Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has just published his review of the new Surface Pro 3 tablet by Microsoft. It's about an 800 word article, but it can be summed up with one word: "Meh." SJVN concludes, " Too little hardware, too late, for too much money . " From the article:

Microsoft would argue they're not going after the low-end market. Microsoft's avowed target audience are the people today who buy a MacBook Air and the iPad. Really? Microsoft thinks that the Surface Pro 3 is going to persuade the Apple faithful to move to Windows 8.1? Come on! If there's any tech audience that's more faithful to their brand than Apple true-believers, I don't know who they are - and I spend most of my time hanging out with the Linux crew. For that matter, it seems to me that Microsoft isn't that clear on their target audience. Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Surface Computing Panos Panay told Mary Jo Foley that they're still calling the Surface Pro 3 a tablet even though "tablets have not landed" and not really hitting the productivity sweet spot.

So what's the deal? Any Surface Pros in your future? Does Microsoft have a chance? Or is this just one more data point in the graph that shows Microsoft has jumped the shark ? Or heck, is the next version of the Surface Pro going to be the one that sweeps consumers off their feet? Grab your ipads and let us know ...

I've got Captain Obvious on the line, and he'd like you to know: the data you store in the cloud isn't private. You might be thinking, "I knew that." But it's news to some, like this guy, who got busted for possession of illegal pornographic images (child porn) , after backing up his computer to a Verizon cloud backup service. Bonus: he was the deacon of a Catholic school in Baltimore county: oops.
Turns out, cloud storage providers routinely sweep stored data, using hashes for known illegal images or media files. If they find one, you're toast.

From Ars Technica:

When Congress passed the PROTECT Our Children Act of 2008 mandating that service providers report suspected child pornography in the content that their customers surf and store, the law gave providers an out: if they couldn't check, they wouldn't know, and they wouldn't have to report it. But while checking is still voluntary, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has been pushing providers to use image-matching technology to help stop the spread of child pornography.

This isn't breaking news: the articles date back to March. But it's still relevant in the framework of the ongoing discussion of cloud-versus-local and the rights of authorities to revise your computing habits.

It was only a year or two ago when every journalist on earth suddenly went into fits, calling it the new age of tablet/mobile computing and assuring us the desktop would soon be a niche industry for has-beens and old fashioned losers. Lenovo would beg to differ. In fact, they've sold 55 million computers in the year ending March 2014 . They also sold 50 million smartphones and 9 million tablets, so there's no doubt mobile computing is increasingly going to take a huge chunk of the market. From the article:

Looking at the numbers by product line, Lenovo's worldwide laptop PC business increased in the fourth fiscal quarter by 16 percent to $4.8bn, accounting for 51 percent of the company's overall sales. Despite the general market declining, its desktop PC sales for the same period increased 14 percent to $2.7bn, or 29 percent of the company's overall sales worldwide. The company's sales of smartphones and digital home products jumped to $1.3bn, or 13 percent of the company's overall sales, and Lenovo said its worldwide smartphone shipments grew 59.4 percent in the fourth quarter.

But the world's largest PC maker would like you to know the age of the desktop computer has absolutely not come to an end.

Cool news from NASA:

All systems are go for construction of a new Mars lander .

NASA and its international partners now have the go-ahead to begin construction on a new Mars lander, after it completed a successful Mission Critical Design Review on Friday. NASA's Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) mission will pierce beneath the Martian surface to study its interior. The mission will investigate how Earth-like planets formed and developed their layered inner structure of core, mantle and crust, and will collect information about those interior zones using instruments never before used on Mars.

I'm happy to have some good news related to space exploration, since the US-Russia space cooperation relationship is such a mess .

Interesting article at the BBC about improvements in quantum computing, plus a Canadian company by the name of D-Wave, who claims to have built working models of quantum computers .

Quantum computing exploits the weird physics of quantum mechanics, which takes hold at tiny (atomic or sub-atomic) scales. Computers that tap the quantum realm could carry out complex calculations much faster than their conventional - or classical - counterparts. While the basic units of information in classical computers are called "bits" and are stored as a string of 1s and 0s, their equivalents in a quantum system - qubits - can be both 1s and 0s at the same time. ... Scientists have struggled to entangle more than a handful of qubits, and to maintain them in their quantum state. Lab devices suffer from drop-out, or decoherence, where the qubits lose their ambiguity and become straightforward 1s and 0s. This has ensured that quantum computers remain confined to the lab - proofs of principle capable of solving only elementary problems.

Sounds interesting, as long as I can theme it. </joke>

If you've missed the trendwagon for cloud computing, don't worry, it's already passi(C) . Cisco has been thinking deeply about the limitations of the cloud server approach, which for better or for worse still remains just a variation on the classic server-client relationship.

Modern 3G and 4G cellular networks simply aren't fast enough to transmit data from devices to the cloud at the pace it is generated, and as every mundane object at home and at work gets in on this game, it's only going to get worse. Luckily there's an obvious solution: Stop focusing on the cloud, and start figuring out how to store and process the torrent of data being generated by the Internet of Things (also known as the industrial Internet) on the things themselves, or on devices that sit between our things and the Internet.

Marketers at Cisco Systems Inc. have already come up with a name for this phenomenon: fog computing.

Added bonus: clouds bring rain and unhappy weekends. But fog brings vampires .

Assuming everyone here is glued to the business end of a computer for most of the working day, you probably spend more time looking at your desktop than you do your kids :( So, where do you get your artwork? I was a big fan of Digital Blasphemy for many years, and actually I still do like Ryan's stuff. But there are so many good artists out there, and so many great sources of interesting images, from the abstract to the futuristic to the mundane. Where do you go to get interesting artwork?

[Ed note: Don't say 4chan. Please don't say 4chan.]

What do dating sites and research facilities have in common? More than you think, apparently, at least in the case of the Neglected Tropical Disease research, who is increasingly benefitting from the website technology used by dating sites to encourage sharing and collaboration across research projects. Says Trudie Lang, researcher from the University of Oxford, UK:

Modern technology, such as wiki-style and dating sites software, allows scientists to "organise information in a very clever way", she added. "As scientists, we're rubbish at sharing," Lang said. "Unless we share the methods by which we collect the data, it won't be of much use."

Sounds good to me. It's easy to believe researchers all collaborate in a utopian bubble of sharing and cooperation, until you see what really happens for yourself. Anything that encourages information sharing and careful stewardship of scarce research funding has got to be a good thing, and if that gets a few scientists a date, too, that's just bonus.

Some say this is an awesome time to be a gamer. I don't agree: I'd say things are getting worse, not better. Start with the freemium model of game development, to which Henry Dowling says,

There's a rancid stench wafting around the gaming industry of late, and it can only be attributed to the advent and subsequent growth of the freemium business model ... Vampiric developers and their publisher overlords sit hunched over analytic spreadsheets, chuckling throatily about nefarious things like coercive monetisation, pay walls and progress gates.

Then, there's the endless patching. Think about it: yes, games are more complex these days, but the size of patches being shipped out now surpasses the size of the games themselves back in the day. Erik Fredericksen writes,

This isn't cleaning up code or fixing minor functionality issues, this is modifying massive parts of games. This is delivering the passenger seats a month after I bought the car.

And don't even get me started on gaming culture. Wired has just published a highlight on online harassment . For starters, just look at all the abuse one female gamer has collected in a couple years of playing.

It all might just make you nostalgic for 1994 again , when everything was OK and 16 bits were all you needed.

It's not the Terminator , but it's a start. Military robots are here, and they're taking an increasingly important role in modern warfare . The folks at Vox write:

The armed robots issue is becoming so real, so fast, that 87 countries sat down at a United Nations-convened conference from May 13th to the 15th to discuss banning the things. Those nations, including Russia, China, and the United States, discussed amending the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, which 117 countries have accepted, to prohibit the use of armed robots during wartime. A lot of the news coverage on this issue has treated robot arms control as if it's a joke or a novelty. It's neither: For over a year, Human Rights Watch has been building a campaign to pressure for banning military robots, arguing that they pose an unacceptable threat to civilian populations. Are they right? Should we be banning what HRW calls "killer robots"?

What's your opinion? Crawl out of your underground bunker/weapons cache and let your fellow Pipeheads hear you. But do it quietly: the future robots can hear you .