Another huge factor is the quality of the glass. The lowest-noise, highest-contrast, most-linear, biggest Dmax sensor in the world isn't going to give you good results if it has a cheap-o plastic lens in front of it. (Unless you're looking for that effect, like you get with a Lens Baby.) Futhermore, designing and manufacturing high-quality lenses is really quite difficult. Putting high-quality glass in a phone-sized device is, currently at least, impossible.

To make things worse a lens made for a smaller sensor needs to be better than the lens made for your DSLR. If you're trying to get the same resolving power out of the lens made for a sensor that is 4 mm x 5 mm, the manufacturing tolerances need to be 4x better than the lens made for a 16mm x 20mm sensor. With a cheap lens on a tiny sensor you get the worst of both technologies.

Exactly. This time last year I spent a few weeks travelling with some of my employers big time road warriors. Along with their corporate laptops they all carried netbooks. The netbooks gave them a personal e-mail, media and lightweight web browsing device that they could use in their off hours without having to worry about infecting the corporate machines with viruses or having the corporate snooping brigade finding out what they did in their off hours.

The iPad is a perfect replacement for that netbook market niche. It's a better media and casual browsing machine due to the instant on nature of the OS and the "walled garden" that protects you from web site shenanigans.

The General that described it as wonderful only endorsed the iPad as an off the cuff remark during testimony given to Congress to justify his selection as the CG of the newly created Cyber Command. He told a congressional committee that he was a technophile, and mentioned he had an iPad as an example of his gadget freak cred. So one of the congressmen asked him how he liked it and he said it's "wonderful". This is hardly an official endorsement by the NSA of locked down iPad like devices for everyone.

How much of the long gone and best forgotten CDE was Sun's fault? The horrible dull blue on dull gray theme seems to tie into their hardware offerings and the standard Java UI look and feel so I've always given them a large share of the blame for it. I hated CDE. Dullest windowing environment ever, and not at all free.

Sure, the camera companies will build wi-fi in their cameras at some point. But do you want to buy a new $1000 camera body just to get one with a $25 wi-fi chipset built-in? That's how the camera companies will solve this problem.

Is the JPEG limitation in this a function of how the Eye-fi firmware works or something that can be fixed in the Python script?

I'll agree that the war isn't over yet in the DSLR world, but in the point&shoot world there really is no point in going any higher than they have achieved. If you shove 12 megapixels into a sensor that is 1/4 the surface area of an APS-C sensor you should really couple it with a lens system that is 4 times more precise than the one used on your APS-C camera to get equivalent resolution. But the camera makers aren't doing anything like that. They're putting out junk lenses and big sensors because that's what marketing tells them to do.

Aside from the well designed "cool factor" of the Apple Store the other thing it has going for it is working products and helpful sales people. When you go to a Best Buy type store you're lucky if half the computers are even working. Most of them are screen locked and even if you get someone to unlock it all you'll get to see is the bundled software that comes with it. At the Apple Store the machines are unlocked and they have a lot of extra software loaded on them. You want to see Photoshop CS4 in action on a high end desktop? You can do that at an Apple store. You can't at Best Buy. Want to test out some headphones on the MP3 players? Good luck with that at the Buy More.

Microsoft might restore their image somewhat with a store that showplaces their product in as good a way as the Apple store showplaces Macs and iPods. The Best Buys of the world are all in a race to the bottom of the "low bottom line" market and this isn't a good environment to show off the products.

A better option might be VirtualBox and similar virtual machine environments. Run Windows with the 1 or 2 applications you can't make work in Linux, saving the 3rd application slot for a virtualized Linux that runs everything else you want. This way you're not limited to just whatever web apps you can find.