Got My MacbookPro

[syntheticrhyme]

Alright, i actually was lucky enough to register the domain www.macbookpro.com and I can't wait to actually pick the actual mackbook and toss my g4 in the trash.

Does anyone know the actual shipping day or has anyone received their's yet?

[A LaMere]

I for one,... am surprised you were able to pick that domain name up.

Kudos!

-Aaron

[fifthcircle]

Acording to the folks at the Santa Monica, CA Apple Store, the new Macs probably won't ship until Late Feb or March. They aren't even allowed to take orders on them yet.

--Ben

[Dopamine]

So what do you want to do with the site?

[ExistanceMusic]

my guess is trade it for the aformentioned MacBookPro, a type of "offer they can't refuse"?

If they say no, you could always re-direct it to AMD.com or microsoft.com!

[Geert van den Berg]

Cool you got the domain, but don't you think that if they really wanted to use that domain they wouldn't already have it by now?

Also I think nowadays companies can go to court if someone has a domain that has nothing to do with their own business. I don't say they will, but if it brings bad publicity to them, they might.

[6strings]

Yeah, I wouldn't invest much time into that site. Look who owns powerbook.com. I imagine you'll get a knock on your door soon enough...

[syntheticrhyme]

I acutually got into the domain business by accident (i'm a full time producer/engineer/musician) Believe it or not, domains are a better investment than any stocks or real estate, because the value just goes up. The current domain Macbookpro.com is generating revenue as we speak. Basically, people searching for this new laptop end up on my domain parking page, when they don't find what they are looking for, they click on one of the advertisements and we make a percentage of the revenue. A few months ago, the name Invention.com sold on Ebay for $ 650,000 That name was generating $15,000 per month. in revenue sharing. (i wish it was mine)

If anyone is looking for a foolproof investment, domains are the way to go. You can register one for about $8, and if the name is great, it can be sold for thousands in 2-3 years

Check out this, someone on ebay is selling BS.net (the current bid is 15,000

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...MEWA%3AIT&rd=1

[Jonboy79]

Well you really shouldn't say stupid shit like domain names are a better investment than real estate. My family has been in the real estate business for 30 years and we've NEVER lost money or broken even on a house we've owned more than two years. We ALWAYS make a profit when we buy and sell our own homes. For example I sold a two story to a gentleman last year, probably closer to a year and a half, for 179 thousand dollars. He sold it this october for 215 thousand. He basically made over thirty grand by living in a house for a year. Here's another example. My aunt purchased a 2 bedroom 800 sq ft. house in Orange County California for 32 grand in 1973. 30 years later she sold the house for 780 grand. Thats nearly a three quarter million dollar profit. Yes some domanin names might do that and some stocks, but every single house built in her area is worth that much, every home in that area(with very few exceptions) has risen at equal pace to my aunts home, that BTW backed right up to a freeway. So yes domain names can be a good investment, but real estate(as long as you purchase with sound mind) is an almost guarenteed positive investment.

[syntheticrhyme]

I agree Johnboy, you have to know what your buying as with any business. But if you want to talk return on your investment, i've bought one domain for $6.19 (registration cost) and sold it for $905 a week later. Similarly, I bought another one for $6.19 , and sold it a week later for $500 As you can see, as far as markup is concerned, it is a huge percentage even though the sales are small. But as with any business, you have to know what you are doing (especially in the competitive domain business)

[T_R_S]

Here is some news about dual core chips. I am gald I waited for a G5 stuff always seems to get better after a couple of rev's
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


The Intel dual core chip was rushed on a hastily built design to beat AMD's dual core chip to market says an Intel engineer. The beans were spilt at the Hot Chip conference in Palo Alto, California and blogs are already abuzz about it...and whether the engineer will have a job for much longer.

PCWorld is reporting that, following the Intel's realization that its single-core processors had hit a wall, Intel engineers plunged headlong into designing the Smithfield dual-core chip in 2004, but they faced numerous challenges in getting that chip to market, according to Jonathan Douglas, a principal engineer in Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, which makes chips for office desktops and servers.

"We faced many challenges from taking a design team focused on making the highest-performing processors possible to one focused on multicore designs," Douglas said in a presentation on Intel's Pentium D 800 series desktop chips and the forthcoming Paxville server chip, both of which are based on the Smithfield core.
Intel was unable to design a new memory bus in time for the dual-core chip, so it kept the same bus structure that older Pentium 4 chips used, Douglas said at the conference at Stanford University. This bus could support two separate single-core processors, but it was far less efficient than either the dual-independent buses that will appear on the Paxville processors or the integrated memory controller used on AMD's chips. The memory bus or front-side bus on Intel's chips is used to connect the processor to memory.

All of Intel's testing tools and processes had been designed for single-core chips, Douglas said. As a result, the company had to quickly devise a new testing methodology for dual-core chips that could measure the connections between both cores.

In addition, engineers had to design a new package for the Pentium D chips that could accommodate both cores. "We're putting two cores in one package; it's like trying to fit into the pair of pants you saved from college," Douglas said.

Intel would have preferred to design a package that put two pieces of silicon in a single package, like the design that will be used for a future desktop chip called Presler, but its packaging team simply didn't have time to get that in place for Smithfield, Douglas said.

The company's Pentium D processors consist of two Pentium 4 cores placed closely together on a single silicon die. The design creates some problems, since dual-core processors must have some logic that coordinates the actions of both cores, and those transistors must go somewhere in an already small package, Douglas said. This complication led to signaling problems that needed to be overcome, he said.

Intel also had to design special thermal diodes into the chip to closely monitor the heat emitted by the combination of two fast processor cores, Douglas said.

Ultimately, Intel completed the Smithfield processor core in nine months, Douglas said. By Intel's standards, that is an extremely short development time for a major processor design, said Kevin Krewell, editor in chief of The Microprocessor Report in San Jose, California.

"Most designs take years," Krewell said. "But it was very important for them to get back in the game and have a road map."

Short Timeline

Intel began to put together the Smithfield project around the time it publicly announced (in May 2004) plans to cancel two future single-core designs and concentrate on multicore chips. The company realized that wringing more clock speed out of its single-core designs would require a significant engineering effort to deal with the excessive heat given off by such chips.

At the time, AMD had already started work on a dual-core version of its Opteron server processor, which it subsequently demonstrated in September of that year. AMD unveiled its dual-core Opteron chip in April, a few days after Intel launched Smithfield. AMD has since released dual-core desktop chips.

One reason for Intel's aggressive schedule for developing Smithfield was the company's need to respond to AMD's actions, Douglas said, without mentioning AMD by name. "We needed a competitive response. We were behind," he said.

Despite the rush, Smithfield was good enough to get Intel into the dual-core era, Krewell said. "It's not an optimal solution, but it's a viable solution. It works, and it works reasonably well," he said.

Intel took a little more time designing the server version of Smithfield, known as Paxville, Douglas said. For instance, the company addressed the bus inefficiencies by designing Paxville to use dual-independent front-side buses. Also, the more sophisticated package was available in time for Paxville, reducing the chip's power consumption, he said.

Paxville will be released ahead of schedule later this year in separate versions for two-way servers and for servers with four or more processors. Though Intel had originally expected to release the chip in 2006, it announced Monday that it will get Paxville out the door in the second half of this year. Another dual-core server processor, code-named Dempsey, will be released in the first quarter of 2006.

Future multicore designs will present additional challenges, Douglas said. Point-to-point buses and integrated memory controllers have been prominent features of other multicore designs, such as Opteron and the Cell processor. These designs help improve performance, but they require a larger number of pins to deliver electricity into the processor, and that can hurt yields, he said.