A supercomputer requires at least 100 m^2 floor space, exclusive of cooling equipment. And it takes at least one large tractor trailer for transport to the site.
Among other things, it would force programmers to do more with less -- always a valid engineering goal. It's one thing to build a chessplayer that needs multiple racks and a three phase 220 V power supply, and a much more impressive thing for a chessplayer running on a hand powered OLPC laptop.
Perhaps there should be a competition where the computer entrants are limited in mass (ca. 1.5 Kg) and power (ca. 25 Watts) as are human brains.
Maybe a temperature limit as well, i.e., operating at under 40 Celsius.
My meaning is that there is no free recordable disc of either type. In earlier (ca. 2002 at least) Apple notebook models that had optical recording capability, a free CD-R or DVD-R disc was included in the retail package.
I picked up a 2.33 GHz MBP (US$2500) a couple of days ago and it meets my expectations. No problems with noise or heat issues, and the build quality and design is much better than the offerings back in 2002 when I bought an iBook 700 MHz G3 and a PB 800 MHz G4. The magnetic power connector by itself is a big improvement.
The included printed documentation is rather lacking for a notebook in this price range. Additionally, there in no recordable CD or DVD included. And as noted before, there is no modem either. For developers, both X Window and Xcode require additional installation steps.
For those who can accept a sligntly slower CPU and half the memory (128 MB vs 256 MB) graphics, a savings of US$500 can be had by getting the base model and using the cash to upgrade the main memory from 1 GB to 2 GB (or 3 GB).
This is what I could really use: a button on the Mail application that marks a message as spam and also reports this back to Apple's mail servers along with a report to SpamCop and perhaps other appropriate parties. Apple would thenuse this information, combined with other reports, to provide further filtering.
Another Mail add-on would be to integrate PGP/GPG in a seamless, easy to use manner so that everyone and their grandma could use it, perhaps by default.
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A supercomputer requires at least 100 m^2 floor space, exclusive of cooling equipment. And it takes at least one large tractor trailer for transport to the site.
Among other things, it would force programmers to do more with less -- always a valid engineering goal. It's one thing to build a chessplayer that needs multiple racks and a three phase 220 V power supply, and a much more impressive thing for a chessplayer running on a hand powered OLPC laptop.
Perhaps there should be a competition where the computer entrants are limited in mass (ca. 1.5 Kg) and power (ca. 25 Watts) as are human brains. Maybe a temperature limit as well, i.e., operating at under 40 Celsius.
My meaning is that there is no free recordable disc of either type. In earlier (ca. 2002 at least) Apple notebook models that had optical recording capability, a free CD-R or DVD-R disc was included in the retail package.
There are some free white Apple decals, though.
I picked up a 2.33 GHz MBP (US$2500) a couple of days ago and it meets my expectations. No problems with noise or heat issues, and the build quality and design is much better than the offerings back in 2002 when I bought an iBook 700 MHz G3 and a PB 800 MHz G4. The magnetic power connector by itself is a big improvement.
The included printed documentation is rather lacking for a notebook in this price range. Additionally, there in no recordable CD or DVD included. And as noted before, there is no modem either. For developers, both X Window and Xcode require additional installation steps.
For those who can accept a sligntly slower CPU and half the memory (128 MB vs 256 MB) graphics, a savings of US$500 can be had by getting the base model and using the cash to upgrade the main memory from 1 GB to 2 GB (or 3 GB).
This is what I could really use: a button on the Mail application that marks a message as spam and also reports this back to Apple's mail servers along with a report to SpamCop and perhaps other appropriate parties. Apple would thenuse this information, combined with other reports, to provide further filtering.
Another Mail add-on would be to integrate PGP/GPG in a seamless, easy to use manner so that everyone and their grandma could use it, perhaps by default.