Apple's second-generation tablet is pretty much sold out everywhere. If you want one, good luck trying. Shortages are sure to intensify demand, and crazy buying behavior. It's a psychology-of-buying thing, like customers running on the bank to get out their cash. People afraid they won't get iPad 2. The next couple of weeks are going to be ugly, as desperate masses fight to get Apple's tablet, further feeding hype and desperation, further pumping up demand (and prices).

The iPad 2 aftermarket is already in motion, as resale parasites -- looking to profit from shortages -- sell iPad 2s they snatched up before genuine buyers could get them from Apple stores. There's hot trade on eBay today, with the 32GB WiFi white iPad 2 selling in the mid $700s. The profiters are interested in more than Americans who couldn't get iPad 2 over the launch weekend. They're looking to profit from sales to international markets where iPad 2 isn't yet available but where there is demand.

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Dozens of electronics and technology companies with headquarters and facilities in Japan have issued initial damage reports in the wake of Friday's catastrophic earthquake and the subsequent tsunamis which resulted in major flood damage, providing the first look at the damage to the country's tech economy.

Currently, most companies are still assessing damages and promise to keep conversant with shareholders as the situation in the country is still unstable.

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Hackers have already managed to break open Apple's latest iPad, with developer and hacker Comex saying he had managed to do so remotely over the weekend. While proof of the jailbreak has shown up in photos and video on the Internet, it will not be made available immediately as it must be packaged for public use.

According to talk on Twitter, versions for both the Wi-Fi and 3G models of the iPad could be released shortly, although no specific date for its release has been given.

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Piriform Software has released a new update for its free Windows defragmentation utility. Defraggler 2.03 is now fully compatible with Windows 7 Service Pack 1, and it includes a number of interesting new features and fixes.

Defraggler is a free (for non-commercial use) tool that can defrag entire drives or just quickly defrag selected files and folders. It supports both FAT/FAT32 and NTFS drives, and it includes a quick-defrag option, scheduler for keeping your drive defragged at regular intervals and an option to defrag free space only.

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You're working away on your laptop, engrossed in your work and typing at speed. And all is well, until you accidentally touch a trackpad mouse button, the cursor jumps somewhere else entirely, and you have to pause to try and undo the damage. It's frustrating, especially when it keeps happening, but you don't have to live with this -- Touchpad Blocker can help.

Once installed and launched, the program runs in the background, monitoring your keyboard. And every time you press a key, it disables the trackpad mouse buttons for half a second, so if you accidentally tap one then it'll have no effect.

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Monday, chipmaker Intel Corp. announced that its recently formed Intel Mobile Communications group has acquired "most of the assets" of privately held Egyptian communications company SySDSoft, a company whose intellectual property includes LTE Protocol Stacks for user equipment and femtocell premises equipment.

In August 2010, Intel acquired Infineon AG's wireless group for an estimated $1.4 Billion, giving the chipmaker access to a significant chunk of the global cellular baseband market. Then five months later, Intel announced the creation of its new Mobile Communications Group which would see the company working not only with its traditional x86 processor architecture, but also with the popular 32-bit ARM architecture.

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Everyone thinks they have a great novel inside them, but taking it from the deep recesses of your brain to a final, published state is a difficult journey. Your computer might seem the obvious tool to help here, but word processing software isn't geared towards novelists, and in trying to record and organize your notes alongside writing the actual story you can quickly become swamped.

What you need is a dedicated tool that doesn't just give you the tools to write your story, but provides you with the tools you need to organize them too. That program is yWriter; it's completely free, and version 5.1.6.4 has just been released, adding support for exporting your finished novel to ebook format.

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People get so paranoid about Google! Not that Google or any other large company in this industry is especially loveable, but so-called privacy advocates are especially prone to presume the most evil motives on its part. The latest example is the "Android Kill Switch."

This issue grew out of the discovery of dozens of malicious applications in the Android Marketplace on March 1st. Google removed the apps and went a couple of steps further: The company issued a program to reverse the effects of any infections, triggering the Remote Application Removal Feature.

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Betanews readers are an opinionated lot, and they have a lot to say about Apple's second-generation tablet, which went on sale at 5 p.m. March 11th. Yesterday I asked: "Did you buy iPad 2?" Many of you tried but found local stores sold out. Many others would kiss the devil before buying iPad 2 -- or any Apple product, for that matter.

"If you haven't bought the iPad 2 you're either broke or on drugs," Roland Jefferson writes in comments from his iPad 2. "There is no in-between or fine gray line. Take your pick: broke or on drugs. To which Hans Torm replies: "You got it wrong. You bought an iPad 2 so apprently you are on drugs and broke. :p"

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I did. My teenage daughter wants to use one for school. Late-afternoon yesterday, I waited for a surprisingly short time outside Apple Store Fashion Valley in San Diego, where at least 500 people lined up to get an Apple tablet. The doors opened at 5 p.m. local time, and I completed my purchase by 6:20 p.m. Apple Store employees rapidly processed purchases using iPhones.

Judging by the number of people using iPhones -- I'd say 60 percent to 70 percent -- the majority of buyers here were existing Apple customers. So in answering "Did you buy iPad 2" please also express whether or not you use other Apple products and whether or not you purchased (or otherwise own or owned iPad 1). Please respond in comments, or email joewilcox at gmail dot com.

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Friday at about 2:45pm local time (12:45am EST) Japan experienced a devastating earthquake, which was given a preliminary register of 8.9 on the Richter scale of magnitude, higher than any in this zone since the invention of the Richter Scale.

According to the US Geological Society, the location of this quake, known as the Japan Trench subduction zone, has had 9 events registering magnitude 7 or higher since 1973. The only one to approach this magnitude took place in December 1994, and was ranked as a 7.8.

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Popular microblogging service Twitter is clamping down on all the third-party client applications that duplicate the service's official apps, a statement from company developers said Friday.

Twitter platform lead Ryan Sarver issued a sort of "State of the Platform" announcement on Friday, which was essentially a warning for third-party Twitter client developers that Twitter intends to be the primary interface that all consumers use. Or, as Sarver put it, the "primary mainstream consumer client experience on phones, computers, and other devices." With that in mind, the Terms of Service for third-party developers has been changed.

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As most of you by now know, last week the Android Market, the official store for applications on Android mobile devices, withdrew a number of apps that had been reported as harmful.

Why is Android encountering challenges where the iPhone isn't? Apps available for download on the Android Market aren't screened as stringently as they are on other public stores such as Apple's. The policy is in keeping with Android's open-source operating system, effectively allowing anyone with programming skill to create apps for mobile devices.

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One of the most effective ways of saving money is simply by tracking your finances. If you know exactly how much money is currently in your account you can go a long way to ensuring you always stay in the black, simply by cutting back on non-essential spending when money is tight.

But it's not enough simply to know how much is currently in your account: what bills are left to be paid before the next payday? It's no good thinking you've got hundreds of dollars left if your mortgage hasn't yet been paid, and what happens if you're the sort of person who regularly forgets to pay their bills? Financial Armageddon might ensue, but if you're a Mac user you could avoid this meltdown by investing a relatively paltry $21 in Chronicle.

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The Chromium-based social browser RockMelt has generated plenty of press coverage since rumors of its capabilities first appeared some 18 months ago. It was only available on an invitation-only beta, though, so you may not have had a chance to try out the program for yourself, but that's all changed today with the company's release of the first RockMelt Public beta.

The new build of the browser looks much like previous versions. Essentially it's Chrome with additional panels to display your Facebook stream, Twitter account, Facebook friends and more, so you can keep up-to-date and chat with your contacts without ever having to visit the Facebook site.

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