I bought the preorder back in October, but only today have had time to deal with the big problems installing it. Tried to install it over a Windows 7 Pro system, and every time just as it was very nearly done, it bluescreened on some IRQ error and removed itself, going back to Windwos 7. Though at some point Windows 7 developed a Counterfeit copy error and became a problem itself. I then tried to install Windows 8 to a clean hard drive, which it did successfully, but then failed to activate/authenticate due to the previous failed installs. And it took an hour or two and 4 MS phone reps to get that cleared out and working as it should have the first time.

So my experience so far is not a happy one. Though I really haven't got to actually use Windows yet, or install applications or games or anything to run on it.

And luckily I made a backup of Windows 7 before I started any of this, so I have it in good condition as well, and can wipe the mangled copy hard drive to use for something else.

I need one. and i do have a smartphone, corporate IM, email, etc. though Skype is officially forbidden for some reason.

For my previous job, i'm not sure i ever had a work related phone call in almost 14 years. at my new job, i'm on the phone a lot. what i found is that just using my cell would be more expensive than getting a voip kit like Ooma for my home office, and connect a desk phone to that. then i use a Google Voice phone number that rings both that and my cell, so i can still take calls if i'm travelling or something, but by far mostly use the desk phone as it's cheaper than upgrading my cell plan to work with this many minutes.

i do use IM as well as email, but phone is still a big part of it.

Laws either require something, or forbid something. In the absence of a law on any particular topic, nothing is required, and nothing is forbidden, thus anything is allowed. So, in the absence of a law that would protect the internet from corporate trolls, they are allowed to put up as many profiteering tollbooths as they want, and take their steps to wreck the whole thing. If laws that would prohibit such maliciousness are disallowed, then we're screwed.

And I'm talking buying brand-new USA editions (I'm in USA), not used or from 3rd-world importers.

I buy textbooks from Amazon when they are cheaper than the university approved bookstore.mbsdirect.net Oh the unhumanity I've caused! Sometimes MBS is cheaper though, and sometimes they have self-published things that can't be had anywhere else. But fir the most part, Amazon is cheaper. And it's not (yet) illegal to buy books from them.

A counterfeiter trying to copy a real bill would have to precisely measure all the attributes of the embedded quantum particles — which is impossible under the tricky laws of quantum mechanics (PDF).

OK, so how does this help to authenticate a genuine note?

I'm really enjoying the testbook for the VHDL/FPGA RTL design class I'm taking now. RTL Hardware Design Using VHDL: Coding for Efficiency, Portability, and Scalability by Pong Chu. It doesn't bog down talking about all possibilities the language allows for legal syntax. The author really seems to focus on common practice for coding into a chip. There's very little if any testbench/simulation in this book, so look elsewhere for that, this one is all about the circuit design. Rather than only explaining what an FSM is, or just that you need a combination of registers and combinational logic, it gives some good suggestion on how to organize your code, such as using two or three separate processes rather than a single one. It talks about coding styles to minimize logic stages for some types of circuits. And it's the first one to explain why getting latches in synthesis is "bad" in a way I could understand, where other books just seem to say "don't allow latches" and I didn't understand why. I find this very refreshing now, as my first exposure to VHDL back in the mod 1990's had a terrible textbook that left me horribly confused about how to do anything useful with the language. And that was very frustrating as I was very interested in FPGAs, and there was no Verilog course at my university. After working with Verilog for the past few years at work, Chu's VHDL textbook has made it a lot easier for me to see how to create Verilog as well, rather than just read to understand other people's code. Chu has some other books that come in VHDL and Verilog pairs. They have project examples to play with in an inexpensive FPGA board. Check them out too.

For firmware and coding hardware, look for books on Embedded style programming, and about driver development. Look up some programmer guides for some ARM chips, they will tell you register definitions and fields and such to program to. I don't know how good these will be, but on my todo list are "Essential Linux Device Driver", "Linux Device Drivers, 3rd Edition", and "Hardware/Firmware Interface Design: Best Practices for Improving Embedded Systems Development". I looked at "Atmel AVR Microcontroller Primer: Programming and Interfacing (Synthesis Lectures on Digital Circuits and Systems) " which may be a good example of some of this as well, and check out some Arduino project books, that seems likely to talk about some of this stuff as well. A reviewer of one of the many AVR books says to go look up the http://www.avrfreaks.net/ website for some free such info. They and similar sites for Pic and Arm should have some relevant information for you. If these all seem too much of the "this is the language" or "this is what the hardware looks like" but not enough of "common practice is to..." type, maybe get a kickstarter project going to make what you need, and start interviewing people that do this every day.

OK, I've seen a few people concerned that the hotmail/live login is needed for EVERYTHING. How is this different than Android? Your gmail login is your phone account is your app store account is your docs/drive account is your scholar account is...

Have I missed where people complained that Google is the same way?

If the average joe is not allowed to get investment in his company, then how do companies with wealthy venture capital investors work? What's the difference?

I forgot to mention in my initial post, there's also FPGA based hardware clones of the "Classic" Amiga computers to run the old M68k based OS on. Minimig is an open-source one available for a variety of FPGA boards such as Terasic's DE1 and Minimig-branded boards for some time now. Natami is a proprietary one that's been produced for their FPGA code developers only so far but have been seen on YouTube and such doing demonstrations of what's working so far. Even without the Amiga name at all, they to many of the community are more "Amiga" than the official name licensees like this Commodore thing.

To get an idea of what the Amiga community thinks of this, look here:
http://amigaworld.net/modules/news/article.php?storyid=6305&start=0

Understand that this has nothing to do with what people know to be or remember having been an Amiga. The "True Amiga" and the name have gone in somewhat different directions. Amiga the company licensed Amiga the name to these Commodore people to stick on whatever they want to stick it on. it has nothing to do with "Classic" Amiga computers, AmigaOS, or what the remaining Amiga user community is interested in. Most of us feel that this Amiga the name thing is nothing more than Amiga the company flipping us all off and doing everything it can to cause confusion and harm to the user community and AmigaOS platform. We the community use computers now called "Classic" Amigas running AmigaOS (the old M68K/PowerPC based Amiga 1000, 500, 2000, 3000, 4000 models), more modern AmigaOS4 or MorphOS computers called AmigaOnes or SAMs, Pegasos(1 or 2), Efika, or some Powerbook models for MorphOS, or nearly any PC running AROS or WinUAE.

AmigaOS4.x is the current "True Amiga" OS platform with the officially licensed name and source code origin, and is PowerPC based. MorphOS is also PowerPC based and at one time was considered as a candidate to become the "True" AmigaOS, not it is an -alike competitor. MorphOS recently suggested they are considering switching or adding support for ARM and/or x86 at some point in the future. AROS is an open-source clone and runs on x86 and other processors.

This "Commodore Amiga" thing is an annoyance to many in the Amiga user community. It's not the return of anything Amiga other than a stupid sticker. The "Real" Amiga platform is elsewhere. You all on slashdot probably wouldn't like that either, as it's also expensive and a nanoscopic market (Though expensive at least makes more sense in the non-mass-market hardware scale of economy, though that's still difficult to accept at times)

The Commodore name went a different direction than the Amiga platform long ago. This company seems to want to bring the two names together again for some reason, but they don't seem at all interested in anything resembling the Amiga platform. Their Amiga 1000X (likely yet another lame PC running Linux Mint) product name seems to be an attack on the existing AmigaOne X1000 motherboard (Runs AmigaOS4 on a PowerPC chip) They even say that the free and open-source AROS is of no interest to them. I really don't understand what genuine purpose this company offers to the Amiga community. I don't really care about the sticker at this point. Give me a Quigibo 4240 running AmigaOS (or an -alike) and I'm happy. Give me a Linux box that says Amiga on it, and without anything -alike, it's just a Linux PC like any other.

AmigaOS today is for people that are obsessed with it. Either you are, and enjoy it, or you are not, and don't care. It can be a useful platform, though yes it does have some limitations today. I don't know why people post Amiga stuff to the non-caring Slashdot etc. sites. Move along and let us enjoy our hobby, we obsessors don't need your counseling and it won't bring us to our senses anyway.

Look at the R's to choose from. Even if people were "smart enough" to choose the best candidate, we don't really have a good candidate on the list. Then, for all the D's who were disappointed with how little change we got from Obama, why is there not a second choice there? The system is completely rigged to avoid the possibility of a "best" or even a "good" candidate to vote for.

I have new running shoes for running only
old running shoes for everyday wearing, mowing the lawn, and most other things
I have a pair of dressy shoes for the odd occasion I have to look nice.