Speculation of course, but I think they were told to push the Metro UI by upper management. The obvious culprit would be Ballmer, but he is already gone.
So you may end up being right about the UI team being fired when someone is needed to take the blame. But I doubt they deserve it.
Poor adoption rate is their big problem
How is that their big problem? They don't need high adoption. Moreover they control the supply of Windows 7 licenses they can resolve the adoption problem very easily. Today Windows 8.1 sells with downgrade rights to and Windows 7 Professional and Windows Vista Business. Tomorrow they eliminate that. If adoption was their problem the solution is trivial.
That might be too much incentive for people to finally switch to Mac or Linux. Early netbooks have shown that the power of Windows to keep users is finite:
Linux gained significant market share in the segment, until Microsoft created the ultra-cheap (or was it even free?) Starter Edition of XP.
But what actually seems to happen is that Windows 9 will bring the start menu back in some form. Problem solved for Microsoft where the desktop is considered.
I wonder if Microsoft is learning the wrong lessons from their "good" versions. They're having a hell of a time getting people to leave them. In the future, if people hate the version they're on, they'll be much more likely to buy a new version in the hopes that it's better. Brilliant!
That will only work if you can get people onto the hated version first. Which works not so well with Windows 8, which seems stuck at 12.5% right now (including both 8.0 and 8.1).
That's the only think I can think of to fully explain Windows 8, and why even now they're refusing to admit that Metro apps are a steaming turd on top of an otherwise competent OS. The only idiots who like using those "apps" are the ones who would probably be better off with a tablet or smartphone instead of an actual desktop computer, for whom the actual power of a desktop is apparently wasted.
I think it was an attempt to use their dominance in the desktop market to force the users onto Metro. In the hope that said users would eventually buy more mobile devices with Windows Phone, because they are already familiar with he GUI. Now Windows Phone is making some gains, going from 0.45% to 2.49% over the last six months. But I doubt it is worth the poor acceptance for Windows 8.
Microsoft seems to bet that their dominance of the desktop market is a guaranteed thing. I'd love to see them proven wrong.
I think there are levels in between, such as having some older games that you want to play at decent quality but not the latest stuff.
This said, the AMD IGPs tend to be limited by RAM bandwidth. Discrete graphics cards with similar numbers of shaders tend to beat the AGPs in graphics. I think AMD needs either quad-channel memory (too expensive?) or stacked VRAM on the APU itself. Without that, it is only a matter of time until Intel's HD graphics catch up...
If you quit because the employer fails to pay you, you can also get out of the non-compete ($90a III HGB, culpable conduct of the other party).
Again, IANAL and the above is my best guess as an interested layman who has access to online law texts. This said, non-competes have become rare anyway in Germany as the employer has to pay some compensation for them, otherwise they are illegal..
It is a chip for cheap machines without high performance requirements. Sort of an entry level CPU and entry level GPU in one, with a bit more emphasis on the GPU than the i3.
And where you call the AMD "slightly less underpowered" in GPU, the i3 is arguably overpowered for typical office applications. Read, the A10-7800 can do those adequately.
Overall I think the A10-7800 has its market, for home use where you want to do a bit of everything or maybe as HTPC. It is nothing very impressive, but neither is an i3 without discrete graphics card.
Technically (under German law) the employment contract still exists and you could sue them for the unpaid wages. Which may fail if the company is already bankrupt. In that case, you'd be thowing good money after the bad.
But at the same time, AFAIK (IANAL) not paying wages is a bad enough breach of contract that you can get away with immediately terminating said contract. So if you have another job lined up, go for it.
Depends on the audience of the web sites your ads were displayed on. If you were, for instance, advertising for a US company on a site that had lots of viewers from Europe, the exhaustion early in the day might have been legitimate. Europe is a few time zones ahead.
But if adwords does not give you statistics about this, I agree that dropping them would be the smart thing to do.
And I'm tempted to compare it to the behavior of users who want the latest and shiniest, but complain about the shinies eating performance.
Desktop analogy:
I sometimes suggest to users of Vista and above that they switch back to the "traditional" XP look of the desktop. Most of the time that suggestion is met by derision. Only those who disliked the change in the first place tend to like my suggestion (if they have not already changed their desktop settings themselves).
IANAL, but from a layman's perspective it looks like a breach of contract. A more sue-happy person might have taken that incident to court.
But the new corporate headquarters overseas would presumably not be bound by the subpoena. In that case, it sucks to be the guy in the US subsidiary who just got subpoenaed. Because he is unable to comply.
That said, the real papers you want to be on the lookout for are cathode improvements, there's a lot more potential for volume/mass reduction there than in the anode.
Exactly, all articles I can remember offhand for the cathode talk about a capacity of less than 200 mAh/g for existing cathode chemistries. So the cathode would make up most of the weight of the battery.
If the technology from TFA works out, maybe we can get a 20% - 30% improvement in overall energy density.
Many years ago, I joined a group of audiophile students at my university and we were building a pair of two-way loudspeakers with semi-expensive chassis. Students' budget, but it still had potential. When experimenting with crossover components, we soldered things together at first, then someone had the idea to use alligator clips (two each connected by a cable soldered to the clips) for faster turnaround.
The sound quality, which had been quite good up to that point, suddenly dropped to that of a cheap speaker from some supermarket. The ohmic resistance of the cable between the alligator clips was IMHO too low to have much of an influence.
Conclusion:
It must have been the alligator clips, and good contacts matter. Since that experience I like to use gold-plated connectors, but with standard cables to connect them. That combination tends to be cheap enough and works for me
Depends on your main board.
My last purchase from 2011, an ASUS M4A7LT, has an onboard sound chip that cannot drive headphones at more than low volume.
At low volume it sounds good, and I'm sure it would be adequate to drive the input of an amplifier. But when I put in my (low impedance, maybe 30 Ohms) walkman headphones it fails miserably. Severe clipping as soon as I turn up the volume a bit.
Instead of putting an external amplifier on my desk, I put a sound card into the PC. Problem solved.
Correcting myself:
Tepco itself has estimated a damage of $137 billion, see http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-07/fukushima-137-billion-cost-has-tepco-seeking-more-aid.html
Remember to say hello to your bank teller.
