Did you ever wonder why we had to run for shelter?
Landlady came round with plumber to look at Mysterious Damp Patch the other day. Apparently an overflow pipe from the toilet was spilling into pipes from the previous boiler and spreading through the floor somehow. Apparently it will take a while for the floor to dry out though.
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Musical Genre Table is there. I won't be driving this one: feel free to take it over.
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Euro fiscal squabbles continue.
Repeat: long but fascinating mocap analysis.
Mac Mini
Repeating what I've said elsewhere: might as well have it all in one place. This is the last section: you can skip straight to the comments if you like...
I'm not much of a Apple fan: bought an iRiver instead of an iPod, thought that the iMacs were mostly style of substance. But once in a while they do live up to their reputation, and the Mac Mini is a good example.
The advantage of the Mac Mini is the triple combination of quietness, cheapness and smallness. To compare you really need to think about a kind of NPV factor: multiply noise * price * volume. Nothing in the PC world currently comes close: we're talking factors of 100 or so.
People still seem to have the idea they can just sit a couple of months and there will be similar PCs around. Maybe sometime, but not soon.
Problem A is the processor design. For years now Mac have been concentrating on low clock-speed, low-power, cool-running processors. Also in the last few years Athlon, Intel and co have been concentrating on high clock-speed, hot-running processors. The result is that with the cooling fans you have desktops that sound like Lancaster bombers and laptops that sound like dentist drills.
This makes it a lot harder to cram all the PC parts into a similar sized box. The smaller a fan is, the faster it has to move and the noisier it gets. PCs have a relative disadvantage in producing small, quiet boxes.
Problem B is economies of scale: the more you make of something, the cheaper you can make them. In the past, that's helped PCs against Macs. But a MacMini-killer would have to start off with much lower production volumes: it's going to be harder to compete on price.
Naturally they'll be a bunch of wannabes on the market pretty soon. But they're going to be bigger and noisier, and probably to compete on price they'll have to sacrifice quality. Expect them to be prone to overheating problems, and hard to fix when they do.
TheophileEscargot's Mac Mini prediction:
No PC will come match the noise * price * volume score until 2007 or later.
The interesting question is what it will do the PC market. As I say they can still compete on price so, expect smaller, cheaper, lower-quality PCs. Now one obvious way to sacrifice quality for price is to install an open source OS: might see a few more along those lines. Microsoft may have to reduce their pricing too, if cheaper computers make their OS a bigger fraction of the price.
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