What's the point of setting a record if the program is not working correctly? This chess program does not implement full chess rules. For example, it does not understand castling, moves the king into check (illegal move), does not test to various draws (e.g. stalemate, 50 moves rule), does not understand en-passant, etc.

To be clear, I am not complaining that this is not a good chess program; what I say is that this is NOT a chess program!

Oh yeah? But compared to the US, you pay for it through you nose by high taxes! Thell me, what is the average tax rate in say Zurich? 8.5%?! oh wait...

Err, no! Clippy is included in all versions for free. You can pay $14.99 to get rid of it!

Yep, let's stop all these science bullshit!

... a guy whose job is dependent upon finding a need for "mathematics" finds that there is a need for a new "mathematics study". How shocking...
... a guy whose job is dependent upon finding a need for "astrophysics" finds that there is a need for a new "astrophysics study". How shocking...
... a guy whose job is dependent upon finding a need for "healthcare" finds that there is a need for a new "medical study". How shocking...

Imagine that! Oh, btw:

... a guy whose job is dependent upon finding a need for "software" finds that there is a need for "writing a new software". How shocking...

Pity that the article is behind a paywall. Anyone has a link to the full text (PDF)?

That's an interesting point. Well, let's see: at the time I paid $40 for that license, my wife used another promotion and got hers for $80, I got an OEM license for another machine for $140 and finally got another license for yet another machine for "free" through Dreamspark. So I have paid $260 for 4 Windows 7 license. Would I ever pay $1200 for 4 full retail license? Hell no.

At the time there was a promotion for people with .edu email accounts.

Tell me about it. The computer is nothing remarkable, though it was pretty good in 2010: Intel i7-950, 12 GB RAM, ATI 5870, 2x2.0 TB HDD, 128 GB SSD, Blue-ray, card-reader, nice case, etc. The price included the monitor (HP ZR24w) and few accessories (head-set, keyboard, mouse, etc.). The price was way more than what I initially hoped for but I had to practically by everything as I was moving from one country to anther and had nothing from the past. Recently, I added water-cooling but I didn't include that in the $3000 figure...

You are just making HUGE assumptions with no evidence to back them. "You're not going to convert those people to legitimate users", "why anyone would pay for a copy of Window", "people will always choose the hardware that provides tangible improvement".

Why do you think every single user out there is a pirate that would never convert? I for one used to pirate Windows, for my home machines. That included Win 3.1, 95, 98, NT 4.0, 2000 and XP. With Windows 7 I got myself a legitimate, but discounted, full version (I don't remember how much it was, $40 or something). If they offer Windows 8 for a low price, I'll buy it.

In 2010 I paid over $3000 to buy components to build my workstation/gaming machine. Paying an extra $40, i.e. round 1.3% more to get the right software added no significant burden to my budget. I have no problem to pay for a software that I use everyday single day for a couple of years as long as I don't feel it is a rip-off. Since this is ./, yes, I boot into Linux when I need to.

I don't agree. auto (or var) very rarely hide any information which is not immediately visible. For example there are trivial cases where auto (or var) just save extra typing:

var my_object = new my_class();
v.s.
my_class my_object = new my_class();

Here using var just saves a few key struck (or a lot, in case my_class happens to be a type with a particularly long name). In any case the type of my_object is perfectly known and quite visible so I think using auto is just fine.
There are however cases that a complex type is used while we actually DO NOT care for the type per se. For example in C++ consider the case for a lambda function:

auto my_fun = [](int i) { return i * i; };

Here I actually don't care about the exact type of my_fun. All I care is that it take an int and returns an int which I can see clearly. Finally, another case could be situations in template programming where insanely complex types are used/generated and we don't want to (or even cannot) type them again and again. Also I guess in Java or C# you might get away by cheating and using an object (I hate it when people do that!) but we don't have that luxury in C++.

Another vote for OneNote + Tablet PC.

Thanks for recommending these apps. I'll try them. I'm sure for most purposes there are apps to cover what I'm missing in Android. I didn't get your other point about WM being unusable on a capacitive touchscreen. My experience with HD2 and sense was quite positive. Older apps might be really hard to use without a stylus but I didn't have any significant problem with lots and lots of apps that I used on WM. Anyway, maybe I have just forgotten the bad parts and only remember the good parts :)

I suggest to try Android on HD2 to see how it works. You can do it even without removing WM6.5 (i.e you can run Android from the SD card). Contrary to what you said, Android has really poor support for media files: it cannot play most AVIs, does not support WMW and WMA, etc. On HD2 I could play almost anything I can play on my Desktop but with Android half of my library is unplayable. Currently I'm running Android from ROM on my HD2 but I'm seriously thinking of going back to WM6.5. I have been using Android on it for months but now that novelty has worn out, I miss the good media support, Office mobile, Remote Desktop, more complete Buletooth support (Bluetooth stack on Android sucks! Even on Nexus One it sucks big time!) and all the offline apps (dictionary, navigation, ...). I know that some of these do not work properly on WP7, but Android fail at many of them too.

What? Don't you think the obvious answer is that if you cannot stop short, you are driving too fast! If it rains, you have to slow down, doubly so if you don't have a good break.

WP7 and old iPhone did supported all of the scenarios you presented. The point is in none of your examples 2 programs need to run at the same time. The suspend/resume model used in WP7 and old iPhone is/was sufficient for all those cases. What is new is the possibility to bug the CPU in two user programs at the same time (both OS can/could run multiple system tasks at the same time). It is sometimes needed but circumstances are much more limited than initially appears.