Now sharing ANY music is illegal?

If the copyright cartel had their way, any piece of technology which could possibly be used for things they don't approve of would be illegal.

They've been trying very hard to get that for years. If they keep bribing the right people, they might eventually get it.

Gordon Ramsey is not a culinary genius. I think you miss the whole point of the shows if you get that idea. He's a business chef and his goal is to make money, not to make food necessarily taste great.

Except, you don't get Michelin stars just for nothing. He trained under Michelin star chefs.

He's turned that into a lot of restaurants, a lot of money, and a lot of fame.

You may or may not like Ramsey (not everybody does, and that's fair), but if you think he's "just a business chef" out to make money, you're woefully unaware of the fact that he's a real chef, who worked in, and now owns, restaurants with Michelin stars. Which is about the snootiest rating for a restaurant you can get, given out by hard core foodies.

By the time you're there, you have some pretty mad skills, and a pretty refined palate. In fact, far better than most.

He probably knows more about food, and what it's supposed to taste like, than most professional chefs ever will.

Is he the greatest chef ever? Probably not. Is he one of the better chefs around today? He's certainly up in the lists.

based on previous rollouts, we are doomed. xp - good, vista - garbage

You know, vista wasn't terrible if you threw enough resources at it.

I've been running it on a quad-core machine with 8GB of RAM since 2009. It's my daily desktop.

And I can honestly say I've been quite happy with it. Which, I know isn't something you hear every day. :-P

Can we stop with the "Windows on less than X amount of RAM is unusable" rhetoric?

Rhetoric??? Really??

Sorry, but in my experience recent versions of Windows are using almost 2GB of RAM on system startup. My wife's work laptop had (until recently) 4GB of RAM ... and by the time it booted and had one program running on it, it was already thrashing. It was slow to the point of being painful.

My mother owns a laptop with Vista and 1GB of RAM on it .. and doing anything on it is pathetic.

It wasn't true then and with multicore processors and SSDs, it's even less true now.

The speed of your processor is completely irrelevant if all it's doing it paging to VM.

I've said for years, if you want to get the most longevity and usefulness out of a computer, don't worry about buying a faster CPU, buy a truck load more memory -- because over time everything wants more damned memory.

When my wife's work laptop got upgraded from 4GB to 12GB, the speed and the utility of the machine changed drastically ... as in, actual multi-tasking worked because the machine wasn't thrashing. It went from "it's still booting, I can't start task manager" to "it's still booting, but I can start task manager, launch Outlook, AND fire up a VM". Because it's no longer wasting all of it's time paging.

It has been true since Windows 3 that if you run Windows with the minimum Microsoft suggested, you'd have a useless machine which did everything slowly. And this was when computers came with more like 4MB of RAM.

When Vista came out, it was pretty much unusable with anything less than what seemed like a vast amount of memory at the time, certainly more than was in most systems at the time.

If you think saying Windows with not enough RAM is rhetoric, either you don't use computers much, or you're entirely too willing to put up with a machine which is too damned slow.

Put a full version of Windows onto a tablet with a small amount of RAM, and you most certainly will end up with a slow and useless device.

Rhetoric my ass. It was true then, and it's true now. Windows with insufficient RAM is a dog.

So, most people still prefer Windows 7, Windows 8/8.1 is only slowly getting market share and people apparently don't like it much, Windows 9 is supposed to come out this fall ... and somehow we're also expecting a Windows 10 next year?

Does Microsoft think people will pay them annually for an upgrade? Or that we'll buy new machines to run this new thing?? They might be sorely disappointed with that.

With the new version of the operating system, they'll be unifying the application platform for all devices: desktops, laptops, tablets, and phones

Hmmm ... so they're going to have one big enormous bloated build for all platforms? Is that what this means?

Right, because your phone should carry all of the bloat which goes along with a server.

And, once again, one wonders if Microsoft really has any understanding of the mobile market.

Unless your phone has the same specs as your desktop, this isn't really going to be workable, is it?

I commend them for finally adding virtual desktops ... a feature they've only occasionally realized people actually want, but the rest of this just makes me think they've lost the plot a little.

All are running Intel chips and full Windows

A full windows install with Intel chips isn't exactly tuned for mobile battery performance.

So will these things have an exceedingly short battery life?

And I'm betting they will have so little memory as to be unusable -- because Windows with anything less than 4G is a complete dog in my experience.

I predict a terrible product on this one.

Nobody did.

The new Stream laptops by default have no touchscreen, but can be configured with one.

There are Stream tablets, and Stream laptops. The GP even quotes the part which says laptops.

A tablet without a touch screen is basically an etch a sketch. :-P

Wow, did you think of that all by yourself?

Your mom must be really proud.

So, are they going to remove this once they've finalized the release?

Or is Microsoft more or less giving themselves the right to do real time monitoring of every Windows machine on the planet?

Because that would make them even bigger assholes than I've come to expect, and quite possibly would break the law in a bunch of places.

Sounds like a terrible idea to me, maybe if they focused on more QA before they released it, they wouldn't need to do this.

A real-time "call home to Microsoft" feature needs to be killed.

Maybe they find it horrible because the UI was designed by a two year old? Actually, that not fair, I haven't used it since 2006, but the horrible user experience was the driving force behind my disgust with it. In fact only early today I was using WireShark on OS X and remembering years of being annoyed by the terrible UI toolkit and total incompetence of the people who put the UI together. WireShark reminds me of the last time I used GIMP.

One of my accounts which I've had for years is definitely not my own name.

Because I use it for different things.

I've been studiously avoiding Google+ because of that stupid real-name policy, because the interweb isn't always a place you want to use your real name.

I understand Google have relaxed the real name requirement for Google+, but I honestly have no idea of what the net benefit of it would be to me.

I'm not interested in Google's vision of social networking everywhere. In fact, I'm actively disinterested in it.

They may feel they've created the greatest social networking system on the planet. But I don't give a shit about it or most other forms of social networking. And certainly not in having it integrated with every damned thing I do on the internet.

I think it's better for a phone to run the version of android that offers the best user experience.

And many device manufacturers prefer to enhance their revenue stream and monetize your experience.

The market should get to choose.

The market never gets to choose.

Because the market is always skewed in favor of the people who control the market.

And they don't want it to be free and open, they want your money and ad impressions.

The manufacturers don't give a damn what you or the market wants.

Annoyingly, some of them can't be directly disabled.

You need to uninstall updates to get it back to a lower version, and then disable it.

I've seen several of the core Google apps which can't simply be disabled.

It's kind of annoying.