On Tue, Mar 01, 2005 at 07:48:25PM -0800, Carl Lowenstein wrote: > On Tue, 1 Mar 2005 15:21:50 -0800, Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Friday 25 February 2005 03:23 pm, Randall Shimizu wrote: > > > Athlon 64 DTR (Laptop processor) 1gb memory limitations............??? > > > > Did a bit of poking around, and found that Tadpole machines > > (UltraSPARC-based Solaris notebooks) are really the only ones around that > > support more than 2GB. They even had a dual-CPU, dual-HD monster that > > would take 16GB ram. Probably cost more than a new car, though. > > > > Gregory > > Over the years (40-ish) that I have been buying both cars and > computers, I have observed the price of cars to go up by perhaps a > factor of 20, > while the price of computers has gone down by about the same factor.. > But the computers of today are much more capable, and the cars are > much more gadgety and less emission-prone. > > Totally irrelevant. > > carl
Not so much irrelevant as kooler material. I rather imagine that an analysis would show that the major difference has been the ability to achieve ever greater efficiencies in ICs, not available in mechanical devices like engines. Even so, when adjusted for inflation, I would expect that the cost of a no-frills low end car today would be comparable or even less than that of a Model T. The only force that would drive up the real costs of manufactured goods is the ever increasing "rent," that is, the component of the item's cost that goes to land. Historically in hard money economies with an equitable tax base, there is a gradual deflation, that is, money gradually becomes more powerful. This encourages savings and investment. In a debt-based economy with regressive taxes (like our present mess), there is steady inflation and no savings. Moralists like to blame the current low savings rate on the self-indulgence of the Baby Boomers, but when you have less buying power at the end of each year on the money in your savings account, it doesn't make much sense to put money into it unless you're trying to build up a short-term nut like a house down payment. -- Lan Barnes [EMAIL PROTECTED] Linux Guy, SCM Specialist 858-354-0616 -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
