....shit tastes good does not mean it does.

No, you are incorrect. You are talking about stacked gates. That is significantly different than what I am talking about which is making entire stacked devices where you have a second level of additional devices including sources and drains as well as gates. Work has been tried with amorphous silicon with mixed results, no of which amount to much.

You are correct in that the power density issue trumps all other concerns.

And in the end economic issues will trump everything.

Making 3D chips is the holy grail of semiconductor processing but is still beyond reach. They've not been able to lay down a single crystal second layer to make your stacked chip. They have tried using amorphous silicon but the devices are not near as good so there is no point.

We are already seeing the outcrop of all of this, as next years machines are not necessarily 2x the performance at the same cost. I really think that money would be better spent helping all of you coders out there in creating a language/compiler programing paradigm that can use 12 threads efficiently for something beyond rendering GTA. I certainly don't have the answer and given that that problem has not been solved yet, neither does anybody else at this time.

Its a very very hard problem. It is going to be interesting here in the next few years. If nothing changes, your going to have to start becoming accustom to the fact that next years PC is going to cost you MORE not less and thats really going to suck.

Oh, thats right.... and when you get SQL server you just go out to your local store and buy a copy of Windows install it on your machine and then you go buy your copy of SQL server and install that.

Oh darn, that's not right you buy Windows SQL server and it is sold as an OS with SQL server built in.

Ok but when you are looking at TAM (Thats called Total Available Market) you certainly count the number of people with blue eyes and divide by two right? No.... thats not right. It's a subset of the PC market and is allocated to the number of server machines sold worldwide and is part of the total OS seats available.

Its an OS. It is sold from the group that creates OS's. It's market and TAM is part of the OS market.

None of you are looking at the big picture. Microsoft started out selling operating systems quickly followed by Office products. The bulk of their revenue and profit today is from operating systems ( I would include Exchange and SQL in the lot) and Office products. They name on the box may be different but at its core what they sell today is basically what the sold when they started.

Apple started selling only computers, then printers, then anything Coke man and Amelio could think of and then Jobs had the presence of mind to see that portable devices would enable his end game which is content and services. Drastically different. Jobs he pushed to create the iPod and then had the balls to kill it now with the iPhone. He recognized that to survive you have to eat your own. Microsoft OTOH crippled all of its previous tablet entries because the Office GM did not want to port Office to Pen OS. Pen OS was killed because it was viewed as a threat to Windows. You have massive internal turf wars inside Microsoft that prevent any real innovation and at the top they reinforce this behavior. I stand by what I said. If Microsoft does not change they will be history.

Seriously dude, just because you can list it does not mean any of those contribute to any relevant (profitable) revenue. I would lump SQL under Windows.

Noise, just like I said.

2 product lines...

Windows
Office

Every thing else they make is either a looser wrt revenue & profit - Xbox, zune, et. al.

or just noise.

It is exactly the same thinking that killed DEC, killed DG, killed "enter name", companies that only see a market from the perspective of what they currently manufacture.

Like them or not, contrast the two companies, Apple and Microsoft and where they have come from and what they currently make. Apples main revenue stream did not exist when Apple was formed. Microsoft is still a 2 product company and gets its revenue from the same 2 product lines they started with. They are a "deer in the headlights". They can't think outside of what brings in their current revenue. The concept of killing your own so you can grow into new markets is a totally foreign concept, and IMHO, will kill them in the end if they don't learn to change.

They seriously don't get it. The very statement that it will be running a derivative of Win7 says that they are doomed from the start. Actually, not that Win7 is bad, on the contrary even as a MacFanBoy I like Win7 but it's not the right OS for a tablet platform. They keep trying to shoehorn the same thing to be a one OS meets all. They have no ability to step back and say what does the market need and what is the solution the users needs. All they seem to be able to do is ask "What is the problem and how can we solve it with Windows?". The concept of thinking outside the box simply does not exist in Redmond. Really sad as I'm sure at the worker level there are a ton of very smart, all be it ,very frustrated software engineers.

How about 3.2Gbit/s vs 800Mbit/s for starters.....

That's the point. I've just priced it and I can spend $2500 and get a 3.2Ghz Quad core with 12Gb Ram, 2Tb SATA III HD's, USB 3.0, FW800 and an NVIDIA FX3800. So why should I spend $6k for a Mac?

I run Maya, FCP, Adobe Master Suite. I am a one person shop. I've gone back and forth between Win and Mac for the past 25 years and very knowledgeable on both systems. I have Shake but it is dead. Apple bought it and killed it. I compose using Toxik which comes with Maya. Most, if not all, available plug-ins for Maya run under Windows. Only some run under Mac. A critical one I currently use only runs under windows. I currently run under bootcamp so I can use that plug-in. Rendering time, especially in HD is a HUGE factor for my workflow. The speed difference between Premier Pro running their Mercury engine on a NVidia card vs FCP plodding along on my Mac is somewhere between 15 to 20 X. This is not trivial. Premier Pro is not quite as nice as FCP. I've used both and I know what they both can do but at that much price/performance tradeoff you can't ignore it.

As far as scanning, I have AV on my WIn 7 side but I don't get email or surf the web on Windows except to get upgrades and support. I know where to go and what to do and not do. I can scan at night and there is no impact to me.

Mac's are nice but quite frankly, the writing is appearing on the wall. I really don't think Apple much cares about that desktop market. The % of sales and profit to Apple is in the round off error of their annual report. If I was Job's I'd have killed it a while a go. I'm a Fan of Macs but in the end I need to get my work done. I'm not going to get Mac's just because their Mac's. They need to justify their existence to my bottom line and my production workflow. At the current direction and price-point I'm saying there needs to be some serious consideration of alternative options.

I love Linux but I've done the VM and Wine bit and it's a joke when it comes to real 3D and video production. I have to run native and I have to have all my apps available to me all the time and I don't want it across a gaggle of machines. I use Linux servers for farm rendering and that works great. For desktop apps, no.

Yea, but I need Adobe in my workflow. No way around it. Dual booting sucks. Win 7 is not near as sucky as previous versions of Windows and my video workflow in HD would scream with the new Premium Pro and an NVidia card. I will wait to see what the new FCP looks like but if it is the rumored iMovie on roids that will be the final nail in the Apple coffin for me as far as professional workstations.

Hey, I'm a Apple Fanboy but this is just a screw job. No SATA III, No USB 3.0 ????

I need a good platform for my 3D work and was hoping that there might be something making the new MacPro's worth waiting for but not this.

Just priced a nice Win 7 system from Newegg and me thinks for work I'm switching back. This is just absurd.

You are 'mad' if you don't think that Jackson and crew did a fucking phenomenal job with the LOTR trilogy. One doesn't just walk into a multimillion dollar movie with a book written 50 years ago, which is sometimes terribly depressing and obtuse, and faithfully recreate every scene to placate a select few who only take gospel from the original creator of the yarn. Middle-earth belongs to all of us now, not just Tolkien. He had to throw in some comic relief, a more explicit and passionate love story, and some teen-appeal to add some lightheartedness to the yarn. It's just too depressing and dry most of the time to be a good movie. There's a reason screenwriters have a job. Most books are pure crap when interpreted directly as scripts. In summary, if you think that he did an "ok" job, I expect that you are massively disappointed with all modern cinema, including independent films. The only thing I would expect you to enjoy are documentaries, and only when "that bugger with the voice-overs isn't talking".