Uhh.. the reason those features don't exist is to clearly push those kinds of customers towards Windows 8 Pro. It's the same reason why Office RT doesn't have Outlook. Microsoft doesn't want Windows RT to be used in enterprise and there are plenty of clues as to why not.

Honestly, the only thing important to DirectX 11.1 besides some optimizations is a standardized way to support 3D instead of proprietary nVidia 3D vision and AMD HD3D. And if you don't care about S3D, then 11.1 is a non issue. Sounds like a bunch of FUD to me. Regardless, until you see a bunch of DirectX 11.1 exclusive games and DirectX 11 support is dropped (which will never happen), people are ranting about nothing.

The game console will never die, but calling it that certainly will. When people spend far more time doing non-gaming activities, it behooves Microsoft and Sony not to call it that anymore so they can try to grab a wider audience. They want people to rent movies, buy TV shows, listen to music, download apps, etc... in addition to playing games on this device. In fact, if you could record and watch live TV, the cable set top box would be dead (and that's the real market they are trying to go after). With the apparent success of the $99 Xbox 360 w/ subscription, we are going to see Microsoft push that model further with the next Xbox. I'd say buy the console for $200 (high-end SKU), then for $30/month for at least 2 years, get Xbox Live Gold, Xbox Music, and maybe 1 free movie rental a month. The last part clearly indicates it's a media machine, and people have gotten used to paying monthly bills for cellphones and stuff like Netflix and Hulu Plus. Considering the Xbox 360 isn't that much cheaper now than it was when it launched ($299 & $399), the only reasonable reason not to buy a new console immediately is because it lacks any tangible functionality over the old one (back when they only played games). Oh, and the next Xbox must be FAR better at multi-tasking. Taking 3 minutes to boot an app is ridiculous. NEEDS MORE RAM.

When a huge chunk of those users are in China which has effectively banned Facebook in it's current form (it would have to partner with a local Chinese company and jump through TONS of hoops to start making inroads), I don't think you can count on growth from more users anymore. Besides, that doesn't scale very well anyway. They need to make more money PER user. It should be far easier to double the money made per user than to double the number of users.

Old investors who sold their stock for the IPO have already made their money. New investors who bought at the IPO price (or near it) were suckers since it's lost value. Retail investors who probably didn't have a chance to buy it at anywhere near the IPO price are probably going to sit this one out since the excitement is now over. Current shareholders who are most likely employees are disappointed because while they are worth a lot on paper, they can't sell their shares for a good 6 months, and will have to see their fortunes decrease every day. Bystanders like me are just laughing at the amount of funny money now floating around chasing a company that has a P/E of 100, almost 1 billion users, and no serious way of monetizing that base at the moment other than display ads.

Probably closer to $7-8, as they definitely have some significant avenues of revenue growth available to them, namely mobile. But $38 is rather silly for a company to be valued at $104 billion initially off of earnings of $1 billion a year. Though because it was an IPO day, the retail investor was likely locked out for most of the early trading (especially because the NASDAQ screwed up with delays). It might have actually benefited them though, because they probably didn't get a chance to buy it at $42-$45. But whoever bought it at that price just lost ~30% of their money in a day based on today's price of $33. Suckers!

It's all fun and games until someone hacks your bank, releases your identity, then you have lots of credit cards opened up in your name. "But your bank was secure and they were just doing it for the lulz!!!" People only care about this stuff when it happens to them. Even if you think what lulzsec is doing is a good thing, it encourages hackers with worse motives to try the same tactics with far more disastrous results. But of course, you think it's a great idea, so sure, let's let them continue!

Even if it's profitable, it's probably better to pour their limited resources into a car that would have larger mass-market appeal. They only have so many engineers.

The Windows Mobile and Windows NT kernel are not the same thing.

And here I was thinking that Google owned the trademark to "Chrome" as it refers to browsers and "Chromebook" would be an extension of that. How on earth is "Chromebook" the same as "ChromiumPC Modular Computer"?? The nerve some companies have these days.

And this is why you should get a phone that can be rooted and have a custom ROM on it, no wireless carrier is going to be able to install their shitty software OTA just to make a buck.

How do you use 250GB/month? Have a family and you'll find out. It becomes REALLY easy to bump against the cap if you ditch cable and buy all your TV shows from iTunes.

An important thing to realize is that multi-tasking is NOT the same thing as as an app/OS being multi-threaded. While most apps need to be specifically coded to be multi-threaded, operating systems for a long time have had the ability to take advantage of multiple CPUs to complete tasks. Now, while a big jump in a single application may come from taking a huge CPU task and chopping it up into little pieces, there are definitely some tasks that lend themselves very easily to being multi-threaded. For example, probably the most important one is independently-executed Javascript threads. Browser performance can really be improved from multiple CPUs chewing on Javascript threads and then powering down to a low power state. Now, will it really matter when most of the wait for a page loading is downloading images? Probably not, but better performance is still better performance. The key goal with dual/quad core chips is making sure the system itself still feels responsive when doing tasks. A good example of this is if you have an iPhone and you are listening to a video podcast while running Safari, the system will definitely see some slowdown. Or running any app while the OS is installing something from the App Store, uploading a photo to Flickr in the background, or streaming Pandora. As refined as smartphones seem, they are still just pocket computers with limited resources.

That's why developers create middleware engines to abstract away most of the low-end stuff because they don't want to be bothered with it. Ever heard of Unreal Engine 3?

a) It would be VERY irresponsible of her to stop taking that medication cold turkey. It doesn't get out of your system for days/weeks and in the short term would have had rebound effects. b) She would have been told very clearly not to drink while on any anti-depressant/anti-psychotic medication. She obviously broke that rule. Adds these two points together and you get someone with poor judgement and not able to take very good care of herself.