[GTALUG] great boxing week ultrabook deal

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Giles Orr <gilesorr at gmail.com>

| I've been looking at the Asus UX305 for the past couple months.  As
| it's been ~$850 the whole time, I was happy to get it for $650.
| Thanks for the information.

$850 for the FullHD version (1920x1080) (eg. NCIX right now)?  This is
$650 for the FullerThanFullHD version (3200x1800) -- 2.7777 times the pixels!

>From my experience with the Yoga 2 pro: XTerm with the default bitmap
fonts is REALLY hard to read on this screen but the pixels are all
there.  So I've switched to GNOME Terminal.

| Microsoft's site insists you use or create a Microsoft account to
| purchase from them: there's no guest option.  Presumably because you
| will of course want that acct when you go online with their fine
| operating system on your new laptop.

Yeah.  And for support etc.

You may well want to keep Windows in a corner just to do firmware updates.

| They don't accept the "+" symbol in email addresses.

Yeah.  There seem to be a lot of sites that do that (breaking the RFC
822 and successor requirements).  I wonder if some Microsoft framework
does that and hence causes the problem on other sites.

|  They don't
| accept spaces in their passphrases - so I guess they're only
| "passwords."  So I took the spaces out of the passphrase ... and it
| was rejected because they required special characters.  Unimpressive.

Yeah.  But I never talk about spaces in passwords because that would
tell people something about my passwords.

| The irony of buying a computer from the Microsoft Store so I can
| install Linux on it isn't lost on me.  I gave them money.  <sigh>  I
| hope it was below cost and they aren't actually profiting from this.

I've bought several computers from them.  At very good prices.  Not
all their prices are good but randomly they've had excellent ones.

| From: Tim Tisdall <tisdall at gmail.com>

| No, even better is that you now have a $50 gift card for the Microsoft
| store...  ^_^

The coupon is only good for credit in the Windows Store (I hope I got
the confusing name right).  Once you exercise the coupon you get
credit that only lives 90 days (if I remember correctly -- check the fine
print).  As far as I know, the credit can only be used for:

- Windows "apps"

- XBox games

- music

I've always chosen the latter because you can buy mp3s without DRM.
It's the only way of getting something OUT of the Microsoft
ecosystems.  But you've got to be using some Microsoft system to make
the purchases and downloads.

And you need a Microsoft account.

Their account identity system pervades all their services.  Kind of
like Google's and Apple's.  It could be worse: lots of unrelated sites
let you log in with your Facebook or Twitter identity (I don't have 
those).