"Windows 8 bit"

:P :P :P

It's suboptimal, but is it barely usable? If so, then people will use it because it's there.

Sun Tzu said the greatest victory is one which doesn't require a shot. One won by subverting the enemy from within.

What greater subversion can there be than to convince the enemy to hire you to build their weapon's systems components?

Apparently the American Military (and probably that of the rest of the world) hasn't bothered reading any "classic" literature on warfare before signing on the dotted line...

It must be so embarrassing for the Iranian government to be in a dick-waving contest with the US and the world when the best they can show is a tiny example of 50 year old technology. The fact that they'd even think to brag about it shows how much their internal media must be censored, or how stupid they think their people are for them to be impressed by this "accomplishment."

What happened to their threats to reverse engineer the drone that crashed^H^H^H^H^H^H^H they captured. Can we expect to see that in 2061?

I do own a thumb drive. But it's not for "storage". It's for "sneaker net" between offices.

Rumour has it that the inimitable Richard M. Stallman might have some experience with "office living"... :P

I don't find it strange at all. Metro locks users in to Windows 8. None of the compatability systems like Wine are ready to support Metro, and are unlikely to do so in the near future.

If you can get even a fraction of open source and "learning" systems built using Metro, that's some segment of the user base that now has to use Windows 8, or forego the application in question.

More importantly, it seeds the developer community with people that only know Metro for Windows 8, and have no experience in using the "traditional" APIs and toolkits.

What? You thought Microsoft would stop trying to lock people in just because of those pesky "abusive monopoly" charges and oversight committees?

How seriously you underestimate the lure and power of the almighty profit.

BTW, I always thought the Microsoft image on Slashdot should have been of the Grand Nagus rather than a borgified Bill. :)

It was the rant on his site against Wikipedia as a Web 2.0 startup (rather than, e.g., an educational charity) that really nailed his cogent and sound arguments for me.

I don't see why an employee would need a service like Dropbox while working for a large corporation like IBM.

They already have all kinds of subversion, document, and content servers in-house, readily available by logging in to the VPN (securely!)

External services like Dropbox are fine for consumers whose employers don't already provide intranet "cloud" storage for data, but employees of large companies? What kind of employee shoot-myself-in-the-foot insanity would place cricital corporate information on a public cloud service instead of securely within the intranet cloud?

I tend to think we need to split out "Artificial Sentience" from "Artificial Intelligence." Technologies used for expert systems are clearly a form of subject-matter artificial intelligence, but they are not creative nor are they designed to learn about and explore new subject materials.

Artificial Sentience, on the other hand, would necessarily incorporate learning, postulation, and exploration of entirely new ideas or "insights." I firmly believe that in order to hold a believable conversation, a machine needs sentience, not just intelligence. Being able to come to a logical conclusion or to analyze sentence structures and verbiage into models of "thought" are only a first step -- the intelligence part.

Only when a machine can come up with and hold a conversation on new topics, while being able to tie the discussion history back to earlier statements so that the whole conversation "holds together" will be able to "fool" people. Because at that point, it won't be "fooling" anyone -- it will actually be thinking.