From the BUILD conference. Very in-depth, with lots of information on how the revamped Start menu and overall Metro UI work.

But even in this early state, Windows 8 is unambiguously a first-class tablet operating system.

Update: you can read the press release from the Build Windows event on Microsoft’s website.

A short but sweet article by Ars Technica.

Now that Steam is running on the PlayStation 3, the service may be added to other games as well as Portal 2, but Lombardi refuses to give any specific news. “We are hoping other titles will benefit from the Steamworks tools and services we’ve created for Portal 2 PS3, but we don’t have anything to announce today.”

An interesting discussion regarding mobile platforms, consoles and their respective technical constraints.

A modern, top-notch, triple-A title costs many tens of millions of dollars to develop. If you have 60 or 100 people working for multiple years, it’s just really damn expensive. And, when there’s that kind of money on the line, there is an unavoidable degree of conservatism that comes in. You want to do things that you know people love and you want to make it better and polish it, but you really don’t have an opportunity to go off into left field—that’s really, really risky, and people don’t want to bet their company on things like that.

A nice writeup by Ars Technica.

If you take a look at the block diagram above, you’ll notice that most of the blocks are fairly obvious … But the purpose of the “FSB replacement block” may not be obvious. This particular block essentially implements a kind of on-die “frontside bus” with the exact same latency and bandwidth characteristics as the older bus that connected the CPU and GPU when they were discrete parts.

The FSB replacement essentially lowers the performance characteristics of the SoC in order to retain the performance level of older Xbox 360 machines.

Between January and February, Internet Explorer dropped a significant 0.60 percentage points and Firefox slipped 0.18 percentage points. Chrome jumped a sizeable 0.41 percentage points to 5.61 percent of the market while Safari fell 0.06.