One of my favorite episodes of the original "Star Trek" series had Mr. Spock trying to confuse a pair of identical female robots by telling one that he loved her, but telling her identical twin that he hated her. The object was basically to make them both "blow a fuse" by the illogical nature of his statement, since they were both exactly the same.
This year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was different from past shows in many respects. Probably the biggest news was the large number of tablets and e-book readers announced. It's difficult to draw a clear line of distinction between these two types of devices, but generally they break down like this:
Netbooks -- those small devices that are actually underpowered laptops -- make me yawn. My reasoning on this has always been that for the same money, you could buy a good used laptop with power to spare.
Today in the column and the podcast I discuss issues relating to social networks, origins of the need for them, and some possible upsides and downsides of this trend to watch out for.
In the column this week I describe some of my recent adventures with my new iMac and Magic Mouse, as well as briefly mention the Gateway SX 2800 PC series.