Uh, it's pretty well known that all of the big tech companies pay quite well. In the pacific northwest (Amazon, Microsoft) H-1B salaries for graduates with 4-year bachelor's degrees start at around $100k, fresh out of college. It's even higher in Silicon Valley (Facebook, Google, Apple, etc.), although it's offset by higher living costs.

Since when can you install Linux on an iPad?

The other day, MS's engineering team did an AMA on reddit where they answered the question of screen resolution:

So it seems that Microsoft has data that suggests that, despite the lower resolution, the Surface has greater precieved detail than the iPad. (although I find it annoying that they've muddied the waters by re-using trademarks - they've repurposed "Cleartype Display" as the MS equivalent of Apple's "Retina Display")

So in other words it's like traditional portfolio theory except worse?

That isn't true. The pure idiocy and stupidity rampant in American politics means that the US government can default, just like they came close to doing a while ago. That's why the rating on government bonds was dropped to AA - the fact that default was even being considered as a possibility is utterly mindboggling.

Economically there's no reason why the government would ever default. Instead it's the pure unadultered retardation of the politicans in this country that have ensured that an investment that should be risk-free, actually isn't. And that's just so insane that I still have trouble believing that we actually managed to get ourselves into this situation.

Regardless, those are activations... not sales. Microsoft counts the number of times money has exchanged hands for a copy of their product, not the number of times people hit the "Activate Windows Now" button.

I'm sorry to have to ask this, but are you retarded? Honestly.

Hardware acceleration means that the drawing/animations/etc are done faster, more efficiently, and with lower power. And if you don't have hardware acceleration available, it falls back to software. There is not a single conceivable case in which you would prefer software over hardware-accelerated rendering - if it's available the hardware does the same thing, except faster and more efficiently. If you prefer to do everything in software, feel free to rip the graphics card from your PC and go back to your P-133.

This is a fix-it update, which doesn't appear through windows update and isn't pushed out through WSUS...

The Windows SDK won't ship with MSVC, but Visual Studio Express 11 still does. Visual Studio Express 11 still includes the full compiler toolkits and you're free to use those however you want as you could with the Windows SDK. But the IDE itself will only support creation of Metro-style projects.

ReFS (Win8) and ZFS (Solaris) already exist and are production-ready. There's btrfs for Linux but it's still early in development and is far from usable.

You'd have to be pretty crazy to use ReFS on a removable drive. ReFS is a direct competitor to ZFS, and is designed for use in enterprise and high-integrity systems, not on your USB thumbstick.

Er, because any filesystem can have nonfatal minor errors? For example a filesystem that uses a bitmap to track free space (like NTFS does) can have that bitmap corrupted by bad sectors or whatever. Things like that are sufficiently simple that you can attempt a repair while the volume is online, without major risk of failure.

The German courts and legal system doesn't listen to the US judge. That much is patently obvious, because the US has no jurisdiction in Germany.

But Motorola is a US company who does business in the US. Hence it must abide by US laws and rulings. The US judge said to Motorola, "even if you win the case in Germany, you must not follow through on the ban on MS products in Germany until I have made my ruling here." That doesn't infringe on German jurisdiction.

In ceremony of knighting, the knight-elect kneels on a knighting-stool in front of The Queen, who then lays the sword blade on the knight's right and then left shoulder.

After he has been dubbed, the new knight stands up, and The Queen invests the knight with the insignia of the Order to which he has been appointed, or the Badge of a Knight Bachelor.

Contrary to popular belief, the words 'Arise, Sir ...' are not used.

Source: royal.gov.uk

Microsoft pays a regular dividend to its shareholders, unlike most other tech companies. It's not exactly rocket science that a regular dividend suppresses a company's stock price.