The Fire arrives configured for Amazon One Click purchases, and the option to disable this does not work. Anyone who picks up your Fire will be able to order anything they like without any password, PIN, or other attempt to verify the purchase being made.

See here: Serious Security Flaw In The Kindle Fire

Teach the child social skills. Otherwise, stay out of his way.

Are nVidia and AMD willing to finance a Fab for TSMC? Apple has a history of paying manufacturers enough in advance for their product to finance the plant and equipment needed to build that product.

This certainly changes the the equation when deciding which client should have priority.

This is the same administration that declared the details of the draconian ACTA treaty to be freaking State Secrets:

Plenty of folks are quite concerned about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiations are being negotiated in secret. This is a treaty that (from the documents that have leaked so far) is quite troubling. It likely will effectively require various countries, including the US, to update copyright laws in a draconian manner. Furthermore, the negotiators have met with entertainment industry representatives multiple times, and there are indications that those representatives have contributed language and ideas to the treaty. But, the public? The folks actually impacted by all of this? We've been kept in the dark, despite repeated requests for more information.

When the Obama administration took over, there was a public stance that this administration was going to be more transparent -- especially with regards to things like Freedom of Information Act requests. The nonprofit group Knowledge Ecology International took that to heart and filed an FOIA request to get more info on ACTA. The US Trade Representative's Office responded denying the request, saying that the information was "classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 12958." This is a treaty about changing copyright law, not sending missiles somewhere. To claim that it's a national security matter is just downright scary. As KEI points out, the text of the documents requested have been available to tons of people, including more than 30 governments around the world and lobbyists from the entertainment industry, pharma industry and publishing industry.

But when the public asks for them, we're told they're state secrets?

A company named Fingerworks, which got it's start in 1998, already had patents for these things in 2005, when Apple bought them.

As the Anandtech article points out, despite the hardware only getting half as much battery life under Windows as it would on a Mac OS, they class this performance under Windows as "decent". As their testing shows various laptops from Asus, Toshiba, MSI, Gateway, fare WORSE running Windows than Apple's hardware.

Since the same computer is MUCH more power efficient running Mac OS X than running Windows, this seems to be an odd argument for Microsoft to be making.

Anandtech:

Apple claims 10 hours of battery life for the MBP13 when running OS X, and Anand hit pretty close to that mark when testing it out with his light web browsing test. Now, we’ve shown before that OS X is more optimized for mobile power consumption than all versions of Windows, so going into this test the expectations were a fair bit lower.

And for good reason; the MBP13 (running Windows 7) showed fairly similar battery life to some of the older Core 2-based systems. With it’s 63.5 Wh lithium polymer battery, the MBP hits 5.5 hours on our ideal-case battery test, and exactly 5 hours on the web browsing test. While this is decent for the average Core 2 notebook, it’s pretty woeful compared to the OS X battery life of the MBP. If you have no reason to run Windows (program compatibility, gaming, etc) you’re better off in OS X just so that you can get about double the battery life.

According to Linus Torvalds, on an SSD that is worth a damn, nobody needs TRIM:

Apple's solution to the whole TRIM problem was to not use SSD's with badly implemented garbage collection in their computers in the first place.

Meh. What does the guy who created Linux know about computers.

Charlie Miller, who frequently wins the Pwn2Own contest had this to say:

Since Pwn2Own allows hackers to attack any plugin installed on the OS by default, Microsoft had an advantage until now.

The Xerox Alto did not do what you think it did. Perhaps you have it confused with the Xerox Star which came later.

Download the Alto User Handbook and see for yourself.

The Alto had a command line interface and commands were largely entered through the keyboard.

As I mentioned before, people who claim that the Macintosh was a copy of the Alto VERY obviously do not have a clue as to how the Alto actually worked.

The Alto had more similarities with MS-DOS than with a Mac when it came to things like file manipulation or starting programs. You literally did that stuff with a command line on the Alto.

There was none of that double clicking an icon to start a program. On the Alto, you had to type in the program name from the command line to start it if it was on the local disk, or start a separate network aware command line interface if the program was located on a file server.

There was none of that dragging and dropping file, folder and disk icons to manipulate the file system as was pioneered on the Mac. You had to type out copy commands just like you were running DOS.

The Alto also required an endless stream of keyboard commands to get much of anything done in it's programs. For instance, to open a document in the included Bravo word processor, type G (for get), then type in the path to the file you want to open then it's file name and extension, then hit the Escape key.

Happily, this being the internet you can download a copy of the Xerox PARC Alto Users Handbook and see for yourself how incredibly unlike the Macintosh an Alto really was.

Xerox PARC was certainly responsible for many innovations, nobody can deny that. However, claims that Xerox single handedly invented the WIMP interface (Windows, Icons, Pointer, Menus) and that Apple copied that interface exactly as created by Xerox are simply incorrect.

Englebart's NLS created the first implementation of Windows, and of using a Pointer to access Menus. The only addition made by Xerox PARC was the addition of Icons. NLS had bitmapped WYSIWYG graphics, but did not come up with the idea of using Icons to represent commands, using text based menus instead.

Here is a bit of Alto History for you:

Going back farther, NLS was inspired by work done by Ivan Sutherland who created a program called Sketchpad as his Ph.D thesis.

Sketchpad:

Some video of Sketchpad in action is available online. (Jump to the four minute mark.)

Going back still farther, Everyone I've mentioned points back to an article by Vannevar Bush published in 1945 describing an imaginary personal computer called the Memex as a huge inspiration.

To sum things up...

Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad was inspired by Vannevar Bush's idea of the Memex.

Douglas Engelbart at SRI was inspired by Sutherland's Sketchpad when he created NLS.

Xerox was inspired by NLS when they created Alto.

Apple was inspired by Alto when they created Lisa and Macintosh.

None of these was a direct copy of the other. Learn some history, and STAY OFF MY LAWN!

(BTW - Neither Alto nor Macintosh were written in an object oriented programming language.)

It's pretty obvious that you've never actually seen video of a Xerox Alto in action, or you wouldn't claim the Mac interface was a copy of the Alto. The two are very different.

It's also very obvious that you aren't aware that Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute, not Xerox, invented the mouse and the windowed user interface as part of a system known as NLS . (NLS was also the first system with: bit-mapped displays, remote procedure calls, collaboration software, hypertext, remote graphical access, the chording keyboard, presentation software, and others)

The unveiling of NLS to computer scientists in 1968 is referred to as the Mother of All Demos.

See for yourself.

We will see if Apple's habit of actually rethinking their user interface and user interaction methods can bring some life to the tablet market. I think expecting users to use a stylus with the traditional tiny user interface elements in Windows was a problem holding back the form factor.

However, I have faith that people will come up with plenty of reasons to hate the new hardware when it appears.

If it were comparable, it would keep winning PC Magazine's service and reliability survey every year, wouldn't it?

http://www.pcmag.com/image_popup/0,1871,iid=242792,00.asp