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.

I was wondering the same thing.

"Do this impossible thing for us."

"I can't, it's impossible."

"Well, do it anyway."

"Okay, this is as close as we can get with the resources available."

"No good. You're fired."

Am I the only one that occasionally worries that we might stumble across some edge case that breaks whatever is simulating our "universe", and the whole thing has to be shut down and started over? Not that I'm convinced of it, mind you, but the possibility is a nagging one.