Currently, an installation costs around 2000 Euros/kW(peak). YMMV and all that, but it is a reasonable number for estimating if you should consider it at all.
In (relatively) sunny southern Germany, you can expect around 1000 kWh per year per kW(peak). At end user prices of 25 (Euro)cent per kWh, that means 250 Euro/year or a payoff in 8 years if you use all the energy yourself and use it to lower your consumption. The areas bordering the Mediterranean Sea are better by the way, you may get twice the output there.
Two more interesting details: Germany also has a premium price for buying grid energy from renewables, but it is decreased each year for new installation (once an installation is operational, it gets the price from that year for 20 years). For small installations it is currently 24.43 (Euro)cent per kWh, so the above calculation also works for selling to the grid. For large installations, the price is already below 20 cent per kWh.
Considering that existing Windows Software will not work on ARM (and usually not even work well on x86 tablets), I'd say that Microsoft does not have the usual advantage of a huge existing software base there.
So I consider it possible that Windows 8 loses in the tablet market against Android and iOS. And another two years of head start for Android and iOS has to hurt;-)
On the desktop, I agree that Windows 7 should easily "survive" a a failed launch of Windows 8 and keep most of the desktop market share for Microsoft.
Some things are obvious disadvantages, such as strong shortsightedness. Say, more than three diopters (a mild shortsightedness could be an advantage if you live in a world without reading glasses and have to focus on near objects a lot).
But what we don't know is how to change just this aspect and leave the rest alone. AFAIK genetic engineering is still not a very exact procedure.
And if you just de-select the whole person by sterilizing them, it becomes complicated how to weight the pros and cons. And the best weighting may change with the circumstances.
Taking myself as an example: On one hand, I'm relatively smart and can do qualified work (in my case, software engineering). That makes me one of those that are fit to contribute to society as we know it. On the other hand, I'm one of those guys with glasses like the bottom of a coke bottle. A clear disadvantage. So if you were a rabid fan of eugenics, would you select me for breeding or sterilization?
Seems you got lucky with your onboard audio. My experience with onboard audio over the last three mainboards is as follows:
-Abit IC-7 from 2004: Lots of background noise. Scrolling the screen was audible as crosstalk on the headphones. Buying a 20 Euro Soundblaster Live (PCI) was quite an improvement.
-Asus M2N from 2007: Supposedly 24 bit high definition, which I don't quite buy in terms of actual quality. But good enough that I didn't bother to get a discrete sound card for this PC.
-Asus M4A78LT from 2011: OK (but not great) with walkman headphones at low volume. Unable to provide more than low volume to said headphones without clipping. Upgraded that one with an old Soundblaster Audigy I picked from someone else's discarded PC. Sound quality improved at all volumes and high volumes were now possible, as opposed to the onboard audio.
But when it comes to downloading stuff, many people have the data equivalent of a bottomless stomach. And this has been known for a long time. Several years ago, when DSL was new, we hade some ISPs going into bankruptcy in Germany, because they unwisely sold unlimited plans and their upstream bills killed them.
Today's ISPs should know better and go straight to the equivalent of 'Max 3 refills'. Something like 'Max.50GByte/month'. If they still sell "unlimited" pland and throttle those, I guess its time to go after them for fraud.
Just use the same textbooks as 30+ years ago. Pre-university mathematics hasn't changed that much.
Actually, it has.
No, actually it hasn't. I speak as someone who took high school math near the beginning of the age of the graphing calculator, and as someone who has taught high school math in the years since.
Maybe school politics change the curriculum now and then, so another subset of mathematics is taught.
But whether school curriculum has changed or not, the subject matter is really old. When I studied electrical engineering in the late 80s/early 90s, the mathematics lectures for engineers consisted mostly of 19th century stuff. Like differential and integral calculus, combinatorics and linear programming (ok, the latter is 20th century).
Thus, the textbooks of 30 years ago should still be worthwhile to use, except that they might not fit the current curriculum exactly.
sometimes the old ram is still really expensive because they know that you are trying to keep something running they feel fine charging you say $100 a stick for 512 even though you could get 4GB of DDR 3 for that just because they had to keep that 512 dimm on the shelf (at least in theory) for x years before someone wanted it.
What I've noticed is that once the following generation of RAM takes over, the price of the older type does not change anymore. Probably due to no more new investments in more efficient manufacturing of the obsolete stuff.
To recycle your example, that 512MB DDR1 stick for $100 was at a similar price six years ago, when DDR2 started to take over. Also, maybe two or three years ago the same happened with DDR2 vs. DDR3. Looking at a well-known German dealer's web site right now, they charge around 26 Euros for a 4GByte stick of DDR3 (Kingston Value RAM). A 2GByte stick of DDR2, also from Kingston, costs around 36 Euros.
As a consequence, upgrading an old system can be more expensive than buying something new with equivalent performance.
That's nice in theory, but the patents quoted in articles like this the patents are often rather obvious or the descriptions just outline the idea, without really telling the reader how to implement it. So I think patent offices worldwide need to be more strict about requiring -a significant inventive step -and a patent description that really helps in reproducing the invention.
If that happens, I guess the patent system could be worthwhile again. As it is right now, I think the flood of crap patents does more damage than the encouragement for real inventors does good.
In other words, I think the granting of low-quality patents needs to be drastically reduced. If that does not work, lets get rid of patents altogether.
Then I might wait for some reviews that tell me if that game will run on my hardware. Chances are that it will not (my PC is recently updated but still does not match a Core i7) and I'll stick to some older games that are not designed for the 2012 Steambox;-)
Seriously, there are still a lot of AAA titles from the last decade I have not played yet. And today's graphics may be better, but the game play has usually NOT improved.
Politicians aren't thinking what's best for the market.
They're thinking what's best for their constituents, and anybody who knows anything about a free market knows that the two are not necessarily the same thing.
Worse: Politicians are thinking what's best for winning the next election. Which may not necessarily be what's best for their constituents. At best, they to do this by trying to find out what the constituents really want and promoting that, in the hope of being reelected as a reward. At worst, they take barely disguised bribes in the form of campaign donations, in the hope of winning through a flashy campaign (and stupid voters are at fault when this approach works).
That comparison will become more realistic when the Prius Plug-In comes to market this year. And it will become a complicated comparison. The Prius Plug-In has a rather short electric-only range (11 miles vs. 35 miles in the Volt as measured by EPS, according to Wikipedia). So
-if you daily commute is short enough that the 11 miles will do, you can compare by price and consumption of electric power. Neither car will need fuel.
-if you drive more than 11 miles per day, but have the option to recharge over night, the Volt might come out favorably.
-if you drive hundreds of miles between recharging, you might want a diesel instead of a plug-in hybrid.;-)
Being from Germany myself, I consider it a good idea to use taxes to promote some adaption to a less wasteful lifestyle. And the income from fuel tax could be used to finance tax breaks in other fields (in practice, our government prefers to waste the money).
About the renewable fuels:
In 2008, when mineral oil prices were as high or higher than today, plant oil as diesel fuel had a small boom in Germany. But then mineral oil prices declined, and roughly at the same time (starting in 2008) energy taxes on plant oil used as fuel were introduced. Those taxes have been gradually increased over the last years, and from 2013 they will be just as high as on diesel.
So the cost advantage has been lost with the difference in taxation disappearing, and renewable fuels are no longer attractive from a financial point of view. An exception is natural gas, which still has a tax privilege until 2018.
Linus has a point. I think an intermediate, pre-defined level of access (higher than normal user, lower than root) might be helpful sometimes. Like the "Power User" from old Windows NT.
A few months ago, I have upgraded an older PC to an AMD 4 way Phenom II as well. I chose the 910e for its low TDP of 65 watts and I'm so far quite happy with it.
But Intel has similar parts, like the Core i5-2400S. If it wasn't for the ECC RAM support the AMD offers (but Intel only in expensive Xeons), I might have gone with Intel this time. In most reviews, the i5-2400S wins clearly on performance.
So it will be a good thing if AMD can boost its performance/power ration and become more competitive.
In this case I hope to see not the high spec CPU improvement, but rather the mid-range CPU segment get a very low power option. Somewhere in the i5 equivalent range, but giving desktop performance while sipping mobile levels of power.
I agree. A CPU with mid-range performance and low power consumption is exactly what I want in my PCs. A few months ago I upgraded an old machine, using a Phenom II 910e (not quite as fast as an i5, but AMD supports ECC RAM in most of its CPUs). But the ECC feature was the only one that kept me on AMD this time. Intel does support it in the Xeon line for servers, but that was a little too expensive for my taste.
If AMD can make their CPUs more attractive with the resonant mesh, it can only be good for end users. Even if they don't want an AMD, competition might force Intel to lower its prices.
That's correct but incomplete. Weapons loadout, range and transversal speed relative to enemy (or speed in general when missiles were involved) are also are important. That makes for a lot of tactical variants.
Overall, EVE is not like a flight sim, but more like Homeworld where each ship is controlled by a different player.
If one believes the recurring tests at http://phoronix.com/, the open source (Gallium3D) drivers for the R300 through R500 chipsets are reasonably mature this days. Still slower than Catalyst, but for a Windows manager they might do.
P3P user agents MUST NOT rely on P3P compact policies that do not comply with the P3P 1.0 or P3P 1.1 specifications or are obviously erroneous. Such compact policies SHOULD be deemed invalid and the corresponding cookies should be treated as if they had no compact policies.
As I understand this, IE should actually search the Google P3P header for a valid statement of what Google intends to do with regard to tracking cookies. If it does not find those, it should apply the default behaviour for web sites without any P3P header. As described by Dean Hachamovitch (the author of the blog post):
By default, IE blocks third-party cookies unless the site presents a P3P Compact Policy Statement indicating how the site will use the cookie and that the sites use does not include tracking the user.
Fine. So your browser sees a Google P3P header without any valid policies. At this point, the clause "unless the site presents..." should kick in and cookies should be blocked. To me this looks like a bug in IE, as they failed to implement the default behavior in this case. It would be appropriate for Microsoft to fix this bug, send the fix as update on next patch day and otherwise be very humble about their error.
Instead, Dean Hachamovitch tries to paint this as conspiracy by Google to circumvent IE's security protection. FAIL.
This move, combined with mandating that applications can be installed only from the Windows store, may be a mistake by Microsoft. It means that from a user's POV, Windows on ARM is a lot like the iPad, with the same limitation to software the vendor allows you to install. So Microsoft has to compete against a similar system that has a significant head start on available software.
Personally, I dislike the exclusion of other OSes as well, and I hope that either - the EU will nix the exclusion on anti-trust grounds - or Windows on ARM bombs in the market, for the reason above.
BTW, what about Android as unifying factor in the ARM world? It seems to me that it could be the common platform that DOS was on the PC, even if that might not have been Google's goal in developing it.
I have recently worked on a project that was about developing a tablet version of existing software. Target system was a x86 tablet under Windows 7. Lessons learned: 1) Using the standard Windows GUI elements with fingers on a touch screen is difficult, because the accuracy is much worse. A stylus is better, but still inferior to a mouse. We (that is, our GUI designer) had to duplicate most GUI elements in double or triple size. After that, our application was reasonably user friendly. 2) Even when the application is tablet-friendly, you still need to manage your Windows settings occasionally. Which brings you back to the above accuracy problem, and right-clicking is slow and awkward compared to the mouse. There goes much of the usefulness of the context menus in the Windows 7 GUI. In short, it sucks. "Throw-the-damn-thing-against-the-wall frustrating" describes it well.
So I think Microsoft needs to re-design both the OS and the applications before Windows and tablets will be an attractive combination. Windows re-design is under way with Windows 8, but I'm not aware of a similar project for Office.
For example how many times have you seen a horror movie and thought "don't go through that door" (cause it' perfect for an ambush)? In a lot of modern games that's the only way to complete the level.
Worse: You do your best to prepare for surviving the ambush, but then a cutscene interrupts you and at the end of the cut scene you are dumped into a, lets say, less than optimal position. Those are the cut scenes I really hate.
If games developers really need some cut scenes to develop the story, they should use them in more quiet moments, when the player is exploring rather than fighting for his virtual life. This way, cut scenes can enhance the game rather than spoil it.
True enough, and not only in North America. At my current place of work (in Germany), there are still some XP SP2 machines around. This despite SP2 being out of support. That is trouble waiting to happen;-)
And there is no way to avoid this, as the CS systems require the new contract agreement before the changes can be applied.
What about canceling altogether and signing up with a new carrier?
My current telephone/DSL provider (in Germany) has a similar clause in its terms and conditions. But I made sure to choose a plan without the two years minimum on the initial deal. So when the time comes to switch to a different plan, I might just boot them out and sign up elsewhere;-)
Just don't crank up the system requirements too much. If a PC game runs well with a dual core CPU, mid range GPU and 2GByte of RAM, 90% of gamers will be on a level playing field.
For instance, Day Of Defeat: Source shows it is possible. With graphics that still look fine to me. The initial release even ran fine on a Pentium4/2.4 GHz with 1GByte RAM and a Radeon 9600Pro (my PC at the time) but subsequent patches have messed up the performance somewhat.
Slashdot Mirror
Currently, an installation costs around 2000 Euros/kW(peak). YMMV and all that, but it is a reasonable number for estimating if you should consider it at all.
In (relatively) sunny southern Germany, you can expect around 1000 kWh per year per kW(peak). At end user prices of 25 (Euro)cent per kWh, that means 250 Euro/year or a payoff in 8 years if you use all the energy yourself and use it to lower your consumption.
The areas bordering the Mediterranean Sea are better by the way, you may get twice the output there.
Two more interesting details:
Germany also has a premium price for buying grid energy from renewables, but it is decreased each year for new installation (once an installation is operational, it gets the price from that year for 20 years).
For small installations it is currently 24.43 (Euro)cent per kWh, so the above calculation also works for selling to the grid. For large installations, the price is already below 20 cent per kWh.
On tablets, yes.
Considering that existing Windows Software will not work on ARM (and usually not even work well on x86 tablets), I'd say that Microsoft does not have the usual advantage of a huge existing software base there.
So I consider it possible that Windows 8 loses in the tablet market against Android and iOS. And another two years of head start for Android and iOS has to hurt ;-)
On the desktop, I agree that Windows 7 should easily "survive" a a failed launch of Windows 8 and keep most of the desktop market share for Microsoft.
Some things are obvious disadvantages, such as strong shortsightedness. Say, more than three diopters (a mild shortsightedness could be an advantage if you live in a world without reading glasses and have to focus on near objects a lot).
But what we don't know is how to change just this aspect and leave the rest alone. AFAIK genetic engineering is still not a very exact procedure.
And if you just de-select the whole person by sterilizing them, it becomes complicated how to weight the pros and cons. And the best weighting may change with the circumstances.
Taking myself as an example:
On one hand, I'm relatively smart and can do qualified work (in my case, software engineering). That makes me one of those that are fit to contribute to society as we know it.
On the other hand, I'm one of those guys with glasses like the bottom of a coke bottle. A clear disadvantage.
So if you were a rabid fan of eugenics, would you select me for breeding or sterilization?
Seems you got lucky with your onboard audio. My experience with onboard audio over the last three mainboards is as follows:
-Abit IC-7 from 2004: Lots of background noise. Scrolling the screen was audible as crosstalk on the headphones. Buying a 20 Euro Soundblaster Live (PCI) was quite an improvement.
-Asus M2N from 2007: Supposedly 24 bit high definition, which I don't quite buy in terms of actual quality. But good enough that I didn't bother to get a discrete sound card for this PC.
-Asus M4A78LT from 2011: OK (but not great) with walkman headphones at low volume. Unable to provide more than low volume to said headphones without clipping. Upgraded that one with an old Soundblaster Audigy I picked from someone else's discarded PC. Sound quality improved at all volumes and high volumes were now possible, as opposed to the onboard audio.
Exactly.
But when it comes to downloading stuff, many people have the data equivalent of a bottomless stomach. And this has been known for a long time. Several years ago, when DSL was new, we hade some ISPs going into bankruptcy in Germany, because they unwisely sold unlimited plans and their upstream bills killed them.
Today's ISPs should know better and go straight to the equivalent of 'Max 3 refills'. Something like 'Max.50GByte/month'. If they still sell "unlimited" pland and throttle those, I guess its time to go after them for fraud.
Just use the same textbooks as 30+ years ago. Pre-university mathematics hasn't changed that much.
Actually, it has.
No, actually it hasn't. I speak as someone who took high school math near the beginning of the age of the graphing calculator, and as someone who has taught high school math in the years since.
Maybe school politics change the curriculum now and then, so another subset of mathematics is taught.
But whether school curriculum has changed or not, the subject matter is really old. When I studied electrical engineering in the late 80s/early 90s, the mathematics lectures for engineers consisted mostly of 19th century stuff. Like differential and integral calculus, combinatorics and linear programming (ok, the latter is 20th century).
Thus, the textbooks of 30 years ago should still be worthwhile to use, except that they might not fit the current curriculum exactly.
sometimes the old ram is still really expensive because they know that you are trying to keep something running they feel fine charging you say $100 a stick for 512 even though you could get 4GB of DDR 3 for that just because they had to keep that 512 dimm on the shelf (at least in theory) for x years before someone wanted it.
What I've noticed is that once the following generation of RAM takes over, the price of the older type does not change anymore. Probably due to no more new investments in more efficient manufacturing of the obsolete stuff.
To recycle your example, that 512MB DDR1 stick for $100 was at a similar price six years ago, when DDR2 started to take over. Also, maybe two or three years ago the same happened with DDR2 vs. DDR3. Looking at a well-known German dealer's web site right now, they charge around 26 Euros for a 4GByte stick of DDR3 (Kingston Value RAM). A 2GByte stick of DDR2, also from Kingston, costs around 36 Euros.
As a consequence, upgrading an old system can be more expensive than buying something new with equivalent performance.
That's nice in theory, but the patents quoted in articles like this the patents are often rather obvious or the descriptions just outline the idea, without really telling the reader how to implement it. So I think patent offices worldwide need to be more strict about requiring
-a significant inventive step
-and a patent description that really helps in reproducing the invention.
If that happens, I guess the patent system could be worthwhile again. As it is right now, I think the flood of crap patents does more damage than the encouragement for real inventors does good.
In other words, I think the granting of low-quality patents needs to be drastically reduced. If that does not work, lets get rid of patents altogether.
...and if you don't???
Then I might wait for some reviews that tell me if that game will run on my hardware. Chances are that it will not (my PC is recently updated but still does not match a Core i7) and I'll stick to some older games that are not designed for the 2012 Steambox ;-)
Seriously, there are still a lot of AAA titles from the last decade I have not played yet. And today's graphics may be better, but the game play has usually NOT improved.
Politicians aren't thinking what's best for the market.
They're thinking what's best for their constituents, and anybody who knows anything about a free market knows that the two are not necessarily the same thing.
Worse:
Politicians are thinking what's best for winning the next election. Which may not necessarily be what's best for their constituents.
At best, they to do this by trying to find out what the constituents really want and promoting that, in the hope of being reelected as a reward.
At worst, they take barely disguised bribes in the form of campaign donations, in the hope of winning through a flashy campaign (and stupid voters are at fault when this approach works).
That comparison will become more realistic when the Prius Plug-In comes to market this year. And it will become a complicated comparison. The Prius Plug-In has a rather short electric-only range (11 miles vs. 35 miles in the Volt as measured by EPS, according to Wikipedia). So
-if you daily commute is short enough that the 11 miles will do, you can compare by price and consumption of electric power. Neither car will need fuel.
-if you drive more than 11 miles per day, but have the option to recharge over night, the Volt might come out favorably.
-if you drive hundreds of miles between recharging, you might want a diesel instead of a plug-in hybrid. ;-)
Being from Germany myself, I consider it a good idea to use taxes to promote some adaption to a less wasteful lifestyle. And the income from fuel tax could be used to finance tax breaks in other fields (in practice, our government prefers to waste the money).
About the renewable fuels:
In 2008, when mineral oil prices were as high or higher than today, plant oil as diesel fuel had a small boom in Germany. But then mineral oil prices declined, and roughly at the same time (starting in 2008) energy taxes on plant oil used as fuel were introduced. Those taxes have been gradually increased over the last years, and from 2013 they will be just as high as on diesel.
So the cost advantage has been lost with the difference in taxation disappearing, and renewable fuels are no longer attractive from a financial point of view.
An exception is natural gas, which still has a tax privilege until 2018.
Linus has a point. I think an intermediate, pre-defined level of access (higher than normal user, lower than root) might be helpful sometimes. Like the "Power User" from old Windows NT.
Some phone vendors do build a fence around it though, by customizing Android to be a "walled garden" and locking the bootloader.
That is of course the fault of the phone vendors, not the fault of Google.
A few months ago, I have upgraded an older PC to an AMD 4 way Phenom II as well. I chose the 910e for its low TDP of 65 watts and I'm so far quite happy with it.
But Intel has similar parts, like the Core i5-2400S. If it wasn't for the ECC RAM support the AMD offers (but Intel only in expensive Xeons), I might have gone with Intel this time. In most reviews, the i5-2400S wins clearly on performance.
So it will be a good thing if AMD can boost its performance/power ration and become more competitive.
In this case I hope to see not the high spec CPU improvement, but rather the mid-range CPU segment get a very low power option. Somewhere in the i5 equivalent range, but giving desktop performance while sipping mobile levels of power.
I agree. A CPU with mid-range performance and low power consumption is exactly what I want in my PCs. A few months ago I upgraded an old machine, using a Phenom II 910e (not quite as fast as an i5, but AMD supports ECC RAM in most of its CPUs). But the ECC feature was the only one that kept me on AMD this time. Intel does support it in the Xeon line for servers, but that was a little too expensive for my taste.
If AMD can make their CPUs more attractive with the resonant mesh, it can only be good for end users. Even if they don't want an AMD, competition might force Intel to lower its prices.
That's correct but incomplete. Weapons loadout, range and transversal speed relative to enemy (or speed in general when missiles were involved) are also are important. That makes for a lot of tactical variants.
Overall, EVE is not like a flight sim, but more like Homeworld where each ship is controlled by a different player.
If one believes the recurring tests at http://phoronix.com/, the open source (Gallium3D) drivers for the R300 through R500 chipsets are reasonably mature this days. Still slower than Catalyst, but for a Windows manager they might do.
And Catalyst versions after 9.3 don't support R300 anyway (see http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_r500_legacy&num=1). So unless you already tried it, why not run the open source drivers?
Consider the following (from http://www.w3.org/TR/P3P11/#ua_compact;
6.4 Compact Policy Processing
P3P user agents MUST NOT rely on P3P compact policies that do not comply with the P3P 1.0 or P3P 1.1 specifications or are obviously erroneous. Such compact policies SHOULD be deemed invalid and the corresponding cookies should be treated as if they had no compact policies.
As I understand this, IE should actually search the Google P3P header for a valid statement of what Google intends to do with regard to tracking cookies. If it does not find those, it should apply the default behaviour for web sites without any P3P header. As described by Dean Hachamovitch (the author of the blog post):
By default, IE blocks third-party cookies unless the site presents a P3P Compact Policy Statement indicating how the site will use the cookie and that the sites use does not include tracking the user.
Fine. So your browser sees a Google P3P header without any valid policies. At this point, the clause "unless the site presents..." should kick in and cookies should be blocked. To me this looks like a bug in IE, as they failed to implement the default behavior in this case. It would be appropriate for Microsoft to fix this bug, send the fix as update on next patch day and otherwise be very humble about their error.
Instead, Dean Hachamovitch tries to paint this as conspiracy by Google to circumvent IE's security protection. FAIL.
This move, combined with mandating that applications can be installed only from the Windows store, may be a mistake by Microsoft. It means that from a user's POV, Windows on ARM is a lot like the iPad, with the same limitation to software the vendor allows you to install. So Microsoft has to compete against a similar system that has a significant head start on available software.
Personally, I dislike the exclusion of other OSes as well, and I hope that either
- the EU will nix the exclusion on anti-trust grounds
- or Windows on ARM bombs in the market, for the reason above.
BTW, what about Android as unifying factor in the ARM world? It seems to me that it could be the common platform that DOS was on the PC, even if that might not have been Google's goal in developing it.
I have recently worked on a project that was about developing a tablet version of existing software. Target system was a x86 tablet under Windows 7.
Lessons learned:
1) Using the standard Windows GUI elements with fingers on a touch screen is difficult, because the accuracy is much worse. A stylus is better, but still inferior to a mouse. We (that is, our GUI designer) had to duplicate most GUI elements in double or triple size. After that, our application was reasonably user friendly.
2) Even when the application is tablet-friendly, you still need to manage your Windows settings occasionally. Which brings you back to the above accuracy problem, and right-clicking is slow and awkward compared to the mouse. There goes much of the usefulness of the context menus in the Windows 7 GUI. In short, it sucks. "Throw-the-damn-thing-against-the-wall frustrating" describes it well.
So I think Microsoft needs to re-design both the OS and the applications before Windows and tablets will be an attractive combination. Windows re-design is under way with Windows 8, but I'm not aware of a similar project for Office.
For example how many times have you seen a horror movie and thought "don't go through that door" (cause it' perfect for an ambush)? In a lot of modern games that's the only way to complete the level.
Worse:
You do your best to prepare for surviving the ambush, but then a cutscene interrupts you and at the end of the cut scene you are dumped into a, lets say, less than optimal position. Those are the cut scenes I really hate.
If games developers really need some cut scenes to develop the story, they should use them in more quiet moments, when the player is exploring rather than fighting for his virtual life. This way, cut scenes can enhance the game rather than spoil it.
True enough, and not only in North America. At my current place of work (in Germany), there are still some XP SP2 machines around. This despite SP2 being out of support. That is trouble waiting to happen ;-)
And there is no way to avoid this, as the CS systems require the new contract agreement before the changes can be applied.
What about canceling altogether and signing up with a new carrier?
My current telephone/DSL provider (in Germany) has a similar clause in its terms and conditions. But I made sure to choose a plan without the two years minimum on the initial deal. So when the time comes to switch to a different plan, I might just boot them out and sign up elsewhere ;-)
Just don't crank up the system requirements too much. If a PC game runs well with a dual core CPU, mid range GPU and 2GByte of RAM, 90% of gamers will be on a level playing field.
For instance, Day Of Defeat: Source shows it is possible. With graphics that still look fine to me. The initial release even ran fine on a Pentium4/2.4 GHz with 1GByte RAM and a Radeon 9600Pro (my PC at the time) but subsequent patches have messed up the performance somewhat.