You get what you pay for.

Buy some shitty cheap OEM android tablet where 1 in 10 breaks in the hands of children, you got what you paid for.

The only joke about this is it costs a minimum $600 because of a subscription based pricing structure. So $50 spent on the actual tablet hardware and $550 spent on bullshit.

Not saying that iPad's are the solution, but you think a company set up to provide devices for the K - 12 age group might have invested a little more heavily in industrial design considering that children are not going to respect a device, especially if its handed to them for free.

Look, this is how economy works.

People make things.
People sell things.
People buy things.

If you take people out of making things and they loose their jobs they can't afford to buy things.

If you can't sell things, then there is no point to make more things, then a company goes out of business.

You can't have an economy where nobody works and no company can stay in business because nobody can afford to buy what they sell, regardless of how automated the whole process is.

So everybody simmer the fuck down and welcome your robotic overlords already.

not true, I have seen some truly beautiful pieces of shit in my experience.

Focusing on format and syntax is a misguided effort that simply hides problems with logic and intent. When a company focuses on coding style, you know you are headed down the wrong path. I have seen elegantly written and "well formatted" code that simply does not work past a few limited test cases.

Saying good code is well formatted code is like telling someone that a good author needs to have beautiful handwriting. Just because someone writes with calligraphy does not make them Shakespeare or even a JK Rowling.

If you want to inspire a young student with software development, tell them to find a way to fix software development.

The problem I am seeing today is that in spite of all the years we have been writing code, stuff is getting less reliable and stable and overall, I find the user experience of most technical things today appalling.

Obviously nothing that is being applied towards software development is working.

I find the Internet today to be worse then it ever has been. For instance I have a 50mbps connection and yet frequently I can't even load google.com because my browser tells me the connection is lost. How can today's broadband be even more unreliable then when I used to browse the internet using dialup?

I have a new Logitech remote that will freeze and not respond about 10 times an evening, in spite of about a dozen firmware updates applied already for it.

Most of the features of my "smart" TV are useless.

Games and Apps on my Android tablet or iPod Touch crash frequently and are updated regularly.

The most "advanced" OS on the planet, OS X, hangs on my every several days forcing a reboot.

There are rampant problems with a general lack of security of all digitally connected things. iOS 7 already has had 2 patches to fix security issues.

And I won't even touch all the issues that came out of Redmond over the years.

So there is a real big problem in software development, and it comes from people assuming they know how to write good software, but then, lets face it, good software is NOT being delivered today.

There needs to be a fundamental paradigm shift in how we develop software. The idea of releasing beta's, patching frequently, or Google's approach to update on a daily basis is no longer acceptable. There is no reason why "flawless" cannot be an objective to describe the user experience of using device or application. There is no reason why we cannot write flawless code. We have more processing power on our phones then we used to have on a supercomputer from 30 years ago, why can't we harness that power to develop a software process that produces zero bugs?

So, if you truly want to inspire a new generation of coders, forget about trying to entice then with current concepts in software development. Show them all the current problems with software development and then get them young minds thinking about solutions for a new era where software bugs and defects simply don't occur.

That is the problem with space and weapon research, is the "trickle" of innovation that comes out of it.

Imagine what could be accomplished if the US spent 1 trillion in energy research, or curing cancer, or other such solutions, instead of spending a trillion a year bombing people in the middle east?

We give trillions to NASA to find out the Moon is a big lump of dust and rock, and we get memory foam beds out of the deal?

I would rather we refocus research spending on the REAL problems on our planet like energy. I think that if we focus a trillion into energy research, we could easily say the trickle down applications could make space travel easier or a weapons better, but at least we are no longer obsessed about wasting money on vapid shit like water on Mars.

I think we better start spending money on solving problems for billions of people rather then spending it to send a few astronauts to Mars or to prove U.S. has a bigger dick then the other countries..

Curved or flexible phones will be a fad that ends quickly.

Consider the uselessness of a touch devices with a concave or floppy limp screen?

While a curved phone works great for making a call by holding it up to your face, MOST people don't use phones in this way anymore. The smartphone is no longer a "phone" platform, its a computing device with a telephony feature.

Focusing too much on making the "call" feature of a smartphone, when it already works great anyways with a flat surface, will only make the other 99% of the features more annoying to use.

I do think there is a market for curved screens in other markets, but for phones its a pointlessly vain design choice.

Why would one assume IBM would try and create a competitive search product, instead, say, sell Watson to Google to improve Google's search, and then also sell Watson to Yahoo, and iCloud, and Bing, and every other search/cloud platform.

Why throw your eggs into one basket when there are so many other people that have already baked the cake? IBM trying to compete with Google will fail, regardless if Watson is even better, however IBM helping to power Google, and others, is a huge win.

IBM doesn't have the mindset to create a consumer based product. Everything they have done consumer wise has failed, it only makes sense for IBM to power the search engines and clouds in the future.

Correction, Microsoft WAS evil.

Microsoft no longer has the market influence to be evil.

I mean you can quote history and claim to still be pissed off about something that happened 30 years ago but is no longer relevant today, or you can move on with your life.

There are significantly more evil companies that actually have market influence and relevance today that have corrupted a new generation of Luddites in ways worse the Microsoft could even imagine.

Welcome to Slashdot, I see this is your first time viewing this website given your incredulity over how Microsoft is perceived poorly here.

Make 4, sell 4, claim you are a hit!

I will agree that perhaps Microsoft could be diligent and keep releasing the same thing and it will eventually sell. I mean you have to realize that in spite of Windows gaining nearly 95% PC market back in the day, Microsoft never had rapid adoption of new versions of their OS. I mean how many people say "I'll wait for the service pack" when deciding when to update to a new version of Windows, and a significant portion of people have never upgraded past Windows XP.

The same kind of sentimentality could happen with Microsoft's hardware. Don't buy version 1 of a product, wait for them to work out their quirks and then buy version 2 or 3. Perhaps we are starting to see this trend with Surface. Certainly early adopters of Xbox360 and Zune paid the price of not waiting.

Realize that Microsoft still has a significant market of corporate users. These corporate users are still clamoring to have a GOOD Windows tablet that works seamlessly with Microsoft's infrastructure. You can berate Microsoft all you want and claim Linux is superior or other Slashdot ingratiating FUD, but the reality is corporations run on Microsoft, period. If Microsoft can find a tablet to hook into the corporate market, it will be a huge win. Whether that trickles over into the consumer markets will yet to be seen, but you can be sure some CEO using a Windows tablet at work all day long is not going to come home to an iPad.

But, Microsoft hasn't figure out the magic yet that will get the corporate crowd to flock to Surface. Certainly my foray into this territory leaves a lot to be desired for when I was handed a Surface Pro to develop for. A Tablet/PC hybrid doesn't work well in either situation, using touch on a standard Windows desktop is useless, and Microsoft's attempt to force Metro on the desktop user base was equally ill conceived. My Surface Pro sits in a box in a drawer in my desk and I only pull it out to test software on once in a while. I don't see anything about Surface Pro 2 that will make me change that.

While these faults may have sealed the company's fate, I won't rule them out just yet. Perhaps all they need to do is to keep the Surface brand alive till Version 3, which seems to be their magic number in terms of when a product finally takes off.

Yes but I expect more out of Apple because they brazenly claim to be superior to everyone else, and yet offer trivial updates and no real innovation for the first 6 versions of their iPhone, and even the iPhone 5s refresh is only skin deep in terms of innovation.

I will start calling Google out when they have gone through 6 intervals of Nexus X devices and nothing has changed except the thickness of the phone, but the differences in Nexus 4 to 5 are more numerous than the differences between even iPhone 4 and iPhone 5, so they have a little more edge on innovation then Apple does.

Naw, I would argue that having the fastest phone was only a deciding factor when Apple started boasting about their new 64bit CPU in the iPhone 5s. Prior to this month the average consumer would not even know or care if their phone had 1, 2 or 4 cores or how many goggleflops it was able to perform.

Apple decided the only way they can differentiate their iPhone 5s amidst all the comments that they are no longer innovative is to create a competitive market based on useless CPU performance numbers, just like what Apple did with Retina displays. Before Retina, nobody cared about pixel density. Before A7, nobody cared about CPU performance or its bittyness. Before the iPhone 5s camera, nobody cared about the size of the CCD pixel on their phone camera.

Apple creates these vapid competitive advantages and then the consumers latch on to them and, unfortunately, the competitors feel the need to have to follow suit.

When did people not have the opportunity to host their own content?

For anybody that has ever hosted their own email server, Raspberry Pi is NOT the right platform to do this on. While you can easily set up an email server on any Linux distro, the reality is that you need something a little bit more powerful than Raspberry Pi to process the ten's of thousands of spam messages a minute you are going to get. And don't think that just because you are "clever" enough to set up your own email server that you will be immune to spam.

And it seems a lot the the Slashdot denizens seem to have forgotten the bygone era of the "Slashdot Effect", when people and companies used to try and host their own websites which couldn't handle a sudden influx of people that used the RTFA. Even a lot of corporate servers couldn't handle when hundreds of thousands of people suddenly jumped onto their websites all at once back in the day. This is why many corporations and consumers just started using hosted services which have a larger, dynamically scalable infrastructure to handle sudden jumps in traffic.

Finally, with things like Facebook and Twitter and a slew of other social networking services, these all but decimated the "personal blog". Nobody cares to go to www.myblog.com and read some mindless ranting from a conspiracy nut. The problem with "decentralization" is that you will be lost in obscurity.

So, aside from hosting anything more than a hobby website for friends and family to touch base with, good luck.

Not sure I want a version 1.0 designer baby.

But really, while I don't agree that buying a baby with specific beauty and vanity traits is the right application of this area of science, selecting an embryo that doesn't have some trait that will have a kid grow up with a hump or other genetic defect should be allowed. While many will scream abortion!, realize that 4 - 8 cells is not a sentient lifeform no matter how far you stretch your faith.

Because aside from the obvious sensational, "OMG a Tesla caught on fire" reactions, the reality of the situation is the car actually warned the driver that something was wrong and they should pull over immediately and get out, BEFORE the fire started.

Consider how many gas powered cars explode and kill passengers every year, I still think EV vehicles are a little safer, especially when the car is monitoring the battery and is kind enough to let you know you should get the fuck out.