In other words, while you can install an app like Photoshop on a full Windows 8 machine, you can't do it here, nor any other Windows application written since the dawn of the OS. Additionally, we have our doubts about whether anyone going forward will bother to write desktop apps versus those more optimized for running in the de facto Live Tile interface.

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Where Twitter does use Ruby, it deploys the code on a custom, highly optimized version of the Ruby runtime designed to manage memory more efficiently when executing long-running processes.

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