I just built 20 PCs at approximately $1200 per machine (including my markup/labor and Windows 7 pro licenses) for a company in St Paul, Minnesota.

The specs:

Core i7 870
8GB G.Skill DDR3-1600 (9-9-9-24)
320GB 7200rpm Seagate 7200.12
Gigabyte GA-P55-USB3
XFX Radeon 4870 1GB
Antec 650W
DVD+-RW DL
ATX mid tower
Windows 7 Professional

I beat the hell out of Dell's quote for their required specs (they had a mid-range Core 2 Quad, 8GB of DDR2, and dual Radeon 4550s for that price).

They're very happy. I make about $150 profit/labor on each, and it only takes me 45 minutes to build each machine, image it, get Windows activated, and join it to their domain.

I warrant the parts as long as their built in warranties (ranging from 1 year to lifetime), and my labor for repairs is free the first year (and on-site - better than Dell's standard 1 year ship-it-in warranty).

Granted, 1000 machines is different - but if you get a small army of people that can build as fast as I can, and if you choose good components and make a good base image, it's certainly do-able.

I did you one better.

System:
Windows 7 x64
AMD Phenom II X4 955 (3.2GHz)
6GB DDR2-800 @ 4-4-4-12
AMD 770 Chipset
ATI Radeon HD 5670
7200rpm SATA, 3.0Gb/s, 16MB cache

Objective results:
Opera 10.60: 14149.9ms
Firefox 4 Beta 6: 15696.6ms
Chrome 6: 16165.4ms
Safari 5: 19600.1ms
IE9 Beta: 38926.2ms

Subjective results:
- Chrome, Opera, and Firefox were all far more responsive while running the test than Safari, which in turn was more responsive than IE (such as when minimizing/maximizing the window).
- IE9 complained during the test a few times that the page wasn't responding and offered to "recover" the page, but a glance at Task Manager showed the test was still running.
- IE9's interface is nice, but it's still kind of a piece of shit under the hood compared to your other options. I'm too lazy to uninstall it and try the test on IE8.

Chrome stable (6.x) gave me 16165.4 on: Windows 7 x64 Phenom II X4 955 (3.2ghz) 6GB DDR2-800 (4-4-4-12)

Oh, and this is slashdot.org, not slashdot.eu - no one mentions how Symbian's doing across the pond because the discussion is about WINDOWS MOBILE.

My point was that there are many better alternatives to Windows Mobile that will remain more popular - I was not purporting to make a definitive list of the top smartphone operating systems.

I love you damn Europeans' abrasive attitude toward Americans - did I say I was talking about the whole world? Did I offend you somehow by not explicitly mentioning Nokia's OS? No need to be condescending about how many people you have in the European Union - I'm well aware that there are regions and countries of the world that are more populous than the US.

I'd say Office and Windows are still pretty damn relevant. However, in the mobile space - yeah, WinMo7 isn't going to change anything. iPhones and Android phones will still rule the smartphone market, and though BlackBerries are a dying breed in terms of the cutting-edge, even they will far exceed WinMo7's usage.

I'm glad someone else is with me on this point - I worked at Circuit City a few years ago right when 120Hz TVs were coming out, and it pissed me off to no end the salesperson and consumer frenzy over the frame-interpolation feature. Yeah, it looks nice and smooth for sports, but it looks like SHIT on movies, because they look EVEN WORSE than soap operas (which are usually filmed at 6 fps faster than film - imagine adding 36 or 96 extra fps!)

I still have clients in my business now that seek my counsel when buying HDTVs. People will ignore my explanation of this feature, and pay several hundred dollars more for a TV _solely_ for the 120 or 240Hz feature, when they don't even understand how it's probably going to make most of their viewing experiences worse (since they'll undoubtedly leave the thing on the High setting at all times).

Right, that's part of what's interesting about it - we do see a greater depth of field and a greater dynamic range with our eyes. But when you try to replicate those effects in film/video/games, it seems more fake - perhaps because we're used to seeing standard photography/videography as "real", and CG/games as having infinite depth of field and all shadows and highlights properly exposed.

That's true as far as photography/videography goes - but what I said about games is that it's the opposite - the "HDR" effect actually increases the dynamic range beyond that of your viewing medium so that it looks more like standard photography, rather than compressing the dynamic range so we can see it all.

That's exactly what I was getting at - the more dynamic range and perfect focus we see in the context of video, the more "fake" it tends to seem, despite the fact that it's more like what our eyes would perceive at the scene.

It's the other way around.

Even though we call it high dynamic range in videos and photographs, it's actually just compressing all the extra information from multiple exposures into a LOWER dynamic range, so we can manipulate/display it on our 8-bit screens.

Games, however - such as the Source engine after it got the HDR update with Half-Life 2: Lost Coast and Day of Defeat: Source, actually do increase the dynamic range of a scene beyond what your monitor can display. They underexpose and overexpose parts of the scene when transitions between light and dark places occur, just as your eyes would before they adjusted to the new light, or as a video camera would depending on what exposure the videographer chose. This makes it look more realistic - just take a look at a bright outdoor scene in Half-Life 2: Episode Two and check out how shiny objects in the sunlight have blown-out highlights that gleam brilliantly, and then look at the same scene in the original Half-Life 2, where that object would look flatly-lit and fake. The "non-HDR" looks more fake because the dynamic range is compressed so you can see all the detail everywhere, which also gives it that flat "game" look.

Of course, that last part is just my opinion - but I believe that in order to look more realistic, CGI needs to simulate the behavior of traditional cameras with a lower dynamic range (or that of your eyes before they've adjusted properly to bright/dim light). The everything-is-exposed-properly, compressed-dynamic-range look just appears fake to me, even though my eyes could probably perceive that range at the actual scene. I'm not sure why.

I take that part back; upon seeing some tests from June, IE9 does compare favorably with Chrome/Safari/Opera. I was basing my comment on some older tests I'd seen of IE9, wherein they were nowhere near as fast as the Webkit browsers.

Besides, do you really blame me for assuming a release of IE is going to be shit? :-)

I use Windows, and if I was using Linux I sure as hell wouldn't be on something like Fluxbox just because Firefox can't have an efficient UI like Chrome and Opera.

The menu bar doesn't exist in Firefox 4 without pressing Alt - all there is, is the menu button at the top-left, in the titlebar. A titlebar isn't necessary and is a waste of space, because the title is on the current tab anyway. That's one logical reason to put the tabs where the title and a bunch of empty space would be.

Another is that it's faster/easier to select tabs if they're against the top of the screen (assuming a maximized window) - because it doesn't require precise Y-axis movement to within a 30-pixel-tall space to choose a tab, you just slam your mouse to the top and make sure the X-coordinate is within the 150px or so that the tab takes up.

I don't use any toolbars - I just like more viewing space. There's literally nothing on the top bar except the menu button and close/minimize buttons - why not use that space for tabs like Chrome? The title of the tab is the same title that'd be in the titlebar anyway, so you don't really need a titlebar. And yeah, on netbooks, Firefox can be really annoying on some sites.

The main thing, however, is not even the screen space - it's the fact that it's even FASTER (despite your mouse traveling a smidge further) to have the tabs at the very top. This is because it doesn't require precise Y-axis movement to within a 30-pixel-tall space to choose a tab, you just slam your mouse to the top and make sure the X-coordinate is within the 150px or so that the tab takes up.

It's not about the mouse distance traveled - it in fact takes LESS time to pick tabs that are on top because you can slam your mouse to the top of the screen - you don't need to spend the extra time precisely choosing your Y coordinate, only the X. Same reason it's nice that in Windows, the close button (even though it doesn't physically touch it) can still be hit by slamming your mouse into the upper right of the screen. It's basically a gesture at that point, not a precise move and then click.