No, it's a super-sized iPad. You won't watch channels any more, you'll watch apps. Some apps will be for regular TV channels (eg. NBC, ESPN), some will be for specific shows, some will be for shows you can't get on regular TV (vintage, foreign, etc.), some will be for internet video services like YouTube, some will access your PC's media libraries, and some will have nothing to do with video content (games, email, web, etc.). It will all be controlled by voice (eg. Siri) with iPad, iPod, or iPhone remotes. There will, of course, be an Android version, but it will be all over the place in terms of quality and app completeness, as different set manufacturers try to differentiate from each other.

Sorry, why are you adding a mouse?

If you're talking about the Hobbit, you must be the biggest sourpuss who ever lived, so you must be talking about The Lord of the Rings. And it's entire first chapter is nothing but hobbit humour. Granted, they are just a bunch of half-drunk, weed-smoking, cabbage farmers whose sense of humour might not be up to your sophisticated standards, but they seem to be having a pretty good time without you.

Oh, and here I thought we were talking about HTML5, WebKit, and open web standards. Fuckin' Apple, ruining it for everyone.

They were announced a year before the iPad, you mean. And they looked like this. By the time they got around to shipping, the iPad had been announced, and the JooJoo had changed to look like this. Kinda like how Android phones were announced before iPhones, but suddenly stopped looking like Blackberries as soon as the iPhone was announced.

But I'll allow that the Crunchpad had a simpler design than other tablets even in its clunky prototype form. But that's also because it wasn't really a tablet - it was a web-based e-reader. It's easier to make a clean design when your gadget has only one function.

Why the dripping sarcasm? This is true. Good industrial design has always been about stripping a thing down to its essentials and making it as simple and focussed to its task as possible. And that does take an utter design genius.

Before the iPad, tablet design was like this and this and this.

The hallmark of good design is that after we see it, it seems "obvious", and design illiterates think there's absolutely nothing special about it. But they can't explain why nobody thought of it before then.

This post explains everything you need to know about why Slashdot simply doesn't get tablet computing, and probably never will.

That's not investing, that's speculating. Odds are that the money you pay for those stocks are not going to the company in question to pay for capital costs or R&D. (Unless you're buying into an IPO or something like that.)

Real investment is if you take that million dollars and use it to bankroll a startup, or finance an existing company's expansion/growth plans in exchange for an ownership stake. Usually that's not done via the stock market. But it's also even harder than playing the stock market, so your main point still stands.

IDEs are great if you are working with code generators, stubs, templates, and general-purpose APIs. But please don't pretend that that kind of work is "serious programming". They're called code monkeys for a reason.

Ah, so that's why iPad has 10 billion aps.

They're still the world's largest vendor of open source, standards-compliant Unix systems. The things we used to like about them haven't changed.

But it's not up to them to skip the things they don't want to do and still call themselves an engineer with a Bachelor's degree.

Education is what is left behind after you've forgotten everything you were taught. If you were only taught "useful" things, you didn't get an education, you learned a trade.

How about some actual prices?

Plants vs Zombies - $20 on website, $10 on Mac app store, $7 iPad, $3 iPhone.

Pixelmator - $60 on website, $30 on Mac app store.

Aperture - $200 in box, $80 on Mac app store.

Autodesk Sketchbook - $80 list, sale price $40 at Amazon, sale price $25 on App Store.

But there are lots other publishers trying to maintain the same pricing as their older sales channels, so the marketplace is still churning on this one. Hard to say how it will ultimately work out, but there's little evidence that prices are feeling an upward pressure.

No need to speculate, the App Store has existed for some time, and there are many 3rd-party applications being sold there.

And the evidence shows that prices tend to drop by 60-70% when they go onto the App Store.