Back in the early '90s I knew someone who was a tech writer and developer and became a beta tester for the Trackpoint, as it's actually called. She said that the test subjects universally hated the device. And then she added "So of course IBM immediately took them to production."

I work on Windows 7 by day, have a MacBook as my personal machine, and on my business trips I have a Android tablet for email and such. I took a look at the Surfaces in their first iteration, but the RT version was crippled, and the Surface Pro just didn't bring enough to the table. And to make the Pro an even harder sell, the Microsoft Store I went to had a bunch of intriguing ultrabooks on display (Lenovo Yoga, Dell XPS12, etc) that were real Windows 8 machines without the hardware compromises of the Surface Pro. The new version at it's higher price point blurs the line further. It ultimately boils down to "do I want to save $100 to have a device that weighs a pound less than an ultrabook". YMMV, but the choice is clear to me - The Surface tablets look and feel too much like toys for me to purchase one.

They won't have to outlaw them. You don't need laws when you have insurance companies. Once self-driven cars are declared safer, insurance rates will skyrocket for manually driven cars, so only the rich will be able to have one.

What I've seen in the 3 decades I've been in the industry is that the number of programmers using OldVanillaLang versus SilverBulletLang is less of an issue - Managers are often willing to go with a more resource-efficient solution, given that IT/MIS departments are often considered overhead on the bean counter spreadsheets. The thing that keeps managers on the OldVanillaLang track is the answers to the questions: "Supposed my SilverBulletLang guys leave - Who takes over their code? How do I evaluate SilverBulletLang developers in interviews? And since they're rare, can I afford them?"

Actually, at least in Central Texas, looking like a hawk might not be the companies' best move. Around here, crows gather a posse and harass the crap out of any raptor dumb enough to get within 30 meters of them. This UAV better have a nice rate of climb to escape that sort of mob.

My favorite pangram is Adobe's WoW-ish "Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow."

And at least in the case of Tumblr, the hack involved stealing addresses and subject lines from a handful of support accounts.

Tumblr informed me that the Zendesk hackers may have the email address and the subject lines of emails. The email content wasn't mentioned has part of the hacker's take, nor did they say that email accounts themselves were hacked. Nothing more than this, at least according to what I've received from Tumblr.

Removing the Start Button because it's rarely used is like removing the jack from your car because it's rarely used. Frequency of use is a different quality than necessity.

And I'm guessing you're gonna need a CAL for every Surface RT you want to connect to that Server 2012 you'll have to buy to make this all go.

Well, good thing it's rare. I've got a friend in Elgin with a herd of 20 - 30 sheep, which provide her livelihood. Poison grass would be a rather bad thing for her.

Really. After reading the article cited by the OP (I know, right?) I think the real title of the CNN story should have been "College Age Listeners Living in Atlanta, Georgia, USA Who Have Excellent Bandwidth And Who Probably Don't Pay The Data Charges For Their Devices Opt for Streaming Over Owning"

Ding, ding, ding. I think you've got it - This isn't targeted at the Angry Birds/Netflix crowd, it's targeted at the sort of firm I work for - A dyed-in-the-wool, Windows-logo-tattoo, full time MS Enterprise consultancy. So instead of pitching glue code to get our clients' projects working on iPads and Android tablets, we can suggest they spring for Surfaces instead, and let MS figure out the bits to get their own enterprise suites (Office, Dynamics CRM, SharePoint) working on these things instead of us.

And as the chair went through the window, the few witnessing it from below heard Schmidt from through the jagged opening screaming "Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!".