I've has my Galaxy Tab 10.1 for a couple of months. Before that I had a Nook Color that I rooted. I started with the NC because I wasn't sure if I would have a use for a tablet, and the NC was half the price of the Tab.

There's no doubt these are primarily consumption devices; although they can be used for creation, that's not their strength and the more creative work you do on them the less fun it gets. What surprised me was just how much of my ordinary computer use was consumptive, and that now it's easier to squeeze in a bit of consumption here and there without resorting to a full computer. Instant on, super-long battery life, and an OS that's simplified make a huge difference.

As much as I was surprised how much I now do on my Tab (so much so that my regular computer gets dusty), imagine what it's like for people that really do want a computer "appliance". Apple created an entire market of consumers out of people who previously weren't consumers: people who didn't want the hassle of [another] computer. This is part of the magic of the iPad, and why nearly 30 million have been sold. The TouchPad's demise doesn't tell us much about the tablet market overall except that the TouchPad wasn't what people wanted compared to an iPad. Android has similar market-share (and mind-share) problems, only differing in degree.

Google should be throwing money at devs to write Android tablet apps if they want to catch up to Apple, our even just stay in the game. Otherwise they risk being marginalized, and if that happens on the tablet side it may leak over to the phone side.

The silly thing is, if you do it with a shader in WebGL you can do 3D raytraced fractals in real time in a browser. Doing this kind of thing in JavaScript really just shows how incredibly inefficient at number crunching JavaScript is. I mean, yes, you CAN do it... but really why should you? For the detail levels they're showing, a native application is 1000x* faster.

*Not directly measured. But I have some experience in this area.

Actually that's fine, too. If they start blocking people who don't spend enough money pre-emptively then suddenly they've sent potential future customers directly to their competitors. If you stop someone from even being able to be your customer, you can be certain they will never change their mind.

It's the same thing that happens to sites that have a following, then erect a paywall and discover nobody reads the site any more. They take the paywall down, but the users never come back. Any site that tries to block people based on their non-consuming will find themselves abandoned.

Oddly enough, people were suggesting that the price for the iPad would be $800 or $900 or so, and yet it came out at $500 or $600. Samsung hasn't officially announced their price yet. Speculation is that it will be high, but it might not be.

An Atari 2600 is so amazingly simple that there is little in there to fail. The PS3, on the other hand, has a bazillion failure points by comparison...

Numeric grades are just as prone to inflation.

Shareholders don't invest money into MS to get no return on their investment; they want to see growth in the stock price and/or dividends, because that's what matters to them. If the stock price stays flat even while profits soar, investors are right to ask where the hell the return on their investment is.

Yes, games exist that teach kids things besides how to use computers and how to play games. 360Ed makes some. (Disclosure: I work there.)

Murdoch doesn't want a paywall. He wants Google to pay him, not the end user, because Google has deeper pockets and it's a battle that can be fought once and won. Getting users to pay would require winning them over constantly and is more work, especially when they're already used to free.

Stop playing your driving games in third-person view.

If only it were that simple. Users (a) aren't always aware that they're using an outdated browser and (b) will therefore simply blame your site rather than their browser. Unless you tell them explicitly their browser is at fault, they will not know.