(Shrugs) I gave up on Dilbert many years ago (probably about the time they tried to create a half-hour animated sitcom out of it). Their website went to garbage about the same time so I stopped visiting and trying to jump through hoops just to view the daily strip.
I can't remember how they broke the site back then, I think it was completely unreadable on Firefox at the time or some silly thing like that.
If I absolutely had to do a low-power firewall server again, I still wouldn't go any smaller then the Micro ATX style cases. There's a bunch of them that are basically 14" x 11" x 10", and use standard ATX power supplies (the Lian Li PC-V351B case caught my eye).
One of the dual-core 45W AMD Athlon CPUs (that would probably only tick over at 5-10W), Micro ATX motherboard w/ built-in video card, and a pair of 2.5" laptop drives could probably be built for $400-$500. It would probably weigh in at 10-15W heavier then one of the tiny units, but it would still be very light while being able to ramp up to handle heavier things. And ultimately, you could throw heavier workloads at it.
(I've done a nano-ITX before. The only reason I'd do it again is if size was absolutely the most important factor. The cases are expensive, the boards are expensive and ultimately, I'd have been better off going with a slightly larger unit.)
Yah, something like a dual-core energy efficient AMD Athlon64 X2 can do a lot of heavy lifting. Such as the Athlon64 X2 4450e/4850e/5050e which are 65nm and 45W. Or the newer 45nm units that are 45W such as the Athlon II X2 235e/240e dual-core, or the triple-core units 400e/405e.
Combine that with a board that doesn't have any chipset fans (such as the Asus boards that use heat pipes and radiators). Micro ATX is a nice size, but without going ultra tiny.
Since the CPU will scale back power usage when it's idle, I wouldn't be surprised to see a unit like that only pull 15-30W. Including power draw for the motherboard, the video chipset, and a pair of laptop hard drives.
Traditional soaps? To break down the bond between the dirt and your skin (or other surface), making it easier to remove. Which means instead of all that dirt being left on your hands or having to waste a few extra liters of water, you can scrub for far less time with a bit of soap.
Soap is not there to kill the germs, it's there to make it easier to get them off your hands and into the sink's drain.
Soaps are useful for cleaning because soap molecules have both a hydrophilic end, which dissolves in water, as well as a hydrophobic end, which is able to dissolve nonpolar grease molecules. Although grease will normally adhere to skin or clothing, the soap molecules can form micelles which surround the grease particles and allow them to be dissolved in water. Applied to a soiled surface, soapy water effectively holds particles in colloidal suspension so it can be rinsed off with clean water. The hydrophobic portion (made up of a long hydrocarbon chain) dissolves dirt and oils, while the ionic end dissolves in water. Therefore, it allows water to remove normally-insoluble matter by emulsification. In other words, while normally oil and water do not mix, the addition of soap allows oils to dissolve in water, allowing them to be rinsed away.
It's similar to Newegg. Newegg does not always have the lowest prices. But I know they ship the same day so I'll get it quickly and they'll fix any problems if something goes wrong. So if it's tech related, I almost always buy from Newegg. For nearly everything else, I use Amazon.
Mmm, NewEgg's big advantage early on is their outstanding website with excellent search and mostly stellar categorization of product. At NewEgg, I can quickly answer the question for next quarter's budget of "how much should we expect to spend for 22" monitors that support 1680x1050". Or finding all 7200rpm SATA drives over 800GB. Or looking for motherboards that support a particular CPU socket. Or prices for 16-port gigabit switches.
A trivial set of examples, but try do the same sort of searches at CDW, MWave, TheNerds.net or a few other companies that used to be "big". A lot of them are getting better, but NewEgg really did it up right early on which is why for the past few years they're pretty much my sole supplier.
The only reason I still buy from MWave is because they offer pre-tested motherboard bundles. Which is well worth the $10 or so that they charge to guarantee me that the RAM, CPU and motherboard all work together and won't be DOA.
Keep in mind that no matter how good SLC gets, MLC will cost about half or a third (for the 3 bits/cell version that I hear is in the works) as much (or less really, due to higher volumes).
When I looked last month, SLC is 5x to 8x as expensive as MLC in $/GB.
Really, if you want to spend that kind of money, put it on a card. It would be much faster on the PCI buss that SATA for a negligible incremental cost.
An SSD that fits in existing 3.5" SATA hot-plug trays would be extremely interesting to us. All of the SSDs that I know about are the tiny 2.5" designs.
But negative one for information found on the forums. I've found the members there to be extremely uninformed and opinionated.
TC is a very good encrypted volume solution. It's not a cure-all, as the contents of the drive are vulnerable to attack if the volume is mounted, but it's fairly secure. (Sometimes GPG encrypted text files are better.)
Anyway, 192kbps MP3's is good enough for most people so I don't really see the point with FLAC unless you are an audiophile which means you don't touch encoded/compressed music anyway.
FLAC is best suited for archival of CDs. Rip it once to FLAC, burn the FLAC to DVDs and store a copy alongside the audio CDs in a box in the basement / attic / closet. Keep a copy closer at hand because they take up a lot less physical space then the original CDs. Convert the FLAC to the format of your choice for daily use (160-320Kbps MP3 or whatever else your devices support).
If you change your mind down the road, dig out your FLACs, convert them again. No need to shuffle CDs for hours at a time to re-rip everything.
Or, if you don't care about disk space, use the FLACs directly. They're about half the size of CD data, so you do get a significant space savings (~750Kbps for FLAC). But I'd still downsize... much better to get down in the 256Kbps range which is about 1/6 the size of a raw CD stream.
(I could generally fit 8-12 FLAC'd albums on a DVD-R, including 10% PAR2 data. So a box with 40 CDs would also have 3-5 DVD-Rs in it.)
MP3 reacts poorly to cymbals at low bit rates. They get muddled by the codec and come out sounding horrid. Go listen to the Prelude in Bizet's Carmen opera.
At 128Kbps MP3, it sounds horrid, even on mid-range hardware and headphones. Bump that up to 160Kbps and it's passable, or go up to 192/256/320. Whichever gooses your willies.
- Reasonable cost at the time
- Lower power consumption for equivalent performance
- Decent performance
Which made it a real popular card (I'm still running a pair in SLI mode). Would I like something faster? You bet... maybe next summer. Hopefully something about twice as fast that uses less power.
It's pretty much the primary testing ground for what goes into RHEL, which *is* a server OS. Which puts it a lot closer to being a server OS then most distros.
The impression that I've gotten ever since FC1 came out is that FC is very much a bleeding-edge, beta-quality, distro with frequent releases in order to test technologies that will go into future Red Hat server offerings. If you want better desktop polish, folks would recommend Ubuntu, SUSE or Mandrake.
Eh, that really only limits the disk that holds the/boot partition. (Our preferred setup is RAID1 for the boot disk, then RAID-10 or RAID-6 for the rest of the disks. So unless 15k RPM disks get over 2TB by 2012, it won't be that big of an issue.)
But yes, I would hope that RHEL 6 tackles that issue.
And if you have 1300 servers... it's past time to SAN. Take the disks out of the servers and switch to blades. (SAN is a lot harder sell for small businesses with less then 20 servers.)
That's because LCDs are lousy for displaying any resolution other than there fixed native resolution. To make a 640x480 game or video look good on an LCD is impossible. Only a CRT can switch back-and-forth to varying resolutions.
Not true any longer. I regularly play older games on my 1680x1050 22" LCD and have the NVIDIA display driver scale them up while preserving the aspect ratio. The NVIDIA drivers do a very good job of scaling. Things like Syberia, Half Life, etc. all look fine when you let the driver scale them.
You just need to give up being a perfectionist and stop worrying about perfect scaling.
FWIW, SATA 3.0 is next year, ONFI 2.0 is next year and Intel and Indilinx (ocz) revision 3 is next year,... I am almost tempted to change my stance and suggest waiting.
I'm waiting until they hit my price point of under $1/GB for the better units. MLC based SSDs are still up around $2.25 to $2.45 per gigabyte for the low-end stuff, with the better MLC in the $2.50 to $3.25 per gigabyte range. I think the best spot price I've seen yet is around $1.90 for MLC.
At $1/GB, I'd quickly replace the 2.5" SATA magnetic drive in my laptop with an SSD. And maybe the boot drive on my game PC. Once it gets below $0.65/GB, I'd definitely use it on the game PC for the boot drive. For servers, the SLC stuff needs to get below $5/GB (not the $10-$15/GB that it is now).
(Sigh) Probably another year to break $1/GB and another year after that to get below $0.50/GB for the MLC stuff.
My eyes would bleed... Until I get new glasses next year, I'm finding the 15" 1680x1050 to be about the lower limit of what is comfortable. I much prefer my 22" 1680x1050 display.
Actually, I didn't know they had pushed the resolution that high in their 15" laptop segment.
Thinkpad T61p comes with a 15" 1680x1050 display. And that was a few years ago. Try either Apple or Thinkpads for the higher PPI displays (with pixel sizes below 0.200mm). Pretty sure there are 1920x1200 laptops out there now in the 17" size.
In fact, the Lenovo site lists (4) 17" notebooks with 1920x1200 displays. The 17" MacBook Pro is also a 1920x1200 display.
I get closer every year... except that there's nothing in Linux that fills the niche of MS-Access. Which is superb at working with one-off, different every week, data has a lifespan measured in days/weeks, data sets. Plus we can shove the MDB directly into a version control system where it lives with the rest of the project files. No need to run a database server, just checkout the MDB, open it up and all the queries, reports and tables are there for inspection and viewing. And I can copy/paste to/from a spreadsheet where it's often easier to make certain types of changes or analysis. Or I can yank data from different data sources (ODBC, other MDBs) and merge it all together for analysis (being careful not to join a local table against a remote ODBC table).
ooBase is a joke in comparison.
All of which is the pretty much the same reason that I'm not using a Mac... I'm not interested in spending the majority of my time running inside a WinXP virtual window.
But yes, modern web browsers are a lot better about letting you zoom the entire page (including images) then was the case back in '02-'03 when I first started working with 126-128ppi laptop displays. Back then it was a lot uglier. Telling Firefox/IE to not use font sizes below a certain size would almost always break websites with overly aggressive design elements. Or there are fun UI dialogs where the buttons/text end up missing entirely or overwrite each other.
I'm going to put IANAE in all of my posts here, since I don't really know what I'm talking about in any depth. However, my guess would be that DNS records, being small by themselves, are dramatically increased in size by adding encryption keys and signatures.
Yah, a lot of DNS replies are really really tiny. As in under 64-128 bytes including packet header tiny. Just adding a 128/160/256 bit signature on top of the reply is going to bulk that up a fair amount. Plus you'll need the signing keys on top of that (another 2k to 4k bits).
It's really only going to be an issue for folks dealing with slow connections (under 64Kbps) as DNS lookups will take as much as an order of magnitude longer (but more like 2x).
(And I probably got a lot of details wrong as things change so fast. I'm sticking with educated SWAGs.)
My best solution is to use a fairly small level of dpi scaling, manually pick some bigger fonts for menus, window titles, etc, and then a nice firefox extension I found that can remember a default zoom level, as well as different zoom levels for different domains. It's by no means perfect, but it's useable.
Firefox 3.5 seems to already remember the zoom level without addons. I'm not sure where it saves it or how, but I regularly zoom in on the OoTS page to read the text and FF 3.5 remembers that the next time I visit.
There's really only a few pixel densities manufactured today.
0.282mm to 0.285mm (19" 1440x900 or 22" 1680x1050)
0.270mm (seen in 24" 1920x1200 displays)
0.243mm to 0.248mm (19" 1680x1050 or 22" 1920x1080)
Personally, I find the 0.245mm pixels to be too small, with the 0.285mm pixels to be just about perfect for me. Then there's the 15.4" Thinkpad display that is 1680x1050, that has really really small pixels (around 128ppi or 0.200mm).
There is an Acer 27" that is 2048x1152 with reportedly 0.291mm pixels.
Basically, when monitor shopping, you need to look at a particular resolution (such as 1680x1050) and then make sure to buy the displays that are the upper end of the size range. The 1680x1050 glass is currently sold in sizes that range from 19" to 22". Your older users will be a lot happier with the 22" 1680x1050.
Or you could go looking for 24-26" 720p TV sets which are typically 1360x768 and have very large pixels. Of course, the small resolution will quickly become a bane to future users.
All of the smaller 1080p TV sets are all 24", which is only a pixel size of around 0.270mm. So the 22" 1680x1050 displays with 0.285mm pixels are a better choice.
Is it THAT hard to get Windows to use a larger font for everything? Wouldn't that address the issue?
In Windows XP, turning on the various "large font options" or telling XP that the screen's PPI is 120 instead of 96 really doesn't work out well in reality. You still end up with web pages where the fonts are super tiny because they were specified in "px" increments.
We used SourceOffSite as our sole means of interacting with VSS. It really helped to keep the corruption to a bare minimum. We still couldn't manage to migrate the repository to SVN directly due to corruption.
(We switched to SVN back in '06. It's come a long way since then and the sparse working copy support was a major step forward for our preference of working with large single repositories instead of dozens of smaller repositories.)
Slashdot Mirror
Dilbert.com
(Shrugs) I gave up on Dilbert many years ago (probably about the time they tried to create a half-hour animated sitcom out of it). Their website went to garbage about the same time so I stopped visiting and trying to jump through hoops just to view the daily strip.
I can't remember how they broke the site back then, I think it was completely unreadable on Firefox at the time or some silly thing like that.
I've had a PRS-505 for 2 years now... no way in hell I'd go back to trying to read on an LCD or LED screen.
If I absolutely had to do a low-power firewall server again, I still wouldn't go any smaller then the Micro ATX style cases. There's a bunch of them that are basically 14" x 11" x 10", and use standard ATX power supplies (the Lian Li PC-V351B case caught my eye).
One of the dual-core 45W AMD Athlon CPUs (that would probably only tick over at 5-10W), Micro ATX motherboard w/ built-in video card, and a pair of 2.5" laptop drives could probably be built for $400-$500. It would probably weigh in at 10-15W heavier then one of the tiny units, but it would still be very light while being able to ramp up to handle heavier things. And ultimately, you could throw heavier workloads at it.
(I've done a nano-ITX before. The only reason I'd do it again is if size was absolutely the most important factor. The cases are expensive, the boards are expensive and ultimately, I'd have been better off going with a slightly larger unit.)
Yah, something like a dual-core energy efficient AMD Athlon64 X2 can do a lot of heavy lifting. Such as the Athlon64 X2 4450e/4850e/5050e which are 65nm and 45W. Or the newer 45nm units that are 45W such as the Athlon II X2 235e/240e dual-core, or the triple-core units 400e/405e.
Combine that with a board that doesn't have any chipset fans (such as the Asus boards that use heat pipes and radiators). Micro ATX is a nice size, but without going ultra tiny.
Since the CPU will scale back power usage when it's idle, I wouldn't be surprised to see a unit like that only pull 15-30W. Including power draw for the motherboard, the video chipset, and a pair of laptop hard drives.
My #1 complaint with mini-ITX chassis...
Proprietary power supplies that can't be replaced quickly.
What's the point of using soap again?
Traditional soaps? To break down the bond between the dirt and your skin (or other surface), making it easier to remove. Which means instead of all that dirt being left on your hands or having to waste a few extra liters of water, you can scrub for far less time with a bit of soap.
Soap is not there to kill the germs, it's there to make it easier to get them off your hands and into the sink's drain.
Soaps are useful for cleaning because soap molecules have both a hydrophilic end, which dissolves in water, as well as a hydrophobic end, which is able to dissolve nonpolar grease molecules. Although grease will normally adhere to skin or clothing, the soap molecules can form micelles which surround the grease particles and allow them to be dissolved in water. Applied to a soiled surface, soapy water effectively holds particles in colloidal suspension so it can be rinsed off with clean water. The hydrophobic portion (made up of a long hydrocarbon chain) dissolves dirt and oils, while the ionic end dissolves in water. Therefore, it allows water to remove normally-insoluble matter by emulsification. In other words, while normally oil and water do not mix, the addition of soap allows oils to dissolve in water, allowing them to be rinsed away.
Soap - From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
It's similar to Newegg. Newegg does not always have the lowest prices. But I know they ship the same day so I'll get it quickly and they'll fix any problems if something goes wrong. So if it's tech related, I almost always buy from Newegg. For nearly everything else, I use Amazon.
Mmm, NewEgg's big advantage early on is their outstanding website with excellent search and mostly stellar categorization of product. At NewEgg, I can quickly answer the question for next quarter's budget of "how much should we expect to spend for 22" monitors that support 1680x1050". Or finding all 7200rpm SATA drives over 800GB. Or looking for motherboards that support a particular CPU socket. Or prices for 16-port gigabit switches.
A trivial set of examples, but try do the same sort of searches at CDW, MWave, TheNerds.net or a few other companies that used to be "big". A lot of them are getting better, but NewEgg really did it up right early on which is why for the past few years they're pretty much my sole supplier.
The only reason I still buy from MWave is because they offer pre-tested motherboard bundles. Which is well worth the $10 or so that they charge to guarantee me that the RAM, CPU and motherboard all work together and won't be DOA.
Keep in mind that no matter how good SLC gets, MLC will cost about half or a third (for the 3 bits/cell version that I hear is in the works) as much (or less really, due to higher volumes).
When I looked last month, SLC is 5x to 8x as expensive as MLC in $/GB.
Really, if you want to spend that kind of money, put it on a card. It would be much faster on the PCI buss that SATA for a negligible incremental cost.
An SSD that fits in existing 3.5" SATA hot-plug trays would be extremely interesting to us. All of the SSDs that I know about are the tiny 2.5" designs.
+1 on truecrypt.
But negative one for information found on the forums. I've found the members there to be extremely uninformed and opinionated.
TC is a very good encrypted volume solution. It's not a cure-all, as the contents of the drive are vulnerable to attack if the volume is mounted, but it's fairly secure. (Sometimes GPG encrypted text files are better.)
Anyway, 192kbps MP3's is good enough for most people so I don't really see the point with FLAC unless you are an audiophile which means you don't touch encoded/compressed music anyway.
FLAC is best suited for archival of CDs. Rip it once to FLAC, burn the FLAC to DVDs and store a copy alongside the audio CDs in a box in the basement / attic / closet. Keep a copy closer at hand because they take up a lot less physical space then the original CDs. Convert the FLAC to the format of your choice for daily use (160-320Kbps MP3 or whatever else your devices support).
If you change your mind down the road, dig out your FLACs, convert them again. No need to shuffle CDs for hours at a time to re-rip everything.
Or, if you don't care about disk space, use the FLACs directly. They're about half the size of CD data, so you do get a significant space savings (~750Kbps for FLAC). But I'd still downsize... much better to get down in the 256Kbps range which is about 1/6 the size of a raw CD stream.
(I could generally fit 8-12 FLAC'd albums on a DVD-R, including 10% PAR2 data. So a box with 40 CDs would also have 3-5 DVD-Rs in it.)
MP3 reacts poorly to cymbals at low bit rates. They get muddled by the codec and come out sounding horrid. Go listen to the Prelude in Bizet's Carmen opera.
At 128Kbps MP3, it sounds horrid, even on mid-range hardware and headphones. Bump that up to 160Kbps and it's passable, or go up to 192/256/320. Whichever gooses your willies.
Big advantages of the 8800GT...
- Reasonable cost at the time
- Lower power consumption for equivalent performance
- Decent performance
Which made it a real popular card (I'm still running a pair in SLI mode). Would I like something faster? You bet... maybe next summer. Hopefully something about twice as fast that uses less power.
That would make sense if Fedora were a server OS.
It's pretty much the primary testing ground for what goes into RHEL, which *is* a server OS. Which puts it a lot closer to being a server OS then most distros.
The impression that I've gotten ever since FC1 came out is that FC is very much a bleeding-edge, beta-quality, distro with frequent releases in order to test technologies that will go into future Red Hat server offerings. If you want better desktop polish, folks would recommend Ubuntu, SUSE or Mandrake.
Eh, that really only limits the disk that holds the /boot partition. (Our preferred setup is RAID1 for the boot disk, then RAID-10 or RAID-6 for the rest of the disks. So unless 15k RPM disks get over 2TB by 2012, it won't be that big of an issue.)
But yes, I would hope that RHEL 6 tackles that issue.
And if you have 1300 servers... it's past time to SAN. Take the disks out of the servers and switch to blades. (SAN is a lot harder sell for small businesses with less then 20 servers.)
That's because LCDs are lousy for displaying any resolution other than there fixed native resolution. To make a 640x480 game or video look good on an LCD is impossible. Only a CRT can switch back-and-forth to varying resolutions.
Not true any longer. I regularly play older games on my 1680x1050 22" LCD and have the NVIDIA display driver scale them up while preserving the aspect ratio. The NVIDIA drivers do a very good job of scaling. Things like Syberia, Half Life, etc. all look fine when you let the driver scale them.
You just need to give up being a perfectionist and stop worrying about perfect scaling.
FWIW, SATA 3.0 is next year, ONFI 2.0 is next year and Intel and Indilinx (ocz) revision 3 is next year,... I am almost tempted to change my stance and suggest waiting.
I'm waiting until they hit my price point of under $1/GB for the better units. MLC based SSDs are still up around $2.25 to $2.45 per gigabyte for the low-end stuff, with the better MLC in the $2.50 to $3.25 per gigabyte range. I think the best spot price I've seen yet is around $1.90 for MLC.
At $1/GB, I'd quickly replace the 2.5" SATA magnetic drive in my laptop with an SSD. And maybe the boot drive on my game PC. Once it gets below $0.65/GB, I'd definitely use it on the game PC for the boot drive. For servers, the SLC stuff needs to get below $5/GB (not the $10-$15/GB that it is now).
(Sigh) Probably another year to break $1/GB and another year after that to get below $0.50/GB for the MLC stuff.
What about 15.4" T61p that's 1920x1200?
My eyes would bleed... Until I get new glasses next year, I'm finding the 15" 1680x1050 to be about the lower limit of what is comfortable. I much prefer my 22" 1680x1050 display.
Actually, I didn't know they had pushed the resolution that high in their 15" laptop segment.
Thinkpad T61p comes with a 15" 1680x1050 display. And that was a few years ago. Try either Apple or Thinkpads for the higher PPI displays (with pixel sizes below 0.200mm). Pretty sure there are 1920x1200 laptops out there now in the 17" size.
In fact, the Lenovo site lists (4) 17" notebooks with 1920x1200 displays. The 17" MacBook Pro is also a 1920x1200 display.
I get closer every year... except that there's nothing in Linux that fills the niche of MS-Access. Which is superb at working with one-off, different every week, data has a lifespan measured in days/weeks, data sets. Plus we can shove the MDB directly into a version control system where it lives with the rest of the project files. No need to run a database server, just checkout the MDB, open it up and all the queries, reports and tables are there for inspection and viewing. And I can copy/paste to/from a spreadsheet where it's often easier to make certain types of changes or analysis. Or I can yank data from different data sources (ODBC, other MDBs) and merge it all together for analysis (being careful not to join a local table against a remote ODBC table).
ooBase is a joke in comparison.
All of which is the pretty much the same reason that I'm not using a Mac... I'm not interested in spending the majority of my time running inside a WinXP virtual window.
But yes, modern web browsers are a lot better about letting you zoom the entire page (including images) then was the case back in '02-'03 when I first started working with 126-128ppi laptop displays. Back then it was a lot uglier. Telling Firefox/IE to not use font sizes below a certain size would almost always break websites with overly aggressive design elements. Or there are fun UI dialogs where the buttons/text end up missing entirely or overwrite each other.
I'm going to put IANAE in all of my posts here, since I don't really know what I'm talking about in any depth. However, my guess would be that DNS records, being small by themselves, are dramatically increased in size by adding encryption keys and signatures.
Yah, a lot of DNS replies are really really tiny. As in under 64-128 bytes including packet header tiny. Just adding a 128/160/256 bit signature on top of the reply is going to bulk that up a fair amount. Plus you'll need the signing keys on top of that (another 2k to 4k bits).
It's really only going to be an issue for folks dealing with slow connections (under 64Kbps) as DNS lookups will take as much as an order of magnitude longer (but more like 2x).
(And I probably got a lot of details wrong as things change so fast. I'm sticking with educated SWAGs.)
My best solution is to use a fairly small level of dpi scaling, manually pick some bigger fonts for menus, window titles, etc, and then a nice firefox extension I found that can remember a default zoom level, as well as different zoom levels for different domains. It's by no means perfect, but it's useable.
Firefox 3.5 seems to already remember the zoom level without addons. I'm not sure where it saves it or how, but I regularly zoom in on the OoTS page to read the text and FF 3.5 remembers that the next time I visit.
There's really only a few pixel densities manufactured today.
0.282mm to 0.285mm (19" 1440x900 or 22" 1680x1050)
0.270mm (seen in 24" 1920x1200 displays)
0.243mm to 0.248mm (19" 1680x1050 or 22" 1920x1080)
Personally, I find the 0.245mm pixels to be too small, with the 0.285mm pixels to be just about perfect for me. Then there's the 15.4" Thinkpad display that is 1680x1050, that has really really small pixels (around 128ppi or 0.200mm).
There is an Acer 27" that is 2048x1152 with reportedly 0.291mm pixels.
Basically, when monitor shopping, you need to look at a particular resolution (such as 1680x1050) and then make sure to buy the displays that are the upper end of the size range. The 1680x1050 glass is currently sold in sizes that range from 19" to 22". Your older users will be a lot happier with the 22" 1680x1050.
Or you could go looking for 24-26" 720p TV sets which are typically 1360x768 and have very large pixels. Of course, the small resolution will quickly become a bane to future users.
All of the smaller 1080p TV sets are all 24", which is only a pixel size of around 0.270mm. So the 22" 1680x1050 displays with 0.285mm pixels are a better choice.
Is it THAT hard to get Windows to use a larger font for everything? Wouldn't that address the issue?
In Windows XP, turning on the various "large font options" or telling XP that the screen's PPI is 120 instead of 96 really doesn't work out well in reality. You still end up with web pages where the fonts are super tiny because they were specified in "px" increments.
Not sure about Vista or Win7...
We used SourceOffSite as our sole means of interacting with VSS. It really helped to keep the corruption to a bare minimum. We still couldn't manage to migrate the repository to SVN directly due to corruption.
(We switched to SVN back in '06. It's come a long way since then and the sparse working copy support was a major step forward for our preference of working with large single repositories instead of dozens of smaller repositories.)