Hmm. So you get easy access to amazing hardware that previous generations could only fantasize about, at bargain-basement prices, and still you manage to find a way to get upset about it, because somewhere out there, somebody might be making a profit by supplying you with products you want at a price you're willing to pay.

I'm finding it a bit difficult to feel much sympathy for your plight.

OP does point to a real issue though -- drive capacity is increasing faster than drive bandwidth. That means that as time goes on, it takes longer and longer for full-disk operations (e.g. drive backups) to complete.

Since NAND access is (at least in principle) parallelizable, perhaps there is some new SD interface that can increase the transfer rate so that we can keep up for a while longer? I certainly don't much look forward to waiting 15 hours to make a copy of my 5TB SD card...

Maybe 6-10 hours of staff time. What I mean is you have to factor what your people cost you. If someone costs $50/hour when you count in salary + ERE (meaning payroll tax, benefits, insurance and all other expenses) then 6 hours of their time costs $300. So, if your transition wastes more than 6 hours of their time, it is a net loss.

You always have to keep that cost in mind when you talk about anything: What does it cost your employees to do? This is the same deal with old hardware. It can actually cost you more money, because it takes more IT time to support. Like if you have an IT guy whose salary + ERE is $30/hour and you have them spend 20 hours a year repairing and maintaining an old P4 system that keeps failing, well that is a huge waste as that $600 could have easily bought a new system that would work better and take up little, if any, of their time.

That is a reason commercial software wins out in some cases. It isn't that you cannot do something without it, just that it saves more staff time than it costs. That's why places will pay for things like iDRAC or other lights-out management, remote KVMs, and so on. They cost a lot but the time they save in maintenance can easily exceed their cost.

Just remember that unless employees are paid very poorly, $300 isn't a lot of time. So you want to analyze how much time your new system will cost (all new systems will cost some time in transition if nothing else) and make sure it is worth it.

Then you've never worked in an enterprise environment that uses it. You'll have a ton of tech support and maintenance costs with Linux. You not only have all the regular user shit, people who can't figure out how to use their computer, administrative stuff, etc. However I've also observed that a good bit of the stuff in Linux requires a lot of sysadmin work, scripting and such. We do Linux and Windows in our environment and we certainly make Linux work on a large enterprise scale, but our Linux lead spends an awful lot of time messing with puppet, shell scripts, and so on to make it all happen. A lot more than we spend with AD and group policy to make similar things happen in Windows.

Licensing savings are certainly something you can talk about savings for, however you aren't getting out of support and maintenance. That is just part of running an enterprise. The question is what would their costs be, compared to Windows? that is likely to vary per environment.

If you aren't a known developer, people want to see some evidence that you have the ability to make good on your plans. Game development isn't simple, and many people are not prepared for what they are going to have to do to bring a successful game to market.

So Doublefine or inXile can get a good bit of funding with nothing but a design doc for a game because people have faith they'll be able to deliver since they are experienced game devs. New crews are going to have to show something to get people to trust them.

Particularly in light of past KS failures in that regard. I've backed a number of games on KS and two of them I knew were fairly high risk: They were being done by an individual who hadn't done a game before, and there wasn't any sort of demo up front, just some basic concepts. I decided to take a risk on it, but fully understood that failure was likely.

Sure enough, both are floundering/failing. One hasn't had any updates in months, the other does update periodically but it is still extremely rudimentary, despite being way past the planned launch date, and it is pretty clear the dev just doesn't have a good idea how to proceed from here.

On the flip side, the games by established studios have either delivered or are well on track (Shadowrun Returns was brilliant, Wasteland 2 ships next Friday, Pillars of Eternity is in beta, etc). Likewise the indy titles that had a demo and were a good bit along with development have delivered, like FTL.

So no surprise many people aren't willing to take the risk. They want a better chance of return so they stick with established devs or with things that have some proof.

Commie lib here: because the GOP's tax cut proposals always amount to massive cuts for their hyper-rich campaign donors, coupled with a fig-leaf of minor tax savings for everyone else, followed one year later by the inevitable budget crunch

that then impacts the quality of life of everyone except those who can afford to seal themselves away from society. It's a grift -- everyone but the GOP's campaign funders end up poorer afterwards.

The first killer app for the Apple watch will be two-way Morse-code base communication using the buzzer, for discreet Googling of the answers during tests. (of course, mastering this technique will actually require more work than just learning the test material, but that won't stop anybody)

Apparently Apple agrees with you, as they are not selling it yet.

That may be so, but let's not rule out the "something I can wear just to get more attention from the people I want more attention from" application. That application has sold lots of other types of jewelry for centuries, and much of that other jewelry costs a good bit more AND doesn't put a realistic animated butterfly flapping its wings and changing colors on your wrist.

For one thing that is a work of fiction, and there is plenty in there to give it away as something that will never be reality. Then there's also the fact that Minecraft is a poorly optimized Java game with graphics from the 1990s, not the foundation for some world wide universe.

But funny thing about money, people always want more.

Sometimes it does. I see a lot of buses driving around 90+% empty.

Off the top of my head DirectX, Visio, Internet Explorer, Bungie, and Wininternals all worked out very well for them. Not saying you personally like all the products there, but they were all commercially successful in a number of ways.

I mean seriously, why would you want Mojang? Minecraft itself has already made most of its money. You'd never make $2 billion on it going forward, it's big sales have already happened. So you'd be buying the talent/IP for future games... ya, about that. Mojang seems to have little or nothing at all in the pipe to speak of. 0x10c has gone all of nowhere, Scrolls has very little interest anymore and that's about it.

When you look at Minecraft, particularly what it started as, where it came from (Infiniminer) and how much has come form community contribution, it is fairly apparent that Notch is not some genius game designer, he just had the right idea at the right time, and got lucky that it went viral. Minecraft was not some amazing feat of design, it was a digital lego game that struck a chord with people. Fair enough, and he deserves his success, but that isn't the kind of thing worth buying in to, particularly given 0x10c's complete lack of development.

I can't see what MS hopes to gain. Maybe the Minecraft name? I guess, in theory, that is worth some money but I don't really think so. I think people will happily play a good builder game, regardless of title.

Just seems like a bad use of money to me.

Ah, you're thinking of LOGO. It isn't widely used anymore, except as a niche language for cruise missile guidance systems.

There is also the fact that Kosminski's personality profile fits that of a serial killer, he had a deep hatred of women, and he was a butcher (and had a knife that matched the cuts). Being a Polish Jew, Kosminski was a likely match for the person who left the 'Jewes' graffiti. This being the case, and with the already prevalent anger against Jews and immigrants in the wake of the murder and the news of the graffiti, it seems likely that the police actually knew they had their man, but did not want to prosecute him publicly for fear of starting an anti-Jewish progrom in London. So they locked him away and made certain that he could never get out.

Shortly after the anniversary of the murders, there was a television special where several experts were asked to weigh in on who the killer was. The most qualified person on the panel, a woman who worked on investigations of serial murderers, said that Kosminski was the obvious suspect, but the audience went with the Queen's Doctor theory because of a TV special that offered that theory--despite the fact that at the time of the murders, said Doctor had already suffered a stroke, and had lost the use of one of his hands. Conspiracy theories always favor the most powerful agencies for events of broad prominence; this is why large government conspiracies are always favored over individual (Lee Harvey Oswald) or small group (Al Quaeda) actors.