Since its introduction at Microsoft's BUILD conference last September, Windows 8 has garnered a large measure of attention, especially with regards to the new Metro interface. The feature that intrigued me the most, however, was the inclusion of Hyper-V.

"Buried somewhat quietly in the noise of Google's spate of announcements today was an interesting fact: the Nexus Q, Google's new media streamer and first self-built consumer hardware, is being manufactured in the United States." Just getting their toes wet, for sure, but it's interesting it's Google making the first attempt to bring back production to the west. I won't comment on whether or not production should move back in the first place, but in all honesty, I expected Apple to be the one to make the first move here.

So yeah, Google totally just won the conference showdown by easily beating both Apple and Microsoft. Not only did Google announce Android 4.1 with some really cool new features, a cheap but non-crippled tablet, and a new Android device called the Nexus Q, but they also opened up pre-orders for Google Glass. So yeah.

Only a few more hours until the last of the big three has its big event (Google i/o, after WWDC and Microsoft's Surface and WP8 events). They will most likely announce a Nexus tablet, as well as Android 4.1, Jelly Bean. While many of you are still on Gingerbread with your top-of-the-line phones - let me poke a few eyes out with mikegapinski's Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich port... To the Samsung Wave. Dual-booting Bada 2 and ICS, right here.

Benedict Evans: "How do you segment without fragmenting? Apple achieved this pretty easily with the iPod by varying the storage, but that wouldn't be meaningful for the iPhone. The cheap one has to run the apps, but people still have to have a reason to buy the expensive one. What you can do is vary the Apple supplied features, without varying the hardware and API platform that your third-party developers are targeting." Like I said: iOS 6 Starter, iOS6 Home, iOS 6 Professional, and iOS 6 Ultimate. Microsoft got blasted for confusing and arbitrary segmentation - rightfully so - but as usual, Apple gets a free pass when it does the exact same thing. At least Microsoft uses different names and forces OEMs to be clear about what they're shipping. I've said it before: I find calling all these different versions "iOS 6" without modifiers pretty scummy and misleading.

According to N4BB.com, internal documents from RIM have been leaked, revealing the screen sizes and form factors of two phones planned for commercial release.

"If you are on Facebook but have never taken a particular shine to Facebook's e-mail capability, Facebook is intent on changing your mind. As of Friday, the company seems to have quietly given or replaced the display e-mail addresses of all of its users with an @facebook.com address, routing any e-mail communiques you would have received back to its own Messages inboxes." Scummy doesn't even begin to describe this.

Gizmodo Australia claims to have a training document which details the rumoured Google Nexus tablet. It's built by Asus, 7", 1280x800, 1.3Ghz Tegra 3 processor, 1GB of RAM, GeForce '12-core' GPU (whatever the heck that means). The 8GB variant will be $199, the 16GB one $299. It looks quite decent, and will run Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. Interestingly, the document also states that going forward, Google will take care of Android updates directly - however, it's not made clear if that's for this device only, or for all Android devices. The "going forward" bit would suggest all devices, but as much as I hope so, it seems unlikely.

The BBC reports on a Turing scholar's recent claims that by today's standard of evidence, there's reason to doubt the commonly-held belief that the famed computing pioneer committed suicide in response to government persecution over his homosexuality. To be clear, he does not claim to have disproved the suicide theory -- only that the cyanide poisoning that killed Turing could well have been an accident caused by his careless at-home experimentation with dangerous chemicals.

From the car to the living room, technologies and markets are fast evolving to offer possibilities for programming pioneers. "The smartphone has proven that a marketplace for delivering code can appear seemingly out of nowhere, and developers would have another choice for showcasing their wares. To help you get a jump on these promising platforms, we did a little digging in what might seem to be unlikely places. In many cases, raw APIs are already well-established, ready for apps to exploit them. Scratch the surface, and you'll get an idea of the potential of porting your wares beyond the smartphone/PC paradigm. You can bet the manufacturers of these products are interested in establishing their own app ecology."

The New York Times further fans the flames of the emerging uneasiness between Microsoft and its hardware partners. As the paper reports, Microsoft decided it needed to get into the hardware game (with Surface) after the utter failure of HP's Slate 500 Windows 7 tablet. "Microsoft worked with other hardware partners to devise products that would be competitive with the iPad, but it ran into disagreements over designs and prices. 'Faith had been lost' at Microsoft in its hardware partners, including by Steven Sinofsky, the powerful president of Microsoft's Windows division, according to former Microsoft executive." The biggest news is not Surface itself. It's the changing industry it represents. Microsoft failed to deliver capable smartphone/tablet software, which pissed off OEMs, who, in turn, turned to Android (and webOS for HP) - which in turn pissed off Microsoft, leading to Surface. Had Microsoft gotten its act together sooner, we'd have had far better OEM products.

Artificial intelligence is still a long way from delivering the human intelligence in robot form that has long been common in science fiction.

The only review that matters - as detailed and in-depth as ever. "I'm giving the MacBook Pro with Retina Display our bronze Editor's Choice award. Making it the first Mac to ever receive one. It would have been a silver had the software story been even stronger (iWork, Mountain Lion, Office and Photoshop being ready at launch would have been a feat worth rewarding). And it would have been a gold had Apple been able to deliver all of that but without sacrificing end-user upgradability." The device has performance issues which Mountain Lion will address (to a degree), but for the rest, AnandTech's review details - without being pro or anti-anything - just how good this new MBP really is. As a sidenote, Windows 8 on the retina display further confirms the classic desktop is dead to Microsoft: it still can't handle high-DPI displays properly. With the desktop going the way of the dodo, why would the company make it so?

After Fedora, Ubuntu has now also announced how it's going to handle the nonsense called "Secure" Boot. The gist: they'll use the same key as Fedora, but they claim they can't use GRUB2. "In the event that a manufacturer makes a mistake and delivers a locked-down system with a GRUB 2 image signed by the Ubuntu key, we have not been able to find legal guidance that we wouldn't then be required by the terms of the GPLv3 to disclose our private key in order that users can install a modified boot loader. At that point our certificates would of course be revoked and everyone would end up worse off." So, they're going to use the more liberally licensed efilinux loader from Intel. Only the bootloader will be signed; the kernel will not.