What they did was confuse the hell out of people. At first Microsoft was touting a tablet that could run Windows Apps called the surface. What they meant was the Surface pro. Instead the device that got released first was the RT and it still had the name "windows". Most people looking at them, and I know of one business that bought a couple, did so thinking they could run existing windows programs. They got 'em home and learned they couldn't.

At least Apple makes it clear that while underneath the hood, both MacOS and iOS share many of the same parts, they are entirely different OS's designed for different purposes. Microsoft failed to do that with the Surface.

The next problem is that the Surface Pro is $1000. At that price what is the incentive to buy it? You can buy a convertible ultra book for just a few dollars more.

Last job we had AT&T. When I left and started my own company, Sprint was the only one with sensible deposit as I wasn't going to do a personal guarantee on advise of the attorney filing the incorporation paperwork. AT&T wanted $1,000 per line deposit and Verizon was $700 IIRC. Sprint was $150 per line (phone & mobile hotspot). I forgot about the deposit until my phone bill arrived this year and it had a negative balance. I had a year of good payment history and this year they credited those deposits. Furthermore my iPhone & Mobile hotpot was still $40 a month less than Verizon or AT&T's iPhone with tethering.

Is data speeds as fast, well the 3GS on AT&T I had was much faster than the 4S on Sprint's network. But the mobile hotspot is fast enough and comes in extremely handy it's saved the day a couple times before a presentation to clients.

And days like today where I'm meeting my fiancé for later for Spamalot at the Muny. So instead of being stuck in an office and slacking off on slashdot I'm slacking off on Slashdot from the Grand Basin in Forest Park St. Louis with a good parking spot.

We may have missed the boat on having fibre owned by local city/county governments and leased to whatever ISP gives you the best deal, but we what we have is a massive legacy network in POTS. We all had home phones when many places in the world did not thanks to copper. That was a huge advantage for a number of years and took a massive amount of infrastructure and time to build.

The other problem is that we get compared as the entire USA vs say Sweden. It's not really a fair comparison given geographic population distributions. Generally I'm going to have more options and faster internet in say in Boston or San Francisco than St. Louis or Little Rock. Now if you start comparing Internet service throughout the entire EU and the United States I wonder how it would start to look. I know that internet options in Poland are very similar in terms of speeds and price as say St. Louis with St. Louis actually a little cheaper.

Run an internal network with no access to the internet. Limit the internet to certain devices or terminals.

Because they got blindsided by Boeing. Boeing was publicly showing off their "SST" designs and hinting at a new supersized 747. Meanwhile someone at Boeing was doing their market research and saw the need for a new generation of planes with lower cost per mile for medium/long haul to replace aging fleets of 757, 767, and 777's.

Airbus was more interested in proving they could "build the biggest plane" more as an ego measure than a design that addressed a real need to their customers (airlines).

When Boeing announced the 787 they completely caught Airbus off guard as they had just spent billions and a decade on the A380.

Problem is the "tablet" that does it costs as much as an ultrabook.

I think it depends. We've been using Keynote on the iPad for over a year now. Keynote works well enough for our purposes and most of our field people are carrying iPads instead of Laptops.

Usually they aren't the ones creating the presentations. While it's not always ideal to work on, it's can be extremely handy if you need to make last minute tweaks to a presentation. It works extremely well for that.

Still, given the choice, most of our people would prefer powerpoint over Keynote. We've been experimenting with Office365 & SkyDrive in the office and so far their only wish has been, "If only I could make edits to a presentation on the iPad". Which you could sort of with Office365. We looked into the Surface, but the RT sucked and the Pro's are so expensive you might as well buy an ultrabook.

Last year when I bought this MacBook Pro the situation went like this:

Me: I want the 15" with anti-glare/matte screen.
Clerk walks to the back, comes out, I add Apple Care, swipe my card, and leave.

For the first time I didn't care about processor type or speed, anything in that model MBP was going to be enough to run xcode, BBedit, MS Office, Eclipse and Windows 7 Pro + Parallels. I just wanted the base ram as I was going to max it out after market from crucial anyway. What I really cared about was not having one of those mirror coated screens that glare like mad with the least amount of backlight. The screen type means more to my productivity than processor or video card. After all this replaced a 7 year old PowerBook & 5 year old intel iMac.

Read a headline from the 1890's in the Tribune when they estimated the horse poop would be 6ft deep by 1920 in the streets. Of course then came the automobile. That's the problem with all these long term prediction models. Things change in ways they never can account for.

Really, those two disasters are some how worse than the tonnes of crap we've been pumping into the air unfiltered the past 150 years and continue doing today and at an increasing rate (here's looking at you China).

And there is a thorium fuel cycle that would use up most of that waste while providing plenty of affordable power for next 500 years. Yes it would probably take 20 years to get the first thorium reactors up, running, and certified for commercial use, but politics happen the be the biggest barrier here, not technology. In particular non-proliferation treaties.

with a small perl script.

Really, because I just make my XCode panel as big as which ever screen I'm using. I've not really seen much of advantage of going into "full screen mode" as far as screen real estate is concerned vs just dragging the corner and making the panel bigger.

And I have a 15" MBP with a 27" Acer monitor next to it connected via thunderbolt to HDMI adaptor. The difference in screen real estate on the 27" monitor is barely noticeable vs the enlarged panel to me. Then I keep Mail and iMessage up on the 15" screen.

Guess to each their own...

And it also opens up opportunity. I have one friend who elected to do Amazon self-publishing. Ended up on Good Reads and got some glowing reviews, about 30 last I checked, and has sold 6k of his first book. He just released his second book and a collection of short stories and talking with him over memorial day he's made about $16k so far this year. Much better than the $5,000 advance the publisher offered and he would have had to do his own marketing anyway. That doesn't sound like much, but his wife makes $30k a year and he makes around $50k. An extra $16k with two young kids makes a difference.

This is what a friend of mine is doing. He's released 3 books and a collection of short stories ranging in price from $.99 - $2.99. He's sold about 8K copies thus far this year. When I asked him about it he said if he had accepted an advance from a publisher, about $3,500 since he was a new author, he'd still have to do all the marketing and promotion work himself. He figured if that was the case he'd rather do it all himself and cut out the publisher entirely. As he said the 70% Amazon gives him is a better deal.

An an extra $16k in his pocket really helps his family as that's about half what his wife earns per year. He enjoys writing and is hoping in a couple years that his wife will be able to afford to stay home with the kids. Which is rather important because one has special needs.

Case in point, this past week my business partner has spent roughly 20 hours upgrading to windows 8 and trying to get Office 2013 to work on her PC. That's 20 hours not spent working on client projects. And we have projects to work on so Windows 8 + Office 2013 have cost us $2000. Meanwhile this week I've worked 20+ hours on projects on my Mac. Just as I have for 10 years now. Yes I know I pay premium upfront for Apple products, but they've stayed out of my way and let me get work done.