Microsoft released Windows for Pen Computing somewhere around Windows 3.1 (1991ish?). The Pen addons continued through the 9x releases. Granted it's not really a tablet initiative by Microsoft personally, but they dabbled in it. It worked reasonably well, and was a full real copy of Windows. They pretty much suffered the same limitations as later Tablet PCs (and today's tablets), though. Mousing was great, any sort of data input was a giant pain and pretty much required an addon keyboard.

This was where they failed for me. I had a couple different Fujitsu Stylistics, and overall I loved it. OneNote was great for notes, and had pretty decent handwriting recognition. I could run any Windows application, and overall it did great. I could sync notes across devices and access them anywhere. It was pretty impressive stuff for ~2000. But the big downfall was the jet engine fan and battery life. I'd be in a quiet classroom or office meeting, and the fan would kick on. I'd get That Look from people and it got old. I also usually only managed to get 2-3 hours out of it, although I did have a spare battery I'd carry around for it. I usually had enough juice to last a whole day of college classes, but sometimes not.

It'd also get pretty darn hot when I was doing anything that ran it very hard, but note-taking didn't usually do that.

My wife and I just last week did a marathon watching of all six. She hasn't historically been a Sci Fi fan, and she thinks she saw ANH as a child but didn't really remember it. Overall, she enjoyed all six fine. She recognized some of the stilted handling of the romance and such, but in general she liked it fine. She had no preconceived notions or expectations going in.

She'll admit the original trilogy are better movies, but she liked them all fine. As a lifelong Star Trek/Star Wars fan myself, it's interesting seeing her perspective on it all since for her, they're just more movies. She doesn't have a lifetime of expectations or fandom or anything.

The reviews on the Play store are showing a fairly high possibility of a bootloop. While I'm all for open source and public patches where appropriate, I expect I'll be passing on this one for now.

Hadn't thought of that! Makes perfect sense.

Sadly I'm just a lone user in a sea of Good Enoughs, so there's not a lot I can do about it other than make the best of it. Said interface is written by a fluffy VOIP server company with a broad reach, so I'm sure we're not the only company that's plagued by it and unable to fix it, per se.

I haven't always found this to be the case. There's one particular webapp we use at work that involves a lot of clicking on things, often alternating sides of the screen. With a mouse I have to mouse back and forth across the screen, with a touchscreen I can just touch the links. It's one of the few cases were I've actually preferred having a touchscreen. And I voted leaning against.

One could argue it's a workaround for a poorly designed website though.

The four major carriers this year got a common database for stolen phones. As far as how a phone gets onto it in the first place, I have no idea.

They'd probably rather sell you a new car with fancy new technology than let you upgrade your existing technology.

Loss of an arm? DF models it down to individual fingers and toes, and fingernails and toenails. It's quite possibly one of the most painfully accurate anatomy simulation available in an RPG.

And it's probably why I've never been able to play more than about 15 minutes minutes of it before giving up in frustration and going back to something less tedious, like Hydlide or Battletoads.

If you haven't seen any of his videos, especially the original unemployed ones, it won't make much sense. He has a certain... style of talking/writing.

I wish the designer of my company's setup had read that. I called an analyst from India who moved here Fnu for about a year before someone finally gold me that was an acronym for "First name unknown" and her real name was her "Last" name.

Very much This. Keep in mind as well that the encryption was for *his* protection, not the users'. He wanted to be able to claim that he had no way of knowing what was uploaded or what its content was. That he's still getting copyright takedown notices should come as no surprise at all to anyone. The difference is he can at least try to claim that he had no idea it was copyrighted material. It'll be interesting arguments if it ever ends up in court or similar.

You're thinking of what was called an "active digitizer". It seems to have mostly been used by older Wacom tablets and Kurta. It was used by a lot of the older tablet PCs, such as the Fujitsu Stylistic and Toshiba Dynapad lines. The pen would have a battery (AAAA usually) and it'd work through some kind of electromagnetic thing. Was much nicer than the "passive digitizer" used by resistive touchscreens as it was a lot more accurate and allowed multiple buttons easily, pressure sensitivity, etc.

It's rather different but might still count enough for prior art.

The funny thing is I still take a lot of my work meeting notes on a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 that was given to me last year. I constantly get people asking me what it is, where to get one, etc. Its keyboard isn't amazing, but it beats a lot of the add-on keyboards people are using (or trying to use) with their tablets, plus it's a lot more durable. It's also running a full Linux setup which I've used for some light development, writing sd cards for a couple embedded projects, and had no trouble with a lot of USB peripherals.

It may not be as cool as a lot of new tablets, and its battery life may not be up to what it was when it was new, but it's been a great thing for me. I have a 7" Android tablet too and haven't found a decent keyboard for it yet that isn't more than I want to pay. But the tablet does do media a lot better, Youtube and Netflix and such. So I tend to keep the netbook for work and the tablet for lying in bed watching something on Netflix. /csb

I've always felt that Apple's problem is they hit on a successful, good formula, and then ride it into the ground and well past its sell-by date. Original Macintosh was something new and interesting, but they were still making the Mac Classic into the early 90s which was fundamentally similar and did poorly outside education (trying to sell a non-color 8mhz computer when PCs were at 33 and 66mhz? Really?). The early color Macs were interesting, but they got bogged down in the confusing product lines and corner-cutting such as the 5200/5300/6200/6300 models. The classic Mac OS was great for 1984, but it was already out of date by the early 90s much less Mac OS 9 running into the early 2000s.

If they were better able to recognize when a market was done and when they needed to bring out new products, they'd probably do well swinging back and forth. They've been on a big upswing since the iProducts and Mac OS X were introduced, but it can't last forever. Granted it's anecdotal and hardly indicative of anything but I have several Apple fan friends who bought Galaxy S3s because they were unhappy with the iPhone 5. It's probably still got several years left but it'll be interesting to see if Apple leverages their iOS lead and fandom into a new world, or we end up in a world of Performas and Centrises again.

Not that I care personally, I'll keep my Android and Linux thanks. More an academic interest as a computer guy.