So Nook was a failure for B&N? Sure, maybe it's not giving Amazon as much of a run for its money as B&N hoped. But then again, just what does B&N think it's going to do if it gives up on Nook now? Sell magazines and coffee? Good luck on that >cough< Borders >cough<.

Does anybody really care about the Start button? All of my keyboards have a great big Windows key on them, and all of the Windows 8 tablets I've seen have a Windows button at the bottom of the display. What I think people really want is the Start menu -- and I am absolutely not convinced that Microsoft is going to give us that back, button or no button.

So basically you first call me a coward for stating my opinion on Slashdot (as if stating it somewhere else would make me more "brave") and then you agree with everything I said about the bad keyboard and poor tablet experience when trying to use Office on Windows. Have it your way then, guy.

None of which has anything to do with the fact that it offers a pretty lousy experience on a tablet, which was the topic of discussion.

BTW, I use Windows 8 every day on laptops, desktops, and now tablets, so I believe I'm entitled to my opinion on it -- more so than many, in fact. What you call "bashing," I call informed criticism.

No. A Samsung device.

So you're telling me that in order to get a feature that's standard on many platforms, I need to find the control panel that historically has been used to switch on features for the disabled? Why isn't there an option in the keyboard itself, instead of forcing me to go hunting all over creation to find it?

That's only of minimal help when I'm trying to enter a mix of letters, numbers, and symbol characters and the keyboard is finicky.

And as others have noted, searching the web to find techniques that should be intuitive is not a good solution. I think you're going out of your way to apologize for poor usability design. The tablet experience on Windows 8 is just not particularly great, and it only gets worse when you want to use desktop apps (such as Office, which is what Gates was bragging about).

One thing I've noticed since switching to a Windows tablet is how lousy the onscreen keyboard is. On most platforms, touchscreen keyboards try to incorporate things like predictive text, auto-capitalization, etc to help you type, because they realize that a touchscreen with no tactile feedback is a less-than-idea way to type. The Windows onscreen keyboards have none of that. What's more, they seem wildly inaccurate ... the visual feedback seems to be telling me that I'm hitting the right keys, but when I look up at what I entered, half of the letters are keys right next to the ones I thought I was hitting (and although I can touch type on a physical keyboard, I do have to look at the keys on a tablet).

Screw all of that. Before you can do any of that, you have to enter your password to login to the system first. Try that when you have a strong password and you can't be totally sure what keys you're pressing.

Wait ... are you actually arguing that walled White Power townships should be allowed to exist? In America?

Don't forget Google and Apple, both of which operate online bookstores, too. If we're going to talk about "the ebook market," I don't think tracking sales of ereaders is the way to do it.

This is actually the case with Kobo, too. As others have pointed out, Kobo is owned by Japanese internet giant Rakuten, which makes a lotta money. In their earnings statements, they don't even break out the Kobo division's revenue as a separate line item. So they said Kobo revenues were "up 143%" last year, but they didn't say how much they actually were. Thus I take their claim that they're #2 in the ebook biz with a grain of salt.

What ... did he send you a letter or something? Let us see it.

If you're claiming that Roger Ebert disrespected the craft of movie-making, on the other hand, you're a fool.

Yeah, maybe I just don't understand gamers, but I don't get all the fuss either. This is a collection of fun/weird things that you can plant in your city, like a big garden gnome or the "world's biggest ball of twine." They're free; all you gotta do is buy a tube of toothpaste or some floss, which I hope you're doing anyway. This just seems like harmless fun stuff for people who like to put their own stamp on their game worlds. And if it wasn't Crest sponsoring them, it would have been someone else.

He was also the first writer to win a Pulitzer Prize ... for movie reviews. That achievement, in and of itself, deserves respect.

This one quote points to the main problem I had with A New Kind of Science, which was that Wolfram seemed to start with a plausible, interesting premise -- "patterns we see in nature can be modeled using very simple cellular automata" -- but then he seemed to repeatedly conclude that "these cellular automata are therefore what are running the processes of nature," which seems absurd.

It's like he has this bizarre short circuit in his brain where he thinks a successful model is necessarily identical to the real process, so that if you stare deeper and deeper into the model -- which you yourself created -- then you will be able to understand more about the real-world process without ever doing so much as a real-world experiment. What do you call that, if not a god complex?

Otherwise, I found Wolfram's text to be more or less indistinguishable from any other long-winded crank science manifesto that purports to refute all of known science and usher in a new age of progress if only the bastards weren't trying to keep me quiet, god damn them! It seems a shame that he's dedicated so much of his life to such pursuits when he seems to be an otherwise competent mathematician and programmer. Kind of a wasted life, if you ask me.

Eh? Netflix seems to work just fine on my Android tablets, and I'm pretty sure it's not using Silverlight there. Probably doesn't use it on the various Smart TVs and Blu-Ray players that support it, either. Is this just a case of Google deciding to enable something that other people were using already? Or do these other platforms use Moonlight or something?

For a lot of types of music, there is no mass market. The "distribution channels" are MySpace, Facebook, and Amazon. The role of the record label is minimal.

I had one friend who managed to score a distribution deal with a pretty big indy distributor. It meant you could walk into any Virgin Megastore on Earth and buy his CD. But did you? No ... you didn't. Those CDs sat there for a few months and were rotated out for something else. Distribution channels aren't everything ... and this isn't the music industry of even a few years ago.

That said, realize that all a record label really is is a bank with a lot of connections. Everything a major record label "spends" on you ... for recording, mixing, mastering, distribution, promotion ... is really just a loan. Nothing is a gift. You get paid, but not before they've made back every penny they spent on you. Putting out an album with record label backing is 100% analogous to starting a company with VC funding.