There's a Windows tool called adwcleaner that takes less than five minutes to run and does a marvelous job of cleaning crap out of browser installations. It's usually the first step I take in cleaning off a Windows machine, but it works beautifully for getting irritating but not genuinely malicious stuff out of the way.

I've actually made a document that I print out and hand to people whose machines I clean off. Probably 90% of the people I talk to have no idea that there's any such thing as a browser add-on or search extension.

I've found that configuring Adblock+ with a decent set of subscription lists and Spybot's Immunizations (basically hosts file entries) do more to stop problems than probably any other steps I could take to stop problems on Windows machines.

Still trying to say you're not a taxi service at this point is getting pretty ridiculous.

io9 is a Gawker blog. You shouldn't even have to click through to the site to know it's going to be shit.

2GB RAM on Windows 8 or 10 is completely usable for common computing tasks. Web browsing is tricky, particularly with Chrome, which at this point is pretty disrespectful of machines with limited amounts of RAM. Firefox and IE both do better. Some of the desktops I support are 2GB Windows 8 machines. For the most part, they're all subjectively identical to 4GB and 8GB machines until enough tabs or PDFs are open for Windows to start swapping.

There's still no working support for the Media Source Extensions, and as a result it has incomplete support for YouTube's HTML5 player. Lame.

I am required by the government, over penalty of a large fine to do business with corrupt insurance companies. I MUST purchase their product, that provides me nothing that I can't provide on my own. I like how now we equate having insurance with having access to health care. Currently I pay about 10,000 dollars a year for insurance that provides me about 5000 dollars in services a year. What could I do with that additional 5,000 dollars a year for the next 10-15 years that I am running a surplus to create a saving account that I can pay for services when I am older and running a deficit.

To make it more plain. On average the country pays more to insurance companies that they are provided in medical services... otherwise the insurance companies would go out of business.

So, yes currently the government compels me to do business with a company that I don't want to

> brutally hot summers in DC.

Coming from Texas, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH,

That's a pretty broad exclusion to be enforceable.

Maybe he shoulda talked to the people he bought the house from instead of level 1 sales drone. Hell, even looking at the house he should have seen if there was coax in place or not.

That's their entire point.

THATS THE ENTIRE POINT OF THIS PAPER.

It is easy to explain the results: In high-level languages such as Java and Python, a seemingly benign
statement such as concatString += addString may actually involve executing many extra cycles behind
the scenes. To concatenate two strings in a language such as C, if there is not enough space to expand
the concatString to the size it needs to be to hold the additional bytes from addString, then the
developer has to explicitly allocate new space with enough storage for the sum of the sizes of the two
strings and copy concatString to the new location, and then finally perform the concatenation. In Java
and Python strings are immutable, and any assignment will result in the creation of a new object and
possibly copy operations, hence the overhead of the string operations. The disk-only code, although
apparently writing to the disk excessively, is only triggering an actual write when operating system
buffers are full. In other words, the operating system already lessons disk access times. A developer
familiar with the language and system internals readily notices the causes of this observed behaviour,
but this behaviour may be easily missed, as indicated by examining similar cases in production code.

What do you expect... There is only one person that MIGHT have a computer background on the paper... This is pure academic fluff, compare an in-memory database with a spinning rust based database and see how many operations you can get out of each one performing the same operation.

Here is how you make the results faster.

Compare:
1) Calculating 1MB of data and writing it to disk
vs.
2) Calulating 100K of data, writing it to disk, repeat 10 times.

If the time to write to disk is what takes most of the time, then getting the operation started early and writing to disk in parallel to calculating your data will always win. In their case - what they have done is made the in memory operation exceedingly stupid so it takes too much time. I could trivially write C code that blows their operation out of the water, unfortunately - their Java/Python code are hiding a LOT of inefficiencies in the in-memory operation. So compare their disk operation, with a cache line optimized in-memory calculation and a disk cache optimized disk write operation... It won't even be close.

I have a "Type"-style (the same sort the Pro 3 uses) purple cover for my Pro 2. I paid $58 for it on Amazon. I actually wanted purple but I could've gotten a pink one even cheaper. Would I take a refurbished keyboard? No question that I would. We use other people's keyboards all the damned time, especially those of us who have an IT support component to our jobs (or for that matter anyone who has ever used an ATM). Am I looking places besides major retailers? No I am not. If you can't find one at a significant discount, you probably shouldn't be buying anything over the internet.

The Surface keyboard is entirely optional. I don't completely love the Windows on-screen keyboard, though it's a damned-sight better than the one Apple ships with iOS (Apple is either not a big fan of basic literacy or thinks letters should always be displayed in uppercase regardless of the state of the shift key). In practice I've found that I don't use it much because my Surface Pro more as a very capable mobile device than as something for real work, but I have powerful desktops and a good laptop available to me as well.

Speaking to the quality of Apple's input devices specifically, I find the lack of key travel and mildly idiosyncratic layout on Apple's own branded keyboards uncomfortable for serious typing in exactly the same way the Surface Type-style keyboard is. I also question the ergonomics of the palmrests on its notebooks and the insistence on comically oversized touchpads as input devices. I wouldn't exactly say either option is without compromise.

MSRP is $130 for a Surface Pro 3 keyboard. They generally sell for under $100, sometimes under $80 if you don't mind one of the less popular colors or getting a refurbished one. I'm not sure where you're getting this $200 figure from, but it's significantly off-base.
Further, the Surface Pro doesn't have a hard requirement that you use Microsoft's keyboard. You can use any bluetooth or USB input devices you'd like.