And what did you watch on that Trinitron? Exactly. Fuck all that that resolution.
What are you really going to do with a 4K television and why is anyone going to make content at that resolution for you? No one will make content at that resolution for consumers because noone has the bandwidth to stream that kind of content. Upscaled content generally looks awful and graphics cards are always being pushed to the limit in terms of what we can render at acceptable framerates with given resolutions. Hell current gen consoles are still stuck at 30 fps at 1080p and plenty of games are pushing the hardware to the absolute limit. Even if we have 60 100 times the graphical processing power that we did ten years ago, it doesn't mean we should be using a resolution 60-100 times bigger, every improvement takes its toll(framerates, resolution, antialiasing lighting, texture quality, filtering,realworld physics offloaded to the graphics card.)
Expect your 4K monitor in a good five years or more when graphics cards are almost 20 times more powerful. Expect your 4K TV when 100Mb/s down stream fiber bundles are common place. And then barely expect it to change for a good decade after that.
We really need to know how they came up with that figure. If you have decently paid employees not able to work for 2-3 days while repaving those computers that could be a large chunk of that cost in terms of lost productivity. 3 days of 170 employees not working is almost 2 years of one employee not working. Then consider the age of the computers. For little over a third more of the cost to fix, they could get new computers, it could easily be worth it to upgrade to new computers if the original ones were old enough. The increased lifespan of new computers could alone justify the cost and the increased productivity from having up to date hardware only helps.
Leaky abstractions lead developers to consult resources that deal directly with their specific problem with specific solutions that have already been shown to work in practice. Most developers write documentation explaining what their APIs do, which is usually pretty obvious based on service calls, method names etc. When a developer consults documentation it is to find out why something is not working as the original author intended it to.
What documentation needs to be doing and frequently does not is explain its abstractions so that a developer can better identify the underlying problems assumptions based on those abstractions are causing. Maybe your implementation of a LinkList using an array under the cover is horribly optimized for the use I intended for it, if you documentation does not explain how it is working then that leaves 3 ways to find this out:
Most of development is very straight forward. Overall, the bulk of work done for something like XQuery or SQL is very simple stuff. The majority of problems that require an expert to solve have to do with those leaky abstractions, where the problem the class or api writer wanted to make disappear with their magical function is not airtight and the complexities seep through. This is where your expert needs to look under the cover and see what's really going on in order to rectify a problem. If documentation doesn't cover this then frequently the quickest way to find the information needed is to look for someone who has come across this problem before and see what worked for them.
Blizzard has become the J.J. Abrams of game developers in the last couple years. Nothing they do is risky or ambitious. As a result Diablo 3 turned into a snoozefest with no new mechanics and a loot system that was less exciting than its predecessor. They showed they can't break away from core mechanics in Starcraft 2 that were terrible for the multiplayer scene. If they were to make a DotA style game at this point, I would give an absolute vote of no confidence in their ability to turn it into a quality competitive game. Sure it'll look pretty and it'll run smooth. It'll either be well balanced and boring as hell or broken beyond all belief. They'll ignore player feedback and commit themselves to horrible design decisions.
The thing I dislike most about Blizzard right now is that they seem to think that they have bottled the formula for fun. They think that they have a perfect statistical method for determining balance while completely ignoring how their games are actually being played. What they've actually bottled is the perfect formula for average clones of prior success. So not really all that excited.
"What man has done, man can aspire to do." -- Jerry Pournelle, about space flight