Sandro Villinger

The first 801.11ac chipsets are coming soon, but 802.11n is likely to stick around for many years to come -- both in the business world and our homes. Unfortunately, the 300Mbps (megabits per second) that the n-standard promises rarely delivers anything even close and proves to be a massive bottleneck in the days of 50/100Mbps (or more?) broadband connections, 1080p video streaming, massive backups and so forth. On the business side of things, even menial tasks such as remote desktop or real-time collaboration suffer from a poor Wi-Fi-connection.

[ 8 free Wi-Fi security tools ]

Windows Live is no more. Long live Microsoft Account.

There's almost no way around the cloud in Windows 8. During custom setup, users are all but forced to sign in or register for a Microsoft account. Once you've done that, you can gradually sign on to several cloud-connected services:

"Good artists borrow, great artists steal!" -- Pablo Picasso said it. So did T.S. Eliot. And, more recently, Steve Jobs. Let's face it: If something makes sense and succeeds, it gets imitated.

Though Windows 8 and Linux distributions differ greatly from each other in design, ideology and -- last but not least -- their primary audience, they're all built on the same basic principles of OS design so there's bound to be some overlap. And while Microsoft has long been accused of stealing from the open source community, according to some Linux fans, it's getting to the point where Microsoft simply appropriates good Linux features.

If you're one of the vast number of Mac users who, like me, love Apple hardware but either hate Mac OS X or simply can't work with it for whatever reason (gaming? business policies?), running Windows on your Mac sounds like the perfect option.

Be warned: There are some major concerns regarding performance, battery life and quite annoying usability quirks that Apple decided not to fix in their Boot Camp software.

Late last month, I spent some time digging into an early Windows 8 build and found some interesting hidden features--including the Windows Store, a hybrid boot mode that drastically reduces cold boot time, Automatic Maintenance, and Spot Verifier, which checks for bad sectors in real-time and marks them as "bad" in order to avoid data loss or damage.

Then came the presentations at the AllThingsD and Computex conferences and all attention turned toWindows 8's new immersive UI. But there's much more happening under the hood that Microsoft isn't quite ready to tell us. After looking through about 1500 group policies of an early Windows 8 build, I've caught a few interesting hints to yet-unrevealed features.

Editor's Note: Microsoft's Windows President, Steven Sinofsky, is speaking this week at the D9 Conference. It is rumored that he will show off the new tablet UI and the long-awaited cloud integration of Windows 8. We will update this article accordingly.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer finally confirmed what tech pundits knew all along: the next generation of Windows will be out in 2012. In the meantime, Microsoft is half-way done with Windows 8 -- it's in the Milestone 3 stage right now -- and is prepping up the first beta for this September's "Windows Developer Conference" in Anaheim, California.