aether said:
I see prices going up for one purpose: profit, and the pleasing of
shareholders (one and the same)
The bigwig shareholders should just be shot. These are men who are
already million and billionaires many times over, but enough is never
enough for them. Such people should be removed from the planet.
Chairman Mao proposed a similar theory as you're expressing here.
Chairman Mao believed that essentially 95% of the people were
"good", meaning inherently altruistic, and 5% of the people were
inherently "bad", meaning greedy and thus incompatible with the
ideals of communism. Chairman Mao believed that you just had to
kill the 5% of the "bad" people, and the rest of the "good" people
can form an ideal communist system.
Unfortunately, Chairman Mao's theories were put into practice,
and millions of people were killed.
The prices will continue to rise. Eventually, very few people will be
able to afford top of the line computers. Everyone else will be using
old hardware.
A friend of mine and I actually talked about processor development
in terms of the capitalist/communist system.
In terms of a communist system, the central planning commision
dictated that this year, Intel's fabs will produce 70 million 80386
processors, and AMD will produce 30 million 80386 processors.
There is no need to produce faster processors, GUI's or GPU's.
Playing games is not productive to the greater glory of the state.
The price of each processor has been set at $40. Next year, the
production quota will be increased by 5%, and costs will be reduced
by 10%. Finally, the engineer that designed the faulty multiplier in
the 80387 MathCo has been determined to be an enemy of the state,
and he will be shot as a warning to all sabateurs.