It *is* true that I find a few faults with the Kindle Fire in my early use of it. Most of these could indeed be fixed with software updates, and I think at least some of them *will* be. In part this is just that the Amazon Marketplace has much less than the Android Marketplace... I confess I have not tried side-loading applications, and am not sure how hard that would/will be.

* I'd really like a native GMail app like I have on my Android phone. The mobile website is kind of OK, but it completely depends on Wifi access, unlike the phone app which caches the latest emails.
* Possibly a really native Facebook app would be nicer than the webpage too, although the latest update to my Android phone FB app looks ever more similar to the web page anyway.
* Multi-user would definitely be nice, but I think this is unlikely to happen.
* I think the Words-to-Go app is really nice as a PDF reader (Acrobat is OK, but I don't like it as well in the Kindle/Android version). However, in a slightly annoying inconsistency in user interface, the latest Books/Documents/Apps/Webpage/Music/etc. all appear on the "top shelf" but getting to a PDF document (or the various other formats, mostly MS-Office related) requires the different (more desktop-like) process of launch-application/open-recent-file. The logical thing would be to let the documents read by applications like this get "top shelf" icons too. Possibly the same is true of the latest picture/video/whatever that I viewed in Gallery (which is also a launch-then-run procedure like a desktop).

I think I might prefer an external volume rocker like some users have said, and I'm not in love with the placement of the on/sleep/off button. But those are minor issues, and I don't *hate* either choice.

I am extremely happy with my Kindle Fire, far more than I would be with an iPad if someone had given me one for free. The form factor is right for the airplane and for reading in bed, much more useful for what I want it for than a 10" tablet would be.

It's true that exactly like the iPad, the iPhone, every Android phone, every other Android tablet, HP's ill fated WebOS tablet, most default OSX, Linux, and Windows installation with auto-login enabled, etc. that there is no privacy protection. It's a single user device, and anyone who sees the device can pretty easily determine what its user was doing on it recently (and in general). That is indeed perhaps a weakness, and I wouldn't mind having Android devices (especially tablets, but perhaps phones also) be multiuser (likewise for the iWhatever stuff).

During my most recent plane trip with my Kindle Fire, which unlike an iPad fits in my pocket, I:

* Read a variety of documents sent to the device from web pages using the Firefox Readability plugin
* Read some PDF documents
* Read (part of) some books that I purchased from Amazon
* Watched a video that I downloaded directly onto the device from a 3rd party website (in anticipation of flight)
* Listened to some music I had put locally onto the device
* Played a few moves of Words with Friends before takeoff
* Played Plants vs. Zombies while in flight
* Checked GMail and Facebook and Google+ quickly before takeoff (using Wifi connection to hotspot)

In every respect that I can see, not least including price, but even more so including Freedom, the Kindle Fire is a far better device than the iPad is.

I am extremely happy with my Kindle Fire, far more than I would be with an iPad if someone had given me one for free. The form factor is right for the airplane and for reading in bed, much more useful for what I want it for than a 10" tablet would be.

It's true that exactly like the iPad, the iPhone, every Android phone, every other Android tablet, HP's ill fated WebOS tablet, most default OSX, Linux, and Windows installation with auto-login enabled, etc. that there is no privacy protection. It's a single user device, and anyone who sees the device can pretty easily determine what its user was doing on it recently (and in general). That is indeed perhaps a weakness, and I wouldn't mind having Android devices (especially tablets, but perhaps phones also) be multiuser (likewise for the iWhatever stuff).

During my most recent plane trip with my Kindle Fire, which unlike an iPad fits in my pocket, I:

* Read a variety of documents sent to the device from web pages using the Firefox Readability plugin
* Read some PDF documents
* Read (part of) some books that I purchased from Amazon
* Watched a video that I downloaded directly onto the device from a 3rd party website (in anticipation of flight)
* Listened to some music I had put locally onto the device
* Played a few moves of Words with Friends before takeoff
* Played Plants vs. Zombies while in flight
* Checked GMail and Facebook and Google+ quickly before takeoff (using Wifi connection to hotspot)

In every respect that I can see, not least including price, but even more so including Freedom, the Kindle Fire is a far better device than the iPad is.

I can actually see a reasonable discovery purpose in looking at the contents of FB pages, and that is mentioned in the article. For example, if the parties have made comments about how responsible they might be in a custodial role (something suggested in article), that could be germane.

But FB isn't really a walled garden anymore. Now there is a quite good "export my data" functionality within it. A reasonable judge's order would simply be for exchange of that downloaded data, which will contain all the relevant background that might exist with past posts. Obviously, this is contingent on parties not deleting old posts first, but other posters have already noted how doing that would be spoilation of evidence (and if parties would do that, they could equally do so with a live account after passwords were shared).

I do recognize that the article mentioned "dating sites" too. Those sites may still be walled gardens, and may well not provide easy data export capabilities. For those, the only way to look at relevant posts/emails/profiles/etc. might indeed be password sharing. Of course, who knows what general data policies those sites have--i.e. are messages automatically deleted after N days, and archives inaccessible to users? Access to password may or may not reveal the full history of site usage.

I would put it in exactly the opposite way. A GUI is an efficient way of doing a small number of specialized tasks. For more general requirements, a (good) CLI always wins... and wins by many orders of magnitude. That said, editing graphics and videos is absolutely one area where a GUI often wins. That's mostly because our interaction and understanding of those data formats is inherently visual, and most work with them is interactive. There's usually no systematic or programmatic way to describe what we want done... and in fact, what we want emerges out of interactions with the data.

On the other hand, for things that can be systematized--even on an ad hoc basis--a CLI might be hundreds or thousands of times easier. I preview pictures like everyone. I also often, for example, look for data and patterns in files. To do that, I can do things like (off the cuff):

        % find /home -name *.csv | grep "Date: 2011-1[01]" | cut -d, -f1,6 > interesting.data

If I happen to have a thousand files in various directories that match the name pattern, and many of them have records for dates in Oct-Nov 2011 with a field I care about, what exactly might I do in a GUI?! Spend hours and hours hunting for the files, opening each, copying the data, etc? I could, but that would suck. Or I could also certainly write a *program* in some language other than bash to walk the directories, open the files, etc. But that's much less interactive and more clumsy than just doing it with one command (albeit, some other programming languages let you express something similar with little more text than the bash line... however, those are still matters of typing the write text, not of clicking on icons and dragging a mouse around).

Now clearly for some frequently repeated tasks, makers of applications and operating systems add in special menus and toolbars to do complex tasks like the above line. But those menus, dialogs, etc. always wind up being less flexible than the command-line and missing future uses that are easy to express with commonplace command-line simple tools (like find, grep, cut, etc).

Most of the comments below--and to a large degree the source article--seem to implicitly assume that all discussion of programming languages happens on Stack Overflow. There probably is some difference in the average experience level of programmer of various languages. But it's also almost certainly the case that OTHER websites also discuss programming languages. For example, someone interested in finding a solution to Python puzzle might well go to the Python Cookbook (http://code.activestate.com/recipes/langs/python/) rather than Stack Overflow. Similarly, to varying degrees, for all the other languages mentioned (with various sites appropriate to each). All this really amounts to is that "Stack Overflow is a good place to find info on languages X, Y, Z; but not so good for A, B, C" ... and this effect is somewhat self-reinforcing, as users of the "underrepresented languages" look elsewhere for help.

The mere distribution of specialization on various websites says nothing at all about the quality, difficulty, breadth of use, or much anything else about the languages themselves.

Aaaghh!

Python is, of course, a STRONGLY typed language (not untyped). It is also DYNAMICALLY typed rather than STATICALLY. But these issues are orthogonal, and languages exist in every quadrant of the type system grid implied.

Well... at 46 yo, I've learned probably about a dozen new programming languages since I was a spry 40 yo. OK, a number of those I've "learned" relatively superficially... I wish I had more opportunities to get my hands dirtier on a daily basis with all the languages I've only played with a little in the last few years, but I get paid quite a bit to do relatively few things.

Actually, over the last few years, I've *written* at least two languages. Not quite programming languages, but one markup language and one, well "annotated grammar description" I guess you'd call it. Yes, I know that NIH syndrome is a bad thing, but there's a reason why I wrote what I did (trust me). On the shelves near me I have books on about a dozen PLs that I either haven't worked with at all, or have touched passingly; it wouldn't be true to say I'm actively reading all of those books, but I certainly glance at them.

Seriously? WTF?

I'm not sure any review really merits the front page, but surely if one must appear it could be from an actual news site.... perhaps even from a technology-oriented site.

Have you tried non-transparent tape?

I can't speak to what Amazon measured as "50%" nor what PhrostyMcByte measured at "6%" ... they both sound like strange attempts to connote more than measure. However, I WILL note that I happened to buy my partner a Kindle 2 shortly before the Kindle 3 launch, and used the device enough to find it "pretty good, but I sure wish the contrast was better." This is subjective, but definitely what I found in the conditions in which I normally read (she used it more than I did, but I read enough on it to get a sense). Then that Kindle 2 had a hardware problem not related to the screen, and the helpful Amazon rep basically told her "get the Kindle 3 instead" ... and that change actually wound up costing a negative amount, since we went to Wifi only and returned the Kindle 2 within warranty for full refund. Anyway, with the Kindle 3, my subjective sense is "contrast is not an issue I need to think about."

So I don't know what quantitative percentage difference that is, nor exactly what a percentage would measure. But as a threshold thing, it went from noticeably lacking to nothing to worry about. I assume that the improvements to other brands of e-ink readers have crossed a similar threshold by now, and my guess is that they have all reached "good enough" (there are other things I would wish better: I have software freeze-ups on my Kindle DX that really suck; I wish the flicker on page turn was much less [and it could be with a smarter algorithm for pixels to change]; the interface could be improved; etc. ... but e-ink itself seems to have reached maturity).

@TrentTheTheif: Do you mean that you can uninstall everything because you've already rooted? On my T-Mobile G2--while generally an excellent phone--I am stuck with several irritating and stupid unremovable apps that T-Mobile stuck on there. I probably should get around to rooting to get rid of them, but I certainly can't do so in stock configuration.

Oops... my case is actually FAR stronger than I wrote. The actual number of distinguishable states of my terminal isn't 256*4320. It is 256**4320. Which is to say, around 4e10405. That is also VASTLY more than the number of particles in the universe, which is a measly 1e84 or something.

The reason terminals are so useful is because they have greater usable information density than really any other interface. The article desperately misses this in its lead about the 2.3 megapixels of display space, and the presumed potential information content. But a terminal has quite a lot of information in it! Far more information--from a human usability POV--than the oversized icons this TermKit uses to adorn every small bit of textual information.

For example, on my MacBook Pro, using a pretty large font size, I run a 90x48 terminal (with multiple tabs, but that's a different issue). This terminal occupies approximately half of my display (sometimes I put another one next to it, though there's slight overlap at my screen size, font size, frame elements, dock/menu bar, etc). Now, as we can see using the 'calc' utility I wrote for systems I work on:

    505-Documents % calc 90x48 # result on stdout, canonical form of expression on stderr
    90x48
    4320

Well, 4k-ish characters isn't that many positions (but it's not tiny already), but each of those characters might be any of approximately 256 values. Saying exactly how many it is is a little tricky though. Many of my tools (e.g. the bash prompt itself, ls, less with lesspipe, vim, etc) colorize output, making for multiple easy distinguishable ways the letter 'A' might appear. On the other hand, while high-bit characters are not generally usefully or frequently displayed, modern terminals *do* display many thousands of Unicode characters potentially. So as an approximation, we might say that there are approximately 1.1M easily distinguishable states of my terminal. I know, of course, that, most of the time most of the characters that display are along the left edge of my terminal, and the right side is largely blank. But nonetheless, there are at least a couple 100k states that are both plausible and importantly EASILY distinguishable... not *instantly* distinguishable, of course. Obviously, my eyes need to flit back and forth a while to compare, say, the file sizes and permissions of a bunch of things that show up in an 'ls -l' display. But it is still at least an order of magnitude more information than I'd discern with equal ease using TermKit (or, say, using a GUI file manager like Finder) to look at the same 'ls -l' directory.

Obviously, the theoretical information content of a high-res display is enormous. If I even have a 16-bit display, running somewhere over 1.5 megapixels (my screen is apparently slightly lower res than Steve Wittens') that's something like... well, more than the number of particles in the universe, possible states (e.g. (2**16)**(1680*1050)). But in fact, as a human, I really can't meaningfully distinguish nearly any of those states. I can't even *see* individual pixels, nor distinguish very close colors very well. But even within my actual perceptual threshold, I cannot give direct meaning to a slight color difference in some small part of the GUI screen, except in very broad categories that contain a few bits of information each. My recognition and discernment of the meaning of *characters* of my native language is far greater than some other graphical abstraction.

I wrote about my preferred dual-monitor setup a while back as a guest editorial at: http://onyourdesktop.blogspot.com/2007/07/david-mertz.html

That's still pretty much what I like. I wish the screenshot there was from the work machine I describe in the article, with dual 30" screens. Sadly, I haven't had such nice desktop real estate elsewhere (neither at home nor other workplaces). But what I do typically work with in my own office space nowadays (I'm a consultant, so it's really my own space) is still two screens, though not identical in dimension. I use a (company provided) laptop hooked up to an external 24" monitor (1920x1200--those widescreen ones with only 1080 vertical pixels feel like they rob me of important vertical space). On this main consulting setup I keep a pretty fixed set of apps open... sadly, the work laptop is Windows 7, and I can't choose otherwise. But my setup hides most negatives of that OS.

To the left, on the laptop screen, everything maximized:
  * Email client (usually in front)
  * Version control GUI

To the right, on the external screen:
  * Code editor (jEdit) maximized. This allows two full panes of code, and one
        slightly smaller one for file navigation, project manager, search results, etc
        (my editor tabs between different functions in the utility pane). Each code
        pane is about 85x65 in a reasonably large font. My editor also lets me hide
        all the frame elements, title bar, etc, which removes the look of Windows and
        gives me a couple extra rows of code.
  * Web browser, full vertical, but only about half the total screen with. Lots of tabs
  * Two side-by-side SSH sessions, each one about 90x70 characters. These connect
        to the real machines where I do work. Often I run vim in these session to edit
        code on the remote machines, but also to run test commands, launch compilation,
        etc.
  * Sometimes a chat window or two that use the full monitor height.
  * Sometimes a PDF viewer or two, usually maximized and two-page display

Obviously, I have to switch focus sometimes on the right (external) monitor. But most times I am just looking at the two large SSH windows. It's a bit disjunctive what I edit in my local text editor versus what I edit in my two "panes" of vim on the SSH terminals; but either way I can see a similar two full screens of code to compare visually, which is really useful (e.g. one I use to look at the code of the supporting library while in the other pane I write the code that calls into it; or I am working on two related scripts and seeing both next to each other helps synchronize changes).