I love my Asus EP121 tablet with a real digitizer pen (not a fat finger stylus), using technology licensed from Wacom (same technology as Bamboo and Cintiq devices). I use it to take notes with diagrams, and math symbols. I also use it to do all my math and physics exercises. On other tablets I tried before this one, the pen sucked - it worked but was not accurate enough to efficiently draw diagrams. For taking plain text notes, a keyboard (which the Asus EP121 supports) is more efficient, but in fact I found that I learn more efficiently by taking notes with the stylus. I assimilate the information better this way, probably because I type too fast and have spare time to think about other things while the teacher is talking. So having the pen slow me down ensures that I stay focused.

Little-endian should be fine, but the problem with it is that the US format has created an ambiguity, meaning we can never be sure if 9/11/2011 means September 11, 2011, or November 9, 2011. At least with YYYY-MM-DD, I never saw anyone write "2011-31-12", so I can reasonably expect that "2011-09-11" really means "September 11, 2011"

As soon as a pad is sold with an OS compiled with GCC so that they can retroname it the GNU/Pad

I like the IDE (Eclipse, Visual Studio...) way: - group all errors into a list - double-click on a error takes user to the screen/field that causes the error - fields causing errors are highlighted - when possible, a "autofix" icon next to the error can be clicked to see a list of suggested fixes. Clicking on a suggestion applies the fix (similar to Resharper) The missing part to make this a realistic option would be frameworks that make this easy to implement for "business applications"