It's a data-centric UI v. a function-centric UI. The premise is to put what the user needs most right in front of him quickly. Mail, meetings, weather, contacts, etc. can be readily accessible with minimal effort.

The idea is that most people might not even end up needing to use the desktop.

It's not about the growth, it's about establishing itself as a leader of datamining and analytics. That's basically all Facebook really is.

and from what I heard, FiOS all over the place worked without a hitch. It might have to do with the fact that Verizon's infrastructure was built inside the last decade.

Rafael Rivera generally tends to hold a good deal of trust and clout amongst Windows enthusiasts (shock and awe that there's such a crowd, I know) in that he's known specifically for thoroughly investigating a product. He always produces a high quality service, product, workaround, etc. for whatever his project happens to be, and has provided many of the safe patches that unlock hidden functionality during previous Windows alpha and beta releases.

His involvement in this project and in other general Windows reverse-engineering gigs in the past leads me to believe that ChevronWP7 is a solid and safe release. The fact that Microsoft endorsed this is not at all a surprise.

It's one of the few companies producing scientific research for the sake of research these days. This is a function which used to be governed best by Bell Labs, but now it's MSR that seems to put out the most content out of all research institutions which happen to be wholly-owned subsidiaries of for-profit corporations.

Thank goodness someone gets it. This is precisely how the subprime lending crisis started.

Whoops, I jumped the gun a bit. I read this headline by ABC and assumed it was a done deal:

Bernie Madoff Victims Get Their Money Back

Turns out the payments only just started. Apologies on my part.

Giving a 600,000 dollar loan to someone making 40,000 dollars to sustain a family of four is unconscionable. The fact of the matter is that the crisis started as a result of shrewd underwriters writing bad mortgages while having them sold off in debt vehicles as AAA-risk debt.

Yes, these guys do indeed deserve to be put down for violating both the trust of the people who got the loans and the trust of the financial industry. The problem is that there's just too many of them.

Funny as it sounds: Bernie Madoff is sitting in jail right now for ripping off the rich, and they all got their money back. None of the people who wrote loans to everyday people knowing these people would default ended up going to jail. None of the people who inflated credit ratings on subprime financial vehicles are getting punished. This is where the protests should focus on, not just "greed," whatever that is.

They're too focused on the "greed of wall street," which makes the protesters seem like they're after handouts.

They need to instead focus on financial crimes, the fact that many of the people in the so-called 1% who are responsible for the subprime lending crisis, etc. aren't sitting in jail despite the fact that it's these white-collar crimes which bankrupted many innocent people. If they focus on the tax evasion, insider trading, blatant abuse of trust, and so forth, then they would have a more convincing case.

The data received trough the CEIP is astounding, but what's even cooler about it is the fact that all of it is clean. None of it contains personally identifiable information unless there's an application crash where the user volunteered to send more than the usual set of data.

The CEIP was used in the development of the Windows 7 taskbar as well as the Ribbon UI in Office 2007+. In all cases, the goal was to improve usability, and Microsoft's own statistics (empirical and otherwise) show internally that they succeeded. I'm willing to say that Microsoft has recently become a very powerful player in creating engaging and highly usable systems, and that's based on empirical evidence rather than pure opinion. The sheer amount of research done by Microsoft's labs to ensure that a particular UI is easier to use and more productive than the previous version is mindblowing.

it will be checked against a database from Websense database to in an attempt to [emphasis added]

Guys, come on!

In all seriousness, this'll be helpful for home users much more than it will in the office. I'm just surprised they've taken this long to do it; they've MITM'd every link for at least a year and a half.

I'll be honest, I totally did not expect this answer.

What would be nice would be if we (the developers) could develop WP7 applications which also have the capability to run on ARM-built Windows 8. That said, from my knowledge of the means by which Metro development is being guided, I don't see this as a possibility.

I just feel that it would open Windows 8 on ARM to many established Windows Phone 7 applications (giving it a base to tap into, much like what the iPad had going for it), but given the differences between WP7 and Windows 8, this is just a pipe dream for me. Oh well.

Successful software created entirely inside universities' labs... I wouldn't know about that, but Facebook and Google are products of students at universities at the time said applications came into existence. Both addressed specific problems (Google -> search, Facebook -> social contact/updates/etc.).