[Prestidigitweeze]

It's amazing how worked up people get over these two massive and glacial edifices. We use the objects they sell and so associate the companies' names with daily intimacy, but that's rather like pretending you're the lover of a movie star who in real life wouldn't sanctify you with their spittle. The same is true of Microsoft. Even if W8M doesn't become a threat to Android, what it ought to be able to do in a year should be enough for anyone who wants that functionality.

It annoys me that W8 feels a bit like Lion on the surface -- not because it imitates Lion (it doesn't at all) but because it seems to hide options from you. Of course, you can make tiles do anything if you bother to look beyond the prescribed user muzak.

There should be an internet-based medium that allows for programmers to create objects floating through the equivalent of space. A medium tailored to a metaphor that isn't flat -- that isn't like an endless scroll of pages but more like an horizon. A medium that incorporates metaphors of distance, proximity and depth, so that people on this site could go home and devise objects that would float toward us, and we could talk about them instead of Apple, Google and Microsoft.

Of course, that illusory medium would still be language-based and in that sense be reducible to text, so perhaps purists wouldn't like it because it might seem an overlay on the same expanse of flatness.