But why would I choose to run a crappy OS with even more crap on it?
Take my current XP installation - I'm down to less than 10 services. The default was 29. I could go lower, probably down to 7 in my case, but I like the convenience of a couple of services, like the DHCP client.
but, with just a group of people and a farce of interactions that have no bearing on any story anyone wants to see, you get a soap.
As for BSG, I waver between wanting to see it and just dropping it all together. Last season's ending succeeded in making me want to see this season's opener. My fear is though, that'll they'll drag this out with irrelevant personal stories for 3 or 4 episodes.
I generally don't care about a single character's "Oh my god, what am I going to do? What decision am I going to make? A (that is risky but may give me a way out) or B (which will probably be safer, but will make me a weaslely little runt)? It's always A.
DS9 just never got better during the first few seasons, and was easily one of the most boring shows on TV. In the Trek universe, it might only be surpassed by the Wil Crusher TNG season. Thankfully it was saved by the return of mom Beverly and the resulting diminishing of Wil's role - I eagerly and, as it turned out, vainly awaited some exceptionally cool death for Wil. I still have hope in a future movie that will surely come (don't disillusion me;). Back to the soap opera known as DS9, the Klingon war thing looked cool, but I just couldn't get over the irrelevant "personal side bars" that kept interrupting a pretty cool story.
The reason Enterprise sucked started with the theme song, and continued with its ridiculously heavy moralizing "plots". It actually got decent in the end, but by then almost everyone, including me, had lost interest. Now that it's out on DVD, I may get the last couple of seasons and see if the story really was any good. (I tuned back in near the end, and went wow, they improved it - still have that insipid theme song though):.
The cool thing about STTOS was the fact that it addressed a massive void in offerings when it was made. If you look back at the original Twilight Zones, they weren't well acted either, but both are still very watchable none the less. Not many of today's shows can say that. ("Reality TV"? Who's going to watch that in 2 years, much less 10?)
BTW, that's a classic reverse of the pump and dump scheme, berate and buy. Take a look at IBM's choice for server hardware, followed by Sun, and HP. Do you think that these guys are all wrong? Or could it possibly, just possibly, be that analysts' primary job is to cause churn in the market, as most are paid by trading houses? Personally, if an analyst is screaming "buy buy buy" it's time to "sell sell sell" and possibly sell short. NOTE: this is personal opinon only, for financial advice pick your poison.
Seriously, I've been looking for Woodcrest benchmarks, and have found zilch. I've suspected that because Core 2 only sees major gains from 1P systems, they've concentrated on the 1P solution marketing blitz, to get the most bang for their buck. After all, if benchmarks come out that 2P systems perform only 50% better than a 1P system, and AMD's is almsot 90% (or whatever), that's going to remove a lot of zing from their marketing blitz.
what's funny about that is that AMD beat Intel to the punch, and as far as multi-core goes, will probably lead Intel again in all aspects by mid 2007 at the latest. (They apparently still lead in the multi-CPU, as witnessed by IBM's switch to Opteron)
I'm not so sure that games are going to drive new PC sales in the near future, mainly because dual core machines have been out a while and most games are still single-threaded. Why? Because multi-threading is hard compared to single-threading, if you want any meaningful gains. And just look at the large number of bugs in the relatively simple single-threaded games out there. (As compared to multi-threaded applications)
The last nail in the coffin of games driving PC purchases: all games are currently GPU limited, not CPU limited. With top of the line graphics cards hovering around $500, or almost $1K for SLI (and SLI missing from almost all current Conroe offerings), I doubt people are going to be buying PCs. The gaming enthusiasts will pick up a SLI capable board if they don't already own one, for the current top of the line CPU and then spend the remainder of their cash on a SLI setup. (I'm just guessing here.:)
Vista will live, the same way that XP lives, albeit slightly slower. Corporations aren't going to go Vista for a while, some are barely just now rolling out XP. Most home users in the US have a PC, and many of those aren't going to go buy a new one. (Just look at Dell's forecast for confirmation of that statement)
Where I see people buying new PC's, or parts to BIY, is the geek community who are either interested in pure speed of their games/applications (most of which will run faster on a tuned XP configuration) or the Linux/alternate OS crowd, to whom Vista is as relevant as a hat to a dog. Of course, there's the ever increasingly popular Apple offerings, if you're going to have to learn a whole new interface anyways, why not go with one that's been critically reviewed, and comes in the slickest and sleekest packaging known?
Anything that helps OpenGL and provides drivers for it will be welcome. May it prod developers to write more OpenGL games (mainly) and thus make porting easier.
K8L's modular, on-board, dual-channel memory controllers and 1,600MHz Hypertransport bus are the sort of incremental improvements you might expect, but AMD is also taking up a bunch of big-iron features to carry x86 way past its Intel roots. K8L will feature pooled Level 3 cache, a feature that x86 servers have needed from the start. The Hypertransport bus is getting a kick to Hypertransport 3, which is capable of handling 5.2 billion transactions per second. Remember, like K8, K8L will have multiple Hypertransport channels on each CPU. And you haven't heard the half of it.
Sounds like a little more than incremental improvements.
AMD is still running. Let's wait to see 2P benchmarks before stating Intel is going to make any headway in 2P market share.
As for architecture - Conroe is brand new, AMD 64 more than 2 years old. AMD is working on their next gen, it'll be out in about 6 months. They weren't losing marketshare, so didn't have to do a damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead release of their tech.
Oh, the other cool thing? Buy an AM2 board today, upgrade in 6 months.:)
I have yet to see a benchmark of a 2P Intel system. Until we do, I don't think Intel's getting anything "back". They've made a mark with Conroe, but I'm still going to buy an AMD system, mainly because it's significantly less, and appears to remain that way for the next 6 months at least. Second reason - much better and mature motherboards. I don't want to swap $200 MBs a few times, which usually occurs with the newest cutting edge tech that hasn't had a shakeout yet.
and the answer appears to be, at the moment, unknown. Woodcrest benchmarks with 2P systems aren't out yet. And therein lies the big question. So Intel manages to smoke sharing an L2 cache with an external memory controller. Great. What happens when there's 2 CPUs contending for that one resource? I predict scalablity issues, otherwise Intel would have gone out with bells on for this one.
I think Conroe's advantage is really only apparent in 1P solutions, and thus, to get the biggest mindshare/perception shift, that's what Intel's pushing.
Conroe is an impressive single chip solution, and I'm looking forward to AMD's counter.
Actually, I kinda liked VMS's built in versioning. Then again, it was the first mini-mainframe I worked with, and it was a welcome change from DOS. Heck, VMS's versioning saved my arse more than once, and I recall how I always wished my MS os would do the same thing. (OK, it wasn't limited to only MS OSes, but it was definitely the first, as there were few other options during this time period.)
You're still missing the point - ActiveX doesn't have a sandbox - once you agree - it's got total freedom to do anything in your system, whether you're admin or not (via the numerous security holes)
Both removing and restoring IE is risky and difficult. IE is complex with extensive hooks built into Windows, for efficiency and functionality. Thus unplugging it from your system may impact Internet connectivity, Windows functionality, and break functionality in Microsoft Office and non-MS products.
IE is more than a browser, it is the foundation for Internet functionality in Windows.
So, if all the above is true, how are parts of IE not being pre-loaded by Windows?
I give you the challenge to find the answers if you really don't know, it is up to you to find out who is the nutball, I am not here to spoon feed you programming or process and threads 101...
In simple words - IExplore.exe is a process, it's isolated, that true. And that's apparently all you know. IExplore.exe depends upon numerous DLLs, which, wait for it..... are already loaded in memory by... wait for it... the OS.... applause.
Hopefully the lightbulb above your head got at least half a watt after reading that.
I run mine for weeks at a time, if the machine's up, generally the browser's up. I tend to not reboot or log out unless forced to. Why restart the browser each time you want to visit a page (considering I do that up to several hundred times a day - I develop web applications after all complete with running appservers and DBs, among other things)?
As for FF using so much memory - I'd rather have the speed of flipping through pages than "saving" 100MB of RAM. Then again, I'm running with 2GB, of which roughly 500MB is free at any particular moment. I'm not RAM limited, and for $130 or so neither should anyone else.
Your point is good, but you need to add the clause:
Describe your process with the minimum detail necessary.
ISO9000 isn't about adhering to any particular process, it's about fully documenting your processes and deviations from that process. You get certified by an auditor coming in and comfirming that your processes are adequately documented.
How does this help software? It prevents that "brilliant" new marketing VP from coming in and demanding, simply demanding, that you add targeted customer content based on customer data to your website for next week's release, damn it all. Just point him to the process and tell him he needs to file form 112, form 5134, and then get forms 32, 55, and 101 signed by the CEO for an "emergency feature addition" as defined in our process documentation. If they don't get the picture, they will by the time they get the docs filled out.
How does it hurt software? When some twit decides that every aspect of software development, from "how to write a method" to white space in comments needs to be documented, never mind that every class needs to be instantiated by Spring.
Too much detail will kill a company. ISO9000 isn't about minutae, unless you make it so.
ActiveX - automatically install a virus on your PC with no feedback. Yes, they've hamstrung it some, but that's still possible should you reduce your "security" settings so that you can run an ActiveX control. There's no effective sandbox around ActiveX.
Java Applets - from what I recall - not possible in general to elevate permissions when run within a browser. You can download a Java app and then run it. But within the sandbox of the browser, unless something got seriously broken recently, I don't believe you can even write to local disks or any of a number of other things you'd like to do (reflection doesn't work either).
FF extensions - you install them, they're not required to visit sites, as far as I know. In general, they make a certain task easier, or possible, and not necessarily what a web author wants either (Flashblock and adblock come to mind:). Plugins such as Flash and Adobe Reader are an unfortunate requirement for some sites.
You'd figure. As far as I know, they do not. They do separate header information and body text and attachments (Outlook/Exchange). It's why certain MIME operations don't work well with Outlook/Exchange.
Actually, what I find irritating is that the server doesn't remember what you've done on the client when you hop client to client. I get to see a mail message as unread at least twice, and sometimes as often as 4 times. Mail management (client and server) is wholly inadequate, no matter what you use.
You glossed over the one thing I mentioned about presorting etc: manual tagging/flagging/etc of specific data.
The folder paradigm works for me with mailing lists and the like, as you mentioned. Actually, in my case, that group of friends is like a mailing list, it just wasn't an official one.
The reason you want folders is because searches generally start at some folder, and search through it's contents, including subfolders. This is a scalability/performance issue. Ideally, your mail client would categorize all mail by sender and by To/CC recipients transparently. (There's no need for you to have to do this manually, in my book, only if you want to exclude some group(s) from your inbox, e.g., the mailing list issue.:)
As for the hardware issues: those are all part of any system. Exchange corruption is a function of Exchange more than anything else. I'm not familiar with the latest 6.0 version, but prior versions sucked rocks once the mail DBs got "big". If you're effectively the sole user of your own exchange box, it's not such a big deal, but your mail still gets mangled. I wouldn't suggest it. As for security, I generally keep 2 copies on separate HDs, plus once a month DVD burns. That seems to do everything I need in the way of backups/reliability, etc. Plus, it's my mail, and it makes it harder for others to read since it's not out on some vendor's mail system. (No need to make it any easier for them to scan stuff that's none of their business in the first place)
Traditional mail programs cause users to sort into folders, Gmail says heck with that, here is your data, which piece did you want? Sure, no problem, here it is.
I cannot agree with this yet, purely because I am still below 1000 messages on GMail. However, I have had roughly 400MB of email in roughly 100K messages on an exchange/Outlook system, and search be damned, you have to organize that junk somehow.
Let me summarize that into one small example - you have 6+ years of email in this store, with a small group of friends comprising probably 25% of the messages. Now, you're looking for, say, a particular beer recipe that "Mike" sent you. Problem is, Mike sent you/the group over 500 recipes, and probably 10% of those had discussion among the group, with modifications, etc. So, let's say, for the sake of argument, that there are now 750 messages with recipes in them.
How are you going to find it with search? Look for "beer" - that's no good. "hops"? In this case, that's almost every recipe. "Good"? Well, what if someone used the ever clever "bad" to mean "good"? Look for "bad". Wait, there are at least 50% of those emails with "bad" in them, because they were failures.
I think you get the idea - search, in and of itself, is not a substitute for manually managing your email. Flagging those of interest helps significantly. Then you can search flagged messages only - greatly reducing the subset. Or, those in the "good" folder and flagged (perhaps you use flags for "exceptional"?)
If you think this is ridiculous, I bought a Mac 1.2 years ago. It currently has about 20K emails on it, from several email accounts (not including my gmail or yahoo accounts) after having a large number deleted. Participating in just 4 listserv groups does that to a mailbox. I tend not to delete many of those. Mac's Mail 2.0 program, btw, does a great job of searching your mail (via Spotlight). You still want it somewhat managed, regardless.
Heck any system that involves manual tagging of data sucks.
But, I don't know of a single system that doesn't require some sort of manual tagging to actually be useful when scaled.
As for the DBs I mentioned - the TB+ one was available to users.
I also don't disagree with you on the need to do some of this automatically. Your example for pictures is nice - photo settings can already be read to indicate whether the picture was taken in high or low-light conditions, giving some indication about indoor vs outdoor or night-time vs day-time possibilities. There's also face recognition software that will eventually make it's way into our photo management software, and allow us to tag face A as "Mom", and automatically have all pics with face A tagged with "Mom", or the new car, or have cars automatically categorized (since that's a pretty small set), your house, dog, etc. That will make it easier, but you'll still have to tag it as "Vacation in Maui" until GPS gets built in, in which case you'll still have to tag it as "Vacation". That might be easier though, since a date range and location provided by GPS will do what you need.
I look forward to the day of less work for me. I have about 3000 pictures just from the last year and a half I'm still working on, and probably that many more in negatives that need to be scanned and entered. It's just not a fun job to do manually. Note the disparity in number of pictures - the negatives span 20+ years, the digitals only 1.5 years, yet I've already got more digital pics than film pics. I really do like my digital cameras.
I guess it depends upon whom you do business with. I've had 3 different cell companies, and all three had month to month plans if you wanted them, or start with 1 year contracts, with month to month or new contracts afterwards. Sometimes the month to month winds up being more expensive. It's your choice.
I just checked their specs (warning - pdf) and their current bottom of the line box is a pure PC. No ASICs. I don't think they had any ASICs 7 years ago, although I cannot confirm that.
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But why would I choose to run a crappy OS with even more crap on it?
Take my current XP installation - I'm down to less than 10 services. The default was 29. I could go lower, probably down to 7 in my case, but I like the convenience of a couple of services, like the DHCP client.
but, with just a group of people and a farce of interactions that have no bearing on any story anyone wants to see, you get a soap.
As for BSG, I waver between wanting to see it and just dropping it all together. Last season's ending succeeded in making me want to see this season's opener. My fear is though, that'll they'll drag this out with irrelevant personal stories for 3 or 4 episodes.
I generally don't care about a single character's "Oh my god, what am I going to do? What decision am I going to make? A (that is risky but may give me a way out) or B (which will probably be safer, but will make me a weaslely little runt)? It's always A.
DS9 just never got better during the first few seasons, and was easily one of the most boring shows on TV. In the Trek universe, it might only be surpassed by the Wil Crusher TNG season. Thankfully it was saved by the return of mom Beverly and the resulting diminishing of Wil's role - I eagerly and, as it turned out, vainly awaited some exceptionally cool death for Wil. I still have hope in a future movie that will surely come (don't disillusion me;). Back to the soap opera known as DS9, the Klingon war thing looked cool, but I just couldn't get over the irrelevant "personal side bars" that kept interrupting a pretty cool story.
The reason Enterprise sucked started with the theme song, and continued with its ridiculously heavy moralizing "plots". It actually got decent in the end, but by then almost everyone, including me, had lost interest. Now that it's out on DVD, I may get the last couple of seasons and see if the story really was any good. (I tuned back in near the end, and went wow, they improved it - still have that insipid theme song though):.
The cool thing about STTOS was the fact that it addressed a massive void in offerings when it was made. If you look back at the original Twilight Zones, they weren't well acted either, but both are still very watchable none the less. Not many of today's shows can say that. ("Reality TV"? Who's going to watch that in 2 years, much less 10?)
Wow - 56 drives??? 28 mirrored sets with a stripe? That's one big volume (depending upon the drives:) I'd hate to back that up.
/". No RAID system will.
That setup still doesn't help you if you type "rm -rf
Grubman. Need we say more?
BTW, that's a classic reverse of the pump and dump scheme, berate and buy. Take a look at IBM's choice for server hardware, followed by Sun, and HP. Do you think that these guys are all wrong? Or could it possibly, just possibly, be that analysts' primary job is to cause churn in the market, as most are paid by trading houses? Personally, if an analyst is screaming "buy buy buy" it's time to "sell sell sell" and possibly sell short. NOTE: this is personal opinon only, for financial advice pick your poison.
Seriously, I've been looking for Woodcrest benchmarks, and have found zilch. I've suspected that because Core 2 only sees major gains from 1P systems, they've concentrated on the 1P solution marketing blitz, to get the most bang for their buck. After all, if benchmarks come out that 2P systems perform only 50% better than a 1P system, and AMD's is almsot 90% (or whatever), that's going to remove a lot of zing from their marketing blitz.
So, where are these benchmarks?
what's funny about that is that AMD beat Intel to the punch, and as far as multi-core goes, will probably lead Intel again in all aspects by mid 2007 at the latest. (They apparently still lead in the multi-CPU, as witnessed by IBM's switch to Opteron)
I'm not so sure that games are going to drive new PC sales in the near future, mainly because dual core machines have been out a while and most games are still single-threaded. Why? Because multi-threading is hard compared to single-threading, if you want any meaningful gains. And just look at the large number of bugs in the relatively simple single-threaded games out there. (As compared to multi-threaded applications)
The last nail in the coffin of games driving PC purchases: all games are currently GPU limited, not CPU limited. With top of the line graphics cards hovering around $500, or almost $1K for SLI (and SLI missing from almost all current Conroe offerings), I doubt people are going to be buying PCs. The gaming enthusiasts will pick up a SLI capable board if they don't already own one, for the current top of the line CPU and then spend the remainder of their cash on a SLI setup. (I'm just guessing here.:)
Vista will live, the same way that XP lives, albeit slightly slower. Corporations aren't going to go Vista for a while, some are barely just now rolling out XP. Most home users in the US have a PC, and many of those aren't going to go buy a new one. (Just look at Dell's forecast for confirmation of that statement)
:)
Where I see people buying new PC's, or parts to BIY, is the geek community who are either interested in pure speed of their games/applications (most of which will run faster on a tuned XP configuration) or the Linux/alternate OS crowd, to whom Vista is as relevant as a hat to a dog. Of course, there's the ever increasingly popular Apple offerings, if you're going to have to learn a whole new interface anyways, why not go with one that's been critically reviewed, and comes in the slickest and sleekest packaging known?
Or you can be a member of all three groups.
Anything that helps OpenGL and provides drivers for it will be welcome. May it prod developers to write more OpenGL games (mainly) and thus make porting easier.
Sounds like a little more than incremental improvements.
AMD is still running. Let's wait to see 2P benchmarks before stating Intel is going to make any headway in 2P market share.
:)
As for architecture - Conroe is brand new, AMD 64 more than 2 years old. AMD is working on their next gen, it'll be out in about 6 months. They weren't losing marketshare, so didn't have to do a damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead release of their tech.
Oh, the other cool thing? Buy an AM2 board today, upgrade in 6 months.
I have yet to see a benchmark of a 2P Intel system. Until we do, I don't think Intel's getting anything "back". They've made a mark with Conroe, but I'm still going to buy an AMD system, mainly because it's significantly less, and appears to remain that way for the next 6 months at least. Second reason - much better and mature motherboards. I don't want to swap $200 MBs a few times, which usually occurs with the newest cutting edge tech that hasn't had a shakeout yet.
and the answer appears to be, at the moment, unknown. Woodcrest benchmarks with 2P systems aren't out yet. And therein lies the big question. So Intel manages to smoke sharing an L2 cache with an external memory controller. Great. What happens when there's 2 CPUs contending for that one resource? I predict scalablity issues, otherwise Intel would have gone out with bells on for this one.
I think Conroe's advantage is really only apparent in 1P solutions, and thus, to get the biggest mindshare/perception shift, that's what Intel's pushing.
Conroe is an impressive single chip solution, and I'm looking forward to AMD's counter.
Actually, I kinda liked VMS's built in versioning. Then again, it was the first mini-mainframe I worked with, and it was a welcome change from DOS. Heck, VMS's versioning saved my arse more than once, and I recall how I always wished my MS os would do the same thing. (OK, it wasn't limited to only MS OSes, but it was definitely the first, as there were few other options during this time period.)
You're still missing the point - ActiveX doesn't have a sandbox - once you agree - it's got total freedom to do anything in your system, whether you're admin or not (via the numerous security holes)
This is not possible with Java applets.
If you recall, MS said IE could not be removed from Windows as it is an
"integral part of windows".
In short:
So, if all the above is true, how are parts of IE not being pre-loaded by Windows?
In simple words - IExplore.exe is a process, it's isolated, that true. And that's apparently all you know. IExplore.exe depends upon numerous DLLs, which, wait for it..... are already loaded in memory by... wait for it... the OS.... applause.
Hopefully the lightbulb above your head got at least half a watt after reading that.
I run mine for weeks at a time, if the machine's up, generally the browser's up. I tend to not reboot or log out unless forced to. Why restart the browser each time you want to visit a page (considering I do that up to several hundred times a day - I develop web applications after all complete with running appservers and DBs, among other things)?
As for FF using so much memory - I'd rather have the speed of flipping through pages than "saving" 100MB of RAM. Then again, I'm running with 2GB, of which roughly 500MB is free at any particular moment. I'm not RAM limited, and for $130 or so neither should anyone else.
If calc.exe leaks, MS should fix it.
Your point is good, but you need to add the clause:
Describe your process with the minimum detail necessary.
ISO9000 isn't about adhering to any particular process, it's about fully documenting your processes and deviations from that process. You get certified by an auditor coming in and comfirming that your processes are adequately documented.
How does this help software? It prevents that "brilliant" new marketing VP from coming in and demanding, simply demanding, that you add targeted customer content based on customer data to your website for next week's release, damn it all. Just point him to the process and tell him he needs to file form 112, form 5134, and then get forms 32, 55, and 101 signed by the CEO for an "emergency feature addition" as defined in our process documentation. If they don't get the picture, they will by the time they get the docs filled out.
How does it hurt software? When some twit decides that every aspect of software development, from "how to write a method" to white space in comments needs to be documented, never mind that every class needs to be instantiated by Spring.
Too much detail will kill a company. ISO9000 isn't about minutae, unless you make it so.
ActiveX - automatically install a virus on your PC with no feedback. Yes, they've hamstrung it some, but that's still possible should you reduce your "security" settings so that you can run an ActiveX control. There's no effective sandbox around ActiveX.
Java Applets - from what I recall - not possible in general to elevate permissions when run within a browser. You can download a Java app and then run it. But within the sandbox of the browser, unless something got seriously broken recently, I don't believe you can even write to local disks or any of a number of other things you'd like to do (reflection doesn't work either).
FF extensions - you install them, they're not required to visit sites, as far as I know. In general, they make a certain task easier, or possible, and not necessarily what a web author wants either (Flashblock and adblock come to mind:). Plugins such as Flash and Adobe Reader are an unfortunate requirement for some sites.
You'd figure. As far as I know, they do not. They do separate header information and body text and attachments (Outlook/Exchange). It's why certain MIME operations don't work well with Outlook/Exchange.
Actually, what I find irritating is that the server doesn't remember what you've done on the client when you hop client to client. I get to see a mail message as unread at least twice, and sometimes as often as 4 times. Mail management (client and server) is wholly inadequate, no matter what you use.
You glossed over the one thing I mentioned about presorting etc: manual tagging/flagging/etc of specific data.
:)
The folder paradigm works for me with mailing lists and the like, as you mentioned. Actually, in my case, that group of friends is like a mailing list, it just wasn't an official one.
The reason you want folders is because searches generally start at some folder, and search through it's contents, including subfolders. This is a scalability/performance issue. Ideally, your mail client would categorize all mail by sender and by To/CC recipients transparently. (There's no need for you to have to do this manually, in my book, only if you want to exclude some group(s) from your inbox, e.g., the mailing list issue.
As for the hardware issues: those are all part of any system. Exchange corruption is a function of Exchange more than anything else. I'm not familiar with the latest 6.0 version, but prior versions sucked rocks once the mail DBs got "big". If you're effectively the sole user of your own exchange box, it's not such a big deal, but your mail still gets mangled. I wouldn't suggest it. As for security, I generally keep 2 copies on separate HDs, plus once a month DVD burns. That seems to do everything I need in the way of backups/reliability, etc. Plus, it's my mail, and it makes it harder for others to read since it's not out on some vendor's mail system. (No need to make it any easier for them to scan stuff that's none of their business in the first place)
I cannot agree with this yet, purely because I am still below 1000 messages on GMail. However, I have had roughly 400MB of email in roughly 100K messages on an exchange/Outlook system, and search be damned, you have to organize that junk somehow.
Let me summarize that into one small example - you have 6+ years of email in this store, with a small group of friends comprising probably 25% of the messages. Now, you're looking for, say, a particular beer recipe that "Mike" sent you. Problem is, Mike sent you/the group over 500 recipes, and probably 10% of those had discussion among the group, with modifications, etc. So, let's say, for the sake of argument, that there are now 750 messages with recipes in them.
How are you going to find it with search? Look for "beer" - that's no good. "hops"? In this case, that's almost every recipe. "Good"? Well, what if someone used the ever clever "bad" to mean "good"? Look for "bad". Wait, there are at least 50% of those emails with "bad" in them, because they were failures.
I think you get the idea - search, in and of itself, is not a substitute for manually managing your email. Flagging those of interest helps significantly. Then you can search flagged messages only - greatly reducing the subset. Or, those in the "good" folder and flagged (perhaps you use flags for "exceptional"?)
If you think this is ridiculous, I bought a Mac 1.2 years ago. It currently has about 20K emails on it, from several email accounts (not including my gmail or yahoo accounts) after having a large number deleted. Participating in just 4 listserv groups does that to a mailbox. I tend not to delete many of those. Mac's Mail 2.0 program, btw, does a great job of searching your mail (via Spotlight). You still want it somewhat managed, regardless.
But, I don't know of a single system that doesn't require some sort of manual tagging to actually be useful when scaled.
As for the DBs I mentioned - the TB+ one was available to users.
I also don't disagree with you on the need to do some of this automatically. Your example for pictures is nice - photo settings can already be read to indicate whether the picture was taken in high or low-light conditions, giving some indication about indoor vs outdoor or night-time vs day-time possibilities. There's also face recognition software that will eventually make it's way into our photo management software, and allow us to tag face A as "Mom", and automatically have all pics with face A tagged with "Mom", or the new car, or have cars automatically categorized (since that's a pretty small set), your house, dog, etc. That will make it easier, but you'll still have to tag it as "Vacation in Maui" until GPS gets built in, in which case you'll still have to tag it as "Vacation". That might be easier though, since a date range and location provided by GPS will do what you need.
I look forward to the day of less work for me. I have about 3000 pictures just from the last year and a half I'm still working on, and probably that many more in negatives that need to be scanned and entered. It's just not a fun job to do manually. Note the disparity in number of pictures - the negatives span 20+ years, the digitals only 1.5 years, yet I've already got more digital pics than film pics. I really do like my digital cameras.
I guess it depends upon whom you do business with. I've had 3 different cell companies, and all three had month to month plans if you wanted them, or start with 1 year contracts, with month to month or new contracts afterwards. Sometimes the month to month winds up being more expensive. It's your choice.
I just checked their specs (warning - pdf) and their current bottom of the line box is a pure PC. No ASICs. I don't think they had any ASICs 7 years ago, although I cannot confirm that.