Android screens are rendered widget by widget, pixel by pixel for every screen modification (scroll, zoom, item state changed, etc.) and that means a lot of work is being done for every frame. This is a legacy of the original spec not requiring a dedicated gpu. Modern devices are getting them but the acceleration is sort of hacked into that gpuless model. iOS on the other hand didn't start with such a limiting assumption and paints everything to an open gl surface with a fixed camera. Most screen modifications like scroll and zoom are just basic gl transformations that don't require a re-rendering event. That's why it looks so smooth.

As far as I am aware, win32 which much of the .Net sdk is a thin shim over, is not going to be ported to ARM. The only part of windows that is going to be on the tablets is the new WinRT. .Net programs that use WinRT or don't depend on any part of the sdk that depends on win32 will work across both but that won't be as large of a number as you might think.

If DART catches on I bet you'll see something like PhoneGap or Titanium eventually.

That's partially true. In fact you can write JS style coffeescript and the js output of the compiler is just about as long as cs input. However coffeescript adds some nice syntax sugar that can translate into more complicated javascript. List comprehensions is a good example of this. The generated code isn't very complex and you could write it yourself with a little bit of effort but you don't have to. That's the main selling point of coffeescript. It takes a simpler syntax and translates it to the code you would have written yourself (if you are of any decent skill level). What it does not do abstract you away from all of the odd parts of javascript like 'this' being context based. It does help some like taking away the ability to use == and forcing everything to be ===. If you're going to do a lot of javascript I would still recommend doing it in coffeescript. If you get tired of coffeescript mid way through just switch over to using the last bit of compiled output and go from there.

The Touchpad won't. The card ui is nice but I haven't found much else innovative about it so far. HP failed to generate hype around it, they failed to generate much of dev community and they failed to put out hardware as good as the ipad and priced it at the same amount. At $200 dollars less than the ipad it would have been a compelling proposition because I could take the money and pop it into apps and accessories.

H2O is regulated. The government sets standards for its purity levels somewhat based on scientific studies. They set regulations on things like just how much arsenic in the water is safe to drink. I'm rather glad they don't take a Libertarian/Tea Party stance and leave it up to industry/big business to decide that for me. I for one am happy that for the most part I don't have to worry about my kids drinking tap water.

Yeah, I didn't realize that he had stopped posting for a long time.

Oracle dropped ruby support with this release.

Yes you do. :-)

No, he asterisked out "crud".

I used it earlier this year for writing a library. While it wasn't perfect it was passable. It may have crashed a few times but I never lost my work.

My friend bought the 17 inch model back then and ended up returning it because of that issue. I think it was resolved on those models but I'm not sure. He and I both bought the April model and are enjoying them. The two of us had previously had the original core duo (not core 2) version so the upgrade has been worth it. I recently put in 8 gigs of ram (much cheaper after market) and the thing flies even while running a couple vms. The only things I don't like is that I opted for the 7200 RPM drive which seems to eat the battery. The other thing is that the dumbest programs will kick the nvidia chipset on while on battery causing battery life to dwindle even faster. Why does Evernote need high end rendering?

Just curious, if Ruby is fading what do you see taking its place? My opinion is that it is just coming into its own. YARV and other proper vms are maturing at a rapid rate and Rails 3 seems to be a pretty nice framework. The testability with Cucumber and/or the other types of frameworks is beyond most anything I've seen lately. This is all coming from one who has been exploring Ruby and Rails for the last couple months.

A good compromise is to make sure your sudo setup is good, and disable root logins via ssh completely. You can combine ssh with a utility that will drop in temporary (or permanent) ipchains rules denying IPs or an IP block access to the ssh port after a number of bad password guesses. This way, you won't need your private key if logging on from another host, but still have good resistance against people trying to crack root from remote.