What's wrong with Windows 7 that makes you want to upgrade?

Nothing, other then the problem that it will stop getting updates within the next few years. So if you want to continue to receive security updates, you have to move to Win10.

Which, fortunately for Microsoft, is getting good press and good reception unlike Win8.

The core issue with WinVista and later?

Too many SKUs (combined with cost).

Trying to keep track of what features came with WinVista X vs Y vs Z (or Win7 SKUs or Win 8.1 with five different SKUs) was very consumer-hostile. Consumers got confused and annoyed. Plus there was a huge cost difference between the top-end SKU and the home edition.

There should only have been (1) version of Windows 7 -- with all of the bells and whistles included in Enterprise/Ultimate/DaddyGates editions -- for a maximum of about $60 per copy, or $30/copy if purchased in a 5-pack.

People would then have upgraded in much larger numbers from WinXP to Win7. Instead, because Microsoft got greedy in the prices it charged for the OpSys, people started looking at alternatives.

Back in the early 2000s, a decent rig would run you $1500-$1800 and a $100 license on top of that wasn't too big of a deal. Ten years later, a decent rig is about $600, but the cost of the operating system has gone up to $150. Microsoft is asking people to pay 25% of the computer's value for the Operating System instead of under 10%.

Every time Microsoft talks about the free upgrade, there are always those weasel words in there about "qualified" devices. So what devices qualify?

Multiple certificates (SNI) over a single SSL IP address/port is a mostly solved issue. The only outliers are:

WinXP users still using Internet Explorer (Firefox/Chrome are workarounds), but WinXP is out of support for a year now -- so maybe you should stop pandering to them.

Older versions of Android and iOS - we're talking really old versions (Android 2.x, iOS 3).

Older versions of Windows IIS before 8.x - but Win2003 servers go out of support this coming year, so you should be migrating off.

Two to three years ago, SNI was not well supported and not worth enabling, but things have changed enough that you should forge ahead.

We've had a functionally equivalent capability with Shorewall + LSM (Link Status Monitor) for years now. Setup (2) ISP connections, route a proportion of your traffic to each one and when the link goes down, all traffic goes to the other link.

The hard part of the equation is your public DNS records that need to change to whichever IP address is "active" (or round-robin between the two). But most DNS service providers have a solution for that as well.

Naturally, it's not as seamless as multi-path, but it works without needing a BGP entry or your own IP address block in the public routing tables.

The other way around works better.

eInk readers are perfect for linear reading, such as fiction / non-fiction / stories / etc. I do all of my leisure reading (i.e. fiction) on either my Sony reader or on my 10" tablet. But they are not so good for reference works where you need to flip pages a lot or deal with lots of diagrams.

Reference works, such as books on technical topics, I usually resort to reading them on the 27" display on my desktop (although some are passable on a 10" tablet). The main reason I buy those in electronic from is for search and space savings on my bookshelf.

I'm still moderately happy with the modern Thinkpad T series that we've purchased for others in the office (T440 series). Not sure that it will live up to my T61p in terms of longevity (7.5 years old now).

Guess I'll find out when I replace my laptop next year.

The important things to me are reliability, longevity, 4-5 year warranty, 16-32GB of RAM, Intel i7, docking station, and two internal drive bays.

I suspect the market isn't there yet for 4 TB SSD drives... and it wouldn't require a 3.5" drive case, you could fit 4 TB of NAND easily in a 2.5" drive case (or even less).

Well right now, the 1TB enterprise quality SSDs have dropped below $900 (5 year warranty, super-caps, etc.). They're quickly edging out the 15k RPM SAS drives.

Consider that if I need X IOPS and a TB of capacity, I can either put 2x1TB SSD into a server and spend about $1800-ish. Or I can buy a more expensive RAID controller and try to put together half a dozen to a full dozen 15k RPM SAS drives. Using SSD means less drives, less power, less heat, smaller server footprint - same or better IOPS (usually 10x better).

The magical price point for enterprise storage drives is about $300-$600 per drive. Business IT won't blink at spending $300-$600 on a single drive, especially if it reduces their spindle count and increases performance. Something in the $1500-$2000 range tends to be a rarer purchase.

I've never been impressed with how he kept trying to turn Planetside 2 into a clone of Battlefield / Call of Duty rather then play to its strengths and uniqueness.

Because of that mismanagement, the game is still in an unfinished state two years after release, and core game elements have been revamped multiple times.

That and the issue that the PS2 devs can't seem to push out a single patch without breaking multiple other things -- and then leave it in a broken state for weeks and months at a time.

Sadly, the people in charge of making those bad decisions probably weren't the ones let go today.

Asus (and a lot of other manufs) had trouble with bad caps all the way up until ~2007 give or take. When they go, it is a very loud pop (along with the smell of electricity arcing) that will make you jump if you are in the same room.

I've had quite a few fanless video cards with bad capacitors, along with a few motherboards from the mid-2000s.

EVE seems to be doing OK, and while there's war to participate in if you want to, there are plenty of people making money from mining, research, logistics, and so on.

All activities in EVE (other then agent-driven mission running) are PvP. Selling on the market? You're PvPing against the other sellers who want to undercut you and sell their product faster. Mining? You're competing to harvest before someone else comes and harvests the resource.

One unit per tile (1UT) sucks on the Civ5 maps because the hexes are way too large for the scale. The only way 1 unit/tile would have worked well would have been to subdivide the hexes into 7 smaller hexes while keeping the cities the same size (taking up multiple hexes).

The other major issue with the series is that instead of simply improving upon the Civ4 series (by adding hexes and fixing the stack of death issues and doing work on the AI), they brought in a brand new designer who threw out all the lessons of the past in order to put his mark on the product.

The result was a poor product with numerous bugs and many balance issues and a definite downgrade from Civ4's quality.

Any suggestions - ideally for models that let you lower the alert volume or disable the audible alert entirely? And have USB port protocols that work with Linux?

Give it a SSD and 8GB of RAM and useful life might approach a decade. It might add $100 to the cost, but will definitely make it into something that will be useful for more then 2-3 years.

Java is going to be the COBOL of modern languages - it will be around 10-30 years from now or more.

And if you learn to use AspectJ and a good code generation tool like Spring Roo, a lot of the pain points about Java go away. Sprinkle in a good framework along with things like Maven and JUnit testing. At this point it's a very mature language with a fully fleshed out ecosystem.