If the iPad hardware could be produced for less than $500 then everybody would be making iPad competitors for sub-$500, probably for sub-$400.

Well, according to isuppli the iPad 2's hardware costs $326.60.

To be fair, you still have to factor in Apple's own costs (hardware design, software, licensing costs and so on). There's no word on whether that would then exceed the $500. Some costs are shared across other devices, particularly the iPhone.

They're propping up one business arm with another, and that stinks of a monopoly.

It stinks of common business practice. Lots of businesses will use a stronger part to assist a weaker part - usually because the stronger part would suffer without other one.

Abusing a monopoly position to enable aggressive pricing in another segment would certainly be considered anticompetitive, and presumably illegal. What monopoly is it that you think Apple is abusing to prop up the iPad?

Steve

Apple devices are dirt cheap, these days the only people who don't have an iphone are those who don't want one.

iPhone=700 Euros. Top end android (galaxy S or HTC Desire) or maemo (N900)=450 euros

I think your prices may be a little out of date. Current prices in Germany in Euros are: iPhone 3G (8Gb) costs 519, 4G costs 629 (16Gb) or 739 (32Gb); N900 costs 369 (32Gb) from amazon.de. Android is as you say.

Your point still stands: Apple devices are definitely not dirt cheap. All of them are more expensive than their competition. It's nuts that a 32Gb iPhone costs twice the 32Gb N900.

-- Steve

For some reason, the fact that it's German gives me a little more credulity -- but not enough.

How about the fact that they charged up the Audi A2 once (not in 6 minutes though), and then drove 600km (375 miles) from München to Berlin? More info here: http://www.lekker-mobil.com/ (the site is in German).

The summary title is misleading. Just because the battery can be charged in 6 minutes from a suitable DC source, doesn't mean that anybody actually has that sort of kit about, or even that the car will have a suitable connector. I'm guessing you can charge it fully in less than 2 hours from a standard 32A 400V 3-phase AC supply - these are quite common in Germany, and the picture showing them charging the car looks like it has one of those.

The most interesting thing about this battery is not the mad charge time from some über-Goliath capacitor, it's the size/weight and efficiency of the thing.

-- Steve

A Mac Mini is just way too expensive to be abused as a streaming media player.

Or as a personal computer.

While someone modded this as 'Troll', it's unfortunately true.

The new Mac Mini is a very nice machine, but the price is just wrong. It's even worse in Europe. It's $699 in the US. The UK price (£649) after subtracting 17.5% tax and converting to USD (rate=1.55) is $856. WTF?

I was looking at buying a Mac Mini a couple of weeks ago. Then I called Dell, who offered me a slightly better spec'd machine for £250 ($387) less.

The description 'way too expensive' is quite accurate. The original Mac Mini was priced well. The new one definitely isn't.

-- Steve

USB under 2.4 is not as good as 2.6. I'm working on a device with a 2.4 kernel right now, and some things just don't work very well. Card readers are a problem - there's no notification of changes inside the reader (eg: plugging in a card). I can poll devices and find out that way, but then there's the next problem: the kernel crashes when unmounting any card in a reader, except the first. We will be moving to kernel 2.6, but that won't be with the current release. Oh well...

Your problems may also be related to the USB controller. My board is from Infineon (MIPS-32 CPU), and their USB controller is not good! We added the VIA chip, and that's much better - and supports more channels!

-- Steve

350 deg F = the temp at which to cook most things in the oven when in doubt

Ah.. so that's gas mark 7, then. Glad you cleared that up! They almost never display temperature in terms of gas marks, except on food packaging...

:-)

I'd love to have power management. I could finally find out things like how much charge is left in the battery, and I could enable CPU throttling and so on.

Unfortunately, the only way to make Linux boot on my (2 month old) laptop without causing a kernel panic is to disable ACPI. The kernel doesn't understand the ACPI tables, whereas Vista does (apparently XP too). It's not clear whether the problem lies with Phoenix or the kernel people, but it doesn't work. Can't even power off at shutdown. :-(

Fortunately, the Nvidia driver doesn't use ACPI for its power management, so the GPU throttling works just fine. Everything else works too, even the built-in webcam and WLAN!

-- Steve

I lug around those sawblades I find as long as I can, they're awesome weapons. I lugged one through pretty much all of Ravenholm in the original HL2.

Saw blade? Try Dog's ball! (The one you play with when you get the gravity gun.) Take care not to get it too wet, or hot, and you can take it down into the tunnels after Ravenholm, and at least as far as the car/beach. I'm not sure, but you can probably take it as far as Nova Prospekt. I prefer that to a saw blade...

You can take the friendly turrets with you too. The second siege only has 3, but adding the 2 from the first siege helps quite a bit. It makes a big difference having 5 extra in the teleporter room at the end of the level.

-- Steve

Freaking Nanny statism is getting under my skin.

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

ARBEIT MACHT FREI

And the caps filter sucks.

It sure does, Jurily

-- Steve

For those whining about the price of macs, go spec a computer that has equivalent hardware and equivalent software.

Except that's exactly what we did:

• Mac Mini (basic model), 2.0GHz, 1GB RAM, OSX, iLife etc etc: 599 US dollars.
• Mac Mini (basic model), 2.0GHz, 1GB RAM, OSX, iLife etc etc: 599 Euros (752 USD).

As you can see, we have two computers with equivalent hardware and equivalent software. Identical, even. Yet, one costs 25% more than the other.

The complaint was about prices in other markets. The US price ($599) is about 477 Euros, so a list price of 499 Euros would have been reasonable. There's no justification for what they did.

-- Steve

Mac Mini got its update but the price is absurd as well.

Too damn right!

It's priced at 599 US dollars, and at 599 Euros (for the cheaper one)... except that 599 Euros is well over 750 dollars. I'm sure there will always be price differences, but this is just plain idiotic. That's a price increase of 25%. I think it would actually be cheaper to buy direct from the US and pay shipping and import taxes!

-- Steve

Mine doesn't do that. Mind you, I have a separate history file per tty:

export HISTFILE=$HOME/.history.${tty##*/}

-- Steve

Unfortunately it can also be a problem in real-life, generally when I'm being sarcastic I sound and act exactly as if I wasn't

So, you're English?

I've noticed that the English like to be very straight-faced when being sarcastic, and if you don't get it they'll say more and more outrageous things just to see how far they can go before you cotton on.

Here in Germany they don't use sarcasm so much, but I think that's OK. Do you really want your car made by a bunch of clowns?

A friend (American) complained to me that when he was in London and asked people if they knew the time, they said, "Yes." I had to explain to him about the differences in humour and humor, and that using straight-faced humour against people who are unlikely to get it is a national sport.

-- Steve