I tried installing Windows 8.1 a couple weeks ago, and I spent 20 minutes looking for a way to get it to let me install without a Microsoft account, and couldn't find one. I found a way to get it to let you set up a new account, once the install is finished, without a Microsoft account, and that's the best I could do. Even that wasn't easy.

But I tried going through each step carefully, looking for any button I might have missed, and there just wasn't anything. It hit a certain point, and it would not let me proceed without an account.

Flipped-Over Rotten Dog

You don't need a Windows account to install it, but you have to be firm with it. It asks two or three times and if you keep saying No, it will eventually give up and keep installing.

Are you sure? Because I'm pretty sure that you don't just need an email account, but a Microsoft Live account (or whatever they're calling it now). That Microsoft account doesn't need to include an outlook.com email account, and it can be bound to an email address that's not on a Microsoft domain, but you need to open an actual account for Microsoft services.

And if that's right, that's what annoys me. I wouldn't mind if they set the default to use a Microsoft account. I wouldn't mind if it warned you strenuously, "If you don't set up or use one of these accounts, some Windows features may not work." I just don't like being forced to have an active online account with someone in order to install an operating system.

You know, aside from the "Metro" or "Modern" interface, I don't have a problem with Windows 8. It seems like they've addressed that, so I'm not sure what else you're hoping for.

Actually, I do have one other annoyance: their seeming insistence that you have some kind of an Windows web account (outlook.com or whatever) in order to run the OS I understand that they're actually doing something kind of neat with that, but it's pretty annoying that they won't let you skip it during the Windows setup.

So it's an OS in firmware, that doesn't handwave away the problem.

But 512 megs should be enough for ANYBODY...

I have to agree, but it's too bad in some ways, IMO.

I used to get so much joy programming the metal or tinkering with the assembly that came out of the compiler.

Doing that is still possible, but it doesn't pay the bills.

The dream of abstraction is a bit of a nightmare for those that like to get into the guts of the machine.

GPU programming is another example, though Mantle allows the programmer to get a bit closer to the hardware.

Yeah, it pretty much is. The reason to go with something else, or in addition, is largely if you're in a business setting and you want to be able to push updates and monitor results. Also, I'm not sure about the current situation, but last I checked, MSE was free for personal use but not licensed for business use...?

But for home use, MSE is probably good enough. It also doesn't have popups, it doesn't break any apps or anything in the OS, and it doesn't take up tons of system resources. Ultimately, with AV software, you're choosing the lesser evil: having the AV take up system resources and break things is less evil than the viruses themselves, but if you can find an AV that doesn't do those things, go with that.

Yet in even some of the poorest countries you can get 20Mbit connections with no cap for less money than you pay in the US.

Citation, please, because Akamai's State of the Internet mostly disagrees with you.

Anecdii?

I agree. I'm not sure if this is what you're referring to, but the worst thing was that Microsoft actually had a feature where it would hide menu items that you didn't use often. So you haven't inserted a page break in a few months? Well that's disappeared now, and you have to click some button to "show more options" in order to find it. It wasn't so bad if you understood what was going on, but as an IT support professional, I absolutely hated it because I would regularly get phone calls from people complaining that they couldn't find features.

Ultimately, the ribbon is an improvement. It's compact, and it gives you a lot of options right on the screen, without clicking through a bunch of menus, in a fairly well organized design. I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy, but I think most of the resistance to the ribbon was simply because it was new, and people weren't used to it.

But I'd take this in a heartbeat over an AMD counterpart. The maxwell chips are leagues ahead of anything AMD's got.

WIth one exception: the R9 280x when used for DP floating point compute.

For about $250 you can get an R9 280x that in one second will do one trillion double precision floating point operations. That's about 10x faster than the Maxwell cards.

With such a card AMD should have had the scientist/engineer space for GPGPU locked up by now.

But, you know, they're AMD, so...

Personally I love the GTX 750. It gives the biggest bang-for-the-buck and running at about 55 watts max or so it usually doesn't require a larger power supply. It can run completely off motherboard power going to a 16-lane 75 watt PCIe slot.

It's the perfect card for rescuing old systems from obsolescence, IMO.

The only trouble you might have is finding a single-slot-wide card if your system doesn't have room for a double slot card, though in my case I found a double-slot card that I could modify to fit in a single-slot of an old Core 2 Duo E8500 system.

And heat doesn't seem to be a problem at all, even with the mod I did. The low power of the card means less heat. Even if heat becomes a problem, the card is capable of slowly clocking itself down, though I've never seen that yet, even running Furmark.