Unlock it and we'll talk.

I wouldn't mind having one if I could load Android on it. As long as it's running Windows RT it's useless. Even the Microsoft faithful aren't buying this dud. Let's face it: Windows 8, in all of its incarnations, is an unmitigated failure. Let's hope that Microsoft keeps pushing and pushing this fail until it's too late for them to reverse course.

This is a ridiculously self-indulgent design

Seriously, now the designers are just asking themselves "how can we make our design as ridiculously self-indulgent as possible?" This design smacks of engineers trying to do "we're Apple and we're so cutting edge cool and over the top" but it's really obvious that it lacks the classy touch of Steve Jobs.

Bravo.

Hats off to you, sir. Your understanding of the meaning and purpose of the US Constitution is clearer than that of most people who actually live here.

Conspiracy theory

Kaspersky, a company whose sole source of revenue is band-aids for shoddy Microsoft products, has been paid by Microsoft to distribute fearmongering about a platform that is rapidly eating into Microsoft's market share.

They may have even been paid by Microsoft to develop and distribute the trojan itself.

If Apple wants to delight their users...

If Apple wants to delight their users ... they'll announce that they're switching back to Google Maps.

Windows will always be a Petri dish

Windows will always be a Petri dish. If they can't fix their swiss cheese security model in almost 30 years they're not going to do it now.

Thank goodness the world is finally starting to move on. Linux and Android for the win. Apple for the overpriced win, but still a win for ditching Microsoft. It's about time.

Still Metro, still unwanted.

This is what Microsoft *failing* to have a "New Coke Moment" looks like. They refuse to simply back off and admit that users DO NOT WANT a badly done tablet-like interface on a desktop computer.

Metro needs to go away completely, or at least be placed a couple of deliberate mouse clicks away.

Whiny teenage drama queens

No not the actual teenagers, we expect that; I'm talking about the adults. Every single one of them is a whiny teenage drama queen. There's something about Facebook that brings out the worst in people. Let's hope Facebook's decline into irrelevance happens quickly.

Where this needs to go next

The end game here is for a device like this to be built into every decent screen (both "televisions" and "computer monitors") as standard equipment.

It will be: "Here's your nice 24" LED-backlit monitor, and it's got a DVI input on the back so you can connect your PC to it ... or leave out the PC if you want to, it's got an Android chip so if you want, just plug your mouse and keyboard straight into it"

In a couple of years, there will be quite a few consumers who, faced with a $150 bill from the "we're the local computer shop and we can remove viruses for you" again, may simply say "forget it, I'll just use the Android built into the monitor, it never breaks"

And of course us geeks will simply have the one server in the garden shed running remote desktops and all of our other "computers" will be screens with Android chips or sticks in them. Network Computing is here! It just arrived 20 years after they wanted it to :)

Linux and ARM for the win

As desktop computers continue to disappear from the home in favor of wireless laptops and tablets, there is an increasing need for that one little machine sitting in the background as a file server, media server, etc.

Mine still sits in a rack, but that rack is a relic of a bygone era, when geeks like us had "one of everything" in the basement because there were a zillion different operating systems and no virtualization. In my next home I may just get one of these little servers and bolt it to the wall.

Windows is totally unnecessary for this (and every) task. Linux gets the job done, happily plodding along doing what it's asked, and then idling back down. That being the case, why bother with a "low and slow" Intel Atom when an equivalent ARM runs with lower power, faster speed, and runs the exact same Linux?

Beg to differ

The most reliable machine to run Windows on is a VM on a computer primarily used to run Linux.

binders full of women?

These people ought to be rounded up and shot. This is the most ridiculous thing I've read all week.

Where's the IT angle?

I suppose we all need to eat, but what's this doing in a tech rag?

CO2 is not a pollutant

AGW (man made global warming) has been proven to be a hoax, and it's time for the politicans-masquerading-as-scientists to step down.

That having been said, it's worth pursuing a goal of sustainability from an available-supply perspective. In that case the obvious course is nuclear, nuclear, nuclear. We should be aggressively building nuclear plants until there is so much supply that we have a glut of cheap energy.

Did anyone suspect otherwise?

Did anyone suspect otherwise? This is really not news.

The Linux Operating System

Happy to see the Linux operating system being referred to simply as Linux, and not with the childish "GNU" prefix that the freetards insist on adding. Linux is awesome and it should be everywhere.

price/value

Unless rack space is at a premium, customers would find more value in simply buying an ethernet switch and a fibre channel switch separately. And with fibre channel, switches are almost always deployed in pairs, so there is limited value to convergence.

This little switch might be just the thing for a remote node (say, a disaster recovery setup) in a distant colocation facility somewhere. One of these, a decent filer, and a box full of KVM or VMware blades, and you've got a data center in a can ready to handle your DR needs.

Still, with 10 Gbps Ethernet now affordable and NFS handily outperforming Fibre Channel (NetApp for the win!) I see little value in deploying dual media at this scale.

windows 8 fail

Just goes to show you once again, windows 8 fails at being a pc, fails at being a tablet, fails at being a phone, and makes all products using it fail to be usable.

Fail == Fail

They can call it whatever they want. It's still Windows, it's still Microsoft, and it's still poor quality crap.

Better idea

What they ought to do is just go back to using Google Maps. Seriously, Apple: you suck at this and Google is good at it.

Maritz fail

Before coming to VMware, Maritz worked for Microsoft. And it shows: after he took the reins at VMware they started implementing Microsoft-style suckage.

Nice to see that he's now going to implement that kind of suckage all over the company.

Fail == Fail

When the BOFH pushes "wipe device" he expects the mobe to self-destruct, anything less and the device will not be allowed on the network.

It seems that the true solution would be virtualization for Android (and perhaps some of the bit players such as Blackberry, iPhone and Windoze Phone). An entire virtual handset, with its own IMEI number, phone number, and operating system, running inside the "real" phone.

CO2 is not a pollutant

Man-made global warming is a hoax, has always been a hoax, and will always be a hoax. Anyone who claims to be a climate scientist is actually a politician. They're looking for an excuse to slap big taxes on energy.

End Microsoft

The proper course of action is to *always* side against Microsoft. They are pure evil.