That's true, but it doesn't make them any less weird. They aren't funny like their Mac vs PC commercials were or impressive through subtlety like their iPod/iPhone/iPad commercials usually are. They seemed kind of pointless...almost like Microsoft commercials, except with more obviousness.

photorec does a pretty damned good job at getting data back if the drive is still readable. Even "simpler" methods, like chkdsk /f /r, work sometimes as well, though you might have to wait a long time to see results. (I once tried to recover a drive for a client that had several thousand bad sectors using chkdsk and it took about a month of continuous operation to recover about 40GB of data. Which was unfortunate because the drive was 1TB large.)

I use the physical methods as last resorts, since all of the ones I'm aware of can cause further damage.
I wonder how many people shell up the $1500+ for professional recovery when a few hours or days would have solved it for them...

Hard drives are really, really finicky. What works for some might not work for others, even if they are encountering the same problem. For instance, sticking a drive in the freezer worked for an older drive I was repairing for my mom but not for a former girlfriend's drive that, all things considered, had the same issue. I also once owned a Dell DJ (piece of shit, if anyone is considering getting this) that used a full-height 1.8" hard drive whose actuator would frequently stick; dropping or tapping it worked every time (to everyone else's curiosity), but has never, ever worked for any other drive that seemed to have the same issue.

I think you're pretty much fucked if your SSD starts going south, which is unfortunate. Thankfully, backups are easier to make these days.

While I live in a pretty well-populated area of NYC, my options for fast internet connectivity are surprisingly limited. I tried to get Road Runner cable internet, but the last person to own my apartment floor didn't pay a bill and going to the financial office to prove that I'm not that guy was not worth it for me. So I stuck with Verizon DSL for a while (about 3 years), but I can only get 1.5 Mbps down (and about 700K up) since I'm not close enough to a central office to get their higher bandwidth offerings. I was also disappointed with the increasingly constant outages that I had to deal with.

In hopes of getting faster speed, I signed up for T-Mobile's HSPA/HSPA+ Mobile Broadband package. I started with their 5GB cap and increased it to 10GB when I got tired of practically not having internet for days at a time while I waited for my billing cycle to restart. This worked out pretty well; speeds were much faster in comparison (3 Mbps down/1 Mbps up) and service was generally more reliable. However, I knew I had to switch when I reached my 10GB limit in a matter of days while I was trying (and kept failing at) downloading Windows 8 Customer Preview.

I then signed up for Clearwire's WiMAX offering. While I love the portability of the service (their router is pocketable and can be taken anywhere) and the speed is very nice *outside* of my house (6-8 Mbps down, 1.5/2 Mbps up), it's usually abysmal inside of my house (650-700 Kbps down, 450 Kbps up) regardless of how I position it. I do like that it's, at least so far, truly unlimited.

These days I use DSL at home and Clearwire everywhere else.

Having a "geeky" office with tons of amenities will not do much for attrition if the team is beleaguered with the usual office politics or uncontrolled management pressure that affects many IT and development houses. Based on what I've seen with my few years of working experience, I strongly believe that the most important element in a successful developer-oriented culture is encouraging continuing education and the proliferation of ideas. From what I've seen, this requires having a management team that is *really* good at separating the wheat from the chaff when client or business demands come in and having a team that has very good chemistry with each other. This is really hard to assemble, since it's already somewhat hard to find people that fit what companies want from a technical perspective and harder still to find people that will gel well with everyone else, especially when the pressure cooker starts getting hot and work flows in.

Fair remuneration is pretty damn important too, but a bad office culture will only attract people who are looking to gain in the short term. There is a hedge fund that is notorious for this here in the East Coast; they pay their IT staff *wayyy* over market but have office politics that would put the US government to shame and an extremely socially stifling office culture that makes it tough to stay there longer than six months.

Good luck!

If they're going to lie about why they've removed the Start menu, at least they could've been creative with their excuse. I have never seen anyone use the pinning feature to the extent discussed here. I have, however, seen the recent applications section in the Start Menu used extremely frequently.

Removing the Start Menu was a really bad decision, and using the big Metro landing page as a substitute is, to me, an extremely poor alternative. It remains to be seen how everyone else will take it, though.

You don't work at the Apple Store to make any sort of serious cash. There are many better conduits for people to travel down in both IT and sales if money is a concern. People work there for the *coolness* factor. It's about as hot as working for Google or Facebook, and employee discounts are never a bad thing. Its also an easy experience builder for people, especially given the floor traffic.

And not to nitpick, but $10/hr ain't bad. Especially if you're earning tips.

Apple's tight integration of hardware and software gives them a significantly greater advantage when it comes to releasing hardware that people actually want with software that further fuels their excitement. It's not like the established players (Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung) will go broke or lose Microsoft's partnership overnight; the former three will probably, as hinted by the article, concentrate more on their enterprise products (as they should, as they are very good in that space and invest truck-lodes of their R&D budget there anyway) and Samsung will probably be used as the key hardware manufacturer for executing Microsoft's vision (which allows them the opportunity, if it's successful, to exit the direct-to-consumer business completely).

I think MS is very much on the right track. Despite some idiosyncrasies, it is pretty easy to see the amount of effort they've invested in making Windows 8 friendly for content consumption *and* creation. If the hardware is right (i.e. comparable to iPad) and comes with Office and a tight screen for drawing and writing on, I'm hard-pressed to believe that these won't sell.

I don't agree with most of your post. Here is why:
IE 10: Better HTML 5 support - not much else - who cares? Everyone that uses the default browser by default because they don't want to deal with downloading and installing new stuff. And everyone that will be using Metro by default (most likely)
Sign in with MS Account: Who cares? Is anyone gonna use this? Heck yeah; SSO is good! (Live lets you create an account with your primary email as the username, so very convenient for lots of folks.
Picture Password and PIN Login: Picture pass is kinda cool, but PIN login? Really?this will be *REALLY* useful on tablets. Think of trying to login on a train with a touch keypad.
Ribbon in Windows Explorer: Holy cow no thank you.I think, and my experience supporting others supports this, that the ribbon has helped a lot of people navigate Office much easier. So it follows that it will make improvements on the Explorer side. We'll agree to disagree here.
Refresh and Reset Recovery - How about making it so you don't need recovery in the first place? How is this better than a decent backup system? This thing is going to be pushed hard on tablets. Wouldn't it be convenient to factory reset your Windows tablet just like you can on your iPad or Android tablet?
Native USB 3 - This shouldn't be a Windows 8 "feature," this should be in a service pack for Vista and Seven Good chance it will be; remember USB1.1 support for Windows 98? Rolled back to 95 via OSR2 update.
New Windows Task Manager - Yawn You obviously haven't supported Windows enough to know how much of an improvement it is. (Yes, third-party tools do it better. It's still good for the improvements to be native.)
XBox Live integration - I don't think anyone will care about this - are they thinking about competing with steam? Good luck. You do know how popular XBox live is, right?
Family Safety - Wasn't this included with Windows Live? Yawn Antivirus in Windows Defender - In other words, they are just including MSE. Which is awesome since people can stop paying McAfee/Symantec for their bloated products and not have to worry (as much) about making sure everything is up to date.
Secure Boot Support - Holy cow no thank you Yeah, that does kind of suck.

...it's laundry list of issues just don't make it attractive when I can easily resolve them by buying a comparably nice phone that runs Android. Yes, the UI is incredible and a huge leap from their previous iteration. Yes, the quality of its applications is significantly better as is the set of phones it currently runs on. However, almost all of the applications I currently use on Android are *still* unavailable and all of the ones that are available pale significantly in comparison to their Android or iPhone partners. A few examples:

• Yelp: Very popular app I use for finding, mostly, good restaurants to try. Awesome on iPhone and Android. Slow and awkward to use on Windows Mobile, and lack of proper multitasking causes it to lose state every time I use it.
• Evernote: Very popular app for storing notes and other various pieces of information. I use this religiously, mostly because it's easily accessible from PCs and their Android releases are really, really good. Tons of missing functionality on Windows Phone (no alternative layout options, can't attach anything, at least from the last time I tried)
• Google Voice: I use this almost extensively to call and text people. It works pretty well on iOS and integrates so deeply in Android one could easily mistake it for being native. Notifications barely work on the third-party clients I've tried on WP and the UX is just not there.
• Maps: Great native app, but you need a third-party application to get public transit directions (it works somewhat awkwardly last time I tried it) and no GPS-guided voice navigation, which is included with Android and works really, really well.

Additionally, WP is supremely locked down and jailbreaking is not as simple (or, for some phones, impossible) as it is on Android or iOS. This makes a lot of the things we can do in iPhone and Android impossible in WP. For example, it's possible (and very easy) to backup text messages on iPhone and Android. No way to do this on WP at this time of writing and I don't think they get backed up when you sync with Zune. To worsen matters, WP is *still* vulnerable to a two-year old SMS bug that can make a phone completely inoperable (even after a reboot) when it receives a special text message!

Finally, you need to use Zune to sync stuff. I personally hate using a huge software package to sync stuff, and while Zune is pretty nice, it's still a huge step backward from not needing anything at all on Android.

It's not that Windows Phone is bad; it's just that they don't have anything valuable enough for most Android or iPhone users to switch over. It's great for people new to the smartphone world, but that segment of the market has been pretty small for a while now.

I bought a pair of Klipsch s3 In-ear headphones about a year ago for $35. These are, hands down, the best canalphones you are going to get for that money anywhere. Full stop. J&R might still have an open-box pair for $15.

If you're into cans on your head, the Sennheiser HD201S is $30 or so. These sound just as good and don't leak too much.

I've bought really expensive headphones over the years (not worth it if you abuse them like I do); these are my new go-tos. Good luck!

I have a Windows Phone as well, a HD7. (I use a Galaxy SII on a daily basis, though.) I *loved* using it. The Windows Phone team got a lot of things right, especially with their UX. The Zune application is, hands down, the best mobile music player out there today and its integration with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn is phenomenal (i.e. makes a third-party application for this useless).

The problem is that UX advances isn't nearly as important for users as it was when iPhone broke ground. There is definitely a baseline that competitors in this market need to meet, but like regular computers, people (at least in Europe, Asia and US where smartphones are king) care way more about apps and looks than anything else. Windows Phone is still very light in this department, which is preventing it from really taking off. Case in point: Angry Birds is free on almost every OS (even Chrome!)...except on Windows Phone (2.99). Words with Friends, another super hit, isn't even available there.

He's been vehemently against Nokia's decision to leverage their smartphone strategy on Windows Phone. For more awesome reading explaining why, check this out.

As explained in the link above, it's not Nokia's decision to use Windows Phone on their smartphones that is the chief problem. They are, essentially, hedging their entire existence on the platform, which is a very bad bet for a company whose popularity has always been stronger in Europe, Asia and developing nations. It's almost like a Kodak in reverse in that they are, more or less, giving less importance to their bread and butter and more importance to a huge, HUGE risk. (Notice that HTC and Samsung, the top dogs in the non-iPhone smartphone world, use more of their resources for building Android and their own OS's than Windows Phone.)

The sole fact that, to this day and despite a very recent system update, Windows Phones still have the crippling text-message-of-death bug clearly demonstrates where Microsoft thinks they're at with the OS. I haven't seen any of the major players on Android/iOS commit serious time to Windows Phone yet; until this happens, it's a sinking ship.

For many people, handing out a business card is much quicker than using something like Bump. They also add a layer of expression and professionalism that is easily lost with other mediums. There are people who charge companies a bunch of money per hour just for customising cards, and for good reason; some companies get hoardes of new business just from their cards alone.

I'm not giving up my cards anytime soon. Actually, I need to refresh my design soon! (I take pics of all the cards I get and store them in Evernote; no more mountains of cards or clouding up my address book.)