No one I know would be interested in a device dedicated to a single provider's service. Everyone I know who uses Internet-based delivery for some of their media uses more than one source, and none of them would have any desire to have multiple devices. Perhaps if this was the only way to consume Amazon's video offering... but it isn't.

There's already a number of devices (Roku, PS3, XBox, a variety of DVD/Blu-Ray players, etc.) that allow access to Amazon's Instant Video as well as Netflix and a host of other media services. I can't see how Amazon thinks it's a good idea to compete with that.

It's not only jailbreaking that lets you get around Apple's app restrictions (and I wouldn't rely on it, since jailbreaking gets harder with each release); you can also write an HTML5 app. The only restrictions are what the OS allows HTML5 apps to access. The overwhelming majority of App Store apps I've seen would work just fine as an HTML5 app -- only the more graphically-intense games or things that rely on direct access to hardware features even need to be native.

It has to go through Apple. I needs to meet Apples arbitrary corporate 'standard'

Only if it's a native app. If it's an HTML5 app, then you can make it available -- and installable -- instantly with no review from Apple. The only problem is that the HTML5 apps don't give you access to the complete capabilities of the device.

There's no doubt that the iPad is optimized as a consumption machine. But I think the focus on the walled App Store is a little misleading. It's true that creating and sharing a native iOS app is onerous -- but Apple has excellent support for offline-capable, "installable" HTML5-based apps. People seem to forget that a lot

Now, I'm not saying that the good support for HTML5 apps absolves Apple of the problems with the App Store; but it does mean that saying "you can't use an iPad to create and share an app with your friends" is inaccurate.

It's poorly-phrased. I think that the author meant that people found it strange that when these two collaborated again, they used students from Gates' "model school" as an example of failure.

I mean, a slightly different interface, but substantially the same. And Google killed that product; why do we think this time around will be better?

Well, Google's interest is certainly in getting data; but they wouldn't be able if there weren't a market for it. Why? I don't just use one device, so I want easy, transparent access to my data no matter what I'm using. And some of my devices are quite tiny; I don't want to lose my data when I lose my device, so I'd at least want some kind of automatic remote backup...

Not to mention that things like Evernote do a lot of processing on the data you send them that would be onerous on a portable device. For example, if I snap a pic of a business card, the text on that card is OCR'd and made searchable. That would suck hard on a phone; it's much easier to offload that capability (and corpus!) to the cloud. This saves me precious battery and improves the quality of my results.

The issue isn't network-based computing, it's that we don't have the controls in place to assert control of our data on a provider's equipment; we are forced to trust that they won't do Bad Things. And that's a problem.

Maybe some compensation for all that personal data and advertising revenue they got from his use of Gmail? It's not like Gmail is provided at no value to Google (same with Reader, actually).

OOXML has some serious problems, but "proprietary" isn't really one of them. OOXML is actually two standards: OOXML Transitional and OOXML Strict. OOXML Strict is, by most accounts, a reasonable standard -- some bits open enough to interpretation that there will still be some problems between implementations, but HTML has the same issues.

OOXML Transitional, on the other hand, is filled with specified items that are just holdovers from MS's native implementation(s) of Office file formats. This is, more-or-less, the original submission from MS, and it was roundly rejected on its own. OOXML Strict solved enough of the problems that the standards bodies were willing to accept the dual standard -- OOXML Transitional used only for documents that are converted from old formats, and OOXML Strict used for new documents.

The problem with corporate-sponsored standards, though, is that the sponsoring organization usually has the first or leading implementation -- and the implementation itself becomes more of a de facto standard than the published standard. In the case of OOXML, Microsoft shipped OOXML-Transitional capable systems pretty quickly. But they still haven't shipped a product that reliably writes OOXML Strict documents (though Office 2013 does read such documents accurately).

Because the leading implementation is so... odd... the other "big players" haven't made a significant commitment to OOXML.

This is why I hate science reporting. This kind of study exists entirely to obtain funding for higher-quality research. But it's getting reported as though it were conclusive. The way research of most types works is that you do a cheap, low-quality study that tells you whether there's an interesting enough thing happening to warrant a more-expensive, more-thorough study. In this case, the conclusion is basically "hey, it's possible that caffeine intake might be a factor in glaucoma; we should really do more than just case review and self-reporting to see if it's real." But all we're going to hear about from the media now is how coffee makes you blind.

In other words, as it has been since time immemorial, IT decisions are being made without completing full due diligence. Including understanding and planning for support, training, and related costs.

You don't know how this works, clearly. Lands End is a manufacturer. Walmart is not. They each have different goals and different business processes. Now it's possible that LE uses the same cheap labor that some (if not most) of Walmart's suppliers use; I don't have any information either way, but it's entirely feasible that you're right. However, the process and materials probably vary quite a bit. Walmart ends up carrying cheap stuff because they leverage their large potential market to negotiate ridiculously low wholesale prices with manufacturers, and reducing them each year. Mfg's end up having to make a choice at some point: sacrifice quality, or lose out on the huge volume Walmart offers. Lots of Mfg's feel that sacrificing quality is the right call, and do so: but their products that get sold at higher prices to competing sellers are often of the original, higher quality. Lands End makes their money by using higher-quality, more-durable fabrics and processes than many of their competitors, and selling fewer items at a higher margin than Mfg's who sell to Walmart. There is a profitable market in people who will pay $40 for a $3 (cost) item that's twice as durable as a $2 (cost) item that retails for $15; just as there is a profitable market in doing the opposite.

But home schooling pretty much fails to develop a kid's social skills.

This bit of misinformation seriously undermines discussion about the real issues with home-schooling. Yes, some parents home-school to "protect" their kids from the bad, evil world. Those kids will have social problems no matter what. The majority of the home-schooling community solved that problem a long time ago by, you know, getting together on a regular basis with other families. That's arguably healthier for the kids, as they'll interact with a broader age range than they would in a standard public school.

The most serious issues with home schooling are a lack of enforcable standards -- which mean that some parents end up with kids that are even more ignorant than public-school-educated kids -- lack of advanced knowledge, and lack of facility. The first could possibly be addressed with a well-designed standardized test suite (though the government typically sucks at creating good standardized tests).

The last two -- challenges in finding appropriately-experienced parents in advanced subjects; and the difficulty in getting access to e.g., proper lab equipment -- are much tougher crack. In grade school, this is less of an issue, but many middle- and high-school students who are home-schooled end up with significant gaps in knowledge when it comes to certain advanced topics, and this makes their post-secondary education more challenging.

On top of this, pulling the brightest children out of public schools only further deprives the schools of funding and positive peer models, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of public schools as failures. There are real issues with the way public schools are managed -- not the least of which is that the policies for managing them are created largely by groups who have absolutely no qualifications in education or childhood development -- but home-schooling is not the solution.

I have college diplomas in the fields of mechanical and electronic engineering (technologist and technician for the Canadians). I also took all advanced math, physics and chemistry classes in high school. I don't remember ever seeing the notation "4+3+2=( )+2" before.

Didn't all of that education teach you to learn what solutions others have used before you decide you have a unique problem? As many others have pointed out above, the parenthesis are an artifact of the reporting in the TFA; the actual test questions (as seen in the associated videos) used a blank space. This is a common technique, well-supported by research, to introduced pre-teens to algebraic concepts before using named variables (like 'x').

This test shows, IMO, that students who were tested don't see '=' in a way we'd expect: they are reading equations as "problems", and the '=' as a "solution" indicator. This is probably reinforced by early math problems of the type "4+3 = ?", and the behavior of the '=' key on calculators (which are now used extensively in grade-school math programs).

The notation was not the problem, because that's not the notation that was used.

Now, now. Just because these youngsters need pictures of the food on their cash-register buttons in order to do their job doesn't mean they're stupid. :-)

You're absolutely correct, it doesn't. And, in fact, they don't need them at all. Comments like this just show your ignorance of how organizations work at large scale. The pictures are there because they are universal.

1. McDonald's (for example) is an international company, and they serve their core menu in dozens of languages. It's much easier and less error-prone for them to produce a picture-based keypad than to translate everything without error
2. Fast food companies did research indicating that it's faster -- even for highly-literate people -- to find an item by image rather than by name. Faster means better service with fewer staff, which means more profit.
3. Many fast food chains, and McDonald's in particular, hire people with disabilities. This is a huge win for such people -- real, productive work that can help make them at least partly independent. Many with cognitive or developmental disabilities have written-language challenges, and the picture "menus" are much easier for them to use efficiently. It doesn't make sense to have two versions of something if one works for everyone, does it?

And those are just the three reasons that are most obvious to me. Now get off your high horse!