I think that if changes are made intentionally and some countries are disadvantaged by them, it won't be handled in the same way as the current situation.

sure, because nothing ever goes wrong in the "own everything outright" world. Nobody ever goes on holidays, the right guy is never off sick when you need them most and of course, there's always enough money to make all the right decisions in relation to performance and redundant equipment.

IMHO, whichever way you go, there will be drawbacks. Azure (and Google, AWS, etc.) outages are newsworthy, that's a hint right there. Just keep track of these events carefully so when the time comes you can try to justify bearing all costs for IT while everyone else is keeping their cash in the core business and sharing IT costs by way of cloud providers.

One of the reviews starts with "Words fail me", I hope they all started taking photos so that this doesn't all end up in a nasty case of slander/libel.

Well let's benchmark these things properly before saying that Chromebooks are fast and celerons are slow. On passmark the celerons have a score close to that of an old core2duo. Are we telling people to use "pay as you go" apps from Google Play instead of Microsoft's Live Essentials and those apps that come with W8 just because we can't compare Celerons with ARM SOC s?

A quick search in the Firefox Add-on collection shows this guy here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...

I haven't tried it yet, but on their marketing blurb says that "users of X, y, z.... should try PriceBlink". This suggest to me that there's already quite a few add-ons that work for shoppers. Time to give them all a try!

If memory serves me well, the appeal of OS X to unix pros became a selling point quite late in the Apple revival and shift to Intel CPUs. Back then, Windows XP was clearly too old, ugly, clunky and misused to be part of *any* high end PC offering. In my opinion, the OEM attempts to improve the Windows XP experience by way of pre-installed utilities were even worse.

The elegant UI and experience that OS X offered was way ahead of what Windows XP and most contemporary Linux distros could offer and that's what helped today's perception of MacBooks and iMacs are fine for their price, unlike many Lenovo, HP, etc that only sell at £300-£500 and therefore cannot have high end parts.

Now there's a lot of web-developer type of professionals who use OS X, helping sustain the perception that modern, trendy, successful, etc, etc professionals go with Apple, while the bad guys on 24 use matte black Lenovos :)

Voluptuous Vampire would be much more successful.

I don't know about the diversity, but agree that links should be added, not subtracted from user submissions.

On the upside, the support policy will be published on http://support2.microsoft.com/... and you'll be able to check the status of your chosen products regularly instead of just keeping your fingers crossed and hope that the "service" doesn't move from Beta to discontinued.

oh that explains it then. Somehow I thought the shipyard would be bigger. looks like 2 x 2 kms on Google maps.

Found the address on their website: 3370 Geoje-daero, Geoje-si, Gyeongsangnam-do, South Korea

Googled for "Opko, South Korea" and it took me to a city called "Mopko" which is far away.

People can hate Windows 8 all they want, but the signs are clear: Microsoft wants a unified platform for mobile and desktop apps, because at some point Google will get Android apps to run on Chrome OS and Apple will get iOS apps running on OS X machines
A mainstream machine that merges the tablet with the laptop market will make it clear to those who have been distracted that tablets are the main PC for millions of people. I think that Surface Pro is more of a proof of concept while the the MacBook Air or the supposed 12" iPad can be that machine.

The touchscreen will be secondary, what will define the PC market will be app stores. One fine morning we'll look at the PC market and realise that 30% of machines are running Google Play apps, 30% are running Windows Stores and 30% are running iTunes apps.

Well... Bolt has done his 100m in 9.58s but only needs 19.19s to do twice the distance. I say if he does the marathon in more than 1 hour he's not that great as people say.

Seems to work for a variety of small time programming jobs.

Indie to the rescue! It's now on its last legs as development stopped a while back, but Altitude (altitudegame.com) is great multiplayer game that I read about on Slashdot and have been playing since 2009. The micro-transactions part of the game didn't work well, so the authors dropped it. If you just want to shoot at other players and not read about it, the in-game chat can be switched off, players can be muted and you can just avoid going to the forum pages on their website (which is separate from the game).

With the new billion of people going online on their tablets and phones, there is a lot of noise and annoying sales tactics that didn't work when all computer users were nerds. We just have to choose our battles and our games.