I am very impressed with your 21 inch speed boat. Do you have a tow bar set up for some hard core wakeboarding? Sorry for being pedantic, couldn't resist. Side note, I'd prefer the lady who would want to work on said hot car rather than ride in it or play video games.

Is that a mac I see i the background?

Making a copy of digital information is either lossless or the copy is in error. The making of an analog copy is lossy due to any or all of thermal, electrical, and mechanical noise. The analog copy is also lossy due to bandwidth limits and nonlinearities of the components of the analog system.

Improperly designed hardware really can catch fire. Maybe all the computers in Hollywood have pentium 4 CPUs and Tesla GPUs with a few Sony Li ion batteries thrown in to give it that extra spark.

Once you get an iPod/iPhone/iMac/mac mini "open" it is actually very easy to service the parts. The smaller devices use little ZIF ribbons that make it fairly easy, the computers use interfaces that are also easy to figure out even if you've never serviced your own computer. Had apple not made it hard to open these devices there would be a lot more people buying replacement parts to fix these devices rather than shelling out for new ones. Apple could have easily kept the same form factors and made these devices user serviceable, it just means there are a couple screws on those shiny back plates.

If you're going to do anything in the way of signal processing you will need much more advanced math skills. You're going to need to know calculus, fourier transforms, laplace transforms along with their discrete versions (dft, fft, z). These are extremely useful, powerful mathematical techniques for analyzing data. The mathematics behind them are amazing and elegant. Examples of their use include the enabling of the 'digital' content age through video and audio compression. That's just one example, they can be used to analyze any data stream. It is amazing using DSP to find data in a sea of noise.

TDP is thermal design power. It is the number that CPU vendors give to system builders to let them know the max power consumption of the processor so that thermal solutions can be properly designed. If the CPU goes beyond the TDP the system will power off unless there is lots of headroom in the thermal solution.

Having worked on these processors at the circuit level(*) I can tell you that your '100W over TDP' number is rubbish.

If you'd like to know more about what happens when chip vendors fudge on this "invalid metric" search for "nvidia bumpgate". If our chips were running at 100W over spec'd TDP we'd have a lot of very unhappy customers.

* yes, I'm an engineer at AMD and I designed major components on the parts discussed ITFA. I did my time at Intel as well.

There's one truly Killer App that's not on there - Mac OS X. The low-level APIs use OpenGL for hardware acceleration on supported GPUs (pretty much any discrete GPU in a late model Mac).

http://developer.apple.com/macosx/architecture/index.html
http://developer.apple.com/graphicsimaging/opengl/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_Image