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.

We also need to get some sanity with hyphenation and re-flow, and, I am disappointed that my reader doesn't seem to do a good job of kerning, or do ligatures at all.

Disclaimer: I am a technical writer, and have a lot of experience with publishing workflows.

I love the ease of obtaining books for my e-book reader. I also love the space savings I get from e-books and not having to choose which physical book to dispose of when I get a new one.

Given good content to work with, any programmer could figure out how to make it beautiful using LaTeX. There are even several excellent packages for typesetting novels out there on CTAN. However, there isn't a mature, standardized workflow to get from LaTeX to epub. I sort of expected this by now. It'd be nice if XeLaTeX had an output driver for epub. Everything on planet LaTeX revolves around PDF output, and it doesn't do tagged PDF output, which means that paragraphs cannot be reflowed. So, you can generate a beautiful document for your e-book reader, as long as you don't plan to zoom, and you have to generate a different PDF file for every size of device out there.

That's not to say that LaTeX and friends haven't come a long way. Synctex and TeXworks make editing a joy. XeTeX and fontspec make font selection easy-cheesy.

However, I pine for the day when I can just do epublatex document.tex or taggedpdflatex document.tex and get awesome output. I don't want to have to rasterize my graphics either... I just want it to work. It's coming, I'm sure.

The right thing to do with something that isn't yours is not to pick it up and sell it. Duh. He will learn a lesson from this.