Have you looked at a smartphone lately? How about the ~100Wh battery I have in my 1.5kg laptop? A Tesla S?

OK, from the top then :D

Traditional tablet PCs with WACOM styluses have existed for ages - over 10 years. They use an active digitizer (built into the screen) combined with an inductive stylus, which has a pressure-sensitive tip and does not require a battery. It's the same technology WACOM uses for its separate graphics tablets, which is why the pens are, in many cases, interchangeable - I can use the pen from my graphics tablet for my tablet PC (in this case, a Samsung ATIV Smart PC tablet), for instance. This technology is highly accurate, works across the entire system (due to presenting as a [PS2 or similar] pointing device) and is highly compatible with all existing software. Many Windows and Android devices come with this hardware built in... others (such as Microsoft for their Surface line) have switched to WACOM's main competitor for these products, N-Trig - even more accurate, but require batteries in the pens AFAIK.

iOS devices such as iPads have no such hardware built in - they have a "fat finger" capacitive touch display and no native palm rejection due to the fact that if you turn off the capacitive touchscreen, well, you lose all input - WACOM systems automatically turn off the capacitive touch when the stylus comes within a few centimeters of the digitizer screen, which incidentally also allows hovering over the screen with the stylus as a pointing device. The workaround palm rejection algorithms in these "let's use capacitive touch as a crutch for a stylus" devices and apps are almost always universally horrible. I'm hoping WACOM figured out something better for the product you mentioned, but I kinda doubt it.

The accuracy is also quite horrendous - with most iPad styluses, you wouldn't be much worse off using a hot-dog instead.

Hence the complicated workaround for iOS with Bluetooth (for the pressure sensitivity) and the very slow performance - take a look here for instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I dunno about you, but while the reviewer keeps talking about fast performance, I'd pretty much be pulling my hair out. That might be because of that Bamboo drawing app on the iPad though, and not because the Bluetooth connection is lagging (although that's a possibility too!).

That's an edge case - a special product that doesn't work system-wide - and not a traditional WACOM stylus - the latter requires an active digitizer panel integrated in the screen, which iOS devices simply do not have. There's an entirely different level of accuracy involved, and the iOS version of the product only works with certain apps.

Traditional "real" WACOM styli work system-wide... everywhere you can use a pointing device. And they have absolute positioning on screen.

I am intrigued though - I wonder how the iOS version of the product works, since they're missing an elementary part of the system they usually use (the digitizer in the screen).

>Which have also been available for iOS for years.

Ummm... what? I haven't seen any iOS devices with WACOM or N-Trig... everything available for iOS devices has been the high-tech equivalent of fingerpainting.

It's not bad to have a viewer app that'll render Word/Excel/Powerpoint properly though...

Even if I had HGST drives it wouldn't change much - I'd still have the same backup system in place and if a drive fails, well, it's swapped out and I can go about my day. So meh.

I'm gonna have to start doing the "Oooooh Barracuda!" thing...

Ehhh, I have like 3 of them and they're still going strong. All backed up nightly though, of course, with manual ~monthly additional off-site backups of the more important stuff (pretty much everything other than movies, TV and music).

While this does sound interesting (thank you for the tip, by the way - I may use this for other purposes), I'm not looking to move out of the Skype ecosystem because so many people I communicate with are already in it.

I just want to get rid of the Skype desktop application because it *sucks*. A webapp would be a welcome change.

I do want to be able to talk to my parents and other people who use Skype ;)

If I want screen sharing I'll use fucking TeamViewer. Give me basic IM, voice and maybe video support without a plugin or GTFO.

... so WTF is the point? The whole reason I want a webapp is so I have to install *less* shit on my computers.

The problem with having a single such tool is that the ISPs will prioritize traffic generated by it, just like they do with speedtest.net etc.

How would you work around that without implementing measures that make the measurement of net neutrality related parameters impossible? VPN, for instance, would stop the ISP from prioritizing the measurement tool's data, but it would also prevent any of the potentially Net Neutrality threatening QoS/Blocking you're trying to measure in the first place. Any ideas?

Let me preface this by saying I'm typing this on a custom-built Win7 (& Win8.1/Win10/Ubuntu/ARCH/Debian if you include the dual boot and VMs) PC, I have a Win8.1 tablet on my nightstand and run Windows 7 and Debian on my laptop... but I kinda doubt that.

The MBPs have far far far (~100Wh vs. ~50Wh) Battery life, PCIe-based SSDs vs. (m)SATA, MagSafe... oh and they work OOTB in regards to a POSIX system. The only thing I'd consider genuinely *better* on the M3800 is the screen, and maye the non-backspace delete button :D

Huh... and here I've been hearing that CoreAudio makes everything pro audio so much better on Macs. I can't really complain on Win7, but I suppose the ASIO drivers for a lot of interfaces could be more stable...

Have you ever been at the store and wondered if there was anything else you needed to replenish in your fridge? Wouldn't it be great to pull up a webcam view of the interior right at that moment? Or how about making sure your oven and stove and iron are off? Or getting a video call on your smartphone when someone rings your doorbell while you're not home?

These are just a few of the things that I personally would find useful or at least interesting - I'm sure other people have entirely different lists of things that would be useful or interesting to them. However, in order to allow all of us to do the things we want, we need to first connect, well, pretty much everything to the internet.

It needs to be well-planned and secure, of course... which is why I won't be installing any of this stuff unless I've vetted it myself first.