I read the Giz review, because I have the best sense of their biases (i.e. we don't agree on much), and it looks like it's not something I'd make excuses to buy myself for my birthday to add to my tablet ecosystem.

I am not going anywhere near a barren app market again, so I'll definitely wait to buy until it catches up, rather than buying and waiting. And I'm not as focused as Biddle is on evaluating it as a tablet+, even if that's how it's being sold. I think you should be able to do work without a keyboard--I can do a decent amount of it--I'm toting my ASUS to the ER for the near-infinite (ISTG the meter is broken) battery life and extra ports, not because I'm writing the next great American novel.

I need Office lite apps, and producitivity apps, and cross systems apps-if the app store fills up with things that don't work on my Android and OS X (and to a lesser extent iOS), I'm also less interested, and I think that's the most likely thing to keep me away. I don't know if many people care. But it would be nice if the Android apps I use now develop Windows 8 versions.

Microsoft is offering to handhold app developers: [link]

OK, this is driving me crazy and maybe someone here knows what the problem is. I am having problems with the NY Times Crossword Puzzle Archive [link] and my mortgage account (oddly, the mortgage co. website is worrying me less because I'll pay them whether I can see my statements or not and the payment isn't due for a couple of weeks and SURELY I will have fixed this by then). In both cases, I log in, but there's nothing there - in the case of the mortgage, all I can access is my profile; with the crosswords, I can get this months puzzles, but navigating by date does nothing and clicking on the other tabs gets me an apparently empty list. This started before the latest Java update, which I have since updated (and uninstalled and reinstalled, just in case). I've tried shutting off all extensions in Safari (which is the browser I usually use) and tried Firefox and Opera and maybe Chrome I don't remember. Something advised me to open Safari in 32-but mode, so I tried that, too. None of that has made any difference at all. The NY Times cannot reproduce the problem and helpfully gives me a link to the page that isn't working for me.

Any ideas?

Wait--is it missing in the other browsers or not?

Yes, it's the same in all of them.

Double check your DNS settings, make sure some bit of evil software hasn't messed with them.

Also check to see if you're using an HTTP proxy.

Hmm. Are you able to try in a new computer? The next place I'd be going would be to downgrading to a previous Java version, but you say it stopped before the update...i

Apple removes Java from all OS X Web browsers

If you want to run Java applets in your browser on Mac OS X, you need to install the official Oracle Java runtime on the system to do that.

Basically, Java has repeatedly been found to have security exploits, and Apple is saying that if you want to run Java in your browser, then you're on your own, and it's not our fault if your computer gets broken into.

It's kind of a dick move by Apple, but I also kind of don't blame them.

What's the Java status on iOS?

The DNS settings match what Comcast says they should be. No HTTP proxies. Unless that can be hidden somewhere not obvious?

I'll try on one of my older computers, if that works it'll be an acceptable workaround.

Java 7 from Oracle is what I was running, though I have uninstalled it at present. The pages I have problems with are not prompting me to get a missing applet, so, I don't know, maybe that's not it at all. I can't find anything older to try that will work with Mountain Lion.