You have to try something.

1) Get drunk on dark liquor
2) Put on the song "Pick up the pieces" by Candy Dulfer. Loud.
3) Wear your 3D glasses
4) Play Supaplex

This will change your life forever.

Well I also believe that SLI is a Nvidia technology, I just checked and on ATI cards the equivalent was crossfire. I can't tell for sure which one it was, but this is more evidence to the fact that I've been using onboard vga adapters for quite a long time :-)

Most recent operating systems will take care of saving power when the machine is idle, it won't make a noticeable difference what cpu you pick. Look instead at storage: SSD use between 1/3 or 1/4 of the power used by spinners.

Also if you look at energy efficiency buy one of those smart powerbars that will turn off power in groups (e.g. switching off the speakers when the tv is powered off). Something like a LCG5. This will have a much higher impact on your power bill than cherry-picking computer components.

You don't get comfortable quick... Over the last 10 years the only time I've decided to upgrade a mobo videocard was during a drunken weekend when for some reason I felt ashamed of having an item with a 4.5 score on the Windows Experience Index utility - I went out and bought a pair of high-end Radeon (with the SLI thing). About $600 to get a 9.1 score.

Fans were noisy and I was annoyed each time I had to move the computer because I could never tell in which card I should plug the main monitor. But Youtube videos sure looked good.

The scene happens in the office of Twitpic.

The CEO comes back from a bathroom break and sees the light flashing on his phone. He checks his voicemail. There is a message from someone at Twitter asking him to call back.

The CEO instantly slams down a big red button that has been sitting on his desk since Day 1. Immediately, his closest collaborator, the COO, receives a cryptic Tweet: "it's happening!". So the COO runs to the cupboard, moves around a few boxes of microwave popcorn and poptarts, then finds a bottle of champagne that has been gathering dust for the last 5 years. He puts the bottle in the fridge, then runs around the office to ask everyone to immediately proceed to the conference room.

The whole team is sitting around the speakerphone. Most are running numbers in their head. 1 billion? 200 millions? 10 millions? Just like they do every night before falling asleep, they think about the house they will buy for their mom and how good they will feel about it. They think about the pool parties in Vegas. The orgies with rockstars and supermodels. Fast cars. Loose women.

Then the lawyer picks up. The team hold their breath. At first there is some confusion because the lawyer does not remember why he left a message, he has to go check his dayplanner. Everybody in the team is amazed about this. Some think that since buying a company is something so common that the lawyer can't keep track of potential acquisitions then it's a done deal and maybe they will get the money quickly. Maybe before Christmas. Maybe before the rent is due on October 1st.

Then the lawyer comes back on the line, and within 2 minutes the hopes and dreams of the team are crushed. They did not win the startup lottery. They failed.

Then one by one the team members leave the room, and the office. The CEO and the COO are alone in the room. But they refuse to give up. They open their laptop and go to www.whois.net. They try FacePic.com, GooglePic.com, and many other names. And when they finally get one, they decide it's time to "pivot". Fire everyone, create a new logo, spend a week to revamp the GUI. And then try to win the startup lottery again.

Apple market cap is about $618 billions. So they would need to find 551 billions to go private.

Dell buyout was about $25 billions. Last time I checked the setup was:
-Loan from banks: 50%
-Dell's company cash: 30%
-Loan from Microsoft: 10%
-Private equity (Silver Lake): 7%
-Michael Dell's own money: 3%

To achieve the same kind of setup, here is what it would mean for Apple:
-Loan from banks: 309 billions
-Apple's cash: 185 billions (3x what they have according to you)
-Loan from Microsoft (or other partner, provided Apple has any): 61 billions
-Private equity (Silver Lake) 43 billions
-Tim Cook's own money: 18 billions

Apple has a buyback program but it's not making a dent.

Not making a dent in what? Apples stock is at an all time high.

The purpose of a buyback program is to BUY BACK stock to progressively regain a higher % of ownership of the company. The higher the stock price, the lower the effect of the buyback. Apple spent about 44 billions to buy back some of its stock over the last year. But it did not make a huge difference.

I'm not sure what agenda you are talking about. Is that some kind of lame accusation of being involved in PR for one of the companies I mentioned? Because that's the typical response from fanbois and other zealots whenever someone is not bending over and praising their false idols.

Your emperor has no clothes, it's a greedy corporation with a lousy track record for security and no concern for their customers. Saying that is not a blasphemy or a PR operation, it's just the naked truth.

It's like you think that going private is a bad thing or is a sign of financial struggle. But it's quite the opposite; a company that goes public is basically borrowing money from a shitload of small investors, and giving away the control of the company to a group of board members elected by the investors. And from that point there is an ongoing conflict between the people in the company who want to work on long term projects and the investors who want to see the stock price go up and to receive higher dividends quarter after quarter.

Going private for a public company is difficult because the company needs the money to buy back all their stock in one big swoop, and they have to do that more or less at the current market price, which may be insanely higher than the amount of money the company got at their IPO. So the company needs to have tons of cash, a somehow realistic market cap (i.e how much money is needed to buy back the stock) and private investors who believe in the future of the company enough to pour billions in the operation.

So Apple has never been in a position to go private, even if they had wanted to. When the stock price was low the company had no cash and no investors would take the risk, and when the stock price started to skyrocket even with the good annual profit it was still too expensive. Apple has a buyback program but it's not making a dent. The stock price is way too high for the actual value of the company, and that does not mean the company is not making good products, it just means that investors have unrealistic growth expectations.

The Apple bubble will burst sooner or later. It won't be a bad thing because then maybe the company will be in a position to start innovating again, with less pressure from investors to deliver huge sales every quarter. Then maybe they will have the opportunity to do like Dell, but I doubt it because Apple never had the kind of cash Dell has.

Don't put iCloud in the same category as Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive. iCloud is a joke and people use it only because it's bundled with the iDevices and shoved down people's throat (like IE).

Apple has a culture of nonchalance and carelessness because they have a strong brand and a captive customer base. Shame on them for putting their users in a tough spot and not caring about it.

Most cloud providers offer a very secure hosting environment. Apple should do the right thing: forget their iCloud and build instead a partnership with a company that knows how to operate cloud services. Just like Netflix had the guts to pull the plug on their own infrastructure and leverage AWS.

Last week I broke my Nexus. As I was shopping for a new unlocked phone I was astonished by the price differences.

iPhone 5S: $780
Galaxy S5: $580
Nokia 1520: $500
Nexus 5: $350

Yet the actual hardware is not in line with the prices; as an example most of the non-Apple devices in that list have twice the RAM as the iPhone and a much more powerful chip (such as quadcore Snapdragon vs a basic dual-core A7). Or for devices with the same OS, the difference in hardware does not really make up for the difference in price.

For the record I ended up buying a refurb Samsung S4 for $200. It feels less elegant and more clumsy than a Nexus, and it took me a long time to get rid of the Samsung bloatware, but it does the job and it does not get as warm. And next time I buy a phone I will definitely have a look at the sub-$100 devices to see how things have evolved. Who needs a $800 phone? Even $500 feels absurd.

You don't know what you are talking about. Dell went private because they wanted to switch the company's focus on enterprise services and software, but the short-term agenda of shareholders was preventing them to do that and was forcing them to keep wasting energy trying to increase their PC sales.

Apple is facing the same problem. They have to deliver gigantic growth each quarter to please investors. That's why innovation has been stalled for so many years in that company, they have to sell and sell and sell - and if management can't deliver that, the board will find someone else that will. That happened in the past.

Dell was in a position to go private because they had a shitload of money and a low market cap. For Apple that's impossible because they don't have the kind of money needed to do that and their stock is immensely overpriced so they can't finance a buyout - they are like someone driving down a hill with no breaks and with the owner of the car screaming in their ear to go faster.

So your evidence that Apple makes environmentally friendly products is that Apple says so, and that Greenpeace (basically the greeners equivalent of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition) is singing their praise?

Here's the real thing (read more on http://www.naturalnews.com/031...):

Many large, multinational companies have operation facilities in China, including HP, Sony, Nokia, Samsung, and Toshiba. But among a list of 29 major companies that run facilities there, Apple turned out to be the worst overall, routinely evading inquiries from environmental groups about environmental pollution and other factory problems.

The report, issued by a group of 36 Chinese environmental groups, cites HP, BT, Alcatel-Lucent, Vodafone, Samsung, Toshiba, Sharp and Hitachi as among the best companies for both addressing environmental and workplace concerns, and working on specific ways to fix them. But at the bottom of the list were Nokia, LG, SingTel, Ericsson and Apple.

"Apple behaved differently from the other big brands and seemed totally complacent and unresponsive," said Ma Jun, author of the report and Director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, a Chinese non-governmental organization (NGO).

Before making this kind of statement, did you ever listen carefully at a Justin Bieber's song? Did you take a minute to read the lyrics and reflect on their meaning?

Haha just kidding. If I was not boycotting the mod system (which leads to a situation where someone saying that the iPhone is the best phone is voted "insightful") I would mod you up.

So Apple's share of a growing market is shrinking. That's exponentially worse. It means that as more and more people decide to buy phones, less and less choose Apple products. I don't see how this vindicates you, but logic was never the strong suit of Apple customers anyways.

Maybe you long for those days where being an Apple customer was special because the company's market share was in the low single digits - but don't worry, it's heading there fast.

I don't know where you get your information, probably on some SF local news media like techcrunch, but Samsung alone owns about 2/3 of the Android market. Which itself happens to be 85% of the smartphone market.

But of course while Apple's share keeps going down year after year, there is always a justification in the iCommunity, such as: oh people are just waiting for the iPhone5, or oh people are juste waiting for the iPhone6. Keep the dream alive if you want, but meanwhile the market has spoken. The iShare is about half what it was 5 years ago.