As a longtime software developer and all around computer power user, I find my tablet to be fairly useless. It has a lousy onscreen keyboard, runs limited applications, and can't really be used to do MANY of the really cool things that I've spent the past 20 years doing on computers.

My wife, on the other hand, is a technophobe schoolteacher, and is rarely seperated from it nowadays. It gives her a simple way to do her pointless social and entertainment things...Facebook, email, Youtube, etc...without having to deal with all of that "computery" stuff. If you ask her, she'll tell you that it's the greatest bit of technology ever invented.

But the real eye opener came from my kids, including my about-to-go-to-college daughter who is incredibly computer literate and who I taught the fundamentals of BASIC coding when she was only four years old. To her, and my 14 year old son, it's just another computing device. There are some things that are better on computers, and some things that are better on tablets (who wants to watch a streaming movie on a laptop with a keyboard in the way?) To them, the entire discussion is silly, as both devices have their own purposes. The kids simply move back and forth between them without a second thought.

We are contrained by the limits of our own prejudices and experiences.

GIGabyte? Heh, one of my DNS servers still has an ancient Conner 850MB drive that has been happily spinning away for at least 15 years. Other than replacing a power supply and a couple fans, it (and the ancient Pentium Pro server it's connected to) have been the most durable computers I've ever owned! Of course, since it only acting as a backup DNS server and runs an equally ancient Slackware build (3.9!), it doesn't actually do all that much work. At this point, it's mostly just an experiment to see how long it can actually run before releasing its magic smoke.

They're also good at keeping small veggie gardens warm. I live in a part of California that freezes 10-15 days a year, and not all at once. I have a four 50sf raised bed veggie gardens behind my house, and if they're properly tented, I can grow year round (tomatoes, melons, lettuce, zucchini, beans, radish, asparagus, and a half dozen others.) I toss a 60 watt tough duty bulb in a waterproof droplight casing into each of the gardens to keep them warm when the temps drop below freezing, and keep a small 25 watt bulb burning in the gardens when we get sustained temps under 40. A single 60 watt bulb is more than sufficient to keep the garden above freezing, and to keep the plants alive. A single 25 watt bulb generates enough heat to raise the internal temp by 15-20 degrees.

You can't do that with a CFL and dedicated heaters would burn a LOT more power. They would also be very unsafe...a bulb in a water-resistant housing can be used outdoors in the rain...find a space heater that can do the same thing without creating an electrocution risk.

I work in a university environment and have been programming for...a while...so when my son's Boy Scout troop approached me about teaching programming to some interested boys, I did a ton of research and came up with Alice.

If the goal is to teach programming concepts and logic, then it doesn't get much better than Alice. The course materials are already written, the language is easy to use, it's supported by Carnegie Mellon, and it's completely free.

The greatest thing about Alice is that it's an entirely visual environment, and it gives immediate visual feedback to the students which is PERFECT for younger learners. Instead of scaring students off by throwing them straight into code-hell by forcing them to learn the syntax of Language X just to print "Hello World" to the screen, Alice allows students to learn the concepts of programming in an entirely mouse-driven environment...and they get to watch video animations generated by their software within minutes of starting. That sort of simplicity and feedback keeps younger learners interested and hooks kids who might otherwise see it all as "greek".

The only complaint I had from the group was that I had only three computers to teach eight boys...they were literally shoving each other out of the way to get a chance to program. That's probably the best endorsement anyone could give it.

Some people might complain that Language X or Language Y is better, but the reality is that you're teaching kids, and that any language they are taught today will be abandoned or heavily revised long before any of them are ready to jump into the field. As a teacher, you're better off teaching them in an environment where they can focus on concepts, and NOT syntax.

Go to Alice.Org>About>What is Alice and watch the video at the bottom. It shows the language in action, shows the feedback, and demonstrates the concepts it promotes.