I tried to find your $600 Dell machine and I couldn't get it to match the Apple model.
techbargains.com "coupon" deal, Inspiron 530. The coupons are frequent enough a savvy shopper can wait for the one they want rather than paying list. (Apple doesn't have this or we could compare to their best deal.) I assembled the machine I wanted online, though I ended up going with an HP notebook machine with Blu-Ray.
Technically to match the MacPro, you need to match Dell's workstations
I don't want to match the Mac Pro, I want to match my needs. For the home user, how much difference does a Xeon make relative to a 6700? Not enough to justify busting the budget.
The iMac might fit a user's needs if we drop the Quad Core requirement, but 30" monitors are coming slowly closer to mainstream. I might be able to afford to upgrade my system unit now and replace my 22" monitor next year. And video cards are still advancing faster than other components, not to mention SLI being an upgrade option with PCs but not iMacs.
It's not the price (a small premium is more than justified), it's the holes in the Mac lineup. They apparently prefer pushing the high end (so anyone wanting more than an iMac has to go to a Power Mac) to enlarging their market share. It's their choice, and perhaps a smart one, but it has consequences.
The problem isn't the comparison for specific designs, it's getting the machine that fits a typical slashdotter. Say I want a quad core machine with 8800GT-level video. What's the cheapest Mac that reaches those specs? $2449, by my check. What's the cheapest Dell? I've priced ~$600 for a decent configuration without the card, add another $150 for it. Power Macs are great when you need the full expansion, but for most users they're overkill.
If I want a small form factor and don't care about 3-D graphics, the Mac Mini is great, the best small form factor machine out there (save possibly the AppleTV.) The notebooks also seem more price-competitive.
I pay $80/month before "fees" for *four* phones under a family share plan. ~$100/month for a cellphone seems bizarrely expensive to me after years of paying ~$25/month for a landline.
I resent people who are stating that 5, or 6, or 7 billions is too many and that the growth of world population should make us worry. I would like to point out that, compared to the era when world population was less than 1 billion, the average life expectancy, quality of life and, yes, access to ressources and opportunities has dramatically increased for our species.
However, we've also seen resources collapse in a way we didn't in the past, just because we've gotten so efficient at collecting them. North Atlantic cod stocks and Chesapeake Bay blue crabs have dropped drastically in only a few years. Maine lobster have gone from food for servants to an expensive luxury. We passed Peak Oil in the U.S. 38 years ago, and now the price is $120/barrel. We've had to stop building so many dams and destroy some we already have just to mitigate the environmental damage. Certainly we have plenty of possible ways to reduce our use of resources, but we also have a need to do so where it wasn't so necessary in the past.
You have a fiancee, but enough time on your hands to write that long of a comment? Egads.
We could probably solve Linux usability just by having significant others give us laundry lists of usability issues, with just one small problem: too few Linux geeks actually have SOs...
Why do they refer to this as a heavy nucleus rather than as an atom of type 122? I see the terminology elsewhere on searching, but I'm just trying to get a grip on the terminology. Is this just a way of saying it's an atom with a particularly high atomic number?
At any rate, it's sorta like being inside a living test tube full of nutrients and water. If you don't produce an excess of sugars, the test tube dies. Clearly there's a survival advantage in avoiding that.
The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say. --Bilbo Baggins, on his eleventy-first birthday
This computer that predicts the future by modeling the universe, is in fact itself part of the universe. It would thus have to be able to predict its own result faster than it can predict it.
Seems to me a lot of religions are centered around achieving eternal life.
(See Matthew 19:16-17; Mark 10:17-19; Luke 18:18-20 for Christianity, for example.)
While I agree eternal life sounds like more than I'd want, I think I could tolerate living a few hundred or even a few thousand years. After all, I want to play Duke Nukem Forever one day!
Of course from what I understand of PETA, they would rather have all the animals dead than live under the tyranny of humanity, only to end up on a fork.
Is neutering an animal cruel?
How about not neutering the animal, and then killing half of its young by beating them to death?
Having animals not exist is less cruel than abusing them. PETA may not be the most logical of organizations, but the basic principle of reducing cruelty seems sound.
The thing is, I don't feel bad about stealing their bandwidth any more than they probably care that I'm doing it. The parties being stolen from here are the ISPs. They're the ones in a panic.
When I switched over to FIOS, they gave me an router with built-in Wi-Fi and the encryption already set up. Presumably this is exactly so people won't share it by accident, and preferably won't share it at all.
I can't get my son's iPod Touch to connect to the PITA, though.
I already have a bionic wife. She's hearing-impaired, and has a cochlear implant. Currently the speech processor is still external, but you could imagine an internal one run off of the body's energy.
Occasionally I envy her ability to turn it off. But I really want bionic eyes with zoom, split-screen, and picture-taking ability.
Another nice advantage of the Python syntax is that it would probably be multi-threaded more easily (assuming an example where determining whether an element is part of the subset is computationally expensive.)
When usage starts peaking there is no way to get the sun to send down more energy.
If your plant is large enough, it should have capacity beyond your peak. Coal and nuclear power plants also have finite output limits, this is no different. But you use your excess power to create energy storage, be it heat, hydrogen, synthetic oil, etc., and then use that when the sun isn't being helpful.
What it really comes down to, simply, is cost and capacity. Having enough capacity is a cost in land usage and materials. Storing excess energy is an additional cost, including needing the acreage to be bigger. Making something large enough to supply much of our energy needs in a timely fashion requires a large manufacturing capacity. The only things that would make this wishful thinking or impractical is too high a cost or insufficient capacity to create it.
Patents are a problem these days because examiners are awarding inappropriate patents, not because the system itself is flawed.
Some of us might call that a flaw in the system. If there is no good way to minimize the damage done by inappropriate patents, then the system is flawed.
One possibility -- reduce all not drug patents to 10 years, not 20.
Forget the player prices. It's the disk prices that really matter.
Only if you buy disks. Go Netflix or Redbox (once they start carrying Blu-Ray) and the price doesn't matter. How many discs do you watch that often, anyway?
I wonder when my library will start carrying Blu-Ray discs.
I think that even if they were told a year or 2 in advance about this decision, Adobe still would not have been able to make the port to Cocoa in time.
Agreed.
I'm a professional developer on a commercial Mac/Windows app similar in scale to Photoshop. We've had to port from OS9 to OSX, and from PPC to universal binary. Both have been significant transitions, and developer time spent supporting them is time not spent improving the product in other ways. Using Cocoa rather than Carbon would have delayed our product with no benefit to the user, so as long as it was available, we went with it.
If we have to switch for 64-bit Appleness, we'll do it, but only when there's a definite benefit to a goodly percentage of our users. Hopefully this will be the last major transition for a long time, and we can devote our time to improving the feature set.
I should have clarified that I was talking about college students. Given all the RIAA/MPAA issues with trying to sue college students, it seems like it would be trivially easy to go "underground" with hard drives. Back in the stone age when I went to college, we'd certainly copy records onto tape for friends, and that took a lot more effort.
But why not just copy hard drives? With 500 GB for $100, that's a heck of a lot of music. Even movies if you're willing to go MP4. And the transfer speed once going is pretty darned fast.
Slashdot Mirror
I tried to find your $600 Dell machine and I couldn't get it to match the Apple model.
techbargains.com "coupon" deal, Inspiron 530. The coupons are frequent enough a savvy shopper can wait for the one they want rather than paying list. (Apple doesn't have this or we could compare to their best deal.) I assembled the machine I wanted online, though I ended up going with an HP notebook machine with Blu-Ray.
Technically to match the MacPro, you need to match Dell's workstations
I don't want to match the Mac Pro, I want to match my needs. For the home user, how much difference does a Xeon make relative to a 6700? Not enough to justify busting the budget.
The iMac might fit a user's needs if we drop the Quad Core requirement, but 30" monitors are coming slowly closer to mainstream. I might be able to afford to upgrade my system unit now and replace my 22" monitor next year. And video cards are still advancing faster than other components, not to mention SLI being an upgrade option with PCs but not iMacs.
It's not the price (a small premium is more than justified), it's the holes in the Mac lineup. They apparently prefer pushing the high end (so anyone wanting more than an iMac has to go to a Power Mac) to enlarging their market share. It's their choice, and perhaps a smart one, but it has consequences.
The problem isn't the comparison for specific designs, it's getting the machine that fits a typical slashdotter. Say I want a quad core machine with 8800GT-level video. What's the cheapest Mac that reaches those specs? $2449, by my check. What's the cheapest Dell? I've priced ~$600 for a decent configuration without the card, add another $150 for it. Power Macs are great when you need the full expansion, but for most users they're overkill.
If I want a small form factor and don't care about 3-D graphics, the Mac Mini is great, the best small form factor machine out there (save possibly the AppleTV.) The notebooks also seem more price-competitive.
But they definitely could use Blu-Ray now.
$100/4 = $25/month per phone How is this expensive?
Why are you dividing $100 by 4? The aforementioned Sprint $99 plan is for a single person, it's not a family plan.
I pay $80/month before "fees" for *four* phones under a family share plan. ~$100/month for a cellphone seems bizarrely expensive to me after years of paying ~$25/month for a landline.
I resent people who are stating that 5, or 6, or 7 billions is too many and that the growth of world population should make us worry. I would like to point out that, compared to the era when world population was less than 1 billion, the average life expectancy, quality of life and, yes, access to ressources and opportunities has dramatically increased for our species.
However, we've also seen resources collapse in a way we didn't in the past, just because we've gotten so efficient at collecting them. North Atlantic cod stocks and Chesapeake Bay blue crabs have dropped drastically in only a few years. Maine lobster have gone from food for servants to an expensive luxury. We passed Peak Oil in the U.S. 38 years ago, and now the price is $120/barrel. We've had to stop building so many dams and destroy some we already have just to mitigate the environmental damage. Certainly we have plenty of possible ways to reduce our use of resources, but we also have a need to do so where it wasn't so necessary in the past.
I'm pretty sure I can build my own working R2D2 for a fraction of that.
Then these are not the droids you're looking for.
You can go about your business.
You have a fiancee, but enough time on your hands to write that long of a comment? Egads.
We could probably solve Linux usability just by having significant others give us laundry lists of usability issues, with just one small problem: too few Linux geeks actually have SOs...
Why do they refer to this as a heavy nucleus rather than as an atom of type 122? I see the terminology elsewhere on searching, but I'm just trying to get a grip on the terminology. Is this just a way of saying it's an atom with a particularly high atomic number?
Whats wrong with asparagus??
It makes your pee smell funny.
At any rate, it's sorta like being inside a living test tube full of nutrients and water. If you don't produce an excess of sugars, the test tube dies. Clearly there's a survival advantage in avoiding that.
Just watch out for the bacteria Morpheus and Neo.
The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say. --Bilbo Baggins, on his eleventy-first birthday
Actually, there is a third thing.
This computer that predicts the future by modeling the universe, is in fact itself part of the universe. It would thus have to be able to predict its own result faster than it can predict it.
Who would want to live forever?
Seems to me a lot of religions are centered around achieving eternal life.
(See Matthew 19:16-17; Mark 10:17-19; Luke 18:18-20 for Christianity, for example.)
While I agree eternal life sounds like more than I'd want, I think I could tolerate living a few hundred or even a few thousand years. After all, I want to play Duke Nukem Forever one day!
Of course from what I understand of PETA, they would rather have all the animals dead than live under the tyranny of humanity, only to end up on a fork.
Is neutering an animal cruel?
How about not neutering the animal, and then killing half of its young by beating them to death?
Having animals not exist is less cruel than abusing them. PETA may not be the most logical of organizations, but the basic principle of reducing cruelty seems sound.
Don't forget the all-important DVR functionality.
The thing is, I don't feel bad about stealing their bandwidth any more than they probably care that I'm doing it. The parties being stolen from here are the ISPs. They're the ones in a panic.
When I switched over to FIOS, they gave me an router with built-in Wi-Fi and the encryption already set up. Presumably this is exactly so people won't share it by accident, and preferably won't share it at all.
I can't get my son's iPod Touch to connect to the PITA, though.
But then you would go to a zoo, and you just know that any given moment, *someone* is thinking about spanking the monkey...
I already have a bionic wife. She's hearing-impaired, and has a cochlear implant. Currently the speech processor is still external, but you could imagine an internal one run off of the body's energy.
Occasionally I envy her ability to turn it off. But I really want bionic eyes with zoom, split-screen, and picture-taking ability.
Another nice advantage of the Python syntax is that it would probably be multi-threaded more easily (assuming an example where determining whether an element is part of the subset is computationally expensive.)
When usage starts peaking there is no way to get the sun to send down more energy.
If your plant is large enough, it should have capacity beyond your peak. Coal and nuclear power plants also have finite output limits, this is no different. But you use your excess power to create energy storage, be it heat, hydrogen, synthetic oil, etc., and then use that when the sun isn't being helpful.
What it really comes down to, simply, is cost and capacity. Having enough capacity is a cost in land usage and materials. Storing excess energy is an additional cost, including needing the acreage to be bigger. Making something large enough to supply much of our energy needs in a timely fashion requires a large manufacturing capacity. The only things that would make this wishful thinking or impractical is too high a cost or insufficient capacity to create it.
Patents are a problem these days because examiners are awarding inappropriate patents, not because the system itself is flawed.
Some of us might call that a flaw in the system. If there is no good way to minimize the damage done by inappropriate patents, then the system is flawed.
One possibility -- reduce all not drug patents to 10 years, not 20.
Forget the player prices. It's the disk prices that really matter.
Only if you buy disks. Go Netflix or Redbox (once they start carrying Blu-Ray) and the price doesn't matter. How many discs do you watch that often, anyway?
I wonder when my library will start carrying Blu-Ray discs.
I think that even if they were told a year or 2 in advance about this decision, Adobe still would not have been able to make the port to Cocoa in time.
Agreed.
I'm a professional developer on a commercial Mac/Windows app similar in scale to Photoshop. We've had to port from OS9 to OSX, and from PPC to universal binary. Both have been significant transitions, and developer time spent supporting them is time not spent improving the product in other ways. Using Cocoa rather than Carbon would have delayed our product with no benefit to the user, so as long as it was available, we went with it.
If we have to switch for 64-bit Appleness, we'll do it, but only when there's a definite benefit to a goodly percentage of our users. Hopefully this will be the last major transition for a long time, and we can devote our time to improving the feature set.
I should have clarified that I was talking about college students. Given all the RIAA/MPAA issues with trying to sue college students, it seems like it would be trivially easy to go "underground" with hard drives. Back in the stone age when I went to college, we'd certainly copy records onto tape for friends, and that took a lot more effort.
But why not just copy hard drives? With 500 GB for $100, that's a heck of a lot of music. Even movies if you're willing to go MP4. And the transfer speed once going is pretty darned fast.