This is a parroting of a marketing-derived press release. Move along. I think I'm going to move along. Thanks for the memories, Slashdot.

You do realize, in the post-Snowden era, that the NSA probably already forwarded your Slashdot submission along with your social security number and those of your 8 closest relatives to the RIAA, dont you? :-P

That's about the silliest thing I've heard today. A television screen, even in 1984, was probably a computer monitor. Granted it was NTSC, but around that time most televisions were switched over to digital tuners (which are computers).

I mean, I'm a computer programmer, and I spend my day working in Visual Studio, vim, and NetBeans (depending on what I'm doing). By that logic, I never see a computer either, at least not the one I'm working on. I spend most of my day in an RDP session on a retired tradeshow 27" iMac. I have to touch xcode once in a while, but I mostly keep it for the real estate.

Animated PNG support is terrible... see:

http://caniuse.com/apng

No IE, no Chrome, Opera dropped it when they went to Webkit, no iPhone, no Android...
looks like it's pretty much only available on 20%ish of desktop browsers and pretty much nothing mobile. You aren't going to get anyone to use it in a public-facing web application yet. Remember the days of "this site looks best in (Internet Explorer/Netscape/whatever)"... let's not do that again.

Maybe if the HTML 5 standard said that conforming user agents have to do this it would put a little more umph behind it. Of course, the standard seems to follow browser development in many cases now, not the other way around.

"...I'm planning to do a cross-country trip quite soon with a car..."

Just a bit of advice I got from my sister this March after she and her husband drove from Boulder, CO to Decatur, IL:

"Never accidentally drive across Kansas. It's surprisingly wide."

I'm a QA analyst for a software company. My workplace is saturated with WiFi. My wife has a cheap-but-has-everything-she-wants HTC One V (Android ICS) with prepaid Virgin Moble. I live 0.75 miles from my home, which is also saturated with WiFi. I get by on just an iPod Touch 4, with vTok for calls between me and my wife. We have $7/mo voip service at home for a pseudo-landline, but I bet I could put a client on the iPod if I wanted to.

Behold the phaser.

Progress bars do not make sequences of actions complete any faster. In fact, they make them slower.

That being said, take for example an installer that must perform the following steps during an upgrade:

0. Figure out how many files need to be replaced.
1. Replace 30 files of varying sizes.
2. Add 10 files.
3. Update a half million rows inn a table with a million rows setting a column to a computed value based on some predicates.
4. Run a third party installation mechanism (MSM?) for a supporting library, etc.

Modern computers are time-sharing systems. Each process that involves computation is at the mercy of the scheduler in the kernel to give it the cycles it needs to complete. That means that even if you measure the time it takes to complete some process, it's not going to be the same a second time, because the installation process doesn't get undivided attention.

Steps 0 - 2 - you're at the mercy of the IO buses, hard disk, antivirus software interfering, etc.
Step 3 - What shape are the database statistics in? How efficiently can you apply the predicates? What does the distribution of the data look like? You can't tell this ahead of time...
Step 4 - Does this third party installer provide you some sort of metrics as it runs?

These are the sorts of problems to be overcome to do an accurate progress bar. In short, they aren't worth overcoming.

I celebrate the new year by attending Mass for the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God.

This isn't really "Good-old Gregorian January 1st". When Gregory XIII introduced the new calendar in the 16th century, new year's day was the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ, and that's the way the calendar was until the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council restored the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God to the 1st, which is when it had been celebrated in ancient times since the early councils established the dogma of Theotokos.

So, I think I'd rather say I celebrate the New-Fangled Gregorian January 1st.

I have an iPad2, which I use for all indoor reading with the Kindle and Bluefire apps. I also had, before the iPad2, a Sony PRS-300 and I still use it for outdoor reading. The iPad2 is already bordering obsolete, but the Sony still does what I want. It's only function is e-reading, and I just don't see how, except the battery being too expensive to replace, I would justify replacing it in the next couple years. When we get something like a piece of paper (a killer form factor) for e-readers, I will replace it.

I guess what I'm saying is that the market is declining because people already have them.

For that TI-8x look and feel...

I use Andi Graph. http://dougmelton.com/android/andie-graph/ . It's free if you already own a TI calculator. If you don't, you are morally obligated to purchase a TI calculator so that you can say you've paid for the software. It is exactly like using a real TI-8x calculator except the buttons are not tactile.

It runs faster than a real TI-8x on an HTC One V phone, which is a low-end ICS phone. If you want to run it on a PC, get the Android emulator from Google.

If you don't have your cable to rip the ROM from your calculator, you can find the ROM using Google. I don't think there is a version for iOS.

There are TI-83/83+/85/86 emulators for Android. You just load a TI ROM into them and you're done. Having tried it, here are the biggest problems:

1. Battery life sucks.
2. The touchscreen is a lousy keypad for a calc with that many buttons.

I know that many profs won't allow these devices during tests because of the potential for communicating with other people using them during the tests.

Apple will never allow these emulators on iDevices. They don't like people running arbitrary code in the walled garden. zShell anyone?

I can't believe there isn't a cesspool of litigation between these companies yet.

it's a space sta^h^h^h datacenter.