When web surfers aren't busy calling each other Nazis on forums, they're often cracking jokes about greeting their future robotic overlords with open arms. It won't be funny forever; the groundwork for our eventual demise is already being laid by the best minds in the land. IBM announced that it had created prototype cognitive chips modeled after the human brain almost a year ago, and today, Reuters reported that Intel is launching a research project in Israel dedicated to creating smart tech that can learn the habits of its users. (That way, SkyNet will know the best time to strike.)

As any SSD owner can tell you, fast boot times are a wonderful thing! Except for, well, when they're not. Microsoft's been working hard at reducing the boot times in Windows 8 and to hear them tell it, your home screen pops up so fast that there simply isn't enough time to mash on the trusty ol' F2 or F8 if you need to muck around in the BIOS or enter Safe Mode. Rather than shrugging their shoulders and leaving users to press a key in a 200ms window, Microsoft instead created a new "Boot Options" menu.

With the rapid rise of tablets, analysts have been arguing over which PC hardware company is the biggest in all the land: HP or Apple? Apple, of course, only enters the discussion if you count tablets as PCs. But regardless of how you look at technicalities, Microsoft wants to let you know that when it comes to the operating systems running on all that hardware, there's really only on sheriff in town: Windows.

Some head-in-the-clouds philosophical types say time is like a rubber band, stretching out slowly then snapping forward in a burst; the proof to that hypothesis may just lie in the humble Linux kernel. It took Linus and co. a whopping 20 years to finally release Linux 3.0 last July, and less than a year later, Linux 3.4 is already here. The new build brings several new things to the table, with a multitude of Brtfs updates and support for the latest graphics options being the most noticeable changes.