>Surface pro has a BIOS interface, it's just stupidly inaccessible
I think you misunderstand. Surface Pro supports only UEFI, not legacy BIOS. What you are referring to as a "BIOS interface" is in fact the UEFI firmware settings. If you're having issues accessing the settings, this article may be helpful:
> They are very difficult to troubleshoot. How do you manually turn on AUX heat to test if it's even working at all? As far as I can tell, you can't! The only way we were able to test it is to take the thing off the wall and manually short the wires together (and, of course, it worked fine).
I don't own a Nest thermostat myself, but was browsing their blog out of curiosity after reading this story, and it sounds like the latest software update includes a System Test mode:
You've got this a little backwards. CD Baby, for example, charges per album (currently $49) to sell your music through a number of digital distributors (and they also provide distribution for physical CDs and vinyl records). It's just a one-time fee, but you have to pay it for each album you sell.
Distrokid, on the other hand, does charge an annual fee, but that's for an unlimited number of albums.
Bitcoins have value because they are useful and they are scarce. In order to keep them scarce, there must be some mechanism to keep supply and demand in balance.
If you can come up with a method for maintaining this balance which requires a lesser expenditure of energy, you could argue that a currency based on it would be more environmentally responsible. I suspect, however, that such a method does not exist. At least, I can't think of one. Can you?
I completely agree with this. I signed up for Google Apps for the sole purpose of having an email address at my own domain, and I always wished I could just have that email address supported by my existing Gmail account, rather than having to deal with the hassle of yet another account somewhere. I would gladly have paid for that.
Google's always been pretty good about making sure you aren't locked in to their services, likely due to the efforts of their Data Liberation Front[1], but it always seemed to me that being locked in to using an @gmail.com email address was a big exception to this.
"Existence of some viable open source models doesn’t change the reality for the vast majority of developers. We don’t have a rich daddy like Mozilla. We don’t have an operating system for which we can use a paid-support model. We just want to make apps, then sell enough copies of them so that we can make some more.
"The only principle that enters into it is that of survival: keeping food on the table, and making sure the lights stay on. Open doesn’t sit well with those goals."
They have an iOS app that configures your device to use their proxy servers. I haven't tried it myself since I'm a bit hesitant to route all my traffic through a third party, but it does sound promising.
Yes, it is possible to install Google Chrome without having local administrator rights. It installs itself into the user's "Application Data" folder. A user cannot set it as the default browser without having local admin, however.
If an administrator installs the "multiple user" version of Chrome on the computer (which is installed in the "Program Files" folder as per a normal app), the next time a user runs their "single user" version of Chrome it will display a message that the multiple user version has been installed and their single user application is uninstalled.
I think you misunderstand. Surface Pro supports only UEFI, not legacy BIOS. What you are referring to as a "BIOS interface" is in fact the UEFI firmware settings. If you're having issues accessing the settings, this article may be helpful:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-ca/help/4023531/surface-usi...
I'm not sure what you mean by "install your own copy of windows" but you can certainly boot from USB by following the instructions here:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-ca/help/4023511