"...Completely Predictable Machines..."

     If only we knew all the variables.  Maybe.  "Indistinguishable from magic," Arthur C. Clarke wrote of sufficiently advanced technology, and I've been thinking he meant the wonderfulness of it, producing marvels from thin air before our eyes -- but it can just as easily be taken to refer to the ill-understood incantations and rituals, the unpredictable results and the sometimes cruel or ironic misreading of commands one finds in stories about magic.  Possibly my chalk circle around the desktop had a gap in it.

     My Surface and the inexpensive Acer laptop that is its backup took the update fine, even though it was a pretty large pile of stuff.  The Surface actually did a stealth-update on me between uses at work!