triple that is only 75 miles a day average. hardly a freakish amount. my drive to work is 25 miles a day and same home. That covers 2/3rd of that mileage, I am pretty damn sure a 25 mile commute is not a freackishly rare number.

For some like yourself that drives so little they are definitely practical, I don't drive a lot but I easily do more than triple your daily average, even if you doubled your mileage you will quickly run into serious limitations.

Valve have failed to deliver on just about every project they have worked on the past decade. Everything from Halflife to SteamOS/Steambox and now they are pushing their next Vapourware product. If it wasn't for their hugely successful marketplace flogging other peoples software this company would have gone bust years ago.

Why is this a story? this is common practise for pretty much all industries, especially IT based ones. Most companies don't even try to hide the fact, nothing wrong with the practise, they would be fools if they were not constantly checking what the competition does.

My current Lenovo W520 is going is just over 3 years old now (16GB RAM, i7, Dual SSD's). I have an older W500 as well which is almost 6 years old now and it is also still happily working and still quite powerful (8GB, Core 2 Duo). The Lenovo's are mostly butt ugly but they do seem to last quite well.

Stock price isn't actually a particularly good measure in the case of MS unless you also factor in P/E ratios, When balmer took over they were trading at a P/E ratio of around 40-45. That isn't a realistic number for any company unless they are expecting meteoric growth numbers which given the valuation at the time was just not possible or sustainable, they would have to have grown to well in excess of being a trillion dollar company today to justify that number or to put in perspective they would need to be worth more than apple and google combined. MS currently trade at P/E ratio of around 15.

No I think his biggest problem was that he inherited a company that had a shareprice that was at the time massively overinflated, It masked much of his success of the following decade as people would point at the shareprice and claim he was failing even though financially he was providing excellent growth. He did more than just be a caretaker, he significantly diversified the company while still maintaining a solid to excellent (though not shooting star) growth throughout his time at the helm. I will agree he wasn't a technology visionary, though he was definitely very successful business wise.

Worst CEO of all time? geez most CEO's would give their right arm to be half as successful as he has been since he became CEO. Profits, revenue and sales all increased under him year on year with very good growth across the board while not allowing costs to blow out. Yes he had plenty of failures but from a business standpoint he has actually been a massive success for them with his successes far outweighing the failures, could he have been more successful with a few smarter choices, SURE, but very few CEO's have outperformed him over the past decade or so.

Actually this appears to be the exact opposite and is a demonstration of a free market working not failing. The inability to put pressure on a publisher would be free market failure.

please point out any law that would make MS in any way shape or form on the hook for any warranty after EOL of life of XP. none of the Australian laws do anything like that as they only enforce minimum warranties. The original poster you replied to was completely correct, there is absolutely NONE after the EOL of product supplied by the license, EULA or LAW in Australia that would come into play here. Australian laws are only good for preventing ridiculous claims and extremely short warranties, beyond that they are no better than any other country.

Where are you from with such good laws? here in Australia we have some laws around it but they are utterly toothless where a simple disclaimer in the EULA that local laws take precedence avoids any legal problems (which everyone puts in) and besides which the warranties under law here are far less than most companies provide for software and many many years less than has been supplied for XP.

still in business yes, but the operating now at more realistic prices and production levels for such a niche product.

The price, considering the specs, is actually pretty good. They come in cheaper than the X1 Carbons we currently use and have better screens and are lighter. We already have a few on order to trial them as a replacement for the Carbons for our next batch of machines for remote users.

It DOES have an unlocked bootloader, you can put anything you want on the surface pro.

yes there was likely a damn good reason, the same damn good reason we no longer have Tasmanian tigers or the Dodo as well as hundreds if not thousands of other species. Humans have eradicated a great many species, who knows what knowledge we have deprived ourselves of because of it, perhaps a natural cure to various cancers or the key to longer life.