With touch-screen functionality on a fully capable machine with a proper amount of on-board storage that will be able to smoothly run Microsoft Office applications out of the box, Windows 8 promises to be an exciting transition for dedicated PC users, while offering the best of both worlds for tablet users.

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Hardware for a digital answering machine is also built in, although that functionality won't be available until later this summer via a software upgrade, available over the Internet.

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Those looking to dictate your PS3 with that (presumably costly) universal IR remote, take heart, as the clever folks at Remote Central have whipped up a way to add infrared functionality to your IR-less machine.

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Once you have a basic level of hardware functionality (what is called a Turing machine) all kinds of applications can be created with a mixture of hardware and software.

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Kind of how you'd install an operating system, automatically receive some baseline functionality using least-common-denominator hardware drivers, then install specialized drivers for your machine's video, sound, and network cards?

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