Thanks for the correction. A pity the Dell 4k monitors have not been refreshed with newer electronics to work as single stream.

Try it. Set 200% font scaling and the toolbars, icons, etc double in size. This is with Windows 7 - perhaps in Windows 8 it doesn't work as well, but my guess would be if you turn off Aero and just use the old-fashioned font size scaling it should still be fine.

The trouble with Freshmeat/Freecode was that they aggressively deleted entries when links broke. So if a project's homepage went down it would soon become unsearchable on the site. This reduced the site's usefulness as an archive of known free software. (Much better to keep the archived information and encourage people to fix the links - as a last resort, somebody who downloaded the tarball before the site went down could re-upload it somewhere.) Is there an alternative site which works as a kind of encylopaedia of free software? Github is great and all, but it is a project hosting site rather than an index of all software (which may be hosted externally and perhaps not even maintained in a public git repository).

It depends on how the upscaling is done. If you choose exactly 200% font scaling in Windows, and turn off Aero, then almost all applications scale up crisply. A few such as the command prompt window remain unscaled, but none turn into a blurry mess.

No current DisplayPort standard supports two 4k monitors at 60Hz with a single output. The latest DisplayPort 1.2 will drive a single screen at 3840x2160@60Hz, but current monitors use multi-stream transport (MST) to do so which means the video card sees it as two separate monitors which then must be tiled together - this tends to expose driver bugs. DisplayPort 1.3 will increase the bandwidth but I don't think it has been finalized yet, nor is any hardware available.

The IBM T220 was announced in 2001 and had a 3840x2400 resolution, effectively what marketing now calls "4k" plus a little bit extra vertical space. It was limited to 41Hz refresh, though its replacement the T221 a year or two later increased that to 48Hz (and the last model can be overclocked to 55Hz or so). Sadly there were then the monitor Dark Ages when the T221 was discontinued and the world seemed to regress to crappy resolutions like 1440x900. You're right that 2010 was the time things started to look up again, and 8k has been demonstrated as a prototype. 5 years sounds about right; the difficulty with an 8k monitor is not so much the panel (high-dpi panels exist already, and could be cut to a larger size like 30 inches) but driving it. With the current DisplayPort spec several independent cables would be needed to drive 8k at 60Hz.

Yeah, I wish that there were better alternatives to the normal way of scrolling. Even at 60Hz refresh (and with pretty big font sizes on a 180dpi screen) it is not exactly easy on the eyes to read text as it scrolls. I like the old school way of hitting Space (or PgDn) to move down one screenful. But then you can lose track of where you were in the text. I'd like to see a horizontal red line showing the previous start of the screen, which would fade away over a second or two.

Have you tried 30Hz? It really isn't a big deal for text-based applications like programming and web browsing. Sure 60Hz refresh is nice; it gives you warm fuzzies to know that you're getting a fast refresh rate, and things just generally look cuter and more Apple-commercial-like if the screen refresh is smooth. But it's a hard case to make that it really has an impact on productivity for real work. I'm using Dell UP2414Qs at the moment, and the 60Hz refresh is great (tip: set the colour management to Game mode to eliminate input lag). But before then I used T221s at 24Hz and that was fine too for emacs and web browsing. I've even used a T221 at 12Hz and while I can't say it was the most comfortable setup, it got the job done.

Right, but while you may well need to archive data for 30 years, that doesn't mean you need to store a particular physical tape or disk for that long. It would make more sense to store the volume for five years and then transfer the data to a new one, to take advantage of capacity increases. Your warehouse full of tapes from 30 years ago might fit in a desk drawer now. So if I wanted to back up to hard disks, I'd keep a pool of them and replace the oldest disk every year or so. Admittedly software support for this is not great - RAID implementations don't always support cobbling together a random mixture of disk sizes which change over time.

The thing is that mining bitcoins is not really a supercomputer task. It is an "embarassingly parallel" problem - you could get some PCs and connect them over 9600bps serial ports, and it would hardly be any different to using the fastest network to connect them together. There is not that much communication needed between the parts of the cluster. A true supercomputer usually has fast, specialized interlink hardware between the compute nodes so it can work on problems which are somewhat less parallelizable, requiring more communication between the nodes. That is why it is expensive, and expensive to hire computing time on it, and yet it doesn't perform any better at bitcoin mining than a simple-minded farm of commodity hardware. (And for bitcoin mining, either of those will be blown out of the water by specialized ASICs.)

I don't think market cap is a good measure of size. If it were, then during the dotcom boom various online pet food suppliers, etc, which had barely any assets, employees or customers, would have counted as 'bigger' than more boring companies with a much greater footprint in the real world. Similarly, a large company may head towards bankruptcy and as it does so its market cap heads towards zero. But even if it is sold for a nominal price of one dollar, it is still a big company by any reasonable measure.

There's no issue getting 3840x2160 resolution with any even half-recent video card. I drive a T221 (3840x2400) from a five year old Dell laptop; these displays first appeared a decade and a half ago when PCs were much slower than today. Admittedly, if your new monitor takes Displayport you will need a video card capable of outputting that. Now, if you want to play games at 3840x2160 at 60Hz refresh, you're going to need some pretty serious hardware. But that has nothing to do with using the display for programming or office tasks. 30Hz refresh is quite comfortable for that.

In Windows it works better if you stick to an exact multiple of 100%. In other words your choices are 100% or 200%.

Why on earth would you choose to base your product (something that presumably companies will use for many, many years) on something that will have no security support in just 4 months?

You wouldn't. You based it on something that would be supported for several years when you made the decision back in 2006. It's just that schedules being as they are, it has taken that long to develop the product and get it to market.

In the land of dinosaurs, where Big Companies do Stupid Things, it is fairly common for new products to be launched and then the whole platform end-of-lifed soon after. It's nobody's fault in particular, just how decisions get made.