When I just wake up and read something that provokes me I really should get more awake before I post something snarky, but here goes... As far as my own experience on FB goes, if the kids leave, then fine. They don't have anything to say that interests me and in many cases they outright offend. It really makes me scared for the future of the human race sometimes. And as for FB itself and their revenues, what is the buying power of teenagers versus the buying power of their parents? That's right, not much (though they do spend what they have more freely). Now get off my lawn.

You mean Microsoft?

I know of NO businesses that are just hankering with bated breath to use Windows 8. They would rather upgrade to 7. Home users are having it shoved down their throats with every new PC they buy and they hate it too. You can argue about all the new wonderful things it has under the hood, but the interface is shit. Don't say "It's fine once you get used to it," because it's a step backward in usability. Even after installing something like Classic Shell or Start8 the 'Modern' apps still run fullscreen. "But you can learn your way around that!" you cry. That's some helluvan arrogant attitude to have. The only reason M$ dumped the old menu/window-based interface is because they it would benefit THEM in some imagined convergence of the desktop and tablet, **not** to benefit users or create something more efficient. They were wrong.

You need to make it more plain when you joke around like that

Defender *is* bundled in later versions of Windows. Look, far be it from me to defend M$, but as far as the free AVs go, I've recommended MSSE to a lot of my clients. It runs quietly and unobtrusively and doesn't constantly ask the user to make decisions he may not have a clue about, and it doesn't nag you to ***BUY OUR PAID VERSION ZOMFG*** every five minutes. It does its job reasonably well, albeit not perfectly, and like others I'm a little skeptical of this outfit's testing methodology and results. FWIW, out in the field servicing customers' machine I'm seeing fewer virus infections lately and more adware/crapware infections on W7+. XP is another matter. It's always been a Petri dish.

Pretty much every note, every inch of tape that the Beatles ever produced has been bootlegged. Collectors like me already have all this stuff, though maybe the new releases might have better sound quality. The Beatles themselves would be first to admit that some of this was substandard work though, which is why it wasn't released back then in the first place

About a year I was part of a team of contractors that rolled out new hardware at an aviation/pilot training school. The new boxes were top of the line Xeons with 16GB of RAM and W7/64 preinstalled. Part of our job was to *install 32-bit XP on the machines* because the old training software hadn't been sufficiently tested to the satisfaction of the company on W7, even though the head IT manager had tested it and it worked fine. Since then I've wondered what they'll do come April.

Please help me out here. I'm asking seriously. If all you need to do to succeed at bitcoin mining is throw computer resources at it, and they are $1000 apiece, then why aren't all the world's supercomputers on the job making a thousand bucks a minute? The answer is of course, they have more important things to do. But even if they don't, they have the capacity to. It doesn't make sense to me. The whole currency could be deflated to nothing in one swell foop. If it could be so easily destroyed, then is its foundation really a solid one. I await enlightenment.

I'd leave Microsoft and get another job

Insightful but when the artist only makes at best 0.0084 oout of the 1.0000 pie, you have to wonder a little about who's getting screwed while everyone else laughs on the way to the bank.

That is precisely the opposite of my experience with Anandtech. When I was shopping for an SSD 18 mos. ago I investigated thoroughly which one to get. The site's negative reviews of OCZ products and their failrue rate jumped out at me. (I ended up getting an Intel 520 Series one, which had stellar reviews from every site I visited)

Anandtech, Ars, and Tom's

Can someone expain to me why I should give up a high-end gaming PC in exchange for selling my soul to Microsoft (or Sony)?

I used SuSE from 2004 until the fall of 2011, when I switched to Mint. I like both of them, and Mint "just works" out of the box better than SuSE. The lack of nVidia proprietary drivers is a showstopper for my purposes, and requiring root privileges to access NTFS drives might be a security feature, but to me it's a headache. I say all this in the spirit of constructive criticism. However, once you get SuSE configured like you want it, it runs like a champ. I love YAST; it's everything all in one place.

But I *am* fed up with Ubuntu!