You answered your own question. The K8 product line beat anything Intel was pushing during that time frame. It should have given AMD a sizable portion of the market share. The performance was that much better. In a free market, the obviously better product should take the market share, and as fast as the IT market moves, there should have a perceptible wave in market share and profit flowing into AMD. Who knows where AMD R&D would have gone with the influx of cash.

...part of the price premium means you're getting a laptop built by a highly skilled workforce with a keen eye on tolerances.

Were it not that we had to pay a premium for this...

GURPS?

You can always become a teacher in the inner city or work 2 years for Peace Corps or any of the other methods the government has setup for most or all of your loan to be FORGIVEN.

It has probably been said before, but it bares repeating. TANSTAAFL, let this be your first real world example that. There are alternative ways to replay your loan. For an example:

Load Forgiveness Programs

I always wondered how my life would have changed if I had gone this route. I have this romanticized vision of working in dangerous, tropical climates with hot, altruistic babes with advanced degrees. I find a nice one and after a few years toiling away at toughest job we ever loved, we enter private industry and are bowled over by the size of our first paycheck. And since we were have a large portion of our loans out of the way and are accustomed to spartan living, we start building a roc sized nest egg. The naivete of youth.

The sex. Because you cannot have a good spy story without the sex. Apparently, everyone in this game has sex with everyone else. And all the female characters are named "Pussy Galore."

I am still on the fence about this and "by definition stupid" just does not do it for me. Patents were made to protect the effort and investment spent on innovation. If I build a new, novel system, I want to recoup my initial investment and make some profit without worrying about some other company copying my idea just for the cost of implementation. So is a software patent stupid because you cannot invent a new, novel system that is purely developed in software?

Let there be a widget A that does novel thing X via purely solid state components. Let there be a widget B that does novel thing X via software. If widget B is just a COTS PC, and the software was developed before widget A, is widget B not patentable. Two systems exist that do a novel thing. One is patentable because its build of components but the other is not because its a program that runs on a computer? Yes, its a generalized thought experiment and not a real world example, but I think it represents the question.

1360899 / 655973 > 2

Have you every had a problem finding something off the menu in a web browser? Sure, I lose things in Office all the time, but I cannot remember the last time I had a problem finding something off the menu bar in Firefox.

Do not fume about it. Do not rage on a forum about it. Do not send you buddy and e-mail pointing out the stupidity of their comments. Make a press release containing the facts and release it.

Just wanted to thank eldavojohn for the review link. Apparently the site is blocked due to adult/pornographic content on my work network. Which is always a nice message to see pop up in your browser...

While clusters are cool for cranking away at data, any sort of real time application would get killed by the network latency pushing and pulling data between boxes. One of these SGIs can go to 80 processors, 960 GB memory and 726 GFLOPS but how fast can you get the data you need onto the processor it needs to be on? I find more and more latency acrros network, from disk and to the processor dominates performance. How many of those 726 GFLOPS are spent waiting for data to crunch? I would guess less than in a network cluster of machines.

Just give it an hour or two. The basement dwellers are still wrapped in the throws of slumber. But soon, they will throw off the confines of their StarBlazers comforter, imbibe their hideous concoction of cold pizza and Cocoa Puffs and ready themselves for an assault upon the stone walls of reason! Beware their +16 Rashness tinfoil hats! It makes them impervious to reason!

So accurate, its scary. I wonder if someone leaked it to him.

No manner of technology can defeat good, social engineering. An intelligent attack is made upon the weakest link in the system. In this case, an unscrupulous user with privileges.