Orchid XP v3 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> (OTOH, it only runs on a Mac, which is significantly more 
> expensive than any PC.)

  That's just not true.

  The cheapest existing Mac is more expensive than the cheapest existing PC.

  However, compare the price of any Mac to the price of a PC with the
*same* specs (computing power, memory, graphics card, etc). You might
get a surprise.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:
> Orchid XP v3 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> (OTOH, it only runs on a Mac, which is significantly more 
>> expensive than any PC.)
> 
>   That's just not true.
> 
>   The cheapest existing Mac is more expensive than the cheapest existing PC.
> 
>   However, compare the price of any Mac to the price of a PC with the
> *same* specs (computing power, memory, graphics card, etc). You might
> get a surprise.

I did that a while back. It wasn't very favourable.

(In fairness, the Mac is more expensive by a smaller margin than I 
expected.)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/

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Orchid XP v3 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> I did that a while back. It wasn't very favourable.

> (In fairness, the Mac is more expensive by a smaller margin than I 
> expected.)

  Well, other people seem to disagree with that. One example:

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=macintosh_os&articleId=9023959&taxonomyId=123&intsrc=kc_feat

  MacBook pro: $2799.
  Dell laptop with equivalent specs: $3459.
  A slightly less powerful Vaio laptop: $3150.

  iMac desktop computer (20-inch LCD): $1500.
  A comparable Vaio desktop computer (19-inch LCD): $1800.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:
> Orchid XP v3 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> I did that a while back. It wasn't very favourable.
> 
>> (In fairness, the Mac is more expensive by a smaller margin than I 
>> expected.)
> 
>   Well, other people seem to disagree with that. One example:
> 
>
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=macintosh_os&articleId=9023959&taxonomyId=123&intsrc=kc_feat
> 
>   MacBook pro: $2799.
>   Dell laptop with equivalent specs: $3459.
>   A slightly less powerful Vaio laptop: $3150.
> 
>   iMac desktop computer (20-inch LCD): $1500.
>   A comparable Vaio desktop computer (19-inch LCD): $1800.

Ah yes, Dell. The most over-priced PC supplier known to man. Surely even 
Rolls Royce are cheaper than Dell. ;-)

A while back I did sit down and churn through the numbers, and from the 
suppliers I could find, equivilent-spec PCs always came out cheaper. I'm 
pretty sure that my post has expired from this newserver now; maybe if I 
have the muse I'll redo that research sometime and post it to my blog...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/

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"Orchid XP v3" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:46e446b0$1@news.povray.org...


> A while back I did sit down and churn through the numbers, and from the 
> suppliers I could find, equivilent-spec PCs always came out cheaper.

  I thought they were cheap set-ups? Hmm..



 I'm
> pretty sure that my post has expired from this newserver now; maybe if I 
> have the muse I'll redo that research sometime and post it to my blog...


    'Sent Items'?  ;)



     ~Steve~

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On Sun, 12 Aug 2007 12:46:44 +0200, Orchid XP v3 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> I too keep thinking about maybe getting a Mac of some kind... I've  
> always wondered what a Mac is like. Everybody says the Mac is the best,  
> but I've never actually seen one in real life. I don't know of any shop  
> anywhere in the world that sells them.
>
> Now and then I look online at prices. But... really... I just can't  
> justify such astronomical prices. If you buy a Mac, you buy a sealed box  
> with no upgradable components. For the kind of stuff I do, CPU power is  
> everything. And... well, I let the numbers speak for themselves:
>



>





>


>



>





>
> So, let me see here...
>
> * I can buy a 1.86 GHz laptop for less than the cheapest MacBook (which  
> is only 1.83 GHz and half as much RAM).
>
> * I can buy a 1.86 GHz desktop for less than the cheapest Mac mini  
> (which is only 1.66 GHz and has half as much RAM).
>
> * The iMac... OK, it's a monitor as well. A good LCD monitor costs,  


> less RAM).
>
> Add to that the fact that none of this stuff is upgradable, whereas the  
> comodity equivilents are... (BTW, I really dislike the iMac idea. So, if  
> my monitor breaks, I buy a whole new computer? That's a winner!)
>
> Of course, what none of the PCs have is Mac OS X. So I guess it depends  
> on whether you think that's worth an extra +80% in price or not... From  
> the pictures I've seen, OS X looks reeeeaaally pretty. But having never  
> actually used it, not knowing how hard it is to work it, etc... Do I  
> want to spend many hundreds of pounds on something I might not actually  
> like?
>
> (Then there's the minor issue that all my software requires M$ Windoze  
> in order to function. Well, except POV-Ray...)



-- 
FE

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>  The sad thing is that people are just content with these braindead greedy
> limitations MS puts in their OS.
>  Basically what they do is: Disable support for multiple processors and
> sell it at the regular price. Sell the version without the disabled 
> features
> at a higher price.

It's not just MS that use this strategy, a lot of other companies do even 
outside of computing.  It helps keep costs down rather than having to 
develop 2 or more totally separate products (think NT and Win9x).  If you 
buy a BMW 316, 318 or 320 they will all have the same physical engine, just 
different software to generate a different amount of power.  Graphics cards 
do the same, the cheaper variant just have a few of the pipelines disabled.

>  Of course this is marketing. However, it's sad that people are just 
> content
> with this.

It's not really just marketing, it makes total financial sense if you need 
to sell to a wide range of customers.  No doubt all companies do a careful 
calculation to work out the best way to price their products and what 
features to include at what level.  They're not stupid.

And what, you'd prefer that everyone had to pay a kind of mid-range-price 
for the top version, when 90% of home users won't care about all the 
features in the top version?  Or that MS develop 2 or 3 totally separate 
product lines, probably making all prices higher due to far more development 
required?

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> Oh, that's really cute. Is there also a black market in devices to "crack" 
> the limiter and get all the available power from the engine?

Yes there is, although obviously you'll be screwed if anything every happens 
to the car, it probably voids all warranties.  Official dealers will likely 
not service your car and hence you won't have a full-dealer-service history 
so the re-sale price will drop significantly.  Probably in recent times they 
are more "hacker proof", but certainly the older models can be done.

> (Back in my day, the less expensive car would have an engie with 
> physically smaller cylinders... Which is weird, really, because that way 
> it has more metal in it, and metal is presumably more expensive than 
> air...)

Huh?  If the cylinders are smaller then the engine is usually smaller too. 
The amount of metal in the engine only needs to be strong enough to stop it 
falling apart.  Bigger cylinders usually means higher internal forces, so 
you then need *thicker* metal around the cylinders, not thinner!  When you 
look at the specs of cars, the ones with bigger engine sizes are heavier...

> But then, Intel's low-end chips are actually high-end chips that didn't 
> quite pass QC, so they turned the clock speed down a bit. :-S
>
> As should be abundantly evident, I've never owned a BMW. (And it's 
> unlikely I ever will...)

I would imagine other manufacturers do the same, it's a no brainer that 
making 3 million 2.0 engines is cheaper than 1 million each of 1.6, 1.8 and 
2.0.

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>> Only offer a single version loaded with features and people
>> will complain that it's too expensive and contains loads of stuff they 
>> don't
>> need.
>
>  Not if you offer it at the price you are selling the crippled version.

But you can't do that because your total revenue will be lower then so 
you'll have to charge more.  This will mean a lot of people at the lower-end 
of the market won't buy the software.

>  I have hard time believing people are buying the Home version *because*
> it has limited support for processors. They are only buying it because the
> other alternatives are more expensive. It's not the features, it's the
> price.

Exactly.  And the only reason MS can sell the basic version that cheap is 
because they are getting a load of money for the people who buy the 
expensive versions for the features.

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> One of the bugs is a branching instruction that may, or may not
> jump to the intended address +1.  For the moment it's being
> worked around in the compilers by putting a few NOP's at
> spots that require such branching. Since there may be such
> sets of NOP's in the code, a hacker might replace the NOP's
> with a jump code of their own in order to execute their virus
> code, then jump back to continue execution of the original
> program.

Bah, a hacker can put a jump to their code anywhere. The instruction they 
overwrote with their "jump" they just execute somewhere in their own code 
before returning.  Easiest way is to just overwrite another jump 
instruction, then jump to the location of that jump at the end of your virus 
code.  I don't think they need to specifically look out for NOPs to write 
over.

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