A comment on the linked story notes Flurry is only counting cellular activations. This ignores the majority of tablets that are WiFi only

Wow, $0.5B of investment without even showing a product? It sounds like they've perfected the Reality Distortion Field.

+1. Our kids' middle school also jumped on the iPad bandwagon. For the most part, the kids hated it. The iPads didn't displace any textbooks, so it was 2 lbs of extra deadweight in their backpacks (tablet+mandatory case & keyboard). It was a source of stress, because on the rare occasions they were actually used in class, you got marked down if your iPad wasn't charged. Assignments still had be printed out and turned in on paper, so a separate PC/Mac was still required. The tablets were supposedly locked down to prevent loading games, etc. but tech-savvy students usually found work-arounds. And some of the edu-ware screw-ups were truly appalling - like the "spelling test" app that didn't disable the iOS dictionary feature. Fortunately, the high-school principals are saner. Quote one: "No, I won't bring tech like tablets into the school just because it's new shiny. It really has to fulfill a serious purpose or solve real problems". Amen.

+1 Concerns about battery life. Intel CPUs are not known to be light on power consumption. Couple that with a substantially smaller battery and I doubt this device will last more than a few hours. Remember laptops in the 1990's?

When the settlement was first announced (works out to $1-2K/defendant) I sent a complaint about the small amount to the generic email address at the plaintiff's law firm. Much to my surprise, one of the lawyers on the case contacted me back. He pointed out the defendant's legal budgets are essentially infinite, and they are more than willing to fight the case to the supreme court. Once you get there, a victory by the plaintiffs are not assured. Remember, these are the guys who handed down Citizen's United. Do you want a new TV now, or a very(!) small chance to get a new car 5-10 years from now? That's what it comes down to.

This is fading away. The better solution is something like PhoneGap. This lets you build mobile cross platforms apps in HTML/JavaScript.

Yes, Eudora hasn't updated since '06, but it's still by far my favorite email client.

I'm glad to hear Google is dedicating resources to finding exploits in Internet softw...hey, wait, where'd my Bitcoins go???

You can learn more about the NSA data center here.

+1. It seems like the results are perhaps keying off the compression artifacts introduced rather than any fundamental image data. Moreover, the compression artifacts are consistent from video to video, forming a consistent training set.

This cartoon is rapidly becoming reality. What? Could you speak closer to the lampshade, please?

Leave it to Microsoft to screw up the map.

I was also annoyed by the possible $3B win vs. $324M settlement, so I contacted one of the class action plaintiff's lawyers. He called back and I spent about 20 minutes on the phone with him. Among other things, he pointed out the defendants in the case (Apple et. al) have monster legal budgets, and the case will very likely (after many years) be fought all the way to the Supreme court. The current SCOTUS is more corporate than citizen friendly (witness Citizens United, etc.) and a win there is -not- assured. It is sickening to see the lawyers get a big payday, while you (the class member engineers you) are getting a new TV instead of a new car. But the TV is a sure deal, the car most likely is not.

Graphical programming languages were a popular PhD topic 25-30 years ago. You can find them today in systems targeted at kids or non-technical users. But you won't find them anywhere near serious software development. Text is an incredibly dense and powerful medium for communicating with machines. The problem with graphics for programming is they do not scale well. Consider a moderately complex problem, solved in, say, several thousand lines of code. The same thing expressed graphically starts using dozens of pages (or bubbles, or nodes or whatever graphics) to express the same thing. It gets ugly quick.

Several years ago, I did the side by side experiment of expressing the same non-trivial digital circuit (a four digit stopwatch with a multiplexed display) as both a schematic diagram, and as text with Verilog. The graphic (schematic) version was much more time consuming, and *much* harder to modify than the text-based Verilog. It became very clear why digital circuit designers abandoned graphics and switched text for complex designs.