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If you think you read my title wrong, take a second look. You'd think from all the overblown attention that the Modern interface is garnering, that I was going to focus another drab op-ed around that sole feature. Yes, the Modern UI is a radical change and will turn a lot of people off. But let's not forget that with every new Windows release comes features that actually don't get the time of day. I think a few of these deserve a sliver of attention.

We've been down this road before. Let's not forget that the introduction of the Office ribbon menu system was considered shocking back in 2006, and years later a majority of users have accepted and embraced the changes. Apple received similar kickback on its radical iPhone design back in 2007. I truly believe the heat on Windows 8's Modern UI will come and go like the rest of modern tech's evolutionary moments.

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Could the end of October be any more jam-packed? October 29, same day Microsoft launches Windows Phone 8 in San Francisco, Google will hold an event in New York for Android -- presumably for the next Nexus device(s), just about the worst kept tech secret(s) of the month. Microsoft just can't catch a break. This week, Apple sent out media invites for an October 23 shindig, possibly for iPad mini, coming three days before Microsoft launches Windows 8 and Surface tablets.

Yeah, it's a tough month to be Microsoft -- what, with the company's future hanging on the three products and post-PC, connected-device era stumpers Apple and Google looking to dampen Windows' big days. But what a month for gadget geeks -- and the October 26 and 29 events coming on my three sisters' birthdays (twins, in case three on two days puzzles you): Android devices, iPad mini, Surface, Windows 8, RT and Phone. And, hey, what about some of those new smartphones, like LG Optimus G?

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The cat's out of the bag, and we can all stop guessing as to what the Surface RT will cost. Microsoft confirms many things, namely that Steve Ballmer was spot-on with his estimates on Surface pricing roughly a month ago. The Surface RT is going toe-to-toe with the iPad down to the very last penny. That's a good thing.

One thing I'm curious about is how Surface will change the way K-12 looks at computing devices for the next generation of students. I've already penned my thoughts on why I believe the Surface could very well outshine the iPad in education. A big part of this winning equation has to do with the ecosystem that surrounds a given technology.

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More Americans are discovering what I did, after buying the original iPad more than two years ago: Reading ebooks, magazines and newspapers on a tablet is an immersive experience and often much more satisfying than print. Today, comScore says that in August, two out of every five US tablet owners read a newspaper or magazine and one in 10 did so almost every day.

The numbers' meaning is greater when taken in context of another. Pew says that during the same month, one in four Americans used a tablet (22 percent as owners, 3 percent borrowing one belonging to another household member). Make no mistake, magazines and newspapers are going digital in ways like nothing seen on the Internet, because of publishers' ability to deliver richer content -- at that, more frequently -- and actually make money doing so.

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I’ve been away. We had a death in the family (my brother-in-law) which turned me into a single parent for a few days -- a paralyzing experience for an old man with three small boys and two large dogs. You never know how much your spouse does until it all falls for awhile on your shoulders. I am both humbled and a bit more wrinkled for the experience.

While I was being a domestic god a reader passed to me this blog post by John Miano, a former software developer, founder of The Programmers Guild, now turned lawyer who works on immigrant worker issues as a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) a supposedly nonpartisan think tank in Washington, DC. I don’t know Miano and frankly I hadn’t known about the CIS, but he writes boldly about H-1B visa abuses and I found that very interesting.

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Search engine DuckDuckGo released a video a few days ago that shows how Google personalizes results for all signed in and signed out users. It asked 131 people to search for the same Election related topics ("abortion", "gun control", and "Obama") on Google at the same time, and most of them received slightly different results.

That Google personalizes results in this way is hardly new information. The company has been doing it since 2009 and Eli Pariser covered the topic in depth in his 2011 book, The Filter Bubble (a great read). He also gave an enlightening Ted Talk on the subject in which he observes that "the Internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see."

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Today, Microsoft started taking pre-orders for Surface RT, one of its two branded tablets. The other, which isn't formerly priced, will cost more and comes with Windows 8 Pro. RT prices range from $499 to $699, on par with the new iPad. Microsoft chose not to sell the tablet against lower-cost Androids, such as Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1, which Amazon has for $359.

Surface marks Microsoft's first real push into the tablet market. True, the company released Windows XP Tablet Edition a decade ago but OEMs shipped hardware. Now Microsoft competes with them, by offering its own device, which is optimized for its software and services and ships free of bloatware.

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Tuesday afternoon, seven members of Microsoft's Surface team, led by General Manager Panos Panay, fielded questions from the public in an "ask me anything" (AMA) forum on popular Web community Reddit.

In the two-hour session on Reddit, the team was hit with several hundred questions about Surface; of which, about 50 were directly addressed. Like the United States Presidential debates, there is a considerable amount of equivocation and evasion involved in this sort of question and answer session, so some questions get glossed over with no mention. This happened quite frequently with two questions in particular: Why is there no NFC (near field communications) and why does it cost as much as it does? Neither was directly answered.

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Well, file this in the don't believe anything you read on the Internet department. Contrary to relentless rumors that Microsoft Surface would start at $199, actual cost will be $300 more. Rather than price against tablets selling for $299 or less, Surface competes with iPad, while offering more storage for less cost. But iPad has the way upper hand on screen resolution, which is a compelling feature.

At Noon EDT today, Microsoft started taking pre-orders for Surface, following a gaffe that temporarily offered the tablet and revealed pricing -- $499 to $699 for three models. The entry-level 32GB tablet is $499, same as new iPad, which is 16GB. The $599 Surface adds detachable keyboard cover, and the $699 model bumps storage to 64GB. Pre-orders are for the model running Windows RT. Microsoft hasn't announced pricing or started pre-orders for the Windows 8 tablet. As previously reported, Surface RT launches alongside Windows 8 on October 26. Yesterday, Microsoft kicked off the tablet's ad blitz.

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Microsoft announces calendar third-quarter earnings in three days, and during the conference call, as usually is the case, some financial analyst almost surely will ask about the percentage of professional to consumer versions sold, since the former typically yields higher margins. But that question may soon be a thing of the past, as Microsoft seeks long-term gains from a little short-term pain. The Redmond, Wash.-based company is quietly, but quite deliberately, trying to put Windows consumer, once called Home, out to pasture (hopefully with a bullet in its bytes).

The signs are everywhere. In April, Microsoft reduced the number of Windows editions to three -- 8, Pro and RT -- or four when looking at volume-licensing-only Enterprise. Most people can't buy Windows 8 Enterprise or RT (which is preloaded only). They also can't buy the consumer edition -- yet -- and Microsoft makes it awfully damn easy to get Pro. Existing users of most any version of Windows going back to XP can, until Jan. 31, 2013, upgrade to 8 Pro for $39.99. That's a helluva bargain, and the lowest launch promotional price for a professional Windows edition ever. Meanwhile, buyers of new Windows 7 PCs starting June 2 get a $14.99 free upgrade -- to Pro 8. Last week, Microsoft and retailers started taking boxed Windows 8 Pro upgrade preorders for $69.99. Windows 8 "consumer" upgrade isn't available. Is the pattern clear enough?

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Computing, and I use the term in the widest sense, has always been tribal to an extent. People have loyalties, and there’s nothing wrong with that. This year, tribes are called "ecosystems", but whatever the current label, looking around the Interweb it seems to me that tribalism is becoming more prevalent and more aggressive. It’s as if everyone stood on soapboxes with their fingers in their ears, shouting "LALALALALALALA", while at the same time (a good trick, this) yelling through a megaphone that theirs is the only way and anyone who doesn’t agree is just too stupid to be considered human.

Famously, way back in 1994, the writer and thinker Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose) compared computing loyalties to religions: Apple followers were Catholics who believed that they would find salvation through following the One True Path. Conversely, PC users, like Protestants, were obliged to find their own way through the many paths open to them, and not all would be saved. And (I guess) Linux users are the hairy prophets who come out of the desert proclaiming, "It’s really easy. Honestly. And these days you only have to scourge yourself with thorns once a week …"

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First in a series. Thirty years ago, when I worked for a time in Saudi Arabia, I saw a public execution. I didn’t attend an execution, I didn’t witness an execution, I just happened to be there. There was in the center of this town a square and in the square were gathered hundreds of people. I worked in a building next to the square and looked out the window to see what caused all the noise. At that moment a prisoner was brought forward, his arms bound behind him. He was dragged up the steps to a platform and there fell to his knees.

Another man, whom I quickly came to understand was the executioner, climbed to the platform with the prisoner and poked him in the side with a long curved sword. The prisoner involuntarily jerked up just as the sword slashed down and just like that there was a head rolling off the platform, the body falling dead like a sack of flour. The crowd roared. Beginning to end it took less than a minute.

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Rarely since I started reporting tech legal cases 15 years ago is an appellate order so clear: "We hold that the district court abused its discretion in enjoining the sales of the Galaxy Nexus". More: "Reversed and remanded". Ouch.

Today, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit rejected the preliminary injunction that US District Judge Lucy Koh imposed against Samsung Galaxy Nexus and sent the case back to her. Matters are worse for Koh and Apple, if this 18-page order foreshadows anything about the recent jury verdict against Samsung.

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If you can't figure out why CEO Steve Ballmer talks about reinventing Microsoft as a "devices and services company", Jay Chou, IDC senior research analyst, has an answer. "PCs are going through a severe slump". That's being polite in mixed company, when the F-word is so much more appropriate. Third-quarter PC shipments accentuate an already dreadful trend. Analysts expected slowing shipments as the market prepares for Windows 8, but nothing quite like this. The seasonal back-to-school lift collapsed, with even Mac shipments slowing.

Global PC shipments fell 8.6 percent year over year, according to IDC, surpassing the minus 3.8 percent forecast. Gartner's estimate is a more generous 8.3 percent decline. The United States, a region recently in love with tablets, is in free fall, with shipments down 13.8 percent by Gartner's reckoning and 12.4 percent according to IDC. For the better part of a year, analysts excused declining PC shipments as market anticipation for Windows 8. But the slowdown during back-to-school buying season foreshadows weakness ahead.

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According to a story on the Russian Interfax news site, some Russian Christians have taken to defacing, or replacing, the logo on their Apple products because it’s "anti-Christian" and insults their faith.

While to you or I the logo just looks like a Golden Delicious that’s had a chomp taken out of one side, to some radical Orthodox Christians, including some priests, it apparently represents the original sin as described in the Bible, where Adam and Eve disobey God by noshing on some forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden.

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