Aero (Windows 7)

It's one of the most intuitive interfaces Microsoft has done.

I think the reason for bubble is not the unexpected sky high stock price but because the companies that go public are reporting losses and not generating growth in revenue. I think a lot of tech companies that have gone through IPOs are reporting growing revenues and increasing their net profit every quarter.

The bubble might be for some such as companies that are not able to make a profit or make consistent profit such as Twitter and Zynga after they have made their IPOs.

However, if the definition of bubble is buying companies at inflated prices, then I believe there is. The buyers' big earnings and revenues are able to mask whatever potential losses from the acquired division. The bubble will burst once companies start writing down their expensive acquisitions. Companies will definitely fudge their accounting and not do that until another major collapse of the economy or a string of bad news hit a particular company.

May be some EE and mechanical license to go with it for troubleshooting in case of problems. :P

But if it will be autonomous, the operator will be the one responsible.

Probably most communications are already encrypted. But I believe my data is stored unencrypted.

I use Windows Phone and get 0% malware. The 1% goes to IOS.

Windows is indeed getting better. ;)

Since I could no longer comprehend the technical nature of the discovery, what is the consequence of this discovery? Will existing theories be changed (or validated)? Any complications to other theories?

I hope someone with more knowledge in the subject matter will be able to share.

I think the most important medicine is to surround yourself with people who care and are able to support. Me and my colleagues started a business. Things are going well now but I had those bout of depression before (including thoughts of suicide.) Before, I felt alone in an island. The image of me being perfect was so high that I didn't open up to other people.

Now, it is different, I've learned to share and ask for support from my family and close friends. I have learned that I am not superman and I do make mistakes. I have learned to take care of myself and love myself more. :) Life is so much better now. :)

P.S. May be one bonus for me is that I am generally a happy person living a simple life. Though one disadvantage is that if bad things happen, it does probably hit me harder than other people. I also didn't take any prescription medicine.

Yet when governments demand that data be provided, all the fuss goes away and gives it easily.

I have learned just recently that all you need is one true friend to be there. :)

It's so sad and pathetic that the metric being used by people is amount of Facebook "friends".

I think the best gift would be to spend great quality time with your loved one. :)

PCs have grown to be powerful and surprisingly durable enough that it will work well for five years. In our office, we do cascade our workstations where the powerful are for the graphics and video teams and go to cascade it slowly to the rest of the company. We have some computers running on Core 2 duo/quad that are still ok for use in administrative computers.

The only time we purchase computer is when the old system conks out and parts are no longer available (such as lga 775 motherboards) or we have a new employee to use it. But generally, the cpu, memory, monitor, keyboard, mouse are ok. So we do just replace parts (harddrive, power supply) instead of replacing the entire computer. One factor is to retire high wattage workstations in favor of the modern low power system that will hopefully reduce our energy consumption (we have one of the highest electricity rates in the world.)

I think this will happen to other computing devices such as mobile phones and tablets where Apple and Samsung recently reported a drop in income (started.) Afterwards, it will just reach some steady state replacement cycle much like what we have in PCs.

Moving forward, this 2014, we have a couple of high end workstations lined up and desktop PCs for purchase. This will hopefully slow down the demise of the PC industry that is seeing 82.6 MILLION of sales as of the recent quarter.

That's the problem. All people entering the USA have no protection as accorded to American citizens. You are treated as hostile unless proven otherwise. In the meantime, all rights are suspended with no expectation of being treated as a human being.

Being a foreigner, I have read numerous times of horror stories happening at the immigration. It's really discouraging to go to the USA even if you have all the best intentions to go there. Good thing I don't have any necessity to go there at this point in time.

At the end, I'm not sure it is helping thwart bad people from entering the USA.

I think this might help Microsoft too. If they can pull it off with a great user experience, people will be getting Windows to run both Windows software that they use (such as MS Office, and other corporate software) and run parallel Android apps for their personal stuff. This will be great in sandboxing the work and personal stuff in a computer. People will appreciative of the Windows environment because it can run whatever apps they like. It might also increase the adaptation of Windows (especially ver 8 and above.)

Recently, we built a Supermicro Workstation 7047GR-TRF configuration. I am revising the system configuration to update the parts to get a comparable overview:
Supermicro Workstation 5037A-i - $580
Xeon E5-2643 v2 (fastest available) - $1552
Memory (4GB/ECC/DDR3-1866 x 4) - $240
Firepro W8000 (x2) - $2560
Intel SSD 910 400GB - $2000
Windows 8.1 Pro - $140
Others Accessories - $100
Total - $7,172
The base system will be pretty much high vs the $3,999 cost

In another comparison
Supermicro Workstation 5037A-i - $580
Xeon E5-2697 v2 - $2750
Memory (16GB/ECC/DDR3-1866 x 4) - $840
Firepro W9000 (x2) - $6800
Intel SSD 910 800GB - $4000
Windows 8.1 Pro - $140
Others Accessories - $100
Total - $15210
The configured system is still pretty high compared to $9599 from Apple pricing

Although specifications cannot be matched one is to one, I believe that the Windows workstation can be reduced in pricing by changing the Intel PCIe SSD and GPU to avoid using the top of the line products.

For example, using the following
Supermicro Workstation 5037A-i - $580
Xeon E5-2697 v2 - $2750
Memory (16GB/ECC/DDR3-1866 x 4) - $840
Quadro K5000 (x2) - $3200
Intel SSD DC S3700 200GB - $500
Windows 8.1 Pro - $140
Others Accessories - $100
Total - $8110
The configured Mac Pro is $8119 for the 256GB Storage and Dual D500.

So I guess the configuration will depend on the system.

For us though, we have found a more cost efficient alternative by buying a Supermicro 7047GR-TRF dual Intel Xeon socket and not using the top of the line for everything. But we are able to achieve 12 cores 2GHz, 64GB RAM, Nvidia K4000 for Display, Dual GTX680 GPU for compute, 8Gb FC Celerity HBA for around $5,000.00.

It will really depend on the applications to be used at the end. For us though, most of the applications are available in Windows and Linux configurations will limited Mac exclusivity so the PC solution is economical for us.