I'm sorry, but many forget that most people expect e-mail to work just like plain post.
I for example was putting up with all bugs and weirdness of Thunderbird 1.x simply because it was easier for me to stay with it than to migrate anywhere. (Doubly so as I was Netscape Messenger user for many years). Only after I have learned that Tb 2.x is going to drastically improve all the bugs and bring more of the Outlook Express craziness to the boat, when I have finally made decision to start trying out alternatives. Not sooner.
The point here is as long as Outlook/Exchange would work for the people - they are going to use it. End of story.
If moving around whole address book isn't scary enough (all the incompatibilities of different optional fields presentations) think about moving the e-mail archive. My current personal archive now reached about 3GB (while my past mailbox is about 250MB archived). I know that import/export mostly works, but there is no simple way to verify that some e-mail will not get botched during migration. And not once on me during migration some important e-mails went missing and some attachments went missing/broken.
Changing e-mail client is a red herring. Real story in how migration is done.
MLC still hasn't improved its lower durability bound: 100K erase cycles. (Often flash companies advertise only upper bound: 1-2.5Mln erase cycles. SLC has it at about 1Mln cycles.) And 100K erases for the flash - especially if one puts a FS's journal there - is really not that much since journal has to be updates often while the operation itself might not even reach the disk. E.g. on many systems the sequence will touch only FS journal: create temp file, work with it for a split of second, delete it. And that happens more often than some might think.
People on servers (and not only servers) were doing something similar with EXT3 for quite some time. EXT3 supports external journal and many were using CF cards attached over IDE as a journaling device. It would be interesting to hear about their experience in the context.
To the #2: Opera 10 - unlike 9.x - always check for the updated page!
I'd definitely give 10th a more serious test in the office. I need some robust tool - which can complement recently developed WebUIs for few internal applications.
P.S. Now I even managed to make ^Tab to not to display the fancy list of tabs, but switch to next tab immediately. Slowly, Opera makes progress in my eyes.
1. Is it possible to configure Opera so that tabs behave like in FireFox? The default behavior of Opera after closing a tab to always switch to previously open tab. That totally messes up my workflow when I work with sites like Bugzilla.
2. Is it possible to tell Opera when restoring tabs during start-up to fetch them from net, not from cache? FireFox 3.5 does the same and it is also impossible to turn off. That gave me couple of time already the shock - WTF!? AGAIN???? IMPOSSIBLE!?!?!? - caused mainly by a browser showing me an outdated version of a intranet web page. It's really not the best way to start Mondays.
As FireFox more and more evolves into a "better browser for your mom", it seems that after 10+ years using Mozilla, I have to finally say goodbye. Opera is a great candidate, but the minor perks prevent it from being usable to me.
Any Oracle we have on cheap Linux/x64 runs like crap.
Have seen enough of "real UNIX" boxes to crap out under load to not to believe such statements anymore. OK, number-wise I have seen more Linux boxes running like a crap, but it's mainly because (1) there are simply more Linux boxes out there and (2) people try to squeeze out of them more juice than they really have.
Specifically in case of Oracle, crapped out OS due to heavy load is highly likely misconfiguration of Oracle itself. But it's true that fine-tuning Oracle isn't best occupation (and Oracle consultants are rather expensive).
My employer runs a farm of Oracle DBs on bunch of Linux/x64 and while they are not the best performers, they are definitely worth more what we pay for them (we have support contract for SLES). Especially when compared to "real UNIX" servers and what we pay for them.
I'm not a Sun product specialist, but other bigger part might be the SPARC unit. And selling it makes even less sense: SPARC is open specification, HP can implement one on their own. But I think they are not interested in entering CPU manufacturing business anymore, as competing against cheapo AMD64 platform now is futile. This is where the mass market is. And for niches Itanic is a better fit anyway.
I'm not sure how it is from services POV, but to sell Sun's service unit one has to throw in something what the services unit is proficient making solutions of. E.g. combination of services + AMD64 product lines. But then as many sun insiders commented, AMD64 products were not that big inside of Sun. And Oracle actually might be more interested in keeping AMD64 expertise in house (since Oracle predominantly runs now on cheap Linux/x64 boxen).
That leaves only Solaris as an option to sell of. Considering sorry state of their own HP-UX (and that Solaris would come with SysV license) HP might be bit more interested in buying it (with its services unit). Either to modernize their own UNIX offering or (more likely) kill Solaris and shut off those who keep comparing Solaris to HP-UX (HP-UX looks rather bad in comparison).
No no. You got it wrong. HP's model is "buy it, burry it, write off losses."
Frankly, having seen what HP did to DEC (acquired as part of Compaq; the ill-fated Alphas and Tru64), acquisition of SPARC and Solaris would spell rather quick death to both. In its current shape, HP unlikely to be allowed to do the trick again. (Nor Solaris customers would want to migrate to HP-UX, which is probably most POSIX-incompatible POSIX-certified OS I have seen to date.)
As a UNIX seller, HP is probably most backward company you can find out there. And their upper management who are forgetting at times that they still have UNIX business doesn't help to improve the image.
2. Run 'pidstat' to see which processes write too often to disk. Uninstall what can be uninstalled easily.
I meant of course e.g. 'pidstat -d 30', where '30' is the interval in seconds between state updates.
On my laptop, when idle I get less than 5 disk writes per hour.
After two days with pidstat, about week of cleaning system of GNOME (goodbye gnome-power-manager! goodbye scrollkeeper!!) I managed to bring my laptop to something like 2.5-3 hours from single charge.
Overall from my experience I can tell that Linux (as a whole) extremely poorly optimized for notebooks.
I have spent at least two weeks cleaning my Ubuntu installation to get any decent battery life. I ended up with essentially stripped down Xubuntu installation.
My approach was simple.
1. Run 'top' to see list of process running. Disable unnecessary services while you at it. Uninstall what can be uninstalled easily.
2. Run 'pidstat' to see which processes write too often to disk. Uninstall what can be uninstalled easily.
3. Turn/tmp and/var/* from directories into tmpfs mounts (you should have spare RAM for that, but most modern PC hardware is oversized anyway). That will save a great deal of disk accesses. Note that some/var/* sub-directories have structure and can't be easily turned into tmpfs mount. Experiment a bit in single user mode.
4. Reconfigure syslog to not to write redundant stuff into the log files: disable markers and configure to ignore periodic messages from daemons.
Worst what I have encountered were gnome-power-manager (which writes every 90 seconds to disk state of battery thus preventive hard drive from *ever* going to sleep) and syslog (finding easy to understand manual on discarding messages was major pain).
If you really into notebooks, I can only recommend Apple. Both standard and 3rd party Mac OS X applications were tuned for laptop workflow eons ago. Also Apple picks hardware which is better suited for the notebooks (that's why you will never get in Apple's laptop higher-end CPUs/GPUs which are pretty common in Wintel notebooks).
Go with Linux only if you know how to work in single user mode, know how to install/deinstall software from command line and how to bring the OS from dead (if some tuning attempt went wrong, e.g. putting/var/* onto tmpfs). And be prepared in the end to say goodbye to many bells and whistles. For example my friend has old Toshiba's subnotebook and manages to get out of it 8 hours - but he works exclusively from command line and uses fvwm for his GUI needs.
Strictly speaking Avatar is not a sci-fi - this is more of a "post-modern fantasy."
I'm not a purist, yet sometimes I'm annoyed when people confuse fantasy with science fiction.
Avatar is clearly a fantasy. It's not a science fiction per se. First paragraph of Wikipedia puts it well: "[...] imaginary elements are largely possible within scientifically-established or scientifically-postulated laws of nature [...] Exploring the consequences of such differences is the traditional purpose of science fiction [...]".
Difference is important to me only because I want to be prepared before watching a movie: if it's a pure sci-fi then I probably want to be sober while for action packed post-modern fantasy I might want to grab a beer or two.
In the end, I find it ironic that e.g. Star Wars is less sci-fi than say Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Or to put it simply: for $400-500 big OEMs will never sell you a gaming rig. Last time I was checking they were asking at minimum about $800 (ones with full-featured nVidia x800 or better card). E.g. Dell XPS line starts from around $700.
From all problems you mention, in my experience shitty PSUs is the biggest one. Worst part: some OEMs (Dell is one of them) use incompatible PSU to MB connectors making it impossible to upgrade it.
Or in other words: most of OEM PCs are not ATX compatible, meaning that within two years, gaming-wise, they become fancy dust collectors.
It's been like that since the beginning. Or more precisely, after Doom2's DM was made literally into a new sport. I had friends who participated (and trained a lot for it) in state level Doom 2 (and later Quake *) deathmatch tournaments.
I enjoy FPS, but quite bad at it. In past we had a rule that pros play only with a basic gun, bare hands or a chainsaw. That was leveling up playing field a bit - but also was helping pros to polish their skills in close quarter battle. (Going with a chainsaw vs. RPG never going to be easy.)
PC gamers hate consoles as they're marginalising the PC as a gaming platform. But don't worry, you'll still have a steady stream of identical fantasy MMOs to keep you busy, and maybe a few cast-off shitty ports six-months after the console release.
... thanks for the nice example of hate speak.
It's also nice to see the confirmation that average console gamers doesn't even try to see all the possibilities - because they are so used to be locked in singular console market. Having choices isn't for you. Making the choice - out of question.
Check Steam and Impulse for PC game development. Usual plethora of FPS, RTS, TBS, etc games. Got bored with standard package? Check out mods. Tired of that too? Check out indie/amateur games. You can come across a gem one in a while. Or even new genre progenitor. Tired of that too? Check all the piles of flash based games - you can play new game every day.
PC gaming can't be marginalized for one simple reason: this is where all gaming innovations are happening. When PC gaming dies, so would the gaming in general.
After all, innovations aren't happening behind closed doors by sales people - you need an open, competitive environment for that, filled with people who have a genuine interest. Console companies aren't fit for that: they are too busy coming up with next way to rip off their consumers (while engineering is way too busy to figure out how to map all the 100 of actions sales want in the game on the two buttons of a controller).
Note, I like such practices as much as you do. I'm only trying to clarify that.
its not really new content, its content they already gave you.
They didn't gave it to you. You purchased a disk with content. Along with the disk came the license - yet it wasn't covering all of the content on the disk. To access remaining of the content you need to buy a licenses, which are called DLC in the context.
I guess precisely for the reason (to allow such practices) all console games now are not sold anymore but licensed instead.
You can think of it other way. Disk contains $100 of content. But that's too expensive. So they lock part of content and sell games with only $60 worth of content. If you want to access rest - you have to pay extra.
If you do not agree with such practices, buy a PC. Or STFU.
In my experience, PC gamers are too busy with their games - and with upgrades to their PCs - to actually notice console gamers.
Personally I'd advise to leave console gamers alone - in their eternal mushroom kingdom nirvana. It's impossible for them to learn that there is a choice.
It seems that gaming companies are giving up on the PC as a gaming platform...
PC as gaming platform is much more competitive. Doing business on consoles bears less risks.
But that also means that unless you restrict yourself to few franchises, you have magnitude more games to play. Install Steam and Impulse clients and check the catalog: there are more games on PC than some big publishers would like you to believe.
... and releasing buggy games to us now as an afterthought.
Moot point. Can't recall single PC game in past decade which was 100% playable without couple of patches.
For $7k, the guy might be doing bit more than playing Crysis, you know. Like... "work" and stuff.
Decent monitor x 2, workstation level graphic card and good RAID-10 controller with server grade drives - those alone could easily weigh more than $3k. Not required for games, but for some types of work is a necessity.
If they just wanted to make up for the cost certification, they could charge 50 cents and still turn a profit. (Of course, charging 50 cents ends up costing 25 cents in transaction fees, so make it 75 cents...)
There are piles of other costs involved too, like operations, promotions DRM, bandwidth, etc.
The price is set based on what people will pay, not on what it cost.
So after all you understand it.
In the end it boils down to cost models.
Consoles are like TV and games are like movies and TV shows. And priced like-wise - so the attendance fee would make you feel privileged. (What I strongly believe is the source of the console gaming "hardcore elitism" syndrom.)
PCs are like... PCs. With arrival of internet, establishment of solid gaming communities, many game companies found themselves competing against their own users. On PCs, you would find variety of business models. Not only game companies compete against each other - but also business models compete against each other. Existence of Stream and Impulse (and by now countless other DD stores) is the best evidence of that.
Consequently, PC content has to be priced more competitively than that of consoles. Often, considering competing distribution channels, modding communities and piracy - it's simpler to give it away for free and try to monetize the give away, (rather than charging for it up front).
On consoles the competition induced problem of PC market simply doesn't exist. That's why publishers charge pretty much anything they want. And how they way. That's why many 6+ month old PC game might be considered old and found in discount bin for $10, while most console games after two years might be found on the shelves with the same price as at the release.
Slashdot Mirror
I've begun to feel that Intel is lacking focus in their chip lineup.
Yes. Because they can afford it.
Now fab-less AMD remains in remote second position and can't really compete against the Chipzilla.
That gives a perfect chance to Intel to further fragment the market to maximize the profits.
I'm sorry, but many forget that most people expect e-mail to work just like plain post.
I for example was putting up with all bugs and weirdness of Thunderbird 1.x simply because it was easier for me to stay with it than to migrate anywhere. (Doubly so as I was Netscape Messenger user for many years). Only after I have learned that Tb 2.x is going to drastically improve all the bugs and bring more of the Outlook Express craziness to the boat, when I have finally made decision to start trying out alternatives. Not sooner.
The point here is as long as Outlook/Exchange would work for the people - they are going to use it. End of story.
If moving around whole address book isn't scary enough (all the incompatibilities of different optional fields presentations) think about moving the e-mail archive. My current personal archive now reached about 3GB (while my past mailbox is about 250MB archived). I know that import/export mostly works, but there is no simple way to verify that some e-mail will not get botched during migration. And not once on me during migration some important e-mails went missing and some attachments went missing/broken.
Changing e-mail client is a red herring. Real story in how migration is done.
My contract is cheaper: 0€ * 12 = 0€ / year .... LOL. I'm on prepaid.
calling the petition a 'pro-consumer' (!)
Of course it pro-consumer. It will ensure that only role you can play is being obedient couch potato.
Also that might help finally solve the problem with the pesky indie studios by making it even more expensive to air anything anywhere.
That's what worrying me too.
MLC still hasn't improved its lower durability bound: 100K erase cycles. (Often flash companies advertise only upper bound: 1-2.5Mln erase cycles. SLC has it at about 1Mln cycles.) And 100K erases for the flash - especially if one puts a FS's journal there - is really not that much since journal has to be updates often while the operation itself might not even reach the disk. E.g. on many systems the sequence will touch only FS journal: create temp file, work with it for a split of second, delete it. And that happens more often than some might think.
People on servers (and not only servers) were doing something similar with EXT3 for quite some time. EXT3 supports external journal and many were using CF cards attached over IDE as a journaling device. It would be interesting to hear about their experience in the context.
Thanks a bunch!
To the #1: it works! Finally!!
To the #2: Opera 10 - unlike 9.x - always check for the updated page!
I'd definitely give 10th a more serious test in the office. I need some robust tool - which can complement recently developed WebUIs for few internal applications.
P.S. Now I even managed to make ^Tab to not to display the fancy list of tabs, but switch to next tab immediately. Slowly, Opera makes progress in my eyes.
1. Is it possible to configure Opera so that tabs behave like in FireFox? The default behavior of Opera after closing a tab to always switch to previously open tab. That totally messes up my workflow when I work with sites like Bugzilla.
2. Is it possible to tell Opera when restoring tabs during start-up to fetch them from net, not from cache? FireFox 3.5 does the same and it is also impossible to turn off. That gave me couple of time already the shock - WTF!? AGAIN???? IMPOSSIBLE!?!?!? - caused mainly by a browser showing me an outdated version of a intranet web page. It's really not the best way to start Mondays.
As FireFox more and more evolves into a "better browser for your mom", it seems that after 10+ years using Mozilla, I have to finally say goodbye. Opera is a great candidate, but the minor perks prevent it from being usable to me.
Any Oracle we have on cheap Linux/x64 runs like crap.
Have seen enough of "real UNIX" boxes to crap out under load to not to believe such statements anymore. OK, number-wise I have seen more Linux boxes running like a crap, but it's mainly because (1) there are simply more Linux boxes out there and (2) people try to squeeze out of them more juice than they really have.
Specifically in case of Oracle, crapped out OS due to heavy load is highly likely misconfiguration of Oracle itself. But it's true that fine-tuning Oracle isn't best occupation (and Oracle consultants are rather expensive).
My employer runs a farm of Oracle DBs on bunch of Linux/x64 and while they are not the best performers, they are definitely worth more what we pay for them (we have support contract for SLES). Especially when compared to "real UNIX" servers and what we pay for them.
I'm not a Sun product specialist, but other bigger part might be the SPARC unit. And selling it makes even less sense: SPARC is open specification, HP can implement one on their own. But I think they are not interested in entering CPU manufacturing business anymore, as competing against cheapo AMD64 platform now is futile. This is where the mass market is. And for niches Itanic is a better fit anyway.
I'm not sure how it is from services POV, but to sell Sun's service unit one has to throw in something what the services unit is proficient making solutions of. E.g. combination of services + AMD64 product lines. But then as many sun insiders commented, AMD64 products were not that big inside of Sun. And Oracle actually might be more interested in keeping AMD64 expertise in house (since Oracle predominantly runs now on cheap Linux/x64 boxen).
That leaves only Solaris as an option to sell of. Considering sorry state of their own HP-UX (and that Solaris would come with SysV license) HP might be bit more interested in buying it (with its services unit). Either to modernize their own UNIX offering or (more likely) kill Solaris and shut off those who keep comparing Solaris to HP-UX (HP-UX looks rather bad in comparison).
No no. You got it wrong. HP's model is "buy it, burry it, write off losses."
Frankly, having seen what HP did to DEC (acquired as part of Compaq; the ill-fated Alphas and Tru64), acquisition of SPARC and Solaris would spell rather quick death to both. In its current shape, HP unlikely to be allowed to do the trick again. (Nor Solaris customers would want to migrate to HP-UX, which is probably most POSIX-incompatible POSIX-certified OS I have seen to date.)
As a UNIX seller, HP is probably most backward company you can find out there. And their upper management who are forgetting at times that they still have UNIX business doesn't help to improve the image.
I still can't get why you Americans keep repeating that.
What difference it makes, whether global warming is caused by human activity or not?
It has to be dealt with anyway. Unless we all want to join ranks of dinosaurs.
2. Run 'pidstat' to see which processes write too often to disk. Uninstall what can be uninstalled easily.
I meant of course e.g. 'pidstat -d 30', where '30' is the interval in seconds between state updates.
On my laptop, when idle I get less than 5 disk writes per hour.
After two days with pidstat, about week of cleaning system of GNOME (goodbye gnome-power-manager! goodbye scrollkeeper!!) I managed to bring my laptop to something like 2.5-3 hours from single charge.
Overall from my experience I can tell that Linux (as a whole) extremely poorly optimized for notebooks.
I have spent at least two weeks cleaning my Ubuntu installation to get any decent battery life. I ended up with essentially stripped down Xubuntu installation.
My approach was simple.
1. Run 'top' to see list of process running. Disable unnecessary services while you at it. Uninstall what can be uninstalled easily.
2. Run 'pidstat' to see which processes write too often to disk. Uninstall what can be uninstalled easily.
3. Turn /tmp and /var/* from directories into tmpfs mounts (you should have spare RAM for that, but most modern PC hardware is oversized anyway). That will save a great deal of disk accesses. Note that some /var/* sub-directories have structure and can't be easily turned into tmpfs mount. Experiment a bit in single user mode.
4. Reconfigure syslog to not to write redundant stuff into the log files: disable markers and configure to ignore periodic messages from daemons.
Worst what I have encountered were gnome-power-manager (which writes every 90 seconds to disk state of battery thus preventive hard drive from *ever* going to sleep) and syslog (finding easy to understand manual on discarding messages was major pain).
If you really into notebooks, I can only recommend Apple. Both standard and 3rd party Mac OS X applications were tuned for laptop workflow eons ago. Also Apple picks hardware which is better suited for the notebooks (that's why you will never get in Apple's laptop higher-end CPUs/GPUs which are pretty common in Wintel notebooks).
Go with Linux only if you know how to work in single user mode, know how to install/deinstall software from command line and how to bring the OS from dead (if some tuning attempt went wrong, e.g. putting /var/* onto tmpfs). And be prepared in the end to say goodbye to many bells and whistles. For example my friend has old Toshiba's subnotebook and manages to get out of it 8 hours - but he works exclusively from command line and uses fvwm for his GUI needs.
It's a clear case of the "badsummary". Just check Groklaw.
As I have understood it, it was only summary judgment which was overturned. IOW, there would be a trial.
Strictly speaking Avatar is not a sci-fi - this is more of a "post-modern fantasy."
I'm not a purist, yet sometimes I'm annoyed when people confuse fantasy with science fiction.
Avatar is clearly a fantasy. It's not a science fiction per se. First paragraph of Wikipedia puts it well: "[...] imaginary elements are largely possible within scientifically-established or scientifically-postulated laws of nature [...] Exploring the consequences of such differences is the traditional purpose of science fiction [...]".
Difference is important to me only because I want to be prepared before watching a movie: if it's a pure sci-fi then I probably want to be sober while for action packed post-modern fantasy I might want to grab a beer or two.
In the end, I find it ironic that e.g. Star Wars is less sci-fi than say Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Or to put it simply: for $400-500 big OEMs will never sell you a gaming rig. Last time I was checking they were asking at minimum about $800 (ones with full-featured nVidia x800 or better card). E.g. Dell XPS line starts from around $700.
From all problems you mention, in my experience shitty PSUs is the biggest one. Worst part: some OEMs (Dell is one of them) use incompatible PSU to MB connectors making it impossible to upgrade it.
Or in other words: most of OEM PCs are not ATX compatible, meaning that within two years, gaming-wise, they become fancy dust collectors.
It's been like that since the beginning. Or more precisely, after Doom2's DM was made literally into a new sport. I had friends who participated (and trained a lot for it) in state level Doom 2 (and later Quake *) deathmatch tournaments.
I enjoy FPS, but quite bad at it. In past we had a rule that pros play only with a basic gun, bare hands or a chainsaw. That was leveling up playing field a bit - but also was helping pros to polish their skills in close quarter battle. (Going with a chainsaw vs. RPG never going to be easy.)
PC gamers hate consoles as they're marginalising the PC as a gaming platform. But don't worry, you'll still have a steady stream of identical fantasy MMOs to keep you busy, and maybe a few cast-off shitty ports six-months after the console release.
It's also nice to see the confirmation that average console gamers doesn't even try to see all the possibilities - because they are so used to be locked in singular console market. Having choices isn't for you. Making the choice - out of question.
Check Steam and Impulse for PC game development. Usual plethora of FPS, RTS, TBS, etc games. Got bored with standard package? Check out mods. Tired of that too? Check out indie/amateur games. You can come across a gem one in a while. Or even new genre progenitor. Tired of that too? Check all the piles of flash based games - you can play new game every day.
PC gaming can't be marginalized for one simple reason: this is where all gaming innovations are happening. When PC gaming dies, so would the gaming in general.
After all, innovations aren't happening behind closed doors by sales people - you need an open, competitive environment for that, filled with people who have a genuine interest. Console companies aren't fit for that: they are too busy coming up with next way to rip off their consumers (while engineering is way too busy to figure out how to map all the 100 of actions sales want in the game on the two buttons of a controller).
Note, I like such practices as much as you do. I'm only trying to clarify that.
its not really new content, its content they already gave you.
They didn't gave it to you. You purchased a disk with content. Along with the disk came the license - yet it wasn't covering all of the content on the disk. To access remaining of the content you need to buy a licenses, which are called DLC in the context.
I guess precisely for the reason (to allow such practices) all console games now are not sold anymore but licensed instead.
You can think of it other way. Disk contains $100 of content. But that's too expensive. So they lock part of content and sell games with only $60 worth of content. If you want to access rest - you have to pay extra.
If you do not agree with such practices, buy a PC. Or STFU.
In my experience, PC gamers are too busy with their games - and with upgrades to their PCs - to actually notice console gamers.
Personally I'd advise to leave console gamers alone - in their eternal mushroom kingdom nirvana. It's impossible for them to learn that there is a choice.
Considering that you do not buy console games anymore - you license them - it's fine. Then DLC is simply extra license key for the extra content.
We might not like it, but that was and is standard business practice in some markets.
Seems now also on consoles.
It seems that gaming companies are giving up on the PC as a gaming platform ...
PC as gaming platform is much more competitive. Doing business on consoles bears less risks.
But that also means that unless you restrict yourself to few franchises, you have magnitude more games to play. Install Steam and Impulse clients and check the catalog: there are more games on PC than some big publishers would like you to believe.
Moot point. Can't recall single PC game in past decade which was 100% playable without couple of patches.
For $7k, the guy might be doing bit more than playing Crysis, you know. Like ... "work" and stuff.
Decent monitor x 2, workstation level graphic card and good RAID-10 controller with server grade drives - those alone could easily weigh more than $3k. Not required for games, but for some types of work is a necessity.
console-owning-PC-haters
For whatever reason I recalled my mother who hates soap operas deeply, yet watches them every night.
Console gamers would always hate PC gamers - simply because we get more out of our games than their could ever hope for.
It could be compared to incompatibility between people who watch soap operas and people who'd rather go out for a walk.
If they just wanted to make up for the cost certification, they could charge 50 cents and still turn a profit. (Of course, charging 50 cents ends up costing 25 cents in transaction fees, so make it 75 cents...)
There are piles of other costs involved too, like operations, promotions DRM, bandwidth, etc.
The price is set based on what people will pay, not on what it cost.
So after all you understand it.
In the end it boils down to cost models.
Consoles are like TV and games are like movies and TV shows. And priced like-wise - so the attendance fee would make you feel privileged. (What I strongly believe is the source of the console gaming "hardcore elitism" syndrom.)
PCs are like ... PCs. With arrival of internet, establishment of solid gaming communities, many game companies found themselves competing against their own users. On PCs, you would find variety of business models. Not only game companies compete against each other - but also business models compete against each other. Existence of Stream and Impulse (and by now countless other DD stores) is the best evidence of that.
Consequently, PC content has to be priced more competitively than that of consoles. Often, considering competing distribution channels, modding communities and piracy - it's simpler to give it away for free and try to monetize the give away, (rather than charging for it up front).
On consoles the competition induced problem of PC market simply doesn't exist. That's why publishers charge pretty much anything they want. And how they way. That's why many 6+ month old PC game might be considered old and found in discount bin for $10, while most console games after two years might be found on the shelves with the same price as at the release.