I thought that's what MS released service packs for, right?

This is why we had one really. Do I honestly think the thing is going to save my kids life? Not really. What it did do however was allow my wife and I to go to sleep ourselves instead obsessively looking at the baby monitor trying to determine if she was still breathing through that. It was more of a hack to work around our own insanity really. When I think back on all the piles of weird baby stuff we own that we barely used, that device actually seemed like a bargain at $80-100.

Well, the lack of any consistency in clothing size even with the same item for one. My recent pants shopping expedition has shown that one size 34 waist pants from the same brand, in the same store taken off the same shelf as another can still be wildly different in fit, length and waist. The QA and manufacturing on these things is so horrible that you'll never know how any individual item fits unless you tried it on.

I thought they were working on a feature that allows you do this...again like in the good old days, kind of.

http://store.steampowered.com/sharing/

This is by design. The goal is to get people stuck in Microsoft's crap store where they get a fat 30% cut of all software sales by trickery. That's why you had the Surface Pro...the flag ship product that could do it all and actually filled a niche. And then there's the Surface RT, the turd no one could love if they knew its dark secret...but its a Surface and it was cheap so whoops I bought it because I got confused like I was supposed to be.

But the word is out RT means abomination now. So its time to go with the even more ambiguous Surface nothing to muddy up the waters even more. Coming next year expect the RT version 3 to be re-branded as "Surface Pro E" or maybe they'll go for the full power bait and switch and just call it Surface Pro 3.0. This last change would have come eventually though, the obvious end game to shoe-horning their app store into existence is to close the door on any software sales they don't get a cut of.

I think the opposite sort of happened though. RT actually ruined the whole Surface brand rather than the Pro artificially elevating it. Probably a lot of people (ok, probably not that many people) bought the RT under the mistaken assumption it could do things only the Pro could and then returned it to the store before washing their hands of Surface tablets altogether. Here's the part where Microsoft screwed up, they forgot its a lot easier for a customer to return a tablet to a store than it is for OEMs or customers to return Windows 8 operating system software.

As a yacht salesmen I must respectfully disagree.

With XP I think you need a valid volume license key, which I'm not really sure how hard that is to find. I seem to remember some hubbub about MS blacklisting keys and the regular keys I think they did some kind of checking (since they should only match a single machine by nature). This was back when XP came out though so my memory is hazy. Prior to that any old key could be used and I wouldn't be surprised if half of China had the same 98se install key. Anyway, the Windows Genuine Advantage Activation tool was not part of the original XP release and is separate from all released service packs. You can decline the update. I always do since it provides no end user benefit anyway.

If it was a dog it would have been put down already. But killer whales are much more expensive and difficult to procure. Their training is also an expense. Human trainers are an inexpensive commodity in comparison.

I don't know, when was the first version of Microsoft Office released?

Do you mean vt-d/AMD-Vi (i and d being the important bits)

It does seem AMD hasn't actually market segmented this feature out to the level of near pointlessness like Intel but I can't seem to find good information on which chips do and don't support it. If e-350 does though that is a good sign.

I'm not sure I'd say they were all bad based on your experience. Mine ran all of the water in the house at the same time almost the entire time he was there to try and force any drainage issues to the surface. At the time I wouldn't have thought to do something like that.

IIRC all ants in a colony are essentially clones, which makes the situation even more strange.