Ask some vaguely technical questions. Yes, it's a bit of a trick question. If he starts coming up with elaborate and specific implementation details and other micromanagement, rather than a high-level understanding of the business constraints and risk assessment, who he would delegate to, and what requirements he would communicate, I'd be at least a little bit worried.

If I ask my manager what stance to take with sales data retention, he'll tell me the business policies and IT resource constraints that affect the decision. If I ask him how I should construct the database to keep the large historic data from impacting performance, he'll tell me that's what he hired me for.

Granted, they've only been able to create a Youtube commenter as of yet, but there's still a lot of untapped potential.

Yeah, any fresh platform starts out as a bit of a catch 22. Developers aren't going to target it if nobody is buying it, and nobody is going to buy it if there isn't any software for it. The other way to get people buying it is to have a compelling out-of-the-box experience that substantially differentiates it from the entrenched competition (in a good way), and MS has clearly missed the mark there, so the remaining option is to sink tons of money into it like they did with their XBox business. I don't know if it'll work, but I can tell you that Windows RT doesn't hold any significant appeal for me yet.

That's an outright safety concern, not just a mere perceived nuisance. Does the existence of manual transmission vehicles offend you?

"The Start menu layout is different" is in an entirely different class from "Muscle memory might cause me to stomp the wrong pedal and kill myself/somebody else." It's such a stupid comparison that I can only assume you're trolling.

Nowhere, unfortunately, but I do at least have some black hole zones configured on my home DNS server.

Ads will do that anyway, as they all have to compete with each other for your attention. By accelerating the process, we're just drawing attention to the awful tactics, rather than letting everybody slowly get accustomed to them over time.

Adblock already follows me from one device to the next.

Yup, I've found that, and while it doesn't have everything you could do from the old Start menu, it is pretty handy. It's definitely not very discoverable, though. I'm willing to bet it's a rogue feature, but it's a welcome one.

No, I'm not complaining about things being different from how they were before. I'm complaining about the capricious separation, hiding, elimination, and duplication of functionality. I think the whole finger-friendly Metro concept can work, and I actually like the new Start menu (it puts more in front of you, and can be customized more flexibly and spatially), but it all feels like it was designed by two completely separate teams and integrated at the last minute, with begrudging compromises and concessions to tie everything together. Honestly, knowing Microsoft's size and bureaucracy, that scenario wouldn't surprise me one bit. The combination turns it into an El Camino: it tries to be both a car and a truck, mixing the worst qualities of both, and not excelling at either.

Nice strawman, shill.

Nice try, I don't work for MS. Like I said, Windows 8 certainly isn't without perfectly valid problems, and if you choose to dislike it because of those, that's fine. For me, it's mostly working okay (though I just found out that there's no upgrade path for Virtual PC on 32-bit platforms, which sucks.) But if your argument is only "I don't want to learn different procedures," then I don't have a great deal of sympathy. Then again, I've always been somethng of an autodidact.

That being said, I do sympathize with IT departments, because there's still a very real cost involved - both time and money - with training even the users who aren't opposed to it.

It seems like the number one complaint so far is "It's different, and I don't like to think". That's just lazy, and I tend to discount it immediately.

There are two fairly valid criticisms, however. The first is that by moving functions into various gestures and hidden panels, the discoverability is quite poor. I'm constantly forgetting that the search feature is buried in that "charms" bar, and instinctively look for a search field on the screen somewhere. I'm sure the Microsoft knee-jerk approach to "fixing" this will be to print tips and reminders on the display bezel, which of course won't make any sense when the screen is rotated some other way. Going back to the drawing board and completely re-engineering a concept doesn't seem to be their thing.

Second, the weird desktop/tablet UI dichotomy is baffling. Functions that were previously confined to a small number of places - chiefly the Start menu and Control Panel - are now spread across two "control panels", a hidden "charms" bar, a "Settings" button in that charms bar, and many of these functions bounce back and forth between the tablet or desktop UI, or even duplicate features of one another. Key functionality has also been removed entirely. Where does one view, edit, and reorder the entire list of saved wireless connections? Nowhere, unless you want to use the netsh command!

So while I can appreciate making finger-friendly design considerations, the way they've done it is disjointed and nonsensical. If I had to fix it, I'd allow "Metro" apps to run windowed instead of only full-screen, make it easier to scale up UI elements of "desktop" apps for touch use, get the Control Panel consolidated into a single point of access, and put some of the most common features of the old Start menu directly on the new one, without hiding them off-screen or in menus (Control Panel, Devices and Printers, Run, Computer, Documents, etc). If you change the window manager to act more like the Metro mode when a window is maximized, then you've got a reasonably successful marrying of the two concepts.

For traditional desktop use, it's not at all horrible for an advanced user, and does have some nice performance and usability improvements here and there. For casual home users, it will probably be overly confusing, and leave them shopping for iPads even more than they are already.

If it's anything like traffic lights, there's probably an independent controller/program to watch for invalid states, and immediately disable the fancy logic and switch to a simple failsafe mode. Honestly, the demands are probably less than with traffic lights. (Bad green lights could kill people, but an indecisive elvator would probably be a nuisance at worst.)

Sounds to me like this Surface Pro is going to be the El Camino of tablets. An ugly car, and an under-equipped truck. Now you too can enjoy running Visual Studio with awkward hardware all day, as long as you don't stray too far from an outlet. And all the traditional tablet/mobile use cases get to suffer from the increased bulk and heat, and drastically reduced battery life.

Now, the convertibles like the Iconia W510 could be promising, but that's only if the Atom really can get the battery life competitive with an iPad, and not leave the device frustratingly slow/hot.

Guerillas in the Mist.

I've had a Leatherman Squirt E4 (discontinued, sadly) on my keychain for a few years now. It gets a surprising amount of use. Needle-nose pliers, wire cutters/strippers, knife, single- and double-cut file, flat and Philips screwdrivers, micro screwdriver, and tweezers. The flat screwdrivers make great pry bars in a pinch. And it's tiny: smaller than two AA batteries.