For myself, as a user of Linux & Mac OS X on PPC, I often need to compile from source simply because precompiled binaries aren't available for my chosen platform(s).
Okay, here's the deal... the reason Americans can't live without their cars is that their cities are built around the idea of the car and can't operate efficient public transport systems because of their 'shape'.
There's an interesting intersection of transport, urban theory and economics going on here. I did my graduate architectural thesis on the design of transport systems and got heavily into the topic.
The structure of most major European cities was built before and during the 19th century, a period when the options were to walk to work, take slow (relative to today) horse-drawn public transport or, toward the end of the century, cycle. This had a major effect on the shape of European cities - it lead to high density urban settlement, since most people will try to minimise the time it takes them to get to work, particularly if you're working a 12 hour day plus a half day on Saturday, which wasn't uncommon 150 years ago.
From the end of the 19th through to the first half of the 20th century, as the technology of transportation improved, we got electric trams and various forms of railway and buses with internal combustion engines. These modes of transport changed city shapes somewhat, with ribbons of suburban settlement spreading out in spokes from the early and mid-century core. Commuterland was born.
What's important to note here is that commuter flows in this setup work like river systems draining to the city centre, with walking feeding to buses and trams, then to railways - each level an increasingly heavy capital cost, but since the volumes of traffic rise, they're still economic to put into service and maintain. Everyone's moving along the same routes from one easily defined location to another to planning mass transport is relatively simple.
Let's contrast this with the younger cities of the US, which have mostly flourished since the 1920s and in a period when low-cost personal transport has become available in the form of the automobile.
With a car, you aren't limited to moving along the routes defined by public transport systems. You can go from anywhere, to anywhere, at any time you choose. That's why the automobile has been so spectacularly successful in the 20th century. Using a car, you can live in one suburb and work in another making a daily journey which would be very awkward with a European-model public transport system. You'd have to go into the city centre and back out again.
Automobiles induce people's journeys patterns to flatten and begin to lose their geographical structure. Over time, this has an effect in the very structure of a city - shops and places of work can be almost randomly located miles away from homes and all three can intermingle and recombine in many permutations. The American romance with the block/grid system of urban planning embodies the neutral network of the car perfectly in contrast with European organic urban planning based on patterns of historic use, travel and topographical incident.
When a city is structured so that any given node practically has the same importance as any other, providing a public transport service to meet what is now nearly a random walk becomes impossible from an economic point of view. You'd have to run lots of very small buses criss-crossing the city at close intervals - the bus turns into a taxi service. Traffic congestion makes bus timetables a point of humour anyway.Railways are redundant since not enough people are making journeys along their high maintenance-cost fixed routes.
So, with the rise of American cities coinciding with the rise of the internal combustion engine, public transport had much less opportunity to help build the American city and make itself useful to citizens. The car has shoe-horned out any competition by shaping the city to its own patterns.
Of course, the car brings its own issues: it's a fiendishly inefficient use of finite energy resources (still mostly derived from carbon-rich fossil fuels or nuclear fission, even if the car is powered by electricity). Big retail parks (owned by national and international chains) have persuaded you that you should be spending your own money distributing goods you have purchased instead of having them delivered to a local shop, which has gone out of business. If you live in a modern suburb it's possible that a shop that's in walking distance never existed. People without access to personal mechanised transport find it increasingly difficult to perform their daily tasks. You have to devote a chunk of your income going to the gym regularly to make up for the exercise you're missing by not walking or cycling...
Anyhow, that's how I see "Why are most AMERICANS so hung up on their cars?"
I think he was referring to the English Electric Lightning, which was in service with the RAF from 1960 to 1988, not the WWII-vintage P-38.
The Imperial War Museum site (Duxford is well worth a visit, if only to see a TSR-2) quotes the Lightning with a climb rate of 50,000 feet per minute.
http://www.iwm.org.uk/duxford/brit17.htm
As for whether that's as fast as an F-16, I guess that's down to which variant of F-16 you're comparing it with. aerospaceweb.org claim the F-16C/D with 50,000 ft/min also.
Your comment that nobody plugs their guitar straight into a mixer is spot on. Electro-acoustics in a live situation are the only guitars that I can think of that regularly go straight into the desk.
However, for bass players using DI standard fare.
I can't think of an occasion recently when an venue engineer has preferred to mike my amp rather than use a DI box. I've had problems in the past persuading some engineers to mike up my amplifier when I was experimenting with bass feedback (take a vintage Hofner Verithin bass, hit an open 'D' at high volume and enjoy the results:-).
Anyhow, I can see that a lot of bassists might find this rather more interesting than guitarists would. Given that Gibson haven't been known for their ground-breaking bass designs (The only SG bass I've ever played was a nasty piece of work, so maybe I'm biased) perhaps this is where they're really targeting this development?
Country Total Deaths % of prewar Military Civilian
population
USSR 20,600,000 10.4% 13,600,000 7,000,000
USA 500,000 0.4% 500,000
I'm no fan of Uncle Joe, but I'd suggest that the battle of Stalingrad was a more important turning point than D-day in the war against fascism. Moreover, if the Germans hadn't been distracted by their preparations for operation Barbarossa, it's quite likely that the UK would have been successfully invaded and the US would not have had a platform to launch a successful attack on mainland Europe. We can play all sorts of 'what if' games after that...
I'm not going to deny that American industrial muscle was significant in the outcome, but don't think that 'Band of Brothers' represents the whole picture.
Thanks for the URL. The BBC *did* actually report this on the breakfast news on Radio 4 this morning, but I was half-asleep at the time and assumed that I'd imagined the story in some crazy Kafka-esqe dream, especially after a search for 'torture' at a few of my regular news haunts (including the BBC web site) turned up nothing anywhere close.
Combine this with something like the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act in the UK and it's time to be very, very scared.
FWIW, I was on a course here in the UK last year with a guy who works for Deutsche Bank (who had something like 35 floors at the WTC) and we were discussing backup strategies.
Apparently, their offices in NYC get backed up over wire daily to both London and Berlin, and the London and Berlin offices do likewise to each other and NYC.
Banks like DB take their data really seriously, and make sure that short of simultaneous nuclear attack on all three cities, they can still retain their trading data - and I wouldn't mind betting they've got a contingency plan for that eventuality. I imagine this would go some way to explain how lots of these firms got back up and running so quickly.
Actually, this used to be the case back in pre-System-7 Days. You could walk into any AppleCentre with a bunch of floppy disks (about 4 usually) and ask for a copy of the Operating System - they would often charge you for their time copying the disks, I think it was about £10, but the OS itself was free of charge. I did it myself when upgrading my MacPlus (1MB RAM with a 10MB Rodime hard disk and I managed to 3D model a conference centre in Paris for final year Architecture project on it... those were the days:-)
You can still download older versions of the Mac OS up to 7.5.5 for free at Apple's FTP sites. Granted, however, that they won't work on anything built after 1997.
This is going rather offtopic, but it's true, they did used to have TV Detector vans and I was assured it has a basis in fact.
Having said that, they were mostly used for propoganda (FUD) value as it's a lot simpler to work out who hasn't got a TV licence by street address and target those households without one - as recent Licencing ad campaigns in the UK have highlighted. I'm not sure if they're still using them.
FWIW, I don't mind paying the TV Licence as it's used to support the BBC TV - which gives us Brits an oasis away from advertising and cross-subsidises BBC radio, which you don't need a licence for. Watching the any prime time TV show in the US is a painful experience.
You end up paying for your TV through the extra costs incurred by advertisers even if there's no licence fee system anyhow.
IANAMH* (TM), but I was at the Imperial War Museum's aircraft collection at Duxford a couple of weeks ago.
I was rather surprised to learn that for every German aircraft shot down by AA guns during the Battle of Britain, 18,000 shells were fired from the ground.
Apple recommend 128MB of RAM, though X will boot with less. Of course, as with any *nix, the more RAM you have, the happier it is...
The slowest machines officially supported are the 233 MHz Bondi iMac and 233 MHz beige G3. Some people have got it running on considerably slower hardware.
Hmmm... so I must be imagining the fact that I've not been forced to reboot either my G4 desktop or my G3 PowerBook since installing OS X on March 25th?
I have to say my Linux box is just as stable when it's not booted into NT:-)
I shall be reporting this posting to Jack Straw, the British Home Secretary.
Under the new RIP (Regulation of Investigatory Powers) Act you are duty bound to disclose the unencrypted version of this message which it is believed is being used to further a criminal activity. You may face up to two years in jail if you fail to hand over the keys...
My Seimens S25 GSM mobile phone has a built in web browser, but I prefer to use its onboard modem over an IR link with ProxiWeb on my Palm III as the Palm has a bigger screen and I get to check my mail too.
I'll guess it's measured in mm because Psion are a British company, not to make it seem smaller. Most products will be described in Metric dimensions in Europe; they weigh it in at 1150 grams, for example (approx 2.5 lb).
Fair enough about my assumptions on manufacturing costs. But I still stand by my point that the Cinema display isn't as overpriced as the original posting seemed to suggest. In fact, your information seems to indicate it's more competitively priced.
You're right about the area of an 18.1" - I copied the wrong figure from the sheet of paper where I was working the areas out of the various sizes of screen.
With a diagonal of 22" and an aspect ratio 25:16, I figure the Apple Cinema Display is 18.53" x 11.86". That comes in at 219.77 Sq In, not 200 Sq In.
Thesis One of the major costs for manufacturers in producing flat panel displays is in the 'yield': i.e. the number of produced units that you have to throw away because too many of the pixels are faulty. Most manufacturers will tolerate 2 or 3 faulty pixels on an LCD display. More than that, they're junked. This would indicate that fails would increase approximately in linear ratio with the number of pixels on screen, hence the cost of manufacture.
We'll leave out the factor of the display quality, though the reports I've read from people who've actually seen a Apple Cinema Display in the flesh is that it's very impressive. Let's also set aside other manufacturing difficulties and costs associated with producing a significantly larger flat panel display, such as physically moving it around the factory, etc.
Anyhow, we can then assume that the cost of any LCD display ought to be roughly proportional to the number of pixels it has.
Check my calcs, but.
Apple Cinema display: 1600 x 1024 = 1638400 pixels
It seems that for most large LCDs the resolution maxes out around 1280 x 1024 (Aspect ratio 5:4, not 4:3, you'd have to drop down to 1280 x 960 for that). At this resolution, you get 1310720 pixels on screen. Pixel ratio vs Cinema display = 1638400:1310720 = 1.25:1
On this basis, we'd expect the ACD to cost approx 25% more than a 5:4 aspect ratio LCD display with a max resolution of 1280 x 1024. The Cinema display is officially listed at $3999, so that makes us expect a 'standard' LCD to cost about $3200 at list price.
Data Now, if I get some competing product pricing on a random selection of large LCD displays from C|Net (All these max out at 1280 * 1024).
Eizo FlexScan L66 (18.1") Official retail: $3599 Cnet est. price: $3003 Price ratio vs ACD: 1.11:1 (ACD list:Eizo list) Price ratio vs ACD: 1.33:1 (ACD list:Street price)
Compaq's TFT8000 (18.1") Official retail: $3199 Est. price: $3245 Price ratio vs ACD: 1.25:1 (ACD list:Compaq list) Price ratio vs ACD: 1.23:1 (ACD list:Street price)
IBM T85A (18.1") Official retail: $3499.00 Cnet BM T85A: $3465 Price ratio vs ACD: 1.14:1 (ACD list:IBM list) Price ratio vs ACD: 1.15:1 (ACD list:Street price)
NEC MultiSync LCD1810 Official retail: $3599 Est. price: $3336 Price ratio vs ACD: 1.11:1 (ACD list:NEC list) Price ratio vs ACD: 1.20:1 (ACD list:Street price)
N.B. An 18.1 LCD display at 5:4 aspect ratio has an area of only 193.92 Sq In.
So, by my reckoning, using manufacturers' own retail pricing, with and Apple Cinema Display, you're getting 25% more monitor space for at worst a quarter more in price (exactly in line with my prediction) and, at best, only 11% more $$. Even when you're comparing Apple's official price with average street prices, only with the Eizo do you get more screen real estate for your money compared with the ACD, at 33% more in cost for a 25% increase in screen size.
If you stack the ACD up against the only 20.1" LCDs I could find, made by NEC, which still only max out at 1280 x 1024, it looks even better.
NEC MultiSync LCD2000 Special Edition (20.1") Est. price: $4,734 Price ratio vs ACD: 0.84:1
NEC MultiSync LCD2010 (20.1") Est. price $4649 Price ratio vs ACD: 0.86:1
N.B. these are 'street' prices, not list - I couldn't find the list cost of an NEC 20.1" panel display.
I calculate the screen area of a 20.1" LCD of 1280 x1024 proportion should be 197.35 Sq In (12.57" x 15.7"). Still smaller than the ACD.
Conclusion
The official list price of the ACD is actually 14% cheaper than street prices for the nearest LCD display in both resolution and screen acreage (remember, the ACD has a screen area of nearly 220 Sq In) while still providing 25% more pixels and 11% more screen area. To put it another way, if the Apple Display were in line with NEC street pricing, it would cost nearly $6000.
By my reckoning, it's actually remarkably cheap versus the competition and if you need that much information on screen at one time, there's nothing to touch it.
Slashdot Mirror
Why compile if you're not fixing bugs?
For myself, as a user of Linux & Mac OS X on PPC, I often need to compile from source simply because precompiled binaries aren't available for my chosen platform(s).
Okay, here's the deal... the reason Americans can't live without their cars is that their cities are built around the idea of the car and can't operate efficient public transport systems because of their 'shape'.
There's an interesting intersection of transport, urban theory and economics going on here. I did my graduate architectural thesis on the design of transport systems and got heavily into the topic.
The structure of most major European cities was built before and during the 19th century, a period when the options were to walk to work, take slow (relative to today) horse-drawn public transport or, toward the end of the century, cycle. This had a major effect on the shape of European cities - it lead to high density urban settlement, since most people will try to minimise the time it takes them to get to work, particularly if you're working a 12 hour day plus a half day on Saturday, which wasn't uncommon 150 years ago.
From the end of the 19th through to the first half of the 20th century, as the technology of transportation improved, we got electric trams and various forms of railway and buses with internal combustion engines. These modes of transport changed city shapes somewhat, with ribbons of suburban settlement spreading out in spokes from the early and mid-century core. Commuterland was born.
What's important to note here is that commuter flows in this setup work like river systems draining to the city centre, with walking feeding to buses and trams, then to railways - each level an increasingly heavy capital cost, but since the volumes of traffic rise, they're still economic to put into service and maintain. Everyone's moving along the same routes from one easily defined location to another to planning mass transport is relatively simple.
Let's contrast this with the younger cities of the US, which have mostly flourished since the 1920s and in a period when low-cost personal transport has become available in the form of the automobile.
With a car, you aren't limited to moving along the routes defined by public transport systems. You can go from anywhere, to anywhere, at any time you choose. That's why the automobile has been so spectacularly successful in the 20th century. Using a car, you can live in one suburb and work in another making a daily journey which would be very awkward with a European-model public transport system. You'd have to go into the city centre and back out again.
Automobiles induce people's journeys patterns to flatten and begin to lose their geographical structure. Over time, this has an effect in the very structure of a city - shops and places of work can be almost randomly located miles away from homes and all three can intermingle and recombine in many permutations. The American romance with the block/grid system of urban planning embodies the neutral network of the car perfectly in contrast with European organic urban planning based on patterns of historic use, travel and topographical incident.
When a city is structured so that any given node practically has the same importance as any other, providing a public transport service to meet what is now nearly a random walk becomes impossible from an economic point of view. You'd have to run lots of very small buses criss-crossing the city at close intervals - the bus turns into a taxi service. Traffic congestion makes bus timetables a point of humour anyway.Railways are redundant since not enough people are making journeys along their high maintenance-cost fixed routes.
So, with the rise of American cities coinciding with the rise of the internal combustion engine, public transport had much less opportunity to help build the American city and make itself useful to citizens. The car has shoe-horned out any competition by shaping the city to its own patterns.
Of course, the car brings its own issues: it's a fiendishly inefficient use of finite energy resources (still mostly derived from carbon-rich fossil fuels or nuclear fission, even if the car is powered by electricity). Big retail parks (owned by national and international chains) have persuaded you that you should be spending your own money distributing goods you have purchased instead of having them delivered to a local shop, which has gone out of business. If you live in a modern suburb it's possible that a shop that's in walking distance never existed. People without access to personal mechanised transport find it increasingly difficult to perform their daily tasks. You have to devote a chunk of your income going to the gym regularly to make up for the exercise you're missing by not walking or cycling...
Anyhow, that's how I see "Why are most AMERICANS so hung up on their cars?"
I think someone really ought to tell the Chinese before they try something foolish...
d _4 80000/480710.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsi
I think he was referring to the English Electric Lightning, which was in service with the RAF from 1960 to 1988, not the WWII-vintage P-38.
6 /i ndex.shtml
The Imperial War Museum site (Duxford is well worth a visit, if only to see a TSR-2) quotes the Lightning with a climb rate of 50,000 feet per minute.
http://www.iwm.org.uk/duxford/brit17.htm
As for whether that's as fast as an F-16, I guess that's down to which variant of F-16 you're comparing it with. aerospaceweb.org claim the F-16C/D with 50,000 ft/min also.
http://www.aerospaceweb.org/aircraft/fighter/f1
Your comment that nobody plugs their guitar straight into a mixer is spot on. Electro-acoustics in a live situation are the only guitars that I can think of that regularly go straight into the desk.
However, for bass players using DI standard fare.
I can't think of an occasion recently when an venue engineer has preferred to mike my amp rather than use a DI box. I've had problems in the past persuading some engineers to mike up my amplifier when I was experimenting with bass feedback (take a vintage Hofner Verithin bass, hit an open 'D' at high volume and enjoy the results:-).
Anyhow, I can see that a lot of bassists might find this rather more interesting than guitarists would. Given that Gibson haven't been known for their ground-breaking bass designs (The only SG bass I've ever played was a nasty piece of work, so maybe I'm biased) perhaps this is where they're really targeting this development?
I'm getting really bored with constant assertions that the USA saved Europe from Hitler.
/ statistics.htm>
Check these stats before you think that the USA alone was responsible for winning World War II.
<http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/timeline
Country Total Deaths % of prewar Military Civilian
population
USSR 20,600,000 10.4% 13,600,000 7,000,000
USA 500,000 0.4% 500,000
I'm no fan of Uncle Joe, but I'd suggest that the battle of Stalingrad was a more important turning point than D-day in the war against fascism. Moreover, if the Germans hadn't been distracted by their preparations for operation Barbarossa, it's quite likely that the UK would have been successfully invaded and the US would not have had a platform to launch a successful attack on mainland Europe. We can play all sorts of 'what if' games after that...
I'm not going to deny that American industrial muscle was significant in the outcome, but don't think that 'Band of Brothers' represents the whole picture.
Thanks for the URL. The BBC *did* actually report this on the breakfast news on Radio 4 this morning, but I was half-asleep at the time and assumed that I'd imagined the story in some crazy Kafka-esqe dream, especially after a search for 'torture' at a few of my regular news haunts (including the BBC web site) turned up nothing anywhere close.
Combine this with something like the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act in the UK and it's time to be very, very scared.
FWIW, I was on a course here in the UK last year with a guy who works for Deutsche Bank (who had something like 35 floors at the WTC) and we were discussing backup strategies.
Apparently, their offices in NYC get backed up over wire daily to both London and Berlin, and the London and Berlin offices do likewise to each other and NYC.
Banks like DB take their data really seriously, and make sure that short of simultaneous nuclear attack on all three cities, they can still retain their trading data - and I wouldn't mind betting they've got a contingency plan for that eventuality. I imagine this would go some way to explain how lots of these firms got back up and running so quickly.
Actually, this used to be the case back in pre-System-7 Days. You could walk into any AppleCentre with a bunch of floppy disks (about 4 usually) and ask for a copy of the Operating System - they would often charge you for their time copying the disks, I think it was about £10, but the OS itself was free of charge. I did it myself when upgrading my MacPlus (1MB RAM with a 10MB Rodime hard disk and I managed to 3D model a conference centre in Paris for final year Architecture project on it... those were the days :-)
You can still download older versions of the Mac OS up to 7.5.5 for free at Apple's FTP sites. Granted, however, that they won't work on anything built after 1997.
This is going rather offtopic, but it's true, they did used to have TV Detector vans and I was assured it has a basis in fact.
Having said that, they were mostly used for propoganda (FUD) value as it's a lot simpler to work out who hasn't got a TV licence by street address and target those households without one - as recent Licencing ad campaigns in the UK have highlighted. I'm not sure if they're still using them.
FWIW, I don't mind paying the TV Licence as it's used to support the BBC TV - which gives us Brits an oasis away from advertising and cross-subsidises BBC radio, which you don't need a licence for. Watching the any prime time TV show in the US is a painful experience.
You end up paying for your TV through the extra costs incurred by advertisers even if there's no licence fee system anyhow.
IANAMH* (TM), but I was at the Imperial War Museum's aircraft collection at Duxford a couple of weeks ago.
I was rather surprised to learn that for every German aircraft shot down by AA guns during the Battle of Britain, 18,000 shells were fired from the ground.
Sounds like a pretty low hit rate to me...
* I Am Not A Military Historian
I think not.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/requirements/
Apple recommend 128MB of RAM, though X will boot with less. Of course, as with any *nix, the more RAM you have, the happier it is...
The slowest machines officially supported are the 233 MHz Bondi iMac and 233 MHz beige G3. Some people have got it running on considerably slower hardware.
FWIW, my 500MHz G4 boots OS X in about a minute.
Liberal != Socialist;
Socialist != Communist;
Communist != Marxist;
Marxist != Stalinist
# At least not in Europe
Too bad that Capital bought out XFM... :-(
Hmmm... so I must be imagining the fact that I've not been forced to reboot either my G4 desktop or my G3 PowerBook since installing OS X on March 25th?
:-)
I have to say my Linux box is just as stable when it's not booted into NT
I shall be reporting this posting to Jack Straw, the British Home Secretary.
Under the new RIP (Regulation of Investigatory Powers) Act you are duty bound to disclose the unencrypted version of this message which it is believed is being used to further a criminal activity. You may face up to two years in jail if you fail to hand over the keys...
:-)
My Seimens S25 GSM mobile phone has a built in web browser, but I prefer to use its onboard modem over an IR link with ProxiWeb on my Palm III as the Palm has a bigger screen and I get to check my mail too.
:-)
Sometimes I really like living in Europe...
Hmmn... I wonder. Did the B-52s end up paying royalties to Tandy over 'Love Shack'? :-)
I'll guess it's measured in mm because Psion are a British company, not to make it seem smaller. Most products will be described in Metric dimensions in Europe; they weigh it in at 1150 grams, for example (approx 2.5 lb).
Imagine a computer with only usb and firewire connections...
:-)
Umm... kinda sounds like a G3 or G4 PowerMac.
Fair enough about my assumptions on manufacturing costs. But I still stand by my point that the Cinema display isn't as overpriced as the original posting seemed to suggest. In fact, your information seems to indicate it's more competitively priced.
You're right about the area of an 18.1" - I copied the wrong figure from the sheet of paper where I was working the areas out of the various sizes of screen.
Cheerz,
Rob
Hi,
You got me thinking...
With a diagonal of 22" and an aspect ratio 25:16, I figure the Apple Cinema Display is 18.53" x 11.86". That comes in at 219.77 Sq In, not 200 Sq In.
Thesis
One of the major costs for manufacturers in producing flat panel displays is in the 'yield': i.e. the number of produced units that you have to throw away because too many of the pixels are faulty. Most manufacturers will tolerate 2 or 3 faulty pixels on an LCD display. More than that, they're junked. This would indicate that fails would increase approximately in linear ratio with the number of pixels on screen, hence the cost of manufacture.
We'll leave out the factor of the display quality, though the reports I've read from people who've actually seen a Apple Cinema Display in the flesh is that it's very impressive. Let's also set aside other manufacturing difficulties and costs associated with producing a significantly larger flat panel display, such as physically moving it around the factory, etc.
Anyhow, we can then assume that the cost of any LCD display ought to be roughly proportional to the number of pixels it has.
Check my calcs, but.
Apple Cinema display: 1600 x 1024 = 1638400 pixels
It seems that for most large LCDs the resolution maxes out around 1280 x 1024 (Aspect ratio 5:4, not 4:3, you'd have to drop down to 1280 x 960 for that). At this resolution, you get 1310720 pixels on screen. Pixel ratio vs Cinema display = 1638400:1310720 = 1.25:1
On this basis, we'd expect the ACD to cost approx 25% more than a 5:4 aspect ratio LCD display with a max resolution of 1280 x 1024. The Cinema display is officially listed at $3999, so that makes us expect a 'standard' LCD to cost about $3200 at list price.
Data
Now, if I get some competing product pricing on a random selection of large LCD displays from C|Net (All these max out at 1280 * 1024).
Eizo FlexScan L66 (18.1")
Official retail: $3599
Cnet est. price: $3003
Price ratio vs ACD: 1.11:1 (ACD list:Eizo list)
Price ratio vs ACD: 1.33:1 (ACD list:Street price)
Compaq's TFT8000 (18.1")
Official retail: $3199
Est. price: $3245
Price ratio vs ACD: 1.25:1 (ACD list:Compaq list)
Price ratio vs ACD: 1.23:1 (ACD list:Street price)
IBM T85A (18.1")
Official retail: $3499.00
Cnet BM T85A: $3465
Price ratio vs ACD: 1.14:1 (ACD list:IBM list)
Price ratio vs ACD: 1.15:1 (ACD list:Street price)
NEC MultiSync LCD1810
Official retail: $3599
Est. price: $3336
Price ratio vs ACD: 1.11:1 (ACD list:NEC list)
Price ratio vs ACD: 1.20:1 (ACD list:Street price)
N.B. An 18.1 LCD display at 5:4 aspect ratio has an area of only 193.92 Sq In.
So, by my reckoning, using manufacturers' own retail pricing, with and Apple Cinema Display, you're getting 25% more monitor space for at worst a quarter more in price (exactly in line with my prediction) and, at best, only 11% more $$. Even when you're comparing Apple's official price with average street prices, only with the Eizo do you get more screen real estate for your money compared with the ACD, at 33% more in cost for a 25% increase in screen size.
If you stack the ACD up against the only 20.1" LCDs I could find, made by NEC, which still only max out at 1280 x 1024, it looks even better.
NEC MultiSync LCD2000 Special Edition (20.1")
Est. price: $4,734
Price ratio vs ACD: 0.84:1
NEC MultiSync LCD2010 (20.1")
Est. price $4649
Price ratio vs ACD: 0.86:1
N.B. these are 'street' prices, not list - I couldn't find the list cost of an NEC 20.1" panel display.
I calculate the screen area of a 20.1" LCD of 1280 x1024 proportion should be 197.35 Sq In (12.57" x 15.7"). Still smaller than the ACD.
Conclusion
The official list price of the ACD is actually 14% cheaper than street prices for the nearest LCD display in both resolution and screen acreage (remember, the ACD has a screen area of nearly 220 Sq In) while still providing 25% more pixels and 11% more screen area. To put it another way, if the Apple Display were in line with NEC street pricing, it would cost nearly $6000.
By my reckoning, it's actually remarkably cheap versus the competition and if you need that much information on screen at one time, there's nothing to touch it.
Cheerz,
Rob