashing functions will aid you in both schema design and query optimization. Understanding the theory helps you make the right kind of design. Your design may be implemented differently on different DBs, but simply having knoweldge of a particular DBs syntax will not help you make the right design choices.
Microsoft wants you to buy their software and they try to give you little choice in this. That can be annoying, but at least it's straightforward and obvious.
Google on the other hand doesn't want your money. But they want to know everything about you so they can market to you better and get advertisers' money.
So when you see speculation about a Google service that would be similar to PayPal, you better think twice about the idea here. Sure PayPal makes money, and maybe you think Google just wants a piece of that pie. That would be harmless enough, compettition is always good.
But not so fast! Think about the bigger picture. Right now you have transactions that start with Google, i.e. they start with a consumer clicking on an targeted ad. Now the same transaction can end with Google, by having that consumer pay for the advertised product using a Google payment system. Suddenly Google has knowledge of which ads not only lead to clicks, but lead to purchases. But it gets even better. Because they are able to identify you when you make the purchase, they can tie all the information they have on you to both the click-through and the purchase. Right now they can charge more for selling ad words that are more likely to generate searches, but imagine if they could charge more for advertising to people who are more likely to click-through and make purchases. They're not just selling the words anymore, they're selling you!
Of course the people at Google are very smart. So smart that they're actual plan for how to use this data could be far more sinister than what I've come up with in five minutes. The point is that this service would yield them even more valuable data about internet users and that their business model is all about using data about users to make money off advertising.
Serious runners don't wear Nikes anyways. Their main audience are people who want to wear "running" shoes with their jeans, not people running 20+ miles per week.
Yeah but now the other houses can't prank Fleming by messing with the cannon. So it really does affect everybody. I know that was always a popular target when I was there (Page House '97.)
No, what made the Gamecube's controller awesome was its ergonomics. The controller just fit better in your hand. The different sized buttons were also great. It's great having the over-sized A button since that's what you press the most, at least in most games. I remember picking up the Gamecube's controller for the first time, and then picking up the Xbox's controller. It was like comparing a modern cell phone with one from the early 90's.
Technology catching up with ideas? Oh please. There's no revolutionary technology out there. You think Google is somehow enabling a micropayment system and calling that a technological breakthrough? First of all, there have been micropayment systems going on for years, just look at iTunes (which makes very little profit, but helps the sale of iPods) or any of its many clones. Even if that wasn't the case, this would hardly be a technological breakthrough. The barriers for this have always been around transaction fees from banks on credit cards. There's nothing technological about that. As for premium content... there's still nobody out there buying it. The content that is "premium" is free peer content like blogs. Online advertising most certainly does work, just ask Yahoo. As for investment in social websites... Not sure what you're talking about there. The big social site out there is MySpace. It was bought last year, there's no VC money going into it.
Does anyone know if discs using ICT will play through DVI? I've always heard it as "maybe." The article on Sony only talks about how analog will be allowed, since it is of little concern in the piracy arena. DVI is digital, not analog. Of course if analog works, then you can just use that, but it would be nice to know if my DVI equipped (but not HDMI equipped) TV will work with ICT.
Also, if you knew anything at all then you would know that liberal vs. conservative is a marketing gimmick. You could say that most of the Democrats' platform aligns with what is known as progressivism. The Republicans platform is a mix of classical liberalism (that's right) and religious fundamentalism. The current administration has concentrated much more and latter part of that, which is why there are soaring deficits and a lot of dissension among the ex-Reaganites that helped elect Bush.
This is a good point. Concurrent development of a framework and apps that run on that framework is extremely difficult and can cause a lot of internal frustrations.
I switched too. I replaced my first gen G5 PowerMac with a dual core Athlon64 running XP Pro. I still have my old G3 iBook, but rarely use it anymore and instead use a Centrino based Dell as my primary notebook.
That being said, the aggregation of individual actors, all pursuing their own best interest, will generally lead to greater (approaching optimum) macroeconomic benefit. That's the beauty of the free market. Each person involved doesn't have to worry about the overall economy. Instead they just do whatever is best for them.
Don't worry, a lot of people smarter than you have made the same mistake you made. Hence all the anti-trust legislation that has been passed over the years, not to mention all the government regulations of business that are justified by the aforementioned anti-trust laws. Go take a look at your phone bill or cell phone bill one day to see the net result of people trying to force individual companies to act in the "best interest" of the economy.
Now it may be that the activity that you are competing in has rules and this would place restrictions on what you do to beat your compettition. The only real rules of business are those created by the government. One might say that if you break those rules, then you are being anti-compettitive, but really you are just being criminal. So the question becomes, is Skype/Intel breaking the law? If not, then Intel is simply being compettitive. They are simply trying to beat AMD. They are not limited to beating them by simply producing better/cheaper processors. They owe it to their shareholders to pursue any legal means of gaining a competitive edge over AMD.
You know this same thought crossed my mind too. However, on one hand Oracle has an app server and Oracle has a EJB3-compliant O/R technology. I'm not really sure how well their app server compares to JBoss, but Toplink certainly compares pretty well to Hibernate. Hibernate does have more mindshare than JBoss, but if you compared all the technologies in Oracle's middleware suite to JBoss equivalents, it seems like the one place where Oracle would stand up best is Toplink vs. Hibernate. Maybe what would be more valuable to them would be having the Hibernate guys, particularly Gavin King, as part of Oracle. That would give them a lot more influence on the future of EJB persistence and even JDBC.
Oracle will not practically own EJB3 persistence however. Don't forget about Kodo, a recent acquisition of BEA. They've had the best JDO implementation and now have an EJB3 implementation based on it.
You can flag items just as you suggest. Some of the options are "miscategorized", "spam", "prohibited", and "best of." If enough people do it, then it gets removed.
Eh, maybe. But I don't think so. As many have pointed out, Google increased their font size on the AdWord listings just after Christmas. This was considered a good way to increase AdWord related revenue, but its timing was curious. At the time, it was widely speculated that it was done because their revenues were lagging Wall Street projections. This speculation grew even stronger when Yahoo reported lower earnings than expected. Yesterday's earnings announcements by Google certainly suggests that this was indeed the reasoning for the change. After all if they had planned to do this all along, they should have done it at the start of the holiday shopping season, not at the end. So it sure looks like they are doing anything but ignoring stock market pressures. It's just like the China debacle. More of Google's mystique is being debunked as they demonstrate that they really are just like any other company.
If your site is just intended for recreation, then I think the answer is that you should not care if IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft all start offering free databases. You have a free database that suits your needs and you (presumably) already have a good understanding of how to develop with it and administer it.
I work on a startup company on the side. Our application also uses MySQL (4.1.) Right now our database runs on a modest machine (P4 3.4 with 2 GB RAM.) We have had a few instabilities, and they seem to be MySQL related. I've considered switching either to a new version of MySQL, Postgres, or one of those free-ish commercial databases. Everything was written using O/R mapping (Hibernate) so it should be pretty easy to switch from MySQL to whatever. Obviously if our traffic took off and/or these instabilities worsened, switching to something like this free DB2 might be very attractive.
Opera Mini, just like Google Local for Mobile, is a J2ME app. Hopefully they'll both have a BREW version soon.
So if I want to sell my iPod, I have to remove the music/videos/etc. first? What if I'm just lazy and don't want to erase it. Why do I have to do this to sell it? What if I'm too stupid to know how to erase my iPod? I don't see an "Erase iPod" button in iTunes after all. If I put it up on eBay without erasing, when does it become illegal? If the price exceeds the retail price? If the price exceeds the average price of a similarly used iPod?
What about computers? Do I have to erase the hard drive? What about USB drives? I have a 512 MB SD card for my camera. Do I have to erase it if I want to sell it?
I could see eBay wanting to protect themselves by adding some clause about clearing content from digital storage devices being sold on eBay. They do seem to employ a lot of people to police their site, so maybe they would put pre-loaded iPods on their hit list. However, it would seem very difficult to actually convict somebody of copyright infringement for selling an iPod with a couple of thousand songs on it.
This comparison really makes me wonder about the Intel-based PowerMac replacement. What kind of processor are they going to put into that? The logical choice would seem to be the Conroe. There are rumors of a 3.3 GHz dual-cores being sent out later this month. Intel claims that Conroe will outperform Core Duo 2-1 on a performance-per-watt basis. So a 3.3 GHz Conroe might be as much as 3.6 times as fast (pure performance, it's ok for a desktop chip to consume twice as much juice as a laptop, right?) as a Core Duo. So if you take the iMac comparisons against the current G5s and extrapolate... well a PowerMac based on a Conroe could be a mighty beast. Give it 4 GB of RAM like the PowerMac in the comparison, and it should easily outperform the PowerMac (at least on non-Altivec tasks, but that's a different story.) Of course it's still going to have the stupid front side bus, albeit running at 1.0+ GHz with 4 MB of L2 cache.
Another possibility would be for Apple to wait for the Extreme Edition of the Conroe, the Kentsfield. That would give them four cores, like the current PowerMacs. It won't be out until 2007, and Apple seems anxious to switch everything over ASAP. So they could go with Woodcrest, basically Conroe for servers. This might let them put together a dual-cpu/dual-core setup like they have with the current PowerMacs. This kind of setup was demonstrated by Intel last fall. There were also rumors last year of Apple pressuring Intel to give them Woodcrest chips ahead of schedule.
And of course there's the more mundane question of what will they call the PowerMac replacement? They seem to want to get away from the Power prefix, while stressing the Pro tie-in to their Pro apps. So maybe Mac Pro? Seems too short. Maybe bring out the whole name, Macintosh Pro. Whatever it is, can it make people as upset as "MacBook" did?
In Idaho it would have to be KGGL.