Caught at one hundred and twenty metres per second

Yesterday I noticed two particular headlines standing out in the financial news. The oldest, which was actually from tuesday, read that the European Central Bank was again injecting money into the financial markets. The other one was that home confiscations in the US were way up.

I think the ECB is sending a very bad message to financial institutions here, not by intervening in the market in the first place, but by continuing to provide shelter after a couple of weeks: “act however irresponsibly that you wish to, we'll help you out if you get into trouble anyway.”

While they bear a large part of the responsibility by financing the US mortgage crisis in the first place, big institutions will get out largely unharmed in the long run. At the same time real persons — often lured by overly bullish financial news undoubtedly — will get burned, together with some of the smaller lenders who cannot get enough money back in time.

Capitalist protectionism, at its worst.

Last monday I had to order a computer for use as a workstation for a graphic designer. When I called Dell and asked for a specification on a Dimension system, the — overall very helpful and friendly — account manager stated that the Dimension range was discontinued for business customers and available for consumers only. He told me that the new Vostro line was their new SMB offer.

When I pointed out to him that not only was the Dimension still listed on their SMB web pages, but that the Vostro was inattractive because it could not be upgraded beyond 4GB of memory, he was surprised at first and then stated that `a 64 bit OS was needed anyway to be able to use more than 4GB of memory'.
But if I needed more memory, a Precision workstation would be a good alternative. Well, any Precision I could configure on the Dell website would end up costing 1.5 times as much as a similarly configured Dimension. (which means that I had to add a graphics card with higher 3D performance on the Dimension as what was needed, since this computer was meant for 2D graphic design)
At this point, the sales representative tried building a Precision configuration himself to specifications I had provided him with, but with maximum discount he could apply the price still came out over 30% (meaning, over 300 EUR) more than a Dimension to these same specs. At which point he gave in :)

I seriously hope that the sales person was mistakenly saying that the Dimension would go away as a Dell business offer (though that means that some review of internal communications would be in order). While I'm sure the Vostro line has it's merit, these are some points that make it a lousy or at least undesirable option in some cases:

• memory size limited to 4GB
• currently, no quad core processor option — while this may not be very benificial a lot of the time it would improve workloads that can make use of threading; in addition the Q6600 on the Dimension was only about 10 EUR more costly than the dual core E6600
• while it wasn't that much of an issue in this case, the actual lack of an option to configure a better 3D graphics card than the preconfigured card

The way I see it, the Vostro should be a valuable add-on to Dell's SMB offering at the bottom segment. Throwing out the Dimension would leave a hole between Vostro and Precision. And I'm not sure where exactly the Optiplex fits in; it appears to be more along the Vostro looking at specs, but it's price tag is closer to Precision — it's main feature seems to be a higher default support level.