Actually I didn't moderate you (which should be self-obvious since I can't moderate and post in the same article), nor actually would I have done so. I'd rather respond to each thing seperately...
Oh and on that topic:
"This knocks about $150 (average) off the price of the Intel upgrade path, because you can move to their faster P4 CPUs without having to change socket types"
Sure, but that shiny old P4E/P4EE supporting board would also need to be replaced if they wanted a Intel chip beyond this generation. It's just that Intel had a generation change recently and now will be steady again for awhile. Someone who already had a AMD system would need a new board anyways.
Also once AMD switches to 939 & 940 as the only socket types, those will stay the same for ages. Does anyone remember how long Socket A has lasted? Now Socket A did need improvements to things like the FSB on the socket A platform, but with A64 this won't happen since their is no FSB to increase just the data rate of the hypertransport connections...
"To the average consumer, this means buying a whole new PC."
The average user has been taught to upgrade their whole machine anyways. I don't know a single 'average joe' who would even try to upgrade a CPU. They just know when it's time buy a new box because they feel their machine is now to slow. Most OEM's foster this impression (Dell, HP, Emcahines, Gateway, Sony, etc): 'System to slow? Time to buy a new box!'.
"I would just buy the next fastest Intel chip"
Uh from all reports the next generation will need a new board, in traditional Intel fashion. Only one or two iterations of any chip work with a certain series of baords.
"A new Athlon 64 may be comparable to last year's P4 chips, but the newest Intel chips with larger on-chip cache are clearly out in front of anything AMD has to offer."
You listed Tom 'Intel's Bitch' Pabst's site for your info. I wouldn't listen to Tom if you paid me & if you are listening to Tom then I know why your heads so messed up. I've talked directly to Tom, so I'm not talking out my ass either. Him & Anand just need to go into a field they know something about, cause it's not PC's or PC hardware... Find soem real sources who don't go out of their way to put down AMD & I'd lsiten, but even Tech TV (of all sources! Almost as bad as Tom & Anand) has admitted the A64's are the king of the hill of CPU's.
Unfortunatly I can't give you a bunch of links right now as I just redid my whole system, but try Ace's, tech report, digitimes, CPU review, etc... They have a better understanding of what they are talking about & you see A64 win more often than not, and loose only in SSE2 (aka Intel manipulated) or heavily Intel optimized apps (mostly multimedia encoding which Intel invests the most money in).
"Currently Intel's latest 3.0+ GHz offerings are spanking Athlon 64s in benchmarks with 32 bit applications."
What a bunch of crap! That's almost as big a lie as Intel makes of AMD cpu's. I didn't even bother reading the rest when you are obviously delusional.
BTW A64 chips can be had for the same prices as their A32 counterparts in the same speed rating, Motherbaords are almost equally expensive whether A32 or A64, & outperform them by up to 30%....
Ok well now I have read the rest of your comments & I have to reply to those as well:
"they're going to go to Intel because it has more upgrade possibilities"
What possibilities? They force upgrades way more often than AMD, & are known for being the best money sink for performance users.
"is cheaper than the Athlon 64 for the same level of computing power"
Uh not really, A64 costs the same or less than Intel for comparable performance as long as you don't follow the rule of 'Mhz/Ghz equals performance'. Take a look at pricewatch or Newegg and see for yourself...
"currently performs better"
Hogwash.
"So this is more of a plea for AMD to extend the Athlon "32" line a bit further. Please AMD, don't prematurely kill off 32-bit Athlon chip development!"
Uh they are building them at least through the end of this year, & probably next to some degree. The thing is their is no real future for A32, performance has been decreasing performance-wise in comparison & wasn't keeping up. AMD realized their best bet was to focus on A64 with it's integrated memory controller & higher IPC than A32 has. A64 is a real contender where as A32 wasn't keeping up & they knew it.
All I ever see is el cheapo not worth the silicon & metal their made from Dell's. I don't see how you think Dell is better than Micron was back then, from my view of fixing their 'consumer grade' machines they are equally bad, with only the specialty PC companies making a good reliable product...
Uh well at my store they need to take some of their damn GBA's back, cause we have way to many... It's like a plague of GBA's that never sell... We've sold like 2 GBA's in the last month. But we still get more of them in.
As for the gamecube, well we have been out of gamecubes for quite some time, but no one has even bothered to ask about them. If people want a new system where I work they come in asking for a PS2 or xbox. Heck the last person I sold a gamecube to came in to buy a PSone, but I talked them into the gamecube instead...
I just don't see this increased demand & frankly I don't believe it exists...
Strangely I used to be a big McGyver fan when I was a kid, but since I'm not used to seeing him as Jack O'Neal in SG1 for so long now I actually had trouble seeing him as McGyver in some reruns on Spike TV (I think) they've played recently....
Re:AMD have been better than Intel for some time..
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AMD Back in the Black
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Maybe it's just because I see so many systems that just don't work in my job, but I wouldn't pay more for Intel... They don't "Just work" anymore than Athlon's do...
Re:AMD have been better than Intel for some time..
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AMD Back in the Black
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You mean burst into flames like this?: http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/proces sorsmemo ry/0,39024015,39145079-2,00.htm
Even back then I had my 1.33 Ghz Athlon (first gen socket A, which is when this load of crap started) cpu fan die and it ran on just the heatsink for quite awhile before I noticed... In fact if games hadn't kept locking up after a short time I would probably never have noticed...
Well let me reply to these as I sell gameconsoles as part of my crappy job that I have since I can't find a networking job that requires less than 5 years of experience:
1) In fact people do care about having a hard drive. Most often they care once they hear this eliminates repeated costs fo memory cards. I can get ~75% of people looking at a GC or PS2 to look at the Xbox just because of this. Maybe it's just that peopel where I live are cheap, but recurring costs are something consumers hate and memory cards are recurring costs on all other modern consoles (& most past consoles).
Unless you can point out something that refutes my last two years of personnal experience of selling them, then I'm going to say that your just full of it with this one.
2) Uh how about: Emulation! You know the kind PC users have used for ages to emulate console system hardware? Since MS has already obstructed msot of the hardware layer on the original xbox I don't see this being an issue at all. Sony as much as I dislike them has set the standard and unless it is backwards compatible it will suffer.
This btw isn't a reason not to include a HDD.
3) huh, this doesn't seem to cripple companies like RCA, Archos, Creative, Rio, etc from making MP3 players with 20 or 40 GB HDD's. In fact a portable HDD based MP3 player can be had for about $250 with a 20GB drive. That includes costs of LED or LCD displays, codec costs, and bunches of other things that I won't list right now. I can see an Xbox Next being somwhat more expensive to make, but not by much and with a starting price of $300 (since that's standard for new console systems), I would expect them to break even at the begining. Later they might lose some money on hardware, but with a strong lead this could be irrelevent.
4) You think the average consumer will want to network their console? Power gamers already network Xbox's, but most people I talk to couldn't care less about networking their systems atm. They won't pay someone to install it for them & they are to scared to set it up themselves, which is why they aren't interested. I have slowly started to see more interest thanks to MS's Xbox Music Mixer, but even so it takes a new PC app to run and that scares the average customer...
5) Japanese market is all important? What planet are you living on? The xbox has outsold the GC (as of this last christmas at least based on numbers I've seen) and the GC sells incredibly well in Japan where the xbox sells abismally.
I'd also argue that it's not due to size that the xbox doens't sell well in japan. I'd say it's due to prejudice by the japanese against a soley american company. I see that quite often where I work, the japanese (first gen americans or visitors from japan) that come in are 99% liekly to buy something made by a japanese company... Not US, not Korean, not Chinese, not Tiwanese, but Japanese. Sony being their first choice for almost all electronics sold in the US.
6) They've already spent tons of time trying to kep them from running Linux... This won't even stop that, why does linux care if it's stored on an HDD or a Flash memory unit? They are both writable and eventually regardless of what MS does someone will eb able to run Linux on it...
hmm... It seems like I vetoed all your arguements against including an HDD... Want to try again?
While I will stay out of most of the argument for the msot part, I will point out others have already responded to say that very little floating around in the air is actually able to become radioactive at all. Regardless of how long it was exposed to something radioactive.
That said I'll move to my main point. My main point is that all the top minds in sci-fi (the field that normally inspires and is inspired by) science, have been talking about combining reactions within jet style engines for years. Scramjets are the most practical because they literally can't be used close to the ground so any possible dangers would not harm anyone on the ground (except in the most catastrophic way, but even then it wouldn't be any high atmosphere three mile island).
From what I know about the technology (& since everything areospace is a hobby for me that includes quite alot), Nuclearly enhanced Scramjets pose no threat to life or limb except to pilots... But that's still only equal to any other similiar craft.
This is why no intelligent person uses a drug called 'crack'... I see no good reason why anyone would ever want to use that kind of drug as all it's effects are negative... So it's no suprise their results were bad.
I still don't favor legalized drugs myself, but of all the drugs you could pick that would be the worst....
Uh... sure maybe where you are... But I struggle daily to find someone (anyone) willing to offer me broadband of any form only a few miles away from the third largest city in Pennsylvania (PA having two huge cities: Pittsburgh and Philly that overwhlem anything else in the state). Verizon abondoned us after milking the state for billions, Adelphia only services a limited area of the city itself, Cablevision (aka Time Warner cable) covers my area but doesn't seem interested in providing broadband... The same can be said for the local government, who can't find anyone to provide them with a T1+ conenction and that killed my suggestion for providing municiple broadband service...
That's why I'm still stuck on dial-up... I doubt I'll have basic broadband by 2007, let alone 10mbit broadband... I'm not alone either last I heard broadband services covered only around 40% of people in the US... So maybe some of you can see easy movie downloading, but a large chunk of the population can't...
The scariest thing about your post is that my parents use my old system (K6-2 350, 128 MB SD-RAM, 8 GB HDD, etc) which works just fine with XP... Which I put on because I couldn't find my Win 98/ME disks anymore... Leaving just 2000 & XP, 2000 didn't liek the vid card and had some wierd problem with the NIC in that system (Intel Pro/100), so I used XP... It took a bit of work and some strange error messages the first couple tries, but in about an hour I had it running Win XP just fine...
BTW in case your wondering I dual boot, but I have enough trouble getting my parents successfully doing things on a PC with windows... The headaches if I had them running *Nix ("Why doens't this program I bought at the store work on my system?" for one) was just to high for a choice other than windows...
Err well what taxes would you like included in that? State, local (county), or city? Not to mention that this would rid us of nationally advertised prices... Oh and it would cause retailers huge problems with people driving out of their way to save that extra 2 or 3 cents in city or local taxes to an area which doesn't have them, but they now see an advertised price of $21.19 ($19.9 item with 6% sales tax) instead of 21.39 (same $19.99 item, but with 6% sales tax and a city or local tax of 1% for a total of 7%).
People have been taught to be cheap, "If you aren't getting the lowest price your being screwed!" Currently the focus is on the raw price of the item and the tax is flat percentage across all (or almost all) items purchased. It's already bad enough that here in Pennsylvania we have people drive 50 miles to avoid paying sales tax for New York (Buffalo area) which ends up being liek 7.5% compared to our 6%... prioritizing tax by including it in promotions will only make this worse... If we ahd a federal tax (which unless I'm mistaken is how the VAT taxes work) then it might be possible, but states don't trust the federal government to give them the money from such a tax and I'm not even sure the federal government could legally do such a thing...
Actually most consumer electronics in the US have 1 year warrenties, which isn't all that different than a 2 year warrenty. Not that a warrenty really means anything in the US, as a manufacturers warrenty only guarentees their will be a replacement/repair if their is a manufacturers defect. Which, at least in the US, is determined by the manfacturer. Electronics retailers btw would be the biggest ones to complain if they went to an EU style system and with most non-wealmart electronics retailers heading downwards financially theyed be doing some serious complaining if they had to honor a 2 year warranty on all their products.
But uh some things most not be covered, because I know they sell Gamecubes, Xbox's, and PS2's in the EU and all three of those have 3 month warrenties from the manufacturers. I could list some other 'name brand' items that still come with crappy warranties as well, but those are the most glaring...
Wow someone actually thought you were insightful? Well your not, their are 1.2 million subscribers to XM radio right now & about half to 3/4's that on Sirrus. So while you deny that there is interest in it, there really is.
As I mentioned earlier in this thread, I use CD-r's still at times, but you can't beat soemthing like XM for it's range of listening options that let you find new music... They have 100 channels and even taking out the 20 or so talk radio stations, that leaves 80 concurrent choices in song's to lsiten to... Don't like what's on? switch to another station... Still don't like what's on? Pop in a audio CD/MP3 CD.
It's barely 2 years since XM first came out (july 2 years ago if I remember correctly), so 1.2 million customers for what most consider a 'niche' product is huge... 2 years into the existance of DVD players they had only sold about 2 million units and that was for what they considered a 'mainstream product'. Of course now almost 10 years after DVD's first came out their are 50 some million and it's considered to have surpassed VHS... How about giving satellite radio time and you'll see what it can do...?
Err I have a Alpine MP3/CD/XM headunit which gives me the best of all worlds... XM lets me find new music I like, MP3 CD's let me listen to all the old music I've already found, and CD's let me stay backward compatible for the non-geek types around.
Oh and btw quality of XM radio is as high as it gets, they do a direct digital feed from the distribution CD's and they error check all the data to minimalize distortion. Meaning it is above any level of standard MP3/OGG/etc compression in quality.
Oh XM is also only $9.99/month, $14.99/month if you need an extra receiver...
Obviously from your last couple of paragraphs you don't care to ever watch TV and also you have obviously never seen something in true HDTV... I want a TV that finally can compare to my monitor in quality by being progressive scan and supporting higher resolutions. If your fine with crappy "I can see the dots" TV than fine stay with crappy TV I would rather have a much better picture so STFU about not liking HDTV.
Because unless the Mac in question is an Imac it's a 'workstation' by most definitions of that word. The Opteron is a workstation cpu as much as it is a server one.
I have already commented on the other things you said elsewhere, so I won't repeat those in this reply.
Uh Photoshop a "relavant and fair app"? That's a joke right? That's like MS & Word, Adobe knows they have to optimize hard for Mac or theyed loose their biggest clients who are already dedicated to Apple hardware. Their x86 windows version plays second fiddle and always has...
Err regardless of whether the G5 system is running the Panther build of the OS or not, I've heard it doesn't truly support 64bit operation. I've heard that from apple employee in an interview and I've heard it from a few other sources as well. So of course it has no compatibility issue with drivers, they are all 32bits and haven't changed.
Also I want to say why the heck are we worried about running the Athlon 64s and Opterons on Windows? Their are already several distros of linux with full support for AMD64 and we don't have to wait at all to use them.
In the meantime maybe MS will get their act together somewhat... I still don't see why they can't support DOS emulation unless their is some wierd 16bit mode in their DOS code. I can see the A64's and Opterons not running 16bit code as in 64bit mode only 32 and 64bit code is supported, but unless MS is worse off than we have all thought code-wise DOS shoudl still work...
I see way to many people that buy into Dell's marketing line that they make some of the 'best' systems out there... And what do they get for it? Mostly junk I wouldn't use to build a system...
I seem to get at least one joker a week that things because they own a Dell they can 'run anything' or 'play any game' and complain to me when they can't... I've stopped explainign it to them and instead just life and go "Dude! You got a Dell!' in what I can only think of as true irony...
As for the extra money for a Mac 'experience', well uh... Frankly I can make a windows box (for an example look at: http://www.stardock.com/products/objectdock/) look like a Mac and act like a Mac... I can do the same in Linux. How much more of an experience do I need? And more importantly perhaps why should I pay to have it straight from Apple?
First I will say thanks for reposting the article as I couldn't conenct.
Now for my comment on the story:
Dude you were usign a Dell what did you expect performance-wise? If you'd had a good PC you'd have been able to have more than 4 apps open (I use up to 10 at once on my home PC) without a hitch... And you wouldn't have had to shell out the extra cash for a Mac...
Heck if you were unheppy with windows you could have gone linux... Going Mac just seems like the worst choice in this situation...
Uh you left off Archos which makes tons of really cool HDD based players. Their great advantage (besides price) is recording capability through Minijack and composite audio jacks...
Heck if you want it one model even supports video!
Also one more note... RCA still makes their HDD based Lyra's, I've seen (full price) Lyra's selling at pretty much all my local stores....
I've been playing with what you refer to as 'optielectronics' as a concept for years and I did come up with a way of creating a gate, but not on the scale needed for this sort of thing... Maybe if someone into nano work ever wanted to help out I could reduce the size of my idea, but since I'm not a scientist by trade (it's jsut my hobby). I doubt any serious scientist would want to help me...
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I didn't moderate you (which should be self-obvious since I can't moderate and post in the same article), nor actually would I have done so. I'd rather respond to each thing seperately...
Oh and on that topic:
"This knocks about $150 (average) off the price of the Intel upgrade path, because you can move to their faster P4 CPUs without having to change socket types"
Sure, but that shiny old P4E/P4EE supporting board would also need to be replaced if they wanted a Intel chip beyond this generation. It's just that Intel had a generation change recently and now will be steady again for awhile. Someone who already had a AMD system would need a new board anyways.
Also once AMD switches to 939 & 940 as the only socket types, those will stay the same for ages. Does anyone remember how long Socket A has lasted? Now Socket A did need improvements to things like the FSB on the socket A platform, but with A64 this won't happen since their is no FSB to increase just the data rate of the hypertransport connections...
"To the average consumer, this means buying a whole new PC."
The average user has been taught to upgrade their whole machine anyways. I don't know a single 'average joe' who would even try to upgrade a CPU. They just know when it's time buy a new box because they feel their machine is now to slow. Most OEM's foster this impression (Dell, HP, Emcahines, Gateway, Sony, etc): 'System to slow? Time to buy a new box!'.
"I would just buy the next fastest Intel chip"
Uh from all reports the next generation will need a new board, in traditional Intel fashion. Only one or two iterations of any chip work with a certain series of baords.
"A new Athlon 64 may be comparable to last year's P4 chips, but the newest Intel chips with larger on-chip cache are clearly out in front of anything AMD has to offer."
You listed Tom 'Intel's Bitch' Pabst's site for your info. I wouldn't listen to Tom if you paid me & if you are listening to Tom then I know why your heads so messed up. I've talked directly to Tom, so I'm not talking out my ass either. Him & Anand just need to go into a field they know something about, cause it's not PC's or PC hardware... Find soem real sources who don't go out of their way to put down AMD & I'd lsiten, but even Tech TV (of all sources! Almost as bad as Tom & Anand) has admitted the A64's are the king of the hill of CPU's.
Unfortunatly I can't give you a bunch of links right now as I just redid my whole system, but try Ace's, tech report, digitimes, CPU review, etc... They have a better understanding of what they are talking about & you see A64 win more often than not, and loose only in SSE2 (aka Intel manipulated) or heavily Intel optimized apps (mostly multimedia encoding which Intel invests the most money in).
"Currently Intel's latest 3.0+ GHz offerings are spanking Athlon 64s in benchmarks with 32 bit applications."
...
What a bunch of crap! That's almost as big a lie as Intel makes of AMD cpu's. I didn't even bother reading the rest when you are obviously delusional.
BTW A64 chips can be had for the same prices as their A32 counterparts in the same speed rating, Motherbaords are almost equally expensive whether A32 or A64, & outperform them by up to 30%.
Ok well now I have read the rest of your comments & I have to reply to those as well:
"they're going to go to Intel because it has more upgrade possibilities"
What possibilities? They force upgrades way more often than AMD, & are known for being the best money sink for performance users.
"is cheaper than the Athlon 64 for the same level of computing power"
Uh not really, A64 costs the same or less than Intel for comparable performance as long as you don't follow the rule of 'Mhz/Ghz equals performance'. Take a look at pricewatch or Newegg and see for yourself...
"currently performs better"
Hogwash.
"So this is more of a plea for AMD to extend the Athlon "32" line a bit further. Please AMD, don't prematurely kill off 32-bit Athlon chip development!"
Uh they are building them at least through the end of this year, & probably next to some degree. The thing is their is no real future for A32, performance has been decreasing performance-wise in comparison & wasn't keeping up. AMD realized their best bet was to focus on A64 with it's integrated memory controller & higher IPC than A32 has. A64 is a real contender where as A32 wasn't keeping up & they knew it.
All I ever see is el cheapo not worth the silicon & metal their made from Dell's. I don't see how you think Dell is better than Micron was back then, from my view of fixing their 'consumer grade' machines they are equally bad, with only the specialty PC companies making a good reliable product...
Wow, I remember spending $400 per 4MB 60ns SIMM during that same period... How did you find 128 MB so cheap..?
Uh well at my store they need to take some of their damn GBA's back, cause we have way to many... It's like a plague of GBA's that never sell... We've sold like 2 GBA's in the last month. But we still get more of them in.
As for the gamecube, well we have been out of gamecubes for quite some time, but no one has even bothered to ask about them. If people want a new system where I work they come in asking for a PS2 or xbox. Heck the last person I sold a gamecube to came in to buy a PSone, but I talked them into the gamecube instead...
I just don't see this increased demand & frankly I don't believe it exists...
Strangely I used to be a big McGyver fan when I was a kid, but since I'm not used to seeing him as Jack O'Neal in SG1 for so long now I actually had trouble seeing him as McGyver in some reruns on Spike TV (I think) they've played recently....
Maybe it's just because I see so many systems that just don't work in my job, but I wouldn't pay more for Intel... They don't "Just work" anymore than Athlon's do...
You mean burst into flames like this?:s sorsmemo ry/0,39024015,39145079-2,00.htm
http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/proce
Even back then I had my 1.33 Ghz Athlon (first gen socket A, which is when this load of crap started) cpu fan die and it ran on just the heatsink for quite awhile before I noticed... In fact if games hadn't kept locking up after a short time I would probably never have noticed...
Well let me reply to these as I sell gameconsoles as part of my crappy job that I have since I can't find a networking job that requires less than 5 years of experience:
1) In fact people do care about having a hard drive. Most often they care once they hear this eliminates repeated costs fo memory cards. I can get ~75% of people looking at a GC or PS2 to look at the Xbox just because of this. Maybe it's just that peopel where I live are cheap, but recurring costs are something consumers hate and memory cards are recurring costs on all other modern consoles (& most past consoles).
Unless you can point out something that refutes my last two years of personnal experience of selling them, then I'm going to say that your just full of it with this one.
2) Uh how about: Emulation! You know the kind PC users have used for ages to emulate console system hardware? Since MS has already obstructed msot of the hardware layer on the original xbox I don't see this being an issue at all. Sony as much as I dislike them has set the standard and unless it is backwards compatible it will suffer.
This btw isn't a reason not to include a HDD.
3) huh, this doesn't seem to cripple companies like RCA, Archos, Creative, Rio, etc from making MP3 players with 20 or 40 GB HDD's. In fact a portable HDD based MP3 player can be had for about $250 with a 20GB drive. That includes costs of LED or LCD displays, codec costs, and bunches of other things that I won't list right now. I can see an Xbox Next being somwhat more expensive to make, but not by much and with a starting price of $300 (since that's standard for new console systems), I would expect them to break even at the begining. Later they might lose some money on hardware, but with a strong lead this could be irrelevent.
4) You think the average consumer will want to network their console? Power gamers already network Xbox's, but most people I talk to couldn't care less about networking their systems atm. They won't pay someone to install it for them & they are to scared to set it up themselves, which is why they aren't interested. I have slowly started to see more interest thanks to MS's Xbox Music Mixer, but even so it takes a new PC app to run and that scares the average customer...
5) Japanese market is all important? What planet are you living on? The xbox has outsold the GC (as of this last christmas at least based on numbers I've seen) and the GC sells incredibly well in Japan where the xbox sells abismally.
I'd also argue that it's not due to size that the xbox doens't sell well in japan. I'd say it's due to prejudice by the japanese against a soley american company. I see that quite often where I work, the japanese (first gen americans or visitors from japan) that come in are 99% liekly to buy something made by a japanese company... Not US, not Korean, not Chinese, not Tiwanese, but Japanese. Sony being their first choice for almost all electronics sold in the US.
6) They've already spent tons of time trying to kep them from running Linux... This won't even stop that, why does linux care if it's stored on an HDD or a Flash memory unit? They are both writable and eventually regardless of what MS does someone will eb able to run Linux on it...
hmm... It seems like I vetoed all your arguements against including an HDD... Want to try again?
While I will stay out of most of the argument for the msot part, I will point out others have already responded to say that very little floating around in the air is actually able to become radioactive at all. Regardless of how long it was exposed to something radioactive.
That said I'll move to my main point. My main point is that all the top minds in sci-fi (the field that normally inspires and is inspired by) science, have been talking about combining reactions within jet style engines for years. Scramjets are the most practical because they literally can't be used close to the ground so any possible dangers would not harm anyone on the ground (except in the most catastrophic way, but even then it wouldn't be any high atmosphere three mile island).
From what I know about the technology (& since everything areospace is a hobby for me that includes quite alot), Nuclearly enhanced Scramjets pose no threat to life or limb except to pilots... But that's still only equal to any other similiar craft.
This is why no intelligent person uses a drug called 'crack'... I see no good reason why anyone would ever want to use that kind of drug as all it's effects are negative... So it's no suprise their results were bad.
I still don't favor legalized drugs myself, but of all the drugs you could pick that would be the worst....
Uh... sure maybe where you are... But I struggle daily to find someone (anyone) willing to offer me broadband of any form only a few miles away from the third largest city in Pennsylvania (PA having two huge cities: Pittsburgh and Philly that overwhlem anything else in the state). Verizon abondoned us after milking the state for billions, Adelphia only services a limited area of the city itself, Cablevision (aka Time Warner cable) covers my area but doesn't seem interested in providing broadband... The same can be said for the local government, who can't find anyone to provide them with a T1+ conenction and that killed my suggestion for providing municiple broadband service...
That's why I'm still stuck on dial-up... I doubt I'll have basic broadband by 2007, let alone 10mbit broadband... I'm not alone either last I heard broadband services covered only around 40% of people in the US... So maybe some of you can see easy movie downloading, but a large chunk of the population can't...
The scariest thing about your post is that my parents use my old system (K6-2 350, 128 MB SD-RAM, 8 GB HDD, etc) which works just fine with XP... Which I put on because I couldn't find my Win 98/ME disks anymore... Leaving just 2000 & XP, 2000 didn't liek the vid card and had some wierd problem with the NIC in that system (Intel Pro/100), so I used XP... It took a bit of work and some strange error messages the first couple tries, but in about an hour I had it running Win XP just fine...
BTW in case your wondering I dual boot, but I have enough trouble getting my parents successfully doing things on a PC with windows... The headaches if I had them running *Nix ("Why doens't this program I bought at the store work on my system?" for one) was just to high for a choice other than windows...
Err well what taxes would you like included in that? State, local (county), or city? Not to mention that this would rid us of nationally advertised prices... Oh and it would cause retailers huge problems with people driving out of their way to save that extra 2 or 3 cents in city or local taxes to an area which doesn't have them, but they now see an advertised price of $21.19 ($19.9 item with 6% sales tax) instead of 21.39 (same $19.99 item, but with 6% sales tax and a city or local tax of 1% for a total of 7%).
People have been taught to be cheap, "If you aren't getting the lowest price your being screwed!" Currently the focus is on the raw price of the item and the tax is flat percentage across all (or almost all) items purchased. It's already bad enough that here in Pennsylvania we have people drive 50 miles to avoid paying sales tax for New York (Buffalo area) which ends up being liek 7.5% compared to our 6%... prioritizing tax by including it in promotions will only make this worse... If we ahd a federal tax (which unless I'm mistaken is how the VAT taxes work) then it might be possible, but states don't trust the federal government to give them the money from such a tax and I'm not even sure the federal government could legally do such a thing...
Actually most consumer electronics in the US have 1 year warrenties, which isn't all that different than a 2 year warrenty. Not that a warrenty really means anything in the US, as a manufacturers warrenty only guarentees their will be a replacement/repair if their is a manufacturers defect. Which, at least in the US, is determined by the manfacturer. Electronics retailers btw would be the biggest ones to complain if they went to an EU style system and with most non-wealmart electronics retailers heading downwards financially theyed be doing some serious complaining if they had to honor a 2 year warranty on all their products.
But uh some things most not be covered, because I know they sell Gamecubes, Xbox's, and PS2's in the EU and all three of those have 3 month warrenties from the manufacturers. I could list some other 'name brand' items that still come with crappy warranties as well, but those are the most glaring...
Wow someone actually thought you were insightful? Well your not, their are 1.2 million subscribers to XM radio right now & about half to 3/4's that on Sirrus. So while you deny that there is interest in it, there really is.
As I mentioned earlier in this thread, I use CD-r's still at times, but you can't beat soemthing like XM for it's range of listening options that let you find new music... They have 100 channels and even taking out the 20 or so talk radio stations, that leaves 80 concurrent choices in song's to lsiten to... Don't like what's on? switch to another station... Still don't like what's on? Pop in a audio CD/MP3 CD.
It's barely 2 years since XM first came out (july 2 years ago if I remember correctly), so 1.2 million customers for what most consider a 'niche' product is huge... 2 years into the existance of DVD players they had only sold about 2 million units and that was for what they considered a 'mainstream product'. Of course now almost 10 years after DVD's first came out their are 50 some million and it's considered to have surpassed VHS... How about giving satellite radio time and you'll see what it can do...?
Err I have a Alpine MP3/CD/XM headunit which gives me the best of all worlds... XM lets me find new music I like, MP3 CD's let me listen to all the old music I've already found, and CD's let me stay backward compatible for the non-geek types around.
Oh and btw quality of XM radio is as high as it gets, they do a direct digital feed from the distribution CD's and they error check all the data to minimalize distortion. Meaning it is above any level of standard MP3/OGG/etc compression in quality.
Oh XM is also only $9.99/month, $14.99/month if you need an extra receiver...
Obviously from your last couple of paragraphs you don't care to ever watch TV and also you have obviously never seen something in true HDTV... I want a TV that finally can compare to my monitor in quality by being progressive scan and supporting higher resolutions. If your fine with crappy "I can see the dots" TV than fine stay with crappy TV I would rather have a much better picture so STFU about not liking HDTV.
Because unless the Mac in question is an Imac it's a 'workstation' by most definitions of that word. The Opteron is a workstation cpu as much as it is a server one.
I have already commented on the other things you said elsewhere, so I won't repeat those in this reply.
Uh Photoshop a "relavant and fair app"? That's a joke right? That's like MS & Word, Adobe knows they have to optimize hard for Mac or theyed loose their biggest clients who are already dedicated to Apple hardware. Their x86 windows version plays second fiddle and always has...
Err regardless of whether the G5 system is running the Panther build of the OS or not, I've heard it doesn't truly support 64bit operation. I've heard that from apple employee in an interview and I've heard it from a few other sources as well. So of course it has no compatibility issue with drivers, they are all 32bits and haven't changed.
Also I want to say why the heck are we worried about running the Athlon 64s and Opterons on Windows? Their are already several distros of linux with full support for AMD64 and we don't have to wait at all to use them.
In the meantime maybe MS will get their act together somewhat... I still don't see why they can't support DOS emulation unless their is some wierd 16bit mode in their DOS code. I can see the A64's and Opterons not running 16bit code as in 64bit mode only 32 and 64bit code is supported, but unless MS is worse off than we have all thought code-wise DOS shoudl still work...
I see way to many people that buy into Dell's marketing line that they make some of the 'best' systems out there... And what do they get for it? Mostly junk I wouldn't use to build a system...
I seem to get at least one joker a week that things because they own a Dell they can 'run anything' or 'play any game' and complain to me when they can't... I've stopped explainign it to them and instead just life and go "Dude! You got a Dell!' in what I can only think of as true irony...
As for the extra money for a Mac 'experience', well uh... Frankly I can make a windows box (for an example look at: http://www.stardock.com/products/objectdock/) look like a Mac and act like a Mac... I can do the same in Linux. How much more of an experience do I need? And more importantly perhaps why should I pay to have it straight from Apple?
Maybe it's just me, but I don't see the need...
First I will say thanks for reposting the article as I couldn't conenct.
Now for my comment on the story:
Dude you were usign a Dell what did you expect performance-wise? If you'd had a good PC you'd have been able to have more than 4 apps open (I use up to 10 at once on my home PC) without a hitch... And you wouldn't have had to shell out the extra cash for a Mac...
Heck if you were unheppy with windows you could have gone linux... Going Mac just seems like the worst choice in this situation...
Uh you left off Archos which makes tons of really cool HDD based players. Their great advantage (besides price) is recording capability through Minijack and composite audio jacks...
Heck if you want it one model even supports video!
Also one more note... RCA still makes their HDD based Lyra's, I've seen (full price) Lyra's selling at pretty much all my local stores....
I've been playing with what you refer to as 'optielectronics' as a concept for years and I did come up with a way of creating a gate, but not on the scale needed for this sort of thing... Maybe if someone into nano work ever wanted to help out I could reduce the size of my idea, but since I'm not a scientist by trade (it's jsut my hobby). I doubt any serious scientist would want to help me...