No matter how well you understand how a piece of software is implemented, it shouldn't expose any sort of vulnerability. If VMWare legitimately has cause for concern, they were doing it wrong from the start.

Meanwhile, in the real world, every piece of software has flaws, and now VMWare's are likely to be discovered very quickly.

It's terribly unfortunate that Apple has decided that iPad owners have no right to install whatever software the owner sees fit on his or her own tablet, thus necessitating (and encouraging) the jailbreaking community.

The Apple philosophy is that the iPad is an appliance which should "just work". Because of my background, the locked-down nature of the device tends to rub me the wrong way, but it really is the best way to guarantee that the end-user experience has that quality. Most people using these devices are not computer nerds. They are regular people, and they don't have the time or technical expertise (or both) to figure out if an app is going to screw up their iPad or not. You can't give non-nerds the unrestricted ability to install software from any source and expect anything other than disaster. It may take more or less time depending on how technical the non-nerd is, but it's basically inevitable, especially now that "malware developer" is a viable career.

The "walled garden" model is the computing device equivalent of hiring security staff to guard the door of a fancy club. It means you can't get in dressed like a punk and pushing a shopping cart full of Olde English 800, but part of the reason the other customers are at that club is for precisely that reason - the people who go there don't want to worry about that happening.

An iPad isn't supposed to be a 100% replacement for a laptop. It's somewhere in-between that and a phone. I treat my phone as a utility device, not a general-purpose computing workstation. Having it behave reliably and quickly is more important to me than having the ability to install a custom version of Tux Racer or whatever. I see my tablet in the same light. When I've tried using tablets other than an iPad, I've always gotten the impression that they're crippled laptops rather than devices that really took advantage of the form factor.

I didn't really understand the point of tablets until I used one extensively for testing a particular application at work, and got used to being able to view my calendar and inbox without the compromise of a phone-sized screen anywhere in the office.

Like Jobs supposedly said, when they're made properly, they're intentionally a class that sits in-between "smart phone" and "laptop". They're not intended to do everything either of those device types can do, just like those devices can't do everything (well) that a tablet can.

Right now, I mainly use mine as an electronic replacement for paper documents.

I can take notes using a stylus, which is a lot more conducive to a conversation than pecking away on a laptop, and because they're electronic/backed-up, I don't need to worry about losing the one notebook that contains what I'm working on.

I can view my calendar anywhere, and unlike a printout it's updated in realtime. I can view my work email. I could do those last two things on my phone if I really wanted to, but the having a comfortably-sized display is much nicer.

I can read electronic copies of documents instead of relying on printouts that may be outdated.

Because it's a tablet, I don't need to sit down to use it like I would with a laptop.

All of the other things it can do (RDP/SSH to systems I'm responsible for) are a great benefit as well, but it's the replacement-for-printed/handwritten-materials aspect that I find most useful about it.

Much to my own surprise (I'm not a big fan of Apple, traditionally), I went with an iPad, because it really does have that "it just works" quality. My paper-and-pen notebook or physical printouts never crashed or took five minutes to boot up, and neither should the thing that replaces them.

I have an Android phone, and when something goes wrong with it, it literally does take multiple minutes to reboot. That's just ridiculous.

I've seen the tablet editions of Windows, and it's painfully obvious that Microsoft's staff still haven't learned anything about making a UI that takes advantage of a particular form factor, as opposed to trying to make one UI that tries to do everything and then attempt to use that on all device types.

My understanding is that this was used (the concept, not the camera) to film some of the 'bullet time' like scenes we see in movies now.

Sort of, but not quite the same thing.

The "bullet-time" effect was achieved by arranging hundreds of still cameras along a path that simulated a traditional tracking shot, with all of them rigged to fire at the same time. So in post-production, the "virtual camera" could be made to move backward or forward along that path, but which part of the scene was in focus couldn't be changed.

The light-field design allows the focus to be changed, and a limited amount of changing the perspective of the "virtual camera", but you couldn't take a snapshot of Carrie-Anne Moss from the front with one and then do a 180-degree tracking shot around her in software, because the image data wouldn't be there once you got far enough from the original point-of-view.