I believe Skype has a plugin model for all those things - though granted, I have no idea how good the ecosystem around that actually is. The others are a good point, though I wonder what percentage of users of Messenger actually use those.

You realize that Skype has transitioned to using Messenger for the backend, right? Once you link the accounts Skype is also the client for your messenger account. The only thing they are killing off is the Messenger client, which makes complete sense - there is no reason to continue supporting both. The difference for China is organizational, and would require a restructuring, plus there are probably also various legal hurdles to cross.

This also has the advantage in ensuring that only people thinking they have a decent shot at making it run.

How did I Godwin the thread? Add a reparse point and stick the new volume into C:\TheSDCard or similar. Am I expecting grandma to do it? No. Am I the one who sets everything up for Grandma anyways, whether it is an iPad or a Windows box? Yes.

You are missing the point. If you have a harddrive sized 20Gb, make a folder A/ in it, make a folder B/ in it, and add a hard link inside B to A, then fill A up with 20GB, then look at the sized of both A and B, explorer will show they are each 20GB, for a "total" of 40GB on your 20GB disk. It is not preventing you from using anything because the disk is full warning comes from NTFS's block allocator, which works on a lower level than hark links.

So I have been trying to figure out what on earth is taking up the 13GB, and here is what I have so far:

Recovery and EFI partitions - 4.0 GB

There are two recovery and one system partitions. The system partition appears to be there for EFI.

Pagefile.sys and Swapfile.sys - 2.6 GB

Virtual Memory!

Program Files - 1.0 GB

This is mostly Office, with a few other things thrown in: IE, Windows Contacts, Photo Viewer, etc. Office occupies about 630MB

Windows/System32 - 1.75 GB

This is the core of the OS

Windows/Fonts - 400 MB

Some really large font-files here, but Windows does ship to a huge international audience with complex script support.

Windows/Speech - 400 MB

Speech Recognition and Text-to-Speech.

Windows/IME - 200 MB

This is the support for inputting complex scripts among other things. Dominated by Japanese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese.

Windows/Microsoft.NET - 200 MB

.NET framework

I also have about 800 MB in a SoftwareDistribution folder, but that may be tainted by Windows Update (there were patches available on the first day, literally, weighing in at 600+ MB - for the Office update to RTM among others). Another curiosity is that there is a 10 MB SysWOW64 folder for some reason. Aside, I have not checked how big the system registry hives are.

My user folder is about 2.0 GB, most of which is in Windows Store apps. Still trying to find a way to visualize how much each application takes.

So far that adds up to 10.55 GB (11.35 if including SoftwareDistribution). I have purposely left out the WinSxS folder, because I have no way to telling what its real on-disk footprint is until I figure out how to scan a folder for hard links, which may not be possible on WindowsRT.

That particular myth has been debunked a bunch of times, but here goes again.

WinSxS is the least understood component in Windows. For the most part it contains hard links (not symbolic links, which Windows Explorer understands do not occupy space) to other places on the system. See here (http://www.davidlenihan.com/2008/11/winsxs_disk_space_usage_its_no.html)

Luckily Grandma has grandson who gets the nasty little card, puts it into the surface, mounts it into C: and sets up Grandma's surface so that she does not need to worry about it and has 32 GB or 64 GB for her documents, music, pictures and videos. - using the Libraries functionality. And the best part is, when she upgrades to a new surface or other Windows tablet, just move the card over, remount and update the Libraries location and like magic all her content is already there. Grandma never need worry about removing it.

Obviously will not work for applications, but with most data being stored on a different volume, this setup should work out fairly well. Actually, what I would like to see is a wizard for doing this. Obviously the idea here is to avoid having to remove the card.

With all that said, I am fairly curious what takes up 13GB in the RT install, that seems excessive.

Given the chipsets announced RT devices run on, I would guess that all of the textures *are* going to be downsampled, especially compared to the x86/x64 versions. Same as for console ports.

I am curious, why not use XPMode for your 12-year-old LOB application?

Nobody could possibly want one of these. Especially not a college student...

The company would have to take a fairly substantial risk in not releasing it on Windows, though, for that to happen. Otherwise people will just get the game on Windows. To bootstrap a platform in the face of entrenched competition, quality exclusives are necessary.

2TB NAS? Preferably one that is cloud-storage aware (or has its own clients for tablets/phones) to be broadly accessible even when not on LAN? (I guess I could settle for SkyDrive's Fetch feature, but would rather not have to go through that route).

Even a general-purpose computing device can be sold in a configuration that by default "just plugs in and works."

We (the techies) are not incompetent to be unable to switch to a more productive environment - just that environment does not need to be in everyone's face all the time. Rather than think of this as the PC being "dumbed down," think of it as a call to action to make all the other "appliance" computers be more full-features, but without the historical complexity of PCs, before we knew how to make them easy to use.

Er... not quite. Yes, clustered distributed systems exist, and are growing much faster than mainframes, but there is still a lot of stuff that is done on mainframes, if only because it is a lot more convenient to have a really beefy box for that large, mission-critical multi-user database/application, without having to figure out how to partition it and without being subject to CAP.

Distributed clusters are generally better for non-real-time processing. Real-time HPC stuff is still the realm of supercomputers (not to be confused with clusters, even though both generally tend to run Linux or some other embedded POSIX OS)