Yes, MS screwed up the original Surface sales projections so badly that their corrected sales projections (and thus manufacturing capacity) for the Surface 2 are so low that they cannot meet demand. Have you been under a rock? This has been in all the financial press as a huge negative for their revenue and profit numbers.

So... Bill Gates isn't going to be giving away some device when there is a line of people waiting to buy it.

The linked wikipedia entry that you are calling bullshit allocates ~$2500 per year for food for a middle class teenager. You may want to pay a bit more attention.

I have the early-2011 15" MBP and paid for the matte upgrade as well as the higher resolution screen (standard was 1440 x 900 and the optional is 1680 x 1050).

I just recently purchased the 15" rMBP and while I would prefer matte instead of glossy, I'm never going back. The display is just that good. I'll be sure to ask for a premium price when I sell the old MBP. It's nice to know that it is in demand.

Sometimes Apple fails to properly advertise some nice features, such as this. Target Display Mode actually makes me more likely to buy an iMac the next time I need to buy a computer. If it can work with my wife's ThinkPad and an Intel NUC running Linux, I'm sold.

I have used Target Disk Mode on a few Apple laptops in the past, which was also a very nice feature.

The linked article has a follow-on FAQ that you can click over to. That answers the question.

It's protection money. If Southwest Airlines buys the ad, Google won't put other advertising up. If they don't, any other advertiser is welcome to pay Google money to put up a text ad above the search result.

If I go to Google and search for Southwest Airlines, I plan to visit the Southwest Airlines website. Why would Southwest Airlines pay money to Google for an advertisement that tries to get me to visit the Southwest Airlines website?

If you were to see the actual quote, you may feel differently:

This is a worthless data point.

Windows 8.1 was a free update to Windows 8 machines. If you don't have Windows 8 installed, you need to pay for Windows 8.1.

If Microsoft continues to offer updates at no cost, then eventually all (or close enough to be considered all) Microsoft users will be able to get free updates. But that is going to be many years from now, and Microsoft will still need to convince OEMs to ship machines with a valid copy of Windows as the OS. If they give that away for free, then it would definitely represent a challenge for desktop Linux adoption, especially outside the US and Europe.

Forget about being a "real programmer" and focus on being a "real developer.' There are functional requirements and then there are technical requirements. Functionally speaking, how important is it to have an unsigned data type rather than having the equivalent data type and enforcing a "no negative values" rule? I'm not sure I can think of any, aside from the case of being able to interpret unsigned data types for interoperability. But that says nothing about the need for the actual storage of that data.

I'm pretty sure that some respected Computer Scientist said something about premature optimization....... It's a good rule. Focus on meeting the functional requirements of the system you are developing, and then optimize where it makes sense. I don't think you are going to notice the lack of unsigned data types. But if you really need them, perhaps that should be a signal that a lower-level language is more appropriate for that particular component in the system.

My spinning platter drive allows me to spend far more time in the present.

That's ridiculous. To be allowed to even take the patent bar exam, a person must have an engineering or hard science degree from an accredited university or can demonstrate that their combination of college courses and work experience are the equivalent. Having or not having a law degree is completely irrelevant.

I have read a large number of software, hardware and automotive patents and am convinced that any moderately smart high school student can understand perfectly as long as they pay attention to detail and can read. every. word. I am also convinced that calling a lot of this stuff an "invention" is being overly generous.

Convenience. When you buy a season pass in iTunes and say "yes" to all of the questions, your computer will automatically download each new episode as soon as it becomes available. You will also receive a notification that your new episode is ready to watch.

Apple and Google treat tablets as large phones.
Microsoft treats tablets as small PCs.

Neither approach is incorrect, however Microsoft executed very poorly. If the market allows them enough time (and this may or may not happen), they will eventually get it right. I hope they do - it will be very interesting to see how the market reacts. iOS vs Android is a choice between two competing implementations of a computing concept. Windows RT is a competing computing concept.

That's exactly how Windows 8 works. The windows key takes you to the metro desktop and when you type something on the metro desktop Windows 8 assumes you are trying to find something (why else would you type something at the metro desktop) and does a search for what you've typed.

Well, except that on Windows 8 you don't have to hit enter. It starts searching as soon as you start typing, so you would have probably found your document by the type you wrote "acme"

I don't think that closed vs open is what Google cares about. What they are seeing is that handset makers are replacing Google services with their own and that means that Google is paying for the OS development but not getting anything in return. Google thought that forcing the handset manufacturers to keep Google services on the phone in exchange for access to the very latest versions of Android would be more than enough - every iPhone user can't wait to get the latest version of iOS. But it turns out the the handset makers are doing perfectly fine selling phones with old versions of Android and the users don't seem to care.

The future Nexus (which probably wont survive) and Motorola devices will be running Chrome OS and will have no possible way to rid themselves of Google services. They will probably also be able to keep their apps in exactly the same manner as you describe. It's all the other handset makers that Google plans to kill. They have bet the farm on Android. In a few years, the smartphone landscape is going to be Apple with iOS, Nokia with WP, Motorola with Chrome OS, and... HTC/Samsung/others with a completely outdated Android that gets zero support from Google.