Before you go out and buy a fancy and expensive new computer with an SSD and a bunch of DRAM inside it, take a minute and listen to HP explain how they're going to have a new technology competing against flash memory in a year and a half, and they're planning on rendering DRAM and SRAM obsolete by 2015.

3D scanners, those fancy machines that can turn everyday objects into 3D images for easy manipulation on a computer, have long been expensive specialty items. But now HP has released one that's priced to sell.

My friend S (he hates it when I invoke his name in print), a long-time IT pro, made a sage observation in the wake of HP effectively whacking its TouchPad, Motorola selling itself to Google, the great Samsung Galaxy Tab/Best Buy giveaway (more on this in a bit), and the general bloody state of the non-iPad tablet business. "Apple's been perfecting its ecosystem for a decade, and these guys think they can duplicate it in a couple of months." And then we laughed. Not at HP, but at the whole ridiculous state of the tablet business that S succinctly summed up. So, now that the tablet business has pretty much devolved to Apple and Android, where do we go from here? Don't ask the pundits. They seem to have no more of a clue about the future of the tablet universe than Criswell did about the diabolical plans of vampires from outer space.

When Palm launched the webOS mobile software a couple of years ago, it was generally seen as a pretty solid offering and a good alternative to the iPhone. But since then, HP has bought Palm, and not too many webOS devices have been sold. And today, HP killed the OS off.