Get rid of Base. Both Access and Base are crappy concepts anyway. Databases should run on a server.
Production databases should run on a server.
But Access brings a lot more to the party then just tables and data storage. In a easy-to-manage file, you have queries, reports, forms and the ability to write a spot of code. Want to make a backup of a table and all of its data? Copy-n-paste the table. Which users can easily grok. Need to muck with everything, pack the MDB into a ZIP file or make a copy, just in case. I have yet to see server-level database GUIs that are as easy to work with.
General office users want to know *where* their data is. With a MDB file, they can treat that blob of data just like a Word or Excel file. And it's better that the data is in a MDB table then on a sheet in an Excel file. In general, the MDB is only used by a small handful of people (1-3) so keeping track of the "current" data set is simply a matter of storing the MDB in Subversion.
Access is also useful for cases where you need to archive data, along with the queries and reports used. I prefer not to have job data from 5 years ago cluttering up our SQL Server. By offloading that data into a MSAccess database, along with a few queries and reports, it's available should we ever need to work with that dataset again down the road. Since each job has a different data layout, it's not like we can create one historical table to store all of that data.
Basically, MSAccess fits a very important niche in the business world. And I have yet to see anything come close to competing (Lotus Approach might have... and I haven't looked at OOO Base in a bit).
I agree with the stagnation part. At work some of our laptops are more than 4 years old (May 2003) and they are still perfectly capable and working (P4 @ 2.8 GHz, 512Mb RAM, 60GB HDD). We even have two T30 Thinkpads that are just enough when traveling to browse, check email and write a doc.
I just retired a Toshiba Tecra 9100 from Feb 2002. It was a P4 @ 1.8GHz, 1GB RAM, and the hard drive had been bumped to 120GB. I used it as my primary machine for 5.5 years. So I understand your point. But I *really* like my new Thinkpad T61 (dual-core, 3GB RAM, two 160GB hard drives, and a 15.4" widescreen 1680x1050 display).
Still, the useful lifespan of a machine has gone from 3 years in the mid-late 90s up to 4-5 years at the turn of the century, and dual-core machines will probably have useful lifespans of 6-9 years. The second core should help them remain responsive to the user, even as they age. Hopefully the capacitors on the motherboards will last that long...
1) The base install, after product activation, when things were known to be working fine. It may be 2-3 years old, but it still saves you a lot of time if you ever have to re-install that particular image. These images are also great for when you need to switch the computer over to a new user. They're typically kept on DVD-R and stored in two locations.
2) A weekly snapshot, written to a USB/Firewire/eSATA drive or a central server. And if you have the space, write to alterate directories each week so you can go back further. Use these images for the times when the Windows Restore feature fails.
3) Annual or bi-annual snapshots that never get overwritten. These can be stored along side of the base install disks.
There are already 4 disk external USB/eSATA/Firewire units that can be used for portable storage and setup in RAID5 (if your OS supports it). The downside is that enclosures like that are $250-$500.
The rest of us use hot-swap SATA bays that pack multiple 3.5" drives into 5.25" bays in various configurations. Such as 3:2 (3 3.5" drives in 2 5.25" bays) or 4:3 or 5:3. Combine that with Linux Software RAID and things get easy-peasy.
(Our server boxes are mostly using the 3:2 setup with a triple-active RAID1 array. So even if a single drive fails, we're still running in mirrored mode. Plop the replacement drive in, and we're back up in tripled mode. Pull the wrong drive by accident, and it's still fixable. But the disk activity lights make it easy to know which bay to pull.)
It leaves me to wonder if there are any good Linux Wikis out there that explain things like the boot process clearly and simply, largely without all the technical language and recursive definitions. There's plenty of man pages for those who can parse them, but as far as getting more users to Linux, I'd think this would be quite helpful.
Without looking, I would guess the Gentoo Wiki. Even when I'm looking for information on other distros, Google often turns up hits to Gentoo Wiki.
(I also ran Gentoo for 2-3 years. It was a very good distro for learning the ropes because you do so much at the command line. Not as bare metal as Linux From Scratch, but definitely more so then a standard Ubuntu install.)
Why did it need to be "immediately obvious"? The pilot should take the extra 2 seconds to verify the gear was in the correct strate. The fact they didn't makes it 'pilot error'.
Go read "The Design of Everyday Things".
You can also get some of these insights by reading RISKS digest (either via e-mail subscription or the USENET newsgroup) or by reading FAA post-crash incident reports. They do a very good job of determining whether it was pilot error, equipment error, weather issues, or bad design.
While good design can't trump bad decision making, it hopefully makes it easier to make a better decision then the bad decision.
I recall that the DVD release of The Matrix did a shake-down of compatible players as well. I personally know that Apple's DVD player software of the time was incompatible with the Follow the White Rabbit feature.
Yep, I had one of the early Toshiba DVD players. One of the menu options on the Matrix DVD would cause the player to freeze up. (This also happened with other DVD discs over the years.)
The paladin seal/judgement spell line was new to me (I've played EQ/EQ2/EVE and now WoW). A self-only buff (seal) that can be canceled early (judgement) to do damage or place a debuff on your target.
Blizzard took a lot of things from other MMOs and managed to get it about 95%+ correct, even on the small details. There are a few things that EQ2 did better (mini-dings, mentoring, mini-dungeons, larger quest journal), but for the first four weeks in WoW it seems a lot more polished then EQ2 ever was.
They're delaying an MMO for 14 days so they can finally get around to tweaking game balance issues? They waited until the game was done, started over, done, started over, and done again and then said, "Oh, crap...we forgot to balance it! How fast can we do that?" and came up with a time estimate of 2 weeks....for an MMO.
That's very typical. EQ2 did it towards the end of Beta, they did it again during the combat revamp (which was during almost 2 months of beta testing for the new expansion), and I'm sure a bunch of other MMOs have done it.
It indicates that something has gone wrong in the project management area.
It'd also be nice if they could add incentives to play classes that are needed. It's generally priests and tank guys but I bet they could come up with a dynamic way to encourage class creation of any class that's out of balance at any given time.
It's more of an issue with the player population and personal dynamics.
Playing a priest (and being good at it) requires focus, determination, and being able to put up with all of the "why didn't you heal me?", "heal pet!" and "heal plz". If a DPS goes AFK in the middle of a fight, did you notice? If the tank / healer goes AFK in the middle of a fight, I'll bet you notice right away. And if the group wipes, quite a few players will place the blame on either the healer ("l2heal!") or the tank ("l2tank!").
It's generally a thankless job, until you get a really bad pull and by making a lot of split-second decisions you manage to keep everyone alive with a scrap of health each and a sliver of mana left. At which point, it's a hell of a lot of fun and excitement. After that, you get a lot more respect then you did earlier. (As a priest... I relish a bad situation. That's when I get to use my full bag of tricks.)
There are also evenings where I log on with my priest and have absolutely no interest in doing a group and being responsible for everyone's welfare.
I'd put 40 as another significant milestone. At least a few classes get their first ranks in some class-defining spells at level 40 (i.e. Priest's Greater Heal, Warriors and Paladins can now wear plate, etc.).
I agree that there should be more "epic" mid-level quests in the 30-50 range. Take something like the "Legend of Stalvann", which is a great little quest... now expand it a bit, add in the need to go to various instances.
However, they need to keep it easy. Make the quest items drop off of multiple mobs in the area unless there's a strong storyline reason to have it drop off of a particular boss mob.
(Been playing WoW for about 4-6 weeks now. The grind seems to start in the mid-late 30s when quest XP doesn't push you forward as fast. So I'm looking forward to either (a) adding more quests or (b) what is coming in 2.3 patch.)
We reached that point ca. 2000 (even earlier for people whose web-browsing doesn't involve Flash). Most people don't do anything that needs large amounts of CPU power (more than a ca. 1Ghz P3). They benefit most from RAM and (to a lesser extent) video card upgrades.
Yes, thereabouts (I'd personally peg it at 2001-2002). Computers stopped getting twice as fast every 12-15 months right around that time. We stopped needing to replace machines every 3 years (a 386 was a lot faster then a 286 and the 486 was a big step up as well) because a 3 year old machine was no longer 1/4 to 1/8 the speed of a new one.
The machines that we've been ordering for the office over the past year are dual-core, 2GB RAM, RAID1 hard drives running WinXP. We fully expect them to last at least 7 years (and possibly 10 years) before they need to be replaced. If we do upgrade them it will be to add one more gigabyte of RAM (to get to 3GB) and to add 22" 1680x1050 LCD displays.
Of course, that assumes that the motherboards don't die, or capacitors leak... Everything else can be easily replaced.
(We're buying whatever dual-core CPU we can get for $100-$120. Maybe spending $200 for a power-user workstation. So I only have moderate interest in the latest and flashiest. Mostly it keeps driving more and more powerful chips down into our price range.)
Personally, I'd still RAID them for mission-critical data. But they would indeed have a lot of advantages over magnetic disks once the price drops below $10/GB. Maybe even $20/GB...
Re:Ignoring the politics, the quality has changed
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Replacing a Thinkpad?
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· Score: 1
Over the past 8 years, we've used a variety of systems. Our bread and butter laptop was the Toshiba Tecra line (8000, 8100, 9100, M2 or M3). We also have used Thinkpad T43, X61s, and T61.
The T61 build feels about as solid as the older Tecra 9100 (which I used for 5.5 years). It's black, it's not flashy, and overall feels pretty solid. Our user with the T43 loves his, and the X61s is too new.
I have a few complaints about the Thinkpads:
1) The Ins/Del/Home/End/PgUp/PgDn keys are in an awkward location. I prefer the non-standard location on the Toshiba Tecra keyboards that put those six keys along the right side, just past the enter/backspace area. That made it easy to find PgUp/PgDn and Home/End with my right-pinky without taking fingers off the home row. Still, I'm slowly getting used to it after 7-8 years of using Tecras. We also have a bunch of MacBook Pros in use by the creative folks, and they've held up well.
2) The Function / Control keys are swapped... again, I'm adjusting after using the Tecra keyboard. The ESC key is also slightly moved.
3) No DVI output. I'm dissapointed that PC makers haven't followed Apple's lead and put DVI outputs on their notebooks (and supply the stupid $10 DVI->VGA adapter).
4) Sometimes the ThinkVantage software gets in my way when it guesses wrong. I'm still adjusting to that.
Other then that, the 15.4" widescreen is lovely. The dual-core CPU is a dream compared to my old 1.8GHz single-core P4. The keyboard is fairly nice, with good tactile feedback. And I have a nubby mouse! Hopefully this system lasts 5-7 years like my older Tecra did.
I just started a new job for a non-IT company and the standard issue monitor is a 15" Dell LCD locked at a max of 1024x768 resolution.
Quit and find a better company that isn't so penny-pinching. Especially if your job is to create documentation.
Our standard issue monitors were 17" CRTs for the past few years. Now that LCD prices have dropped, we'll be switching over to either 19" 1440x900 or 22" 1680x1050. Heck, it's darned difficult to even *find* 15" or 17" LCDs anymore. Seems like all the manufacturers have switched over to the 19-22" size.
Win2k, which you left out, was easily the best MS product ever. Could (still can) play games as well as XP, more secure, no activation, near zero DRM, fewer bugs, less memory usage, etc.
It was good on the desktop, but laptop and wireless works better in WinXP. In Win2K, you were at the mercy of the individual wireless chipset vendor for support apps, in WinXP Microsoft does more of the heavy lifting. That made support easier because everyone had the same UI for working with WiFi.
(I used Win2K for about 2 years, switched over to WinXP in 2002. Overall, I'm a bit more happy running WinXP then I was with Win2K on a laptop.)
You've completely left out the cause of a lot of Vista issues:
Support for Digital Restrictions Management
They got in bed with the MPAA / RIAA, chose to support all the crazy DRM schemes, had to rework large portions of the OS to support "trusted paths". And the result is a slow, bloated OS that nobody is particularly interested in.
My company still has some desktops running Windows 98, how about you?
We still have a dozen Win98 boxes, and we're trying to get everyone on WinXP before the end of the year so that we can avoid Vista until 2009-2010. At least, for the desktops. We might end up with a few Vista laptops next year (too soon to spend that money), but a few spare OEM licenses of WinXP might come in handy.
(We're not large enough to do the open/select license thingy... plus we keep our machines running for 5-10 years at a go. I figure the new dual-core WinXP machines w/ 2GB of RAM should perform just fine until 2011-2015.)
$10k per Terabyte isn't all that bad; maybe about 30-50% higher. Server level storage goes for $4-$8 per GB (so $4k to $8k per Terabyte). It may also depend on when that SAN was put into use. Were they able to use less expensive SATA drives, or did they need the raw performance of SCSI, etc. Plus cost per gigabyte slowly decreases over time (not as fast as it used to, but it's still a gradual decline of maybe 25% per year).
The big reasons that EVE's economy is the best working economy that I've seen so far:
1) Location matters. There's no magical transportation of goods like there is in WoW or EQ2. As a result, goods acquire value by moving closer to the buyer. That keeps the market from becoming "flat" where everyone charges the exact same price regardless of location. It also allows younger players to participate by buying low-priced goods in one system and moving them elsewhere where people are willing to pay more.
2) Server size. Having one big server with 20k to 35k active players at any point in time means that nobody can monopolize trade. (With a few very rare exceptions such as Tech2 blueprints, but Invention is cutting heavily into those margins.) You may manage to monopolize trade on a particular item in 3-5 regions, but as the profit margin rises, it becomes increasingly likely that other traders will smell profit and move in to compete.
3) Destruction. Ships get destroyed all the time in PvP. That takes resources out of the economy and keeps players in the market for new ships. Unlike a lot of traditional, fantasy, MMOs, ships are very much replaceable with very few "epic" ships. In EQ1, if you caused someone's epic weapon to permanently break when they died, there would be a riot. But in EVE, destruction and loss of ships is part of the game (hence the adage "only fly what you can afford to lose").
4) Items can be reprocessed into basic minerals. Which means that if you're sitting on a stack of Small Shield Booster I inventory, and prices fall too low, you have the option to reprocess them into basic minerals. In fact, it can be lucrative to be a "junk" trader who buys up low-end modules and reprocesses them for the minerals.
5) Lots of regions = lots of markets. The more markets there are, the more niches. When an economy has lots of niches, it becomes easier for newer traders to enter the market and gain a foothold. You can easily compete in EVE's economy (economic PvP) with only a small bankroll at the start. Over time, you reinvest your profits, allowing you to take larger and larger risks for larger profits. There are at least a dozen distinct ways to earn ISK in EVE (ratting, mission running, mining, moving goods, buying low / selling high, low-ball buy orders, piracy, loot drops, manufacture, exploration, selling information, etc.).
6) Buying and selling are easy. And you can put up buy / sell orders that last for 3 months and you can adjust prices every 5 minutes. The limit is that you can only have X number of buy/sell orders active at the same time unless you train up some skills.
It's a very complex system. And it self corrects constantly.
There's a large gap between charging per processor or per machine. A machine could feasibly be used to independently run the software alongside other instances of it on the network, so charging for another license isn't unreasonable. But charging per core doesn't make any sense to me: unless each core is running a separate and independent instance of Oracle (can it be programmed to do so? Does virtualization play a role here?) then it just seems like you're being penalized for attempting to increase your efficiency.
It's a carry-over from the old mainframe days.
Basically it boils down to "charge the customer as much as possible".
Their argument is (probably) that more cores allows you to process more data simultaneously, therefore you should fork over more money for a more expensive license. Supposedly so that you can get the more expensive version of Oracle (if such beast exists) that will take advantage of all of those cores.
Look at it from their side. In the past, you may have needed 16 individual single-core boxes to handle the workload. So you paid them for 16 licenses. Now, you can do the job with a single quad-core quad-CPU beast. Which would cut Oracle revenues to 1/16 if they only licensed per-box.
Personally, I feel that as of PostgreSQL 8.1, it's more then a match for Oracle in most situations. But nobody gets fired for buying Oracle.
There's no logical explanation for the Jita clusterfcuk other than people are lazy.
I can give you two:
1) CCP still has mission agents stationed in the Jita system. Which means you have mission runners mixed in with all the trade hub customers. Those agents should've been moved out to the surrounding systems back in the spring when they attempted to "fix" Jita.
2) CCP still hasn't stopped mission agents in the surrounding systems from sending you to Jita to run a combat mission. Nothing like a mission that generates 10-50 rat ships to add to the lag, eh?
So it's not just the players' fault. CCP isn't helping the situation by sending mission runners there. There's also the issue that they need to add one or two more stargate connections around Jita so that players can bypass it without adding 1-2 jumps. Because a lot of times, the auto-pilot settings will route you straight through Jita.
I personally think flash memory is going to take over from traditional backup tapes, not hard drives. The problem seems to be writability and that might be a physical problem. If however, we get to build 48GB cartridges they come pretty close to small business backup tapes. Flash drives are very portable like tapes while hard drives are very 'sensitive' to shocks and other external factors.
Interesting idea... the 4GB SD cards are almost dirt cheap now (less then $40?) and there are 8GB SDHC cards already in channel (~$80) with 16/32GB cards coming soon. However, I think the magic size is probably going to be 128GB for $100-$150 before they'll knock off low-end tape. That would make the 64GB chips around $50.
Still, you're right that flash memory is extremely dense and reliable compared to traditional tape.
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Get rid of Base. Both Access and Base are crappy concepts anyway. Databases should run on a server.
Production databases should run on a server.
But Access brings a lot more to the party then just tables and data storage. In a easy-to-manage file, you have queries, reports, forms and the ability to write a spot of code. Want to make a backup of a table and all of its data? Copy-n-paste the table. Which users can easily grok. Need to muck with everything, pack the MDB into a ZIP file or make a copy, just in case. I have yet to see server-level database GUIs that are as easy to work with.
General office users want to know *where* their data is. With a MDB file, they can treat that blob of data just like a Word or Excel file. And it's better that the data is in a MDB table then on a sheet in an Excel file. In general, the MDB is only used by a small handful of people (1-3) so keeping track of the "current" data set is simply a matter of storing the MDB in Subversion.
Access is also useful for cases where you need to archive data, along with the queries and reports used. I prefer not to have job data from 5 years ago cluttering up our SQL Server. By offloading that data into a MSAccess database, along with a few queries and reports, it's available should we ever need to work with that dataset again down the road. Since each job has a different data layout, it's not like we can create one historical table to store all of that data.
Basically, MSAccess fits a very important niche in the business world. And I have yet to see anything come close to competing (Lotus Approach might have... and I haven't looked at OOO Base in a bit).
I agree with the stagnation part. At work some of our laptops are more than 4 years old (May 2003) and they are still perfectly capable and working (P4 @ 2.8 GHz, 512Mb RAM, 60GB HDD). We even have two T30 Thinkpads that are just enough when traveling to browse, check email and write a doc.
I just retired a Toshiba Tecra 9100 from Feb 2002. It was a P4 @ 1.8GHz, 1GB RAM, and the hard drive had been bumped to 120GB. I used it as my primary machine for 5.5 years. So I understand your point. But I *really* like my new Thinkpad T61 (dual-core, 3GB RAM, two 160GB hard drives, and a 15.4" widescreen 1680x1050 display).
Still, the useful lifespan of a machine has gone from 3 years in the mid-late 90s up to 4-5 years at the turn of the century, and dual-core machines will probably have useful lifespans of 6-9 years. The second core should help them remain responsive to the user, even as they age. Hopefully the capacitors on the motherboards will last that long...
In general, you should have at least 3 images.
1) The base install, after product activation, when things were known to be working fine. It may be 2-3 years old, but it still saves you a lot of time if you ever have to re-install that particular image. These images are also great for when you need to switch the computer over to a new user. They're typically kept on DVD-R and stored in two locations.
2) A weekly snapshot, written to a USB/Firewire/eSATA drive or a central server. And if you have the space, write to alterate directories each week so you can go back further. Use these images for the times when the Windows Restore feature fails.
3) Annual or bi-annual snapshots that never get overwritten. These can be stored along side of the base install disks.
There are already 4 disk external USB/eSATA/Firewire units that can be used for portable storage and setup in RAID5 (if your OS supports it). The downside is that enclosures like that are $250-$500.
The rest of us use hot-swap SATA bays that pack multiple 3.5" drives into 5.25" bays in various configurations. Such as 3:2 (3 3.5" drives in 2 5.25" bays) or 4:3 or 5:3. Combine that with Linux Software RAID and things get easy-peasy.
(Our server boxes are mostly using the 3:2 setup with a triple-active RAID1 array. So even if a single drive fails, we're still running in mirrored mode. Plop the replacement drive in, and we're back up in tripled mode. Pull the wrong drive by accident, and it's still fixable. But the disk activity lights make it easy to know which bay to pull.)
It leaves me to wonder if there are any good Linux Wikis out there that explain things like the boot process clearly and simply, largely without all the technical language and recursive definitions. There's plenty of man pages for those who can parse them, but as far as getting more users to Linux, I'd think this would be quite helpful.
Without looking, I would guess the Gentoo Wiki. Even when I'm looking for information on other distros, Google often turns up hits to Gentoo Wiki.
(I also ran Gentoo for 2-3 years. It was a very good distro for learning the ropes because you do so much at the command line. Not as bare metal as Linux From Scratch, but definitely more so then a standard Ubuntu install.)
Why did it need to be "immediately obvious"? The pilot should take the extra 2 seconds to verify the gear was in the correct strate. The fact they didn't makes it 'pilot error'.
Go read "The Design of Everyday Things".
You can also get some of these insights by reading RISKS digest (either via e-mail subscription or the USENET newsgroup) or by reading FAA post-crash incident reports. They do a very good job of determining whether it was pilot error, equipment error, weather issues, or bad design.
While good design can't trump bad decision making, it hopefully makes it easier to make a better decision then the bad decision.
I recall that the DVD release of The Matrix did a shake-down of compatible players as well. I personally know that Apple's DVD player software of the time was incompatible with the Follow the White Rabbit feature.
Yep, I had one of the early Toshiba DVD players. One of the menu options on the Matrix DVD would cause the player to freeze up. (This also happened with other DVD discs over the years.)
The paladin seal/judgement spell line was new to me (I've played EQ/EQ2/EVE and now WoW). A self-only buff (seal) that can be canceled early (judgement) to do damage or place a debuff on your target.
Blizzard took a lot of things from other MMOs and managed to get it about 95%+ correct, even on the small details. There are a few things that EQ2 did better (mini-dings, mentoring, mini-dungeons, larger quest journal), but for the first four weeks in WoW it seems a lot more polished then EQ2 ever was.
They're delaying an MMO for 14 days so they can finally get around to tweaking game balance issues? They waited until the game was done, started over, done, started over, and done again and then said, "Oh, crap...we forgot to balance it! How fast can we do that?" and came up with a time estimate of 2 weeks....for an MMO.
That's very typical. EQ2 did it towards the end of Beta, they did it again during the combat revamp (which was during almost 2 months of beta testing for the new expansion), and I'm sure a bunch of other MMOs have done it.
It indicates that something has gone wrong in the project management area.
It'd also be nice if they could add incentives to play classes that are needed. It's generally priests and tank guys but I bet they could come up with a dynamic way to encourage class creation of any class that's out of balance at any given time.
It's more of an issue with the player population and personal dynamics.
Playing a priest (and being good at it) requires focus, determination, and being able to put up with all of the "why didn't you heal me?", "heal pet!" and "heal plz". If a DPS goes AFK in the middle of a fight, did you notice? If the tank / healer goes AFK in the middle of a fight, I'll bet you notice right away. And if the group wipes, quite a few players will place the blame on either the healer ("l2heal!") or the tank ("l2tank!").
It's generally a thankless job, until you get a really bad pull and by making a lot of split-second decisions you manage to keep everyone alive with a scrap of health each and a sliver of mana left. At which point, it's a hell of a lot of fun and excitement. After that, you get a lot more respect then you did earlier. (As a priest... I relish a bad situation. That's when I get to use my full bag of tricks.)
There are also evenings where I log on with my priest and have absolutely no interest in doing a group and being responsible for everyone's welfare.
I'd put 40 as another significant milestone. At least a few classes get their first ranks in some class-defining spells at level 40 (i.e. Priest's Greater Heal, Warriors and Paladins can now wear plate, etc.).
I agree that there should be more "epic" mid-level quests in the 30-50 range. Take something like the "Legend of Stalvann", which is a great little quest... now expand it a bit, add in the need to go to various instances.
However, they need to keep it easy. Make the quest items drop off of multiple mobs in the area unless there's a strong storyline reason to have it drop off of a particular boss mob.
(Been playing WoW for about 4-6 weeks now. The grind seems to start in the mid-late 30s when quest XP doesn't push you forward as fast. So I'm looking forward to either (a) adding more quests or (b) what is coming in 2.3 patch.)
We reached that point ca. 2000 (even earlier for people whose web-browsing doesn't involve Flash). Most people don't do anything that needs large amounts of CPU power (more than a ca. 1Ghz P3). They benefit most from RAM and (to a lesser extent) video card upgrades.
Yes, thereabouts (I'd personally peg it at 2001-2002). Computers stopped getting twice as fast every 12-15 months right around that time. We stopped needing to replace machines every 3 years (a 386 was a lot faster then a 286 and the 486 was a big step up as well) because a 3 year old machine was no longer 1/4 to 1/8 the speed of a new one.
The machines that we've been ordering for the office over the past year are dual-core, 2GB RAM, RAID1 hard drives running WinXP. We fully expect them to last at least 7 years (and possibly 10 years) before they need to be replaced. If we do upgrade them it will be to add one more gigabyte of RAM (to get to 3GB) and to add 22" 1680x1050 LCD displays.
Of course, that assumes that the motherboards don't die, or capacitors leak... Everything else can be easily replaced.
(We're buying whatever dual-core CPU we can get for $100-$120. Maybe spending $200 for a power-user workstation. So I only have moderate interest in the latest and flashiest. Mostly it keeps driving more and more powerful chips down into our price range.)
Personally, I'd still RAID them for mission-critical data. But they would indeed have a lot of advantages over magnetic disks once the price drops below $10/GB. Maybe even $20/GB...
Over the past 8 years, we've used a variety of systems. Our bread and butter laptop was the Toshiba Tecra line (8000, 8100, 9100, M2 or M3). We also have used Thinkpad T43, X61s, and T61.
The T61 build feels about as solid as the older Tecra 9100 (which I used for 5.5 years). It's black, it's not flashy, and overall feels pretty solid. Our user with the T43 loves his, and the X61s is too new.
I have a few complaints about the Thinkpads:
1) The Ins/Del/Home/End/PgUp/PgDn keys are in an awkward location. I prefer the non-standard location on the Toshiba Tecra keyboards that put those six keys along the right side, just past the enter/backspace area. That made it easy to find PgUp/PgDn and Home/End with my right-pinky without taking fingers off the home row. Still, I'm slowly getting used to it after 7-8 years of using Tecras. We also have a bunch of MacBook Pros in use by the creative folks, and they've held up well.
2) The Function / Control keys are swapped... again, I'm adjusting after using the Tecra keyboard. The ESC key is also slightly moved.
3) No DVI output. I'm dissapointed that PC makers haven't followed Apple's lead and put DVI outputs on their notebooks (and supply the stupid $10 DVI->VGA adapter).
4) Sometimes the ThinkVantage software gets in my way when it guesses wrong. I'm still adjusting to that.
Other then that, the 15.4" widescreen is lovely. The dual-core CPU is a dream compared to my old 1.8GHz single-core P4. The keyboard is fairly nice, with good tactile feedback. And I have a nubby mouse! Hopefully this system lasts 5-7 years like my older Tecra did.
I just started a new job for a non-IT company and the standard issue monitor is a 15" Dell LCD locked at a max of 1024x768 resolution.
Quit and find a better company that isn't so penny-pinching. Especially if your job is to create documentation.
Our standard issue monitors were 17" CRTs for the past few years. Now that LCD prices have dropped, we'll be switching over to either 19" 1440x900 or 22" 1680x1050. Heck, it's darned difficult to even *find* 15" or 17" LCDs anymore. Seems like all the manufacturers have switched over to the 19-22" size.
Win2k, which you left out, was easily the best MS product ever. Could (still can) play games as well as XP, more secure, no activation, near zero DRM, fewer bugs, less memory usage, etc.
It was good on the desktop, but laptop and wireless works better in WinXP. In Win2K, you were at the mercy of the individual wireless chipset vendor for support apps, in WinXP Microsoft does more of the heavy lifting. That made support easier because everyone had the same UI for working with WiFi.
(I used Win2K for about 2 years, switched over to WinXP in 2002. Overall, I'm a bit more happy running WinXP then I was with Win2K on a laptop.)
You've completely left out the cause of a lot of Vista issues:
Support for Digital Restrictions Management
They got in bed with the MPAA / RIAA, chose to support all the crazy DRM schemes, had to rework large portions of the OS to support "trusted paths". And the result is a slow, bloated OS that nobody is particularly interested in.
Clinical Depression is a disease that I hesitate to even wish upon my worst enemies.
My company still has some desktops running Windows 98, how about you?
We still have a dozen Win98 boxes, and we're trying to get everyone on WinXP before the end of the year so that we can avoid Vista until 2009-2010. At least, for the desktops. We might end up with a few Vista laptops next year (too soon to spend that money), but a few spare OEM licenses of WinXP might come in handy.
(We're not large enough to do the open/select license thingy... plus we keep our machines running for 5-10 years at a go. I figure the new dual-core WinXP machines w/ 2GB of RAM should perform just fine until 2011-2015.)
$10k per Terabyte isn't all that bad; maybe about 30-50% higher. Server level storage goes for $4-$8 per GB (so $4k to $8k per Terabyte). It may also depend on when that SAN was put into use. Were they able to use less expensive SATA drives, or did they need the raw performance of SCSI, etc. Plus cost per gigabyte slowly decreases over time (not as fast as it used to, but it's still a gradual decline of maybe 25% per year).
The big reasons that EVE's economy is the best working economy that I've seen so far:
1) Location matters. There's no magical transportation of goods like there is in WoW or EQ2. As a result, goods acquire value by moving closer to the buyer. That keeps the market from becoming "flat" where everyone charges the exact same price regardless of location. It also allows younger players to participate by buying low-priced goods in one system and moving them elsewhere where people are willing to pay more.
2) Server size. Having one big server with 20k to 35k active players at any point in time means that nobody can monopolize trade. (With a few very rare exceptions such as Tech2 blueprints, but Invention is cutting heavily into those margins.) You may manage to monopolize trade on a particular item in 3-5 regions, but as the profit margin rises, it becomes increasingly likely that other traders will smell profit and move in to compete.
3) Destruction. Ships get destroyed all the time in PvP. That takes resources out of the economy and keeps players in the market for new ships. Unlike a lot of traditional, fantasy, MMOs, ships are very much replaceable with very few "epic" ships. In EQ1, if you caused someone's epic weapon to permanently break when they died, there would be a riot. But in EVE, destruction and loss of ships is part of the game (hence the adage "only fly what you can afford to lose").
4) Items can be reprocessed into basic minerals. Which means that if you're sitting on a stack of Small Shield Booster I inventory, and prices fall too low, you have the option to reprocess them into basic minerals. In fact, it can be lucrative to be a "junk" trader who buys up low-end modules and reprocesses them for the minerals.
5) Lots of regions = lots of markets. The more markets there are, the more niches. When an economy has lots of niches, it becomes easier for newer traders to enter the market and gain a foothold. You can easily compete in EVE's economy (economic PvP) with only a small bankroll at the start. Over time, you reinvest your profits, allowing you to take larger and larger risks for larger profits. There are at least a dozen distinct ways to earn ISK in EVE (ratting, mission running, mining, moving goods, buying low / selling high, low-ball buy orders, piracy, loot drops, manufacture, exploration, selling information, etc.).
6) Buying and selling are easy. And you can put up buy / sell orders that last for 3 months and you can adjust prices every 5 minutes. The limit is that you can only have X number of buy/sell orders active at the same time unless you train up some skills.
It's a very complex system. And it self corrects constantly.
There's a large gap between charging per processor or per machine. A machine could feasibly be used to independently run the software alongside other instances of it on the network, so charging for another license isn't unreasonable. But charging per core doesn't make any sense to me: unless each core is running a separate and independent instance of Oracle (can it be programmed to do so? Does virtualization play a role here?) then it just seems like you're being penalized for attempting to increase your efficiency.
It's a carry-over from the old mainframe days.
Basically it boils down to "charge the customer as much as possible".
Their argument is (probably) that more cores allows you to process more data simultaneously, therefore you should fork over more money for a more expensive license. Supposedly so that you can get the more expensive version of Oracle (if such beast exists) that will take advantage of all of those cores.
Look at it from their side. In the past, you may have needed 16 individual single-core boxes to handle the workload. So you paid them for 16 licenses. Now, you can do the job with a single quad-core quad-CPU beast. Which would cut Oracle revenues to 1/16 if they only licensed per-box.
Personally, I feel that as of PostgreSQL 8.1, it's more then a match for Oracle in most situations. But nobody gets fired for buying Oracle.
There's no logical explanation for the Jita clusterfcuk other than people are lazy.
I can give you two:
1) CCP still has mission agents stationed in the Jita system. Which means you have mission runners mixed in with all the trade hub customers. Those agents should've been moved out to the surrounding systems back in the spring when they attempted to "fix" Jita.
2) CCP still hasn't stopped mission agents in the surrounding systems from sending you to Jita to run a combat mission. Nothing like a mission that generates 10-50 rat ships to add to the lag, eh?
So it's not just the players' fault. CCP isn't helping the situation by sending mission runners there. There's also the issue that they need to add one or two more stargate connections around Jita so that players can bypass it without adding 1-2 jumps. Because a lot of times, the auto-pilot settings will route you straight through Jita.
I personally think flash memory is going to take over from traditional backup tapes, not hard drives. The problem seems to be writability and that might be a physical problem. If however, we get to build 48GB cartridges they come pretty close to small business backup tapes. Flash drives are very portable like tapes while hard drives are very 'sensitive' to shocks and other external factors.
Interesting idea... the 4GB SD cards are almost dirt cheap now (less then $40?) and there are 8GB SDHC cards already in channel (~$80) with 16/32GB cards coming soon. However, I think the magic size is probably going to be 128GB for $100-$150 before they'll knock off low-end tape. That would make the 64GB chips around $50.
Still, you're right that flash memory is extremely dense and reliable compared to traditional tape.
The newer SD cards are now being called SDHC (supported by newer devices only). NewEgg had them for $75-$90 when I looked yesterday.
There are also 16GB ($350?) and 32GB SDHC cards in the pipeline, but still not in the retail channel or priced at a sane level yet.