I think the real question is, for those of us debating the free upgrade, most of us with Windows 7, how long do you wait?

I guess it must depend on how much of a disaster the initial launch is...

From my own perspective it will be: How many drivers will be broken? What software will not be supported?

All I know for sure is that WMC will be gone, and I will have to find a replacement for it. Though it has been kinda half broken for awhile now (unsupported codecs etc...).

The real cause of failure? Russian sabotage! Possibly by a deep mole Russian within SpaceX.

They are showcasing their GPU. I've had better experiences with ATI/AMD GPU over nVIDIA.

I'd buy a AMD GPU over an Intel one any day.

But yes, until AMD makes something significantly better, I'll buy an Intel CPU. My current system is Intel CPU, AMD GPU. The system I built before that was an Intel CPU, and ATI GPU, which is pretty much the same thing. Were I to build one tomorrow, probably also.

At least this shows that AMD doesn't have their own head stuck up their ass to know that their customers regularly pair their AMD GPU's with Intel CPU's...

Yes. AMD had a brief window of a few years of total dominance. I recall the Athlon64 (AthlonXP?) crushed the Intel counterparts. They were faster, cooler, and better supported. Then Intel ditched the P4 and went to Core 2 Duo's and the rest is history.

I am kind of shocked however on the decision. Usually corporate types like to stick head in the sand and make believe hard enough until the get their bonuses. I wonder how far up the chain this decision went, and if not far enough if heads will roll. If this was a purposeful corporate decision, perhaps there is hope yet for AMD...

You just want to do a giant selfie don't you?!

This is not new, and happens everywhere. It isn't so much a protest is it is an negotiation tactic.

I know you're joking, however the decision does bring up some questions about marriage, what it is, and why government is involved with it at all. So far as I can tell the only reason government is involved at all, is because marriage does a number of things for you financially and your rights. First you get a bunch of income tax breaks, and second, some rights in court in terms of finance and possessions. Presumably these laws exist for pretty much two reasons, 1) To promote and to help families who would theoretically have kids, and 2) to "protect" the spouse that decides to be the primary person to raise those kids, who really may not make much external money.

Which is the first problem, is that even a traditional marriage, the couple may not want kids, or are unable to have any. Why are they afforded the same benefits as everyone else? Why do non-married people not get the same benefits?

Anyway congrats to all the folks who can now get legally married in the US. However getting the tax advantage is a bit balanced by the protection piece. When marriage works, the people are all very rosie about it, however I'm pretty sure just about every single divorced friend has said, never ever get married, just don't do it! So I guess some more people have some decisions to make, hopefully they make some right ones. Somehow with all the celebration about this decision, I can somehow see a lot of couples getting married that maybe shouldn't, and then a rash of court cases and divorce proceedings in a few years... we'll see how much they think of marriage then.

Then again, perhaps the water would absorb the radiation, creating "Rad Rain", which can't be good.

Mars prospector: "A Rad Rain is commin' sonny, I can feel it in me bones. Best take cover in a local vault until it passes through I reckon."

So here is an idea... no idea of effectiveness, though that could be tested in a lab. Implementation like any terraforming or atmosphere creation scheme is all pretty fantastical. Anyway I know from reading various sources that water, specifically tanks of water can be used as effective shielding against radiation. What if when they are designing what the atmosphere is to be consisted of, they attempt to make it at certain levels pretty soupy with suspended water vapor. A couple km thickness of the stuff might block enough radiation. Of course that will likely make the surface pretty dark, making plant life difficult. Though likely a lot of rainfall, which would be good. Though it would be a pretty bleak dank dark soggy world, much like England.

Use Bing, or Yahoo, or whatever. Who cares. I'm sure MS would like the business.

However on further thought, Google Inc can also make the decision to not support it. If customers don't like it they can go someplace else.

Google is a corporate entity, they can't outlaw anything, but they can choose to not to support it. You don't have to use Google, Companies don't have to sell through Google, and application makers don't have to sell through Google... You might be missing out on some big markets, but you can always go someplace else. Unless everyone follows suit, in which case if you believe there is a big market for it, start your own service...

Or you could just use Google Docs in your browser. Unsurprisingly also supports Google Drive.

So MS makes a pointless app, and makes it free!

I'm a bit of a nuclear nut. However you are right, at least about the older technological nuclear facilities. They take forever to build, then take longer, cost a massive amount of money, then cost more. They do generate a massive amount of constant energy also.

Anyway that isn't what I wanted to say. I think a great deal of the problem could be solved with some pretty simple regulation. However it might make you a political enemy of some pretty big industry monopolies.

It all comes down to what you said about "near dense population centers". One thing forgotten much of the time in the whole power debate is that the power needs to be *distributed* otherwise it is pretty useless. How is this best achieved? Well the basic principle is the longer the distance, the more resistance, the more power you need to supply, and the less efficient it becomes...

Now I've never been a huge fan of solar, largely because of the hype and lack of real advancement. However, what would perhaps drive real results? Demand. It is also pretty simple so far as technology goes, there isn't a lot of moving parts so to speak.

Basically what I am getting at is *massive* roof top solar generation by residents. How does one achieve that? Well you make it easier. You do two bits of regulation. One that would allow government to issue cheap long term loans for the purpose of residential solar. Second would be to make it easier to connect to the grid, requiring distributors to A) allow for it, B) not dissuade it by charging exorbitant fees for hookups, inverters, etc... and make it easy to sign residential to long term contracts at a rate to which more than covers the initial capitol cost.

I think in doing so you would solve most of the power issues we have. Close to market generation, a very distributed and redundant supply, etc... It would also have the net benefit in the demand would drive solar technology to become better. It would also employ a ton of people long term for installs, maintenance, building solar panels, selling solar panels, etc...

You would however have the banking industry as well as the power industry supporting pretty much everyone but your political campaign.

Anyway as I see it, it would be a big deal insofar as solving power issues, with very little actual expense on the part of government, with change largely being driven by the market improving economic situations along the way.

The only problems really being the large capitol costs upfront, and the barriers to connecting to the grid, and uncertainty of power costs/prices. Solve those, and the People will produce their own power. If you really think about it, it is kind of crazy that this (and others) technology exists, and is largely unused and not a priority, and you have to ask why. Corporate interests and politics is my guess over any kind of logistics or technological issues.

Yeah I was thinking that after I posted it, but either way, a lot more profit regardless. I refused to buy HD for a couple of years because of it. Fortunately for me, I over bought storage just before it all went sideways, so I was able to limp along using what I already had for a long time.

In fact prior to the flood, I just bought a 2TB Seagate on sale for a media drive which I think was 79.99 on sale for 69.99 from NCIX. That exact same HD a year or so later was about 300$ which was crazy. It actually failed last year, but again I got lucky in that it failed literally about a month before the warranty ran out. However I had to backup, and lacked sufficient storage at that point, so I went out and got a 3TB at Futureshop/Bestbuy for about 130$ or something like that... After backup, I returned the 2TB Segate, and got a new one, which is still sitting in a box next to my computer because I don't really need it yet. One of these days I'll install it when I am getting a bit storage scarce.

"they should be handling that for you"

Ha ha ya, they should. However they don't. They specifically put the onus on individual departments to work it out on their own... without any support. That said you are right they do back up network resources, and we've been slowly moving to the no local storage model... oh I don't know over the last 10 years or so. I figure in another 10 years it will actually be fully implemented... however until then...

I've tried running a NAS for the office for local backup, however it is largely ineffective, as even before with changing passwords, users had to remember to go in and update their passwords in the scheduler each month, which no one really did, so all the processes would eventually fail. Now even that is impossible, as they change the local security policy so that windows can't even store passwords for a month.

Also in many situations, storing everything on the network isn't really feasible, GIS data for example requires a lot of storage spaces and access. I mean there are ways around it, but just work ineffective, spending more time swapping files on the network than actually working. That said, critical files, and historical stuff you can dump on a network resource, but then again there are a host of problems around security, access, and organization that have never really been addressed.