Microsoft announced Windows Phone 8 today, with multi-core support, a new Start screen, native code sharing with its forthcoming Windows 8, a new Wallet feature for mobile payments, SD card support, more screen resolution support, and IE 10. Phew.

Oh yeah, and existing users won't be able to upgrade to Windows Phone 8, just version 7.8 which basically is a stop-gap. Sorry! Microsoft really appreciates your business and loyalty, but it's time for you to smile and bend over.

The new consumer-facing features are largely UI enhancements. The new Start screen gives more real estate to apps, ditching the right-side trough. All the tiles will be customizable, in small, medium, and large sizes. The SD card slot support will let people store media, or even sideload apps. The new screen resolution support will enable more devices, with support for WVGA, WXVGA and true 720p screens. Under the hood, Windows Phone 8 will support dual- and quad- core processors and is designed to be able to support up to 64-core processors. That's not a typo; Microsoft is trying hard to future-proof this OS from the inside-out.

The new Wallet will have support for both NFC payment systems, and store cards and coupons. It's basically a combination of what Google and Apple are doing, taking on both ends. And finally, if you have a ton of great Windows Phone 7 apps (I mean, someone must, right?) you'll be able to run those on the new phone.

For developers, today's news is all about how the new Windows Phone OS will share its core with Windows 8, Microsoft's forthcoming future-of-Windows operating system that's in Release Preview right now. Developers will be able to share native code between the two systems, and although it won't be write-once-run-anywhere, Microsoft claims that it will take a minimal amount of reconfiguration to get code that runs on one to run on the other, thanks to a shared set of native APIs that will allow for quite a bit of re-use. Microsoft was also touting a new ability for developers to create in-app purchases as a new revenue stream. Microsoft expects to have a software developer kit out later this summer.

There's welcome news for enterprise environments as well. Microsoft is promoting Windows Phone 8 as a complete security platform with secure boot and a vague promise of bitlocker-like encryption. Companies and other large organizations that want to manage which apps their users can have on their phones will get their own app distribution environments.

All in all, it's a substantive upgrade that's going to ultimately please lots of developers and corporate IT departments. But existing users are getting boned. If you've got a Lumia running Mango today, you won't be able to upgrade to Windows Phone 8. Microsoft is upgrading those users to Windows Phone 7.8, which includes the new Start screen. But once native Windows Phone 8 apps start coming out, 7.8 users will be out of luck. Sure, it had to do this to swap over its codebase, but that doesn't make it suck any less for the existing userbase who, you'd think, it would want out there talking about how much they love their Windows Phones.

The killer (or be killed) feature of that new Microsoft Surface for Windows RT is its keyboard. The tablet itself is a wonderful device. It's got a great body and a (seemingly) fast processor. But input is everything.

At the Surface launch yesterday, the auditorium was packed with the tech press, and lots of MacBook Airs, but there was nary an iPad to be seen. And that's because you can't really type on an iPad. If Microsoft has made something truly type-able, that's something we're going to see at events like this in the future.

Here is the state of the tablet computer market: There is no reason to buy anything other than an iPad. Okay, if you're slicing very thinly, you can make a case for the Kindle Fire as a cheap-ish media consumption device. But... that's about it. The iPad on the other hand is clearly a creative device. But when it comes to inputting text, it's just not very much use. In retrospect all that consumption-only bullshit that was being bandied about when the iPad launched was kind of right, in its own wrong way.

Do you remember when people used to complain about software keyboards, like the ones on the iPhone and iPad? The prevailing wisdom, when the iPhone launched, maintained that physical keyboards were so much better than softkeys that the mere presence of physical keys offered a compelling reason to not buy an iPhone. That was stupid. Everyone who bought into that logic lost sight of one very important thing: even the very best mobile keyboards were awful.

The iPad and iPhone turned out to be good enough at input, and the operating system and phenominal app ecosystem made up for the rest. That's still true. The iPad, even the newest one, is far from perfect but better than every other tablet on the market. Yet what was true then is also true now, you just can't type as quickly on it as you can a real, physical keyboard. My brand new third generation iPad doesn't do text input any better than my first generation one does. And when it comes to Android, the situation is even worse.

What the Blackberry dimwits argued years ago turned out to be kind of true: Softkeys aren't very good for typing. But the thing is, when it comes to the iPad, physical keyboards aren't much better. I know, because like a child that just can't learn, I keep buying them, too.

I've bought three, and tested several others. The reason you do not see normal people using iPad-accessory keyboards is because they are all completely horrible. Standalone keyboards are too much of a device disconnect, while combination case/keyboards are ugly and bulky and awful and often don't work very well. This is an entry point for Microsoft.

There was a security guard at the Microsoft event who pointed at my Macbook Air and asked me "is is true that once you go Mac you never go back?" Like most every other journalist at the Surface launch, I was on a Macbook Air. It's not a conspiracy, there's a simple explanation: Journalists have to type lots of words in places that aren't our office, and the Macbook Air is best for that because it's incredibly small and portable, but still powerful and (maybe most importantly) easy to type on. I do go back, but for me Windows has become a desktop OS, because the Macbook Air so completely owns portable computing.

But you know what? I'd love to start to thinking of it as cumbersome and clunky. I'd love to be able to slim down even further. There's an outside shot that a Surface for Windows RT could do that, but it all depends on how well the keyboard works, which is still a big unkown.

Microsoft made a big deal about the TouchCover with its built in keyboard, and the Surface's kickstand that collapses flush away. And it's easy to see why. The TouchCover is so thin, and flips back and forth so easily that you won't really think of it as a keyboard. It's a fold-over sleeve. But it's a sleeve you can touch type on, with a self-contained stand, too. It's something you can put in your lap, and get things done.

Maybe. If it works.

Microsoft wouldn't really let us put it to the test.

At the Surface release, I saw an impressive demo, but didn't get a good hands-on. My guess is that my total in-my-mitts time with the various tablets was somewhere between one-to-two minutes (which, in fairness to Microsoft was more than I got with the first iPhone or iPad when announced) and got no time at all using the keyboard—its killer feature.

The Surfaces that we got to examine that were turned on didn't have SmartCovers attached, and the Surfaces with SmartCovers weren't booted up. Microsoft was covering something, alright.

I hope that it works as well as promised, even though I'm skeptical that it will, simply because I wasn't given the opportunity to see it for myself when there was clearly room for that. Because if Microsoft can solve input with its super slim touch typing keyboard and case, then it will have pushed the tablet market forward again, and that's always a good thing.

Microsoft's event today was long on promise and short on specs. RAM? We dunno. Processor speed? We dunno. Price? We dunno. Release date? We dunno. But even a very brief hands-on made something abundantly clear: It's a super solid device and if Microsoft can deliver what it demoed, the iPad finally has a real competitor and Android has a big goddamn problem.

Microsoft kept touting build quality, and for good reason: the Windows RT Surface tablet is solid and stunning. Attention to detail is positively amazing, and it's so well designed from every angle that it's just a joy to look at. The keyboard is so thin it seems made from fabric. The lines are gorgeous, and it's a well-balanced device that you'll be able to hold for extended sessions. It is, certainly, easier to hang on to than any of the three generations of iPads to date. The screen is bright and vivid, and the viewing angle is as wide as you could reasonably expect to hold it. Even the kickstand that lets it sit upright, which seemed kind of, well, dumb onstage was a fantastic touch once we saw it in person and attached to the keyboard.

It's also fast and responsive. When we flipped through an app, going from snap state to full screen, it blazed faster than your average reggae band in Humboldt County. Touching led to instant firing. We don't know what kind of processor or RAM is in there (mysterious!) but it's ground-up quick.

And then there's typing on it. We couldn't do that! Notably, every single Surface tablet Microsoft let us put our hands on either was turned off, or didn't have a keyboard connected. I kept hearing how quickly you could type on it—"I did 63 word per minute the first time I used it," one Microsoft employee told me—but there was no way to try this out for ourselves.

So. Yes. It's awesome. It's going to be fantastic. Google had better step things up at IO, because this Windows RT tablet is far more impressive than any shipping Android tablet I've ever seen. It's a clear rival to the iPad. Or at least, so it seems. We'll see. Can't wait for Fall.

We're at Microsoft's mystery "event" in Los Angeles today, where if the rumors are true it will announce its own tablet in short order. But will it be the next Xbox, or the next Zune? We'll soon see. Stay tuned.

So far, it's still a lot of tech press milling around and looking for seats. There's no signage that would give up information about what Microsoft's about to announce; the company's kept this whole thing under pretty serious wraps. Ballmer's merry crew is clearly ripping a page directly out of Apple's playbook, which is fine as long as they produce something impressive enough to justify the hype.

Although in fairness, a great way not to get a ton of media coverage is to hold your event exactly when everyone on the East Coast is commuting home.

Let's assume that it is a tablet for a second, and not Steve Ballmer soliciting wardrobe advice for two hours. Several folks have been pointing to the Zune as an example of Microsoft's hardware ineptitude, but that's not entirely fair. The Zune was trying to enter a PMP market that had already started crashing to the ground. A much more apt comparison might be the Xbox, where Microsoft took losses for years to get a foothold in the highly competitive console market. Which they won!

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(For those wondering, yes the event was supposed to start 10 minutes ago, but Microsoft is running behind. Like they are with tablets in general, right?!)

The tech journos have entered the arena; now it's just a matter of time until the event starts. For those curious, the music selection is some sort of trance shit.

In case you were wondering if there were fancy pants alcoholic drinks at the door, the answer is yes, and they are Basil Cucumber Lemonade Belvederes. So is Microsoft trying to get the press drunk before showing its wares? I guess so!

And now the music has swapped to Fun's We Are Young. Which I recognized from shopping at Safeway.

So we're already at a little after 4 PM Pacific time, and given that Microsoft has scheduled press followups just after 5, we're looking at no more than an hour for the entire event.

And Steve Ballmer just walked onstage. He's saying how much Microsoft and the industry have changed over the past still years, but "Windows is the heart and soul of Microsoft." Windows powers over 1 billion PCs, from home desktops to NASA.

"With Windows 8 we have reimagined the product." That's for sure!

Microsoft designed Windows 8 for a world where most PCs are mobile, says Ballmer. (That sounds like a hint.)

Today, we want to add another piece," says Ballmer, "to that Windows 8 story." Yep, it's a hardware announcement.

And we're watching a video about the history of Microsoft's hardware.

"We believe that any intersection between human and machine can be made better when all aspects of the experience, hardware and software, are considered and working together." He's noting how the combination of Xbox and Kinect came together to really work together.

And now Ballmer is saying that Microsoft's OEMS will ship 375 million Windows PC next year. Making it the largest non-phone platform.

"We wanted to give Windows 8 its own companion hardware innovation" he says. Something new, different, and a whole new family of computing devices from Microsoft. Here we go.

It's the new Microsoft Surface, and it's a tablet that looks to be about 10 inches. Ballmer is holding the tablet in his massive hands, and he's brought out Steven Sinofsky to tell us all about it.

It's a tablet that's a great PC, and a PC that's a great tablet, says Sifosky. It's 9.3 mm, with a USB 2 port, 22 degree beveled edges, and has a full magnesium case. It weighs less than 1.5 pounds. PVD finish case. 10.6 -inch display. Dual 2x2 antennas that Sinofsky claims give the best WiFi reception of any tablet today, and it has a stand built into the device.

Oh... and we had out first demo bug, just as Sinofsky was telling us how movies and entertainment do so well on the Surface, it crapped out. Bue hey, now he's showing off a Windows 8 version of Netflix.

It also has a cover, that clicks into place. Sinofsky is very impressed with this. The cover is less than 3 mm. And it folds out to reveal a full multitouch keyboard that features a trackpad and Metro keys. It has a built in camera, that aims up at 22 degrees when the stand is down to get "everyone" in the frame, says Sinofsky. It also has dual array mics and speakers.

And now Michael Angiulo is onstage to show us Surface for Windows 8 Pro. (Wait, a second product? Yes.)

It's less than 2 pounds and 14 mm. It also has a ClearType display with full HD (Sinofsky's was ClearType HD). It also has the 2x2 antennas for the best wifi performance "no matter how you hold it." Powered by IvyBridge processor, and uses less power than today's Core i5, says Angiulo. It has Perimeter venting, a groove that goes all the way around the case, so you can never block the vent with your hands.

Now Angiulo is showing off writing on the tablet, it looks great, he says it's at 600dpi. It also has something called "palmblock" so that when you use digital ink, and move a pen close to the screen, it ignores touch input so you don't mess up what you're doing with your hands. It also has a Displayport, which is great news if you want to use it for heavy duty image processing.

And now Angiulo is showing off something called TypeCover, which is a full keypad, and it completes the Surface line. So that's Surface for Windows RT, Surface for Windows 8 Pro, and two covers (which will come in multiple colors).

(People are going wild cheering. Man, I hope that's not the press.)

And now it's a video on the history of Surface...

Microsoft is noting that the Surface is "perfect" evidence of this is that it sits in your hand comfortably all day. It's meant to make the hardware fade away to the background. The lines are also part of that. The lines are "seamless." But its vision of the product was also to bring creativity and productivity to transition it to the state of "getting things done." The kickstand was a huge challenge for this, especially getting it completely flush when closed. Microsoft really hammered on sound, getting the opening and closing sound of the kickstand perfect. The VaporMg case (pronounced "vapor mag") is molded to .65mm to make it so flush that even a piece of tape would make it bulge, says Microsoft.

And now we're talking about TouchCover. Panos Panay notes that the Surface knows what's connected to it. TouchCover is 3mm thin, which he says is usually at odds with a great typing experience. Panay says they wanted it to feel just like a book, you can't close it wrong. "This spine feels like a book," he says "when you carry it with your other books you'll think it's a book." He also says TouchCover is number two after his wife. (Er. Okay!) TouchCover has an accelerometer and is aware of when its folded back.

Now Panay is demonstrating typing with the TouchCover. It can tell the grams of force you are pressing down with, so that it does not inadvertently fire when you put your fingers down. Pretty slick! The keyboard measures 10x faster than any keyboard in use today, he says.

And here comes pricing!

Surface for Windows RT will have "comparable" pricing to other 32 and 64 GB ARM tablets. Windows 8 Pro will come in 64 and 128 GB products and also have "comparable" pricing. No firm ship date, but the Pro Surface version will ship 3 months after RT. That's a tease.

And Ballmer's back, baby. He's going to let us touch the Surface. And oh, boy, are we going to touch the Surface.

Now there's something awful playing that makes my head and heart hurt. I think it may be Skrillex.

One of the great regrets of my life is that I'll never have the chance to sample a meal at El Bulli, the now-closed Spanish restaurant considered by very many to be the best in the world, where chef Ferran Adrià pushed the frontiers of food. This documentary by Gereon Wetzel will likely be as close as I get to experiencing a meal there.

El Bulli: Cooking in Progress is a sort of Behind The Music of a meal. It takes you backstage over the course of a year, into the kitchen where you get to hang out in an intimate setting with Adrià and his staff, even joining them for meals. But largely, it helps you get into Adrià's thought process as he spends six months preparing for the next season, planning everything around just an idea. From the idea, the movie follows chefs through a lab setting and test kitchen to final presentation. It is food-as-science experiment, and although it drags a bit in parts, if you're fascinated by Adrià and the effect he's had on global cuisine, this is a must-see.

Be warned, it's In Spanish Catalan* with English subtitles, so you'll have to learn how to read. [Netflix]

*And I obviously need to learn a second language.

Dan Lyons, the guy who used to be Fake Steve Jobs, has a story today that asks "once upon a time we put a man on the moon. Now we pee our pants over retina displays. WTF happened to us?" The answer is really easy: We're the same as we've always been. We love to watch things change.

Lyons bemoans what has happened to us as a culture, citing how once we sat rapt and watched space launches, but today the world waits at its desks, forgetting to breathe, while Apple talks about operating system enhancements. Or as he puts it, "So many great minds, devoted to such trivial bullshit."

The thing is, human beings are hard-wired to watch for change. We love to see new stuff, things we haven't seen before. And of all the things we get to see change in technology, Apple certainly has the best sense of theater and drama. Apple events almost never fail to surprise. We may have some idea of what's coming, but we never know. All we know is that if we tune in, we're going to see something new. And humans just naturally love, love, love new things.

Our predilection for the new explains why we love sports—live games are always new and unscripted—and shun re-runs. It's why so many of us consume video games until we get to the end, but so few of us go back and play them again. It explains why history can be both fascinating (I am learning something new!) and dismissed out of hand (that's ancient history!).

And moreover, we should be fascinated by Apple's latest creations. To suggest otherwise is to lose sight of the age of wonders we live in. Travel back in time, and a new MacBook Pro with Retina display would be a prize worth killing for. Its computational power would have saved untold man hours in getting us to the moon. Impossible physics speculation aside, it is inarguably an extremely powerful tool that could, for example, help mankind calculate another moon shot, a mission to Mars, a journey to the center of the Earth.

It's one bad-ass hunk of amazing hardware.

You could make a case (and I think this is what Lyons is doing) that our fascination with Apple means we are captivated by the wrong new stuff. That groovy new computers are not the change we should believe in. That we should be more ambitious as a society, striving for moon shot worthy technology, instead of operating system upgrades. But the thing is, we do have that. We still have massively ambitious, world-changing projects underway They just don't tend play well live, in a way that caters to our desire to see things change in real time.

Clearly a new MacBook is less important than the hunt for Higgs Boson. It is less of a technological feat than the Marmaray tunnel. It is a minor blip compared to new cancer treatments. Our great achievements as a society have not ebbed. They just are often too big and complicated and far-reaching to offer a compelling drama that we can all sit down together and view at the same time.

Like Lyons, I also remember being enraptured by live launches. Sure, I was watching Shuttle missions, not Apollo. But I was no less amazed. Back then the Shuttle was new and unknown and wonderful. It was changing things. It was dramatic, to the point of tragedy.

And then, it wasn't anymore. The first shuttle took off in 1981, and the last some 30 years later. It flew into outer space 134 times. It was utterly, mind-breakingly, amazing. It suffered two horrible disasters. But despite that, it became routine. It didn't seem to be changing. It lost its new. The same goes for ISS launches, when the most novel question is: Will a private contractor be able to pull off what was once the lone right of nation states?

But I promise you, when we do fill a spacecraft up with human beings, and try to send them somewhere new—to another planet, to rendezvous with an asteroid, to do anything hugely ambitious and new that really changes things—people will watch. They always watch.

Apple announced so much great new stuff today, and Tim Cook walked away looking too fine and fancy. But not everyone else left in such good shape. Apple threw plenty of haymakers at its biggest competitors; here are the Manny Pacquiaos* of WWDC 2012.

Google Maps

Not content to start today's keynote by having Siri tell jokes at Android's expense, Apple went on to unveil new in-house maps that really put the screws to Google. Features like local search (which lets you find local businesses and see Yelp ratings among other things), 3D city views, and flyovers are all longstanding features of Google Maps. Everyone knew this was coming, to the point that Google tried to get out in front of it with its own hastily thrown press conference last week, to announce its 3D initiatives and a man-mounted StreetView camera.

The one thing Apple didn't mention was anything resembling StreetView, which remains a killer feature and one Google has put a ton of investment into. But still. This is a tough loss for the big G. And that's before we even mention the turn-by turn directions read to you by Siri. Speaking of which....

Navigation Apps

Apple's maps finally deliver audible turn-by-turn driving directions, with live updates should you go off track, or should a better alternative come up along the way. It features estimated arrival times, traffic data, and automatically changes camera angles to give you a view of upcoming turns and course changes. And Siri is going to read it all to you. Select automakers are even building Siri buttons into the dashboards of new vehicles.

Which is great for you, but really sucks for apps from Motion X GPS Drive, Garmin, and the entire cottage industry of navigation apps. The biggest kick in the teeth probably went to Waze. Waze is a fantastic little app that uses crowdsourced traffic data with specific road hazard information to get you from point a to point z as fast as possible. And it was just Sherlocked to shit by Apple's own crowdsourced traffic data-driven app.

Read-Later Apps

This one, you could see coming. Or at least, you should have been able to. Apps like Instapaper, Pocket and Readability are super popular because they let you bookmark a story in one place in time (like, on your Web browser while you are at work) and read it later on another (say, an iPad at night in bed). Even better, they strip out all the extraneous distracting visuals so you can focus on the text and in some cases images of a story.

And now Safari does all that too. The new Reading List function saves web pages wholesale for reading later, and syncs them across all of your devices. When you're ready to read, you can use Safari's Reader function to strip away all those extraneous elements, too. Instapaper and Pocket have been increasingly focused on discovery recently, helping you find new material to read, which now seems really smart. Because when it comes to purely read it later—and read it prettier—there's probably no use in fighting Apple.

Ultrabooks

You know how ultrabooks were finally starting to catch up to MacBooks? Yeah. So. Here's the new MacBook Pro with Retina display. Unless this thing turns out to have some major problem that isn't immediately apparent, like sending electric shocks to your genitals, it's pretty much the nicest portable machine anyone has ever built. It's way more expensive than your average ultrabook, but it's got way more horsepower, too. Oh, and don't forget those $1000 MacBook Airs that can go spec to spec with the best of the featherweights.

Your Existing Supply of MagSafe Power Cables

What? MagSafe2 electric boogaloo? Nooooooooo! I've been collecting these dudes for always! What will I do with all the other MagSafe power cables I've been stealing from journalists at every press conference I've gone to for the past six years? Now I guess I'm going to have to buy a bunch of tiny $10 magnets. I say "a bunch" because I'm going to lose approximately all of them, too. Oh well, at least you can be sure that this adapter is future proof and Apple won't roll out a new one in the next five years, right?

Right?

*Which is to say, losers, who were robbed, robbed! For you non-boxing watching sensitive types.

"High", from the UK's Max Harris, is the best worst thing since Rebecca Black's "Friday." It hits all the right notes. Autotune. Filmed in an alleyway. Drug references by a minor. Sweatpants. I can't help but think this is self-aware parody.

"I'm on a battleship. I'm sinking. Someone help me. Please help me. Help me."

This is not only my new jam, it's pretty much going to be the anthem of my summer. Genius. [YouTube]

For coastal cities, rising sea levels due to climate change are questions of when and how high, not if. San Francisco's Brian Stokle and Burrito Justice created this amazing poster that shows what the city would look like after the waters rose.

The map shows what the city would like after a catastrophic disintegration of the Antarctic ice cap that caused sea levels to rise 200 feet, transforming San Francisco from a peninsula into an archipelago.

My neighborhood, Ocean Beach, would be completely gone. So too would be the Mission, all of downtown San Francisco, and (thankfully) The Marina district. Time to move uphill. [Burrito Justice]

Twitter has a new logo! And it also has a whole bunch of rules about how you can and can not use that new logo.

Like, you can't put it upside down, they say. Maybe that's because when you do, with the right color profile, it looks like Batman, as Josh Helfferich discovered. Now, every time I see this little bird, I keep imagining it saying, "I'm Batman, Dammit." [Josh Helfferich]

You can even look it up, my friend [www.google.com]:+anodyne&oq=define:+anodyne

Google Maps announced it is rolling out offline maps for mobile, showed a new person-mounted Street View camera and is improving the 3D capabilities of its maps via aerial data. It's a major overhaul, one that comes in the face of Google reportedly losing one of its biggest partners.

Users can look up a map in advance, and select a section to "make available offline." Google Maps will then indicate how much data this will take, and the map automatically downloads to the device. For devices with a compass, maps will automatically orient without 3G or WiFi running. Google called this a benefit of building its own basemap. There was no firm date set, but the company said it is "coming soon to Android." Brian McClendon, who runs Google's geo group, noted that it's "working hard" to bring this to all platforms.

Luc Vincent, who began Google Streetview as his 20 percent project, described how the company has expanded Streetview to include tricycles, snowmobiles and trollies that has let it show views of everything from university walkways to art museums. Today he showed off a human-mounted Streetview camera called the Trekker that hooks on the back, connected to an Android phone, to film places like the Grand Canyon and castles.

Google is also improving the ways its 3D views are shown thanks to some high-flying technology. It used cameras mounted on its own fleet of airplanes that shoot images at 45 degree angles and from directly overhead, from multiple directions. These images are reconstructed in a process called stereophotogrammetry to create textured meshes that let it render 3D photo-realistic scenes. Google showed off a dramatic view of this running on Google Earth on an iPad, that encompassed all the buildings in downtown San Francisco, as well as trees, completely modeled in 3D. It's coming soon to Android and iOS.

The event kicked off with McClendon giving a lengthy history of Google's mapping products and describing its three principles: comprehensiveness, accuracy and usability. He noted that today, 75 percent of all people in the world can see their homes in high resolution, and Google has 187 countries and 26 million miles of roads mapped with driving directions. And of course, it even has indoor maps now, to help people navigate subway stations and cavernous casinos. This focus on comprehensiveness seemed like a subtle attempt to differentiate itself from any upcoming Apple maps.

At its developer-focused WWDC conference next week, Apple is widely expected to announce that it's ditching Google Maps in the next version of iOS in favor of its own system, complete with 3D maps. Which could explain why Google is making big announcements itself ahead of its Google IO conference at the end of the month.

When asked directly about this, McClendon basically talked about how great Google Maps are. But it was telling that despite all of these announcements, plus lots of backstory on things Google is doing across the globe (like working with tribes in the Amazon) all reporters wanted to hear about during the Q&A was Apple.

A few weeks ago we posited that TED—the conference series made of tiresome talks—had diluted its brand and become a place that needed more censorship instead of less. And now Buzzfeed has dug up objective proof, sifting through the mud barrel of videos on the TED site to bring you the 50 worst.

They are quite bad. So bad some even cross the border into good-but-not-for-the-reasons-intended.

Like we said before, TED, make your talks rare animals again instead of cash cows. [Buzzfeed]

If you have a Facebook account, you've likely seen your dull friends post some version of a "privacy notice" there recently. The idea is that posting it as your status will somehow prevent Facebook from, well, doing the things Facebook does with your information. It's nonsense. Don't be that person.

Here's the dumb block of text that's spreading like a bad rash on Facebook, typically accompanied by a plea to repost because the rules are different now that Facebook is publicly traded.

PRIVACY NOTICE: Warning - any person and/or institution and/or Agent and/or Agency of any governmental structure including but not limited to the United States Federal Government also using or monitoring/using this website or any of its associated websites, you do NOT have my permission to utilize any of my profile information nor any of the content contained herein including, but not limited to my photos, and/or the comments made about my photos or any other "picture" art posted on my profile.

You are hereby notified that you are strictly prohibited from disclosing, copying, distributing, disseminating, or taking any other action against me with regard to this profile and the contents herein. The foregoing prohibitions also apply to your employee , agent , student or any personnel under your direction or control.

The contents of this profile are private and legally privileged and confidential information, and the violation of my personal privacy is punishable by law. UCC 1-103 1-308 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED WITHOUT PREJUDICE

WITHOUT PREJUDICE, LOL!

This is the online equivalent of wearing a "no fat chicks" t-shirt, and is just as enforceable. You might as well post a status update that Facebook owes you a gazillion dollars and a bigger penis for all the good it will do.

Your interactions with Facebook are governed by an agreement you previously made, that both parties entered into—even if you didn't read it. When you signed up with Facebook, you agreed to its terms of service. If you've been there for a while, you've even agreed to new terms as they've been updated over the years. That doesn't change because Facebook is a public company, and it doesn't change because you post some dumb crap on your timeline. It changes when Facebook offers new terms, and you accept them either by explicit agreement or your continued presence there.

Facebook is rapidly becoming the new email from old people. The only difference between this and spreading urban legends via email is that you're hitting share instead of forward. Just as with any email that urges you to forward it to 100 of your closest friends, any scary Facebook status update you see that begs you to repost it to your timeline is almost certainly completely bogus.

Come on, people. We already did this dance once before. Do we really have to start bookmarking Snopes again?

It looks like someone at Sprint is either having a seizure, or sat on that fancy new EVO and did some serious butt-tweeting, thanks to a stream of tweets that all read like @Horse ebooks nonsense.

Or maybe this is a viral ploy. Maybe this is really is just some @horse_ebooks strategy to get attention for the new EVO, which is so easy to use that it doesn't even have to make sense. Or something. Unsure. This one is great. Map.

Windows 8 Release Preview is among us and, boy, is it lovely. It's so much dreamier than the Consumer Preview, and makes the Developer Preview look like something cobbled together out of two-by-fours, electrical tape, and rebar. It also is quite boring.

Windows 8 is Microsoft's next-generation operating system, due to ship this fall. It adds lots of touch-based gestures to the old familiar Windows, and introduces an entirely new notion of how apps should look and run with its Metro interface, where single apps take over the entire screen and run free of clutter from buttons and menu bars. It's a dramatic leap forward. But while the Developer Preview was a grand unveiling, and the Consumer Preview was its first big meet and greet, this version of Windows 8 is all about refinements. The new Release Preview is an iterative update, inching us closer to final release. It's more mature maturity, increasingly refined, and already possesses a subtle elegance.

What's New

There are a ton of subtle interface enhancements in the Release Preview, and even one major change: trackpad gesture support. One of the big knocks on Windows 8 has been that it's too touchy-feely, and that if you don't have a touchscreen or tablet, it's going to be a pain to use.

To answer that, Microsoft sent us this build on a Samsung laptop with a boring, old-school non-touch sensitive LCD screen. Using it side by side with another laptop running the Consumer Preview was revelatory. The gesture support built into the trackpad made the experience far, far better. It was more navigable, less likely to launch inadvertent actions, and just all-around easier to use.

The trackpad gesture support is basic and intuitive. Swiping from right to left brings up the Charms menu (basically Windows 8's version of a home row). A left side swipe will switch between apps. Dragging down from the top brings up options. And gestures are built into individual apps as well. For example, pinching the trackpad brings up Semantic Zoom, in both the Metro Start screen and in select apps. (And any app can have this ability built in.)

Given that Microsoft is also building all this into its touch-sensitive mice, and other manufacturers can take advantage of that support as well, it means that the concerns that you must have a touch-sensitive screen to use Windows 8 are way overblown.

The new Release Preview also adds a ton of much-needed polish and interface enhancements. Subtle touches abound that make it easier to navigate and get things done in Metro, like adding semantic zoom to the People app so that you can easily jump from your contacts in the A section all the way to Z without having to scrooooooooooooooooooolllllllll forever.

Mail may be the most useful upgrade. In the Consumer Preview, it was kind of a pain to navigate between folders. You had to drop down into the menu to swap from, say, your notifications folder to your bulk folder to your inbox. Every time you chose one, the others would slide away out of view. Here's a refresher of how it looked.

The Release Preview keeps the three-pane interface front and center by default, and that's far easier to deal with. Sorting through your inbox and then moving quickly to scan your other folders is much easier in this layout. And it's also designed to be navigated with the thumbs in a tablet layout—the sidebar that lists your mailbox folders is extremely narrow. But that doesn't mean it's a touch-only interface. It's not. It works very well with a trackpad or mouse.

Basically, all the Metro apps you've been using have been made slightly slicker, slightly easier to navigate, and all around better.

The Desktop experience has been bettered-up too. It uses fewer resources when it's in the background, and some of the touch-forward UI elements have been toned down. The Start menu gets out of your way faster now, for example, so you can access the task bar.

Apps Aplenty

It also includes a few new Metro apps from Microsoft, all of which are as gorgeous and fluid as any of the others that have come before.

The News app aggregates information from hundreds of stories into one gorgeous app. It's got personalization features so that you can select sources, or track stories or topics you want to follow. You can pull out of the main view using Semantic Zoom to jump from topic to topic.

A Sports app lets you add favorite teams to track their players, schedules, scores and news of the day, as well as follow general news about individual sports.

A Travel app serves as both a Frommer's-powered guidebook, and Kayak-powered reservation engine, so you can research your trip and book it all in one spot.

Microsoft also showed off some new third party apps like a beefed-up WordPress app and a SkyNews app that we couldn't test yet because they weren't available on the Store until after the Release Preview ships. But they were all taking advantage of Windows 8's ability to share data across apps—a photo displayed in the News app can be shared with any other app without actually having to download it to your machine, for example. It all just works together really well.

A Slow Build

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It's a remarkable new operating system, that somehow still drives home Microsoft's inability to gin up excitement about its products. The Release Preview feels like yet-another-trailer when you're just ready to start the show. And while it addresses a lot of concerns and makes very many under-the-hood fixes, there's just not anything radically new that bowls you over.

When Windows 8 finally does drop, it's going to be one of the top technology releases of the year, a watershed product that ultimately affects hundreds of millions of people's lives. It is a Big Fucking Deal. And Microsoft is going to bore the hell out of you as it dribbles it out bit by bit along the way. But that's okay. Sometimes boring is good.

You can download the Windows 8 Release Preview yourself here.