Yes, I remember that episode and it's a good analogy. Off topic, but that episode (baring the odd acting) was one of the better ones from a xeno-culture-clash perspective.
I don't keep any tax data on my PC for security reasons. Had an iMac a while ago that blew up and it was a pain to get the drive out before trashing the thing. Easier just to keep the data in the tax cloud.
Based on my recent experience with an illness, this is exactly what you will have to do if you ever fall out of the normal bounds of straightforward illnesses. You will be managing your own treatment and trying to piece together what's wrong with you. You will burn through doctors and specialists one by one as they say they cannot help and refuse to let you make appointments. You will end up being the only person on the whole planet who cares and all the time you will be doing this when you are sick and/or drugged up. You will also realize that the whole health care system does not work like JIRA and that there is no follow up and your issue will be dropped if you don't continue to be the squeaky wheel. Health care is not engineering. It's scary how few engineering best practices are used in it and how full of holes the "system" has. Healthcare is probably about 40 years behind engineering in terms of problems solving and issue resolution and about a million years behind understanding how our bodies work vs "complex" systems we diddle around with all day on computers. Moral of the story is - don't get sick with anything weird otherwise you're basically toast.
As a hiring manager, I would not care if a candidate had completed their degree online or offline so long as it was a real degree (we can test some things, but the whole point of a qualification is that it's supposed to mean something). However, there seems to be a big reluctance by established universities to give degrees based on these online courses so far. What needs to change for that to happen and will it ever?
No, they stopped selling them because transflective displays are limited by resolution. You can still get cheapy phones with them in Asia, but smartphones with HVGA or greater screen resolution don't have the space for the extra reflective part of the pixel that is required. One compromise is to use monochrome for the reflective part, which is what you see on the MotoACTV and WIMM smartwatches.
Corning's on a marketing offensive against sapphire, which is up and coming as a cover glass material. It's massively stronger than Gorilla (TM) Glass and so can offer better protection for the same thickness from impacts (although Corning will argue the opposite). The main problem has been that it's been expensive, but for some applications it's perfect (I'm looking at you smart watches) and the price is coming down, down, down.
I've hired gray hairs, long hairs, dyed hair and no hairs as programming contractors. Age and experience are not so important to me for these mid-level programming gigs.I care about a few things though - are you up to date on not just coding, but contemporary development methodologies? Have you worked in an Agile team before? Do you have a niche skill that fits with my project (in my case often embedded programming, or Linux device drivers). I'm far more interested in what you've done in that last year before you came to me, so work experience is important. We *will* check if you can program and what approach you take to solving the type of problems we have via multiple interviews on the same day, so if you really can't program, then you will be found out. Also, we place a lot of weight on recommendations, so if you have worked with others on a team and they vouch for you, that will help a lot. Finally, if you are a jerk personality-wise, then we won't want you. Having been burnt more that once by hiring people with serious personality issues it's one of my top things I try to weed out at interview. Finally, a good agency might help you - they take a nasty cut, but push their employees.
Android is a gift, not a product. Android needs fixing to work properly because it doesn't work out of the box. Why? Because hardware changes from OEM to OEM, the government require mandatory support for features that aren't included, the customer (AT&T etc) require support for their apps or services, some very important ones, and last, but not least, it's buggy.
Details: It takes about 6 months for a dedicated SCRUM team to knock a version of Android out that meets a major US carrier's requirements after Google releases their code to the community. I know because I've done it. Verizon has about 6000 requirements for their devices, Sprint and AT&T are not far behind. On top of the carrier requirements, which could be anything from implementing a custom address book sync adapter, to ensuring AGPS works accurately, you need to meet US Government requirements. CMAS is a great example. Further, there may be a stack of accessibility items that need to be done, although, Google dramatically increased their support there from ICS. So, once you've done the carrier requirements and the regulatory ones, you also then need to fix the bugs. These could be part of the open source - just look at the issues at code.google.com to see the outstanding ones, or they could be the result of the changes your chip set supplier made to have the code work with their hardware, or their proprietary codecs, etc.. Google may not have gotten around to fixing their bugs yet, but that doesn't mean you'll be able to ship a product today with without fixing them. Should those fixes be pushed back to the open source tree, absolutely, but are they? Why let a competitor benefit from our hard work? Also, you need to weed out any bugs that are unique to your hardware configuration - that could be caused by touch screen firmware, or the modem, bluetooth, or some other piece. Then, finally, you can decide if you want to reskin the UI or add your twiddly improvement. Sometimes that's an enhancement that customer's expect, like hyphenating dial strings, or sometimes it's a totally sexy homescreen widget. That part gets all the press, but all the other stuff must get done even if you decide to ship "pure android".
I worked with Wildseed - they were a good bunch of folks with a decent idea - a phone targeted at kids that you could swap the outside and it'd change the UI. They planned to sell different branded shells for pop groups, etc. that would effectively re-theme the phone you had completely. The phone itself was really funky, with a slight boomerang shape, and the keyboard was at the top with the screen below. (You can see a diagram here http://www.freepatentsonline.com/D0470135-0-large.jpg). The phone also had an LED strip on the top of the phone that enabled you to sky-write messages to others by waving the phone. I also remember they had a cool FM radio channel sharing feature, where you could quickly tell your mates to check out a station. All in all, they had a tonne of ideas and they did in fact manage to sell a few phones, but ultimately, it died and AOL bought them. The patent looks good to me. Very solid, and narrow. It's for a hardware button on the phone that enables you to quickly enter emoticons. Unless someone can point to a phone that did that before, then I don't see any prior art. As for obviousness, that's a very low bar. If no one had done it before (for emoticons) then why would it be obvious? The problem I see here is that the good intended patent, to protect a start-up's business ended up in a troll haus.
What do you want your audience to think, feel and do? Decide this at the start, and then you'll be able to judge whether you've succeeded in the end. Unfortunately, "Sharing information" is the lowest form of presentation (the highest is a call to action - "Attack!") so if that's all you're doing, it a tough row to hoe. Start with a grabber - something funny, or a question. Then tell them what you're going to tell them. This doesn't have to be an agenda slide, you can do it verbally. This sets the context and tells your team that there will be an end! Give them the content. This can be in the form of slides, or visual aids. Remember, you are the presenter, not the slides. Look at TED talks and you'll see it is the person everyone is looking at and not the slide. Practice standing still and talking to people in the audience. If you have to read off your slides, do it silently for a few seconds, then turn and face the audience and speak. Stand to the left of the screen if you can from the audience's perspective so they'll naturally move their eyes to you (In English we read from the left). For content, I *really* recommend pictures and no text, or very sparse text. Just get rid of all the text and you'll be free to talk about the picture how you like. If you put up text, people will read it instead of looking and listening to you. The Ignite style, or PechaKucha (http://www.pecha-kucha.org/) styles are very awesome and exciting if you want to give them a go. I use www.gettyimages.com as a source - it's a great search engine for emotive pictures. For internal use, screw copyright, just take anything and blow it up BIG (full bleed, no titles). Finish with a call to action slide that drives home what you want the team to think feel and do after they walk out the door. Don't be afraid to ask for something too, or for something they should consider. After all, if there is no point to what you've just said, then why bother? One last point - being told to do a presentation for 30 minutes is an artificial constraint. Will your boss really be upset if you take 10 minutes and get the message across? I've had to do presentations to extremely busy people and had 5 minutes or less and done that with terrific success. The time should not be what you consider - if there's time left over, call it discussion time or Q&A. If there's no discussion or Q&A, maybe you need to be a bit more provocative or thought-provoking in what you are saying.
Hmm. I cheated once at school and it almost wrecked my future. I wasn't caught, and it sent me on a path that I wouldn't have gone down if I hadn't have cheated. I was taking a Chemistry exam aged 14 and due to overcrowding, the exam was in a regular classroom rather than the gym. The assistant music teacher was running the show and as he had really bad eyesight it was just too easy to look through books in my bag for answers. A month later, the results came out and I hit 90% - almost top of the class and a strong indication that I should pick Chemistry as one of my subjects the next year. That was a terrible decision. After slogging through 2 months of Chemistry, I realized I was actually really crap at it and hated the subject, but by then it was too late to switch. I ended up wasting 2 years studying something I hated.
So, you can cheat, but the only person you're fooling is yourself if you think that result means anything at all. Know your own worth.
A friend's Dad bought a ZX80 when they came out and then first thing I did was program a home-made "breakout" game into it. The screen flashed every time the ball went up and down, and then the game ran out of memory.
There's a good tutorial on Amazon's Kindle site here on how to build Kindle books with Word - https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A2RYO17TIRUIVI
Although us Americans may think that $4 a gallon gas is expensive, it's not. What would the change in activity be if it was $7.86 a gallon like in London today? (Source: http://www.theaa.com/motoring_advice/fuel/) In the UK, these kind of prices over the years have meant a wholesale conversion to diesel engines because they have higher mpg, even though diesel costs $8.22/US gallon. The average fuel economy of all UK cars is: City - 17.78, Highway - 37.861, Combined 30.27. Eight out of the top 10 most fuel efficient cars are diesels and have a Combined MPG of >52.56! (converted to US Gallons), with the best The other two are hybrids. (Source: http://fuel-economy.co.uk/stats.shtml). The best diesel is 34% more efficient than the best gas (petrol) car. In the US, the best non-hybrid is the Hyundai Elanta (29/40/33) followed by the Mini Cooper (29/37/32). (Source: http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/pdfs/guides/FEG2011.pdf).
Raising prices to UK levels would mean for a typical family car with a 15 gallon tank, paying in the order of $123 to fill 'er up. Yah, I think that'll make a difference to the decision whether you'll be driving, how far you're willing to commute and how big a car you'll want to buy. Doing it instantaneously would be a huge hit to the US economy, not least because of all the hugely inefficient cars in use today, that people typically live miles from where they work and drive, they haven't ridden a bike since elementary school and there's no public transport. That doesn't mean it couldn't be done, or shouldn't be done or that it wouldn't have an effect.
We in the industry have been using the term "superphone" for a while now to indicate the tier that sits above the iPhone in terms of spec. It is jam-packed with very-high-spec Android devices, like the Galaxy Nexus, Motorola Droids, HTC Bionic, etc. This segment differentiates itself from the iPhone with HD resolution displays, NFC, sub 10mm thickness cabinets, dual-core processors and other techie specs. It is the only space that's really left open now that Apple has claimed the $99 to $199 space and is very crowded as a result. The only other viable space is low-end prepaid, where Pantech, ZTE, LG, Huawei and others fight it out. I have a very neat diagram of this, but I think you get the idea. So this comment on the roadmap is I'm sure nothing more than a tip of the hat to that super-high-end market spot and not a "superphone" that'll rescue Microsoft like Superman.
Our IT team is really the best. They are hugely popular with the staff and I can't imagine a better team. It's a 100+person R&D facility with 3 IT people. Here's how they do it:
1. Invisible firewall - there is one, but you can FTP, ssh, etc. to your heart's content without noticing it. It's even possible to run P2P apps. Of course, if it's non-work related then you're signing your own pink slip. Also, they do audit all PC applications on the network remotely, but I've never been queried and I run some really odd apps sometimes. 2. Simple to use Help ticket system - and they're fast in responding. 3. Adequately staffed - that helps. 4. No restriction on smartphones hooking up to the Exchange server - company doesn't pay for any phones or service though. 5. Multiple VPN services available, so if one doesn't work, try another. Worse case, SSL VPN is available or webmail over SSL. Helpful when traveling abroad or visiting companies that block VPN ports. 6. Support for Windows & Linux, but if you want to run a Mac you can. They'll support you as much as they know. 7. Software purchased under $2000 doesn't need to be vetted, reviewed, quoted or anything else. Just buy it on the dept credit card - with your manager's approval of course. 8. Printers everywhere - we are a printer company, so that helps, but we have competitor's products too, so if one fails and you're waiting for it to be repaired, you have at least two others to print to easily. 9. Copious amounts of network storage for shared files. All RAID. All backed up. 10. Large email quotas, which are instantly upgraded for power-users. 11. Overall a can-do, but pragmatic response to requests - want a load of email or docs archived? They won't waste their time or yours burning DVD's, but they will copy it to an HD and vacuum pack it for you. 12. Finally, no, and I really mean no, draconian controls or policies. Just don't set up a rouge WiFi AP or download porn. Basically, the cardinal rule is - get your work done and be a star.
One clarification - the heart may need those pulses, but the rest of the body does not seem to need them. From NPR June 13th 2011, "Heart With No Beat Offers Hope Of New Lease On Life": "The pulsatility of the flow is essential for the heart, because it can only get nourishment in between heartbeats," Cohn says. "If you remove that from the system, none of the other organs seem to care much." http://www.npr.org/2011/06/13/137029208/heart-with-no-beat-offers-hope-of-new-lease-on-life
I just watched a number of the course previews for a variety of the online professional development courses from Stanford as I was seriously thinking about doing one of their certificates. I also checked out ClassX, which has some classes on it. I'm having second thoughts because I fear I'll be bored to death by the experience. I've been out of university almost 20 years, but it's clear that they haven't changed much and the flow of information from instructor to student is agonizingly slow. Maybe I'm spoiled, but these lectures are essentially academic death-by-powerpoint experiences or even worse, death-by-writing... very.... slowly... on... the board experiences. Just taking a Standford (or any other) lecture, slapping it on the web and putting even a fancy control UI like ClassX has is just not good enough. I think the courses have to be completely redone with online learning in mind. And if they were really well done, then I'd bet lectures would end up being the *last* place you'd want to go to for the course.
Here's some tips for improving on the online UI experience (for Stanford people if they read this):
1. Add a Skip Forward 30s/Back 10s control, because the instructor often dithers around on non-educational topics.(Copy Tivo/Dish/etc.) 2. Enable the video to be viewed faster than real time. I can easily process 2x speech or higher and the instructors often speak slowly. There's no need to force onliners to listen at 1:1. (Like Livescribe Pen desktop playback or software DVD players) 3. Have the instructor repeat the comment/question from the audience for the microphone - it's a classic problem, but they need to do it. 4. Add in chapters for each topic - this will enable us to skip to the next point/slide should the instructor belabor the point - okay I get it! (Livescribe pen / available on some ClassX content) 5. A number of times, the instructors mentioned how questions couldn't be asked by the online participants, but this isn't true. If the video is surrounded with a forum UI then viewers will easily be able to ask questions and a TA or the Professor can answer later - or other students could. (Like Hulu/YouTube/etc) Partially implemented. 6. Allow bookmarking/resume on the videos because it'd be really useful (like BBC iPlayer/Hulu)
Maybe Stanford's real online system has these functions, but if not, they should. Based on the cost of the courses, you'd think they could have a decent system banged out pronto.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I remember that episode and it's a good analogy. Off topic, but that episode (baring the odd acting) was one of the better ones from a xeno-culture-clash perspective.
I thought that was the phrase...
I don't keep any tax data on my PC for security reasons. Had an iMac a while ago that blew up and it was a pain to get the drive out before trashing the thing. Easier just to keep the data in the tax cloud.
Based on my recent experience with an illness, this is exactly what you will have to do if you ever fall out of the normal bounds of straightforward illnesses. You will be managing your own treatment and trying to piece together what's wrong with you. You will burn through doctors and specialists one by one as they say they cannot help and refuse to let you make appointments. You will end up being the only person on the whole planet who cares and all the time you will be doing this when you are sick and/or drugged up. You will also realize that the whole health care system does not work like JIRA and that there is no follow up and your issue will be dropped if you don't continue to be the squeaky wheel. Health care is not engineering. It's scary how few engineering best practices are used in it and how full of holes the "system" has. Healthcare is probably about 40 years behind engineering in terms of problems solving and issue resolution and about a million years behind understanding how our bodies work vs "complex" systems we diddle around with all day on computers.
Moral of the story is - don't get sick with anything weird otherwise you're basically toast.
...had the display flowing over the edge of the phone's sides so you could place a phone on a table and have only the edge display info.
As a hiring manager, I would not care if a candidate had completed their degree online or offline so long as it was a real degree (we can test some things, but the whole point of a qualification is that it's supposed to mean something). However, there seems to be a big reluctance by established universities to give degrees based on these online courses so far. What needs to change for that to happen and will it ever?
Do these guys have a license to transmit in the cellular bands?
I have a Solar Tube in my house in California and it works excellently. Better looking but more expensive than this DIY version.
Yeah, like bleach.
No, they stopped selling them because transflective displays are limited by resolution. You can still get cheapy phones with them in Asia, but smartphones with HVGA or greater screen resolution don't have the space for the extra reflective part of the pixel that is required. One compromise is to use monochrome for the reflective part, which is what you see on the MotoACTV and WIMM smartwatches.
Corning's on a marketing offensive against sapphire, which is up and coming as a cover glass material. It's massively stronger than Gorilla (TM) Glass and so can offer better protection for the same thickness from impacts (although Corning will argue the opposite). The main problem has been that it's been expensive, but for some applications it's perfect (I'm looking at you smart watches) and the price is coming down, down, down.
Plastic guns? Been there, banned those... http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/100/hr4177
I've hired gray hairs, long hairs, dyed hair and no hairs as programming contractors. Age and experience are not so important to me for these mid-level programming gigs.I care about a few things though - are you up to date on not just coding, but contemporary development methodologies? Have you worked in an Agile team before? Do you have a niche skill that fits with my project (in my case often embedded programming, or Linux device drivers). I'm far more interested in what you've done in that last year before you came to me, so work experience is important. We *will* check if you can program and what approach you take to solving the type of problems we have via multiple interviews on the same day, so if you really can't program, then you will be found out. Also, we place a lot of weight on recommendations, so if you have worked with others on a team and they vouch for you, that will help a lot. Finally, if you are a jerk personality-wise, then we won't want you. Having been burnt more that once by hiring people with serious personality issues it's one of my top things I try to weed out at interview. Finally, a good agency might help you - they take a nasty cut, but push their employees.
Android is a gift, not a product. Android needs fixing to work properly because it doesn't work out of the box. Why? Because hardware changes from OEM to OEM, the government require mandatory support for features that aren't included, the customer (AT&T etc) require support for their apps or services, some very important ones, and last, but not least, it's buggy.
Details:
It takes about 6 months for a dedicated SCRUM team to knock a version of Android out that meets a major US carrier's requirements after Google releases their code to the community. I know because I've done it. Verizon has about 6000 requirements for their devices, Sprint and AT&T are not far behind. On top of the carrier requirements, which could be anything from implementing a custom address book sync adapter, to ensuring AGPS works accurately, you need to meet US Government requirements. CMAS is a great example. Further, there may be a stack of accessibility items that need to be done, although, Google dramatically increased their support there from ICS. So, once you've done the carrier requirements and the regulatory ones, you also then need to fix the bugs. These could be part of the open source - just look at the issues at code.google.com to see the outstanding ones, or they could be the result of the changes your chip set supplier made to have the code work with their hardware, or their proprietary codecs, etc.. Google may not have gotten around to fixing their bugs yet, but that doesn't mean you'll be able to ship a product today with without fixing them. Should those fixes be pushed back to the open source tree, absolutely, but are they? Why let a competitor benefit from our hard work? Also, you need to weed out any bugs that are unique to your hardware configuration - that could be caused by touch screen firmware, or the modem, bluetooth, or some other piece. Then, finally, you can decide if you want to reskin the UI or add your twiddly improvement. Sometimes that's an enhancement that customer's expect, like hyphenating dial strings, or sometimes it's a totally sexy homescreen widget. That part gets all the press, but all the other stuff must get done even if you decide to ship "pure android".
I worked with Wildseed - they were a good bunch of folks with a decent idea - a phone targeted at kids that you could swap the outside and it'd change the UI. They planned to sell different branded shells for pop groups, etc. that would effectively re-theme the phone you had completely. The phone itself was really funky, with a slight boomerang shape, and the keyboard was at the top with the screen below. (You can see a diagram here http://www.freepatentsonline.com/D0470135-0-large.jpg). The phone also had an LED strip on the top of the phone that enabled you to sky-write messages to others by waving the phone. I also remember they had a cool FM radio channel sharing feature, where you could quickly tell your mates to check out a station. All in all, they had a tonne of ideas and they did in fact manage to sell a few phones, but ultimately, it died and AOL bought them.
The patent looks good to me. Very solid, and narrow. It's for a hardware button on the phone that enables you to quickly enter emoticons. Unless someone can point to a phone that did that before, then I don't see any prior art. As for obviousness, that's a very low bar. If no one had done it before (for emoticons) then why would it be obvious?
The problem I see here is that the good intended patent, to protect a start-up's business ended up in a troll haus.
Cliff
What do you want your audience to think, feel and do? Decide this at the start, and then you'll be able to judge whether you've succeeded in the end. Unfortunately, "Sharing information" is the lowest form of presentation (the highest is a call to action - "Attack!") so if that's all you're doing, it a tough row to hoe.
Start with a grabber - something funny, or a question.
Then tell them what you're going to tell them. This doesn't have to be an agenda slide, you can do it verbally. This sets the context and tells your team that there will be an end!
Give them the content. This can be in the form of slides, or visual aids. Remember, you are the presenter, not the slides. Look at TED talks and you'll see it is the person everyone is looking at and not the slide. Practice standing still and talking to people in the audience. If you have to read off your slides, do it silently for a few seconds, then turn and face the audience and speak. Stand to the left of the screen if you can from the audience's perspective so they'll naturally move their eyes to you (In English we read from the left).
For content, I *really* recommend pictures and no text, or very sparse text. Just get rid of all the text and you'll be free to talk about the picture how you like. If you put up text, people will read it instead of looking and listening to you. The Ignite style, or PechaKucha (http://www.pecha-kucha.org/) styles are very awesome and exciting if you want to give them a go. I use www.gettyimages.com as a source - it's a great search engine for emotive pictures. For internal use, screw copyright, just take anything and blow it up BIG (full bleed, no titles).
Finish with a call to action slide that drives home what you want the team to think feel and do after they walk out the door. Don't be afraid to ask for something too, or for something they should consider. After all, if there is no point to what you've just said, then why bother?
One last point - being told to do a presentation for 30 minutes is an artificial constraint. Will your boss really be upset if you take 10 minutes and get the message across? I've had to do presentations to extremely busy people and had 5 minutes or less and done that with terrific success. The time should not be what you consider - if there's time left over, call it discussion time or Q&A. If there's no discussion or Q&A, maybe you need to be a bit more provocative or thought-provoking in what you are saying.
Good luck!
> does the adjective virgin have the same connotation in the UK as it does here? [USA]
Yes, it does have the same meaning. It was really racy until FCUK started in '97.
> Nobody got hurt.
Hmm. I cheated once at school and it almost wrecked my future. I wasn't caught, and it sent me on a path that I wouldn't have gone down if I hadn't have cheated. I was taking a Chemistry exam aged 14 and due to overcrowding, the exam was in a regular classroom rather than the gym. The assistant music teacher was running the show and as he had really bad eyesight it was just too easy to look through books in my bag for answers. A month later, the results came out and I hit 90% - almost top of the class and a strong indication that I should pick Chemistry as one of my subjects the next year. That was a terrible decision. After slogging through 2 months of Chemistry, I realized I was actually really crap at it and hated the subject, but by then it was too late to switch. I ended up wasting 2 years studying something I hated.
So, you can cheat, but the only person you're fooling is yourself if you think that result means anything at all. Know your own worth.
A friend's Dad bought a ZX80 when they came out and then first thing I did was program a home-made "breakout" game into it. The screen flashed every time the ball went up and down, and then the game ran out of memory.
There's a good tutorial on Amazon's Kindle site here on how to build Kindle books with Word - https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A2RYO17TIRUIVI
Although us Americans may think that $4 a gallon gas is expensive, it's not. What would the change in activity be if it was $7.86 a gallon like in London today? (Source: http://www.theaa.com/motoring_advice/fuel/) In the UK, these kind of prices over the years have meant a wholesale conversion to diesel engines because they have higher mpg, even though diesel costs $8.22/US gallon. The average fuel economy of all UK cars is: City - 17.78, Highway - 37.861, Combined 30.27. Eight out of the top 10 most fuel efficient cars are diesels and have a Combined MPG of >52.56! (converted to US Gallons), with the best The other two are hybrids. (Source: http://fuel-economy.co.uk/stats.shtml). The best diesel is 34% more efficient than the best gas (petrol) car. In the US, the best non-hybrid is the Hyundai Elanta (29/40/33) followed by the Mini Cooper (29/37/32). (Source: http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/pdfs/guides/FEG2011.pdf).
Raising prices to UK levels would mean for a typical family car with a 15 gallon tank, paying in the order of $123 to fill 'er up. Yah, I think that'll make a difference to the decision whether you'll be driving, how far you're willing to commute and how big a car you'll want to buy. Doing it instantaneously would be a huge hit to the US economy, not least because of all the hugely inefficient cars in use today, that people typically live miles from where they work and drive, they haven't ridden a bike since elementary school and there's no public transport. That doesn't mean it couldn't be done, or shouldn't be done or that it wouldn't have an effect.
We in the industry have been using the term "superphone" for a while now to indicate the tier that sits above the iPhone in terms of spec. It is jam-packed with very-high-spec Android devices, like the Galaxy Nexus, Motorola Droids, HTC Bionic, etc. This segment differentiates itself from the iPhone with HD resolution displays, NFC, sub 10mm thickness cabinets, dual-core processors and other techie specs. It is the only space that's really left open now that Apple has claimed the $99 to $199 space and is very crowded as a result. The only other viable space is low-end prepaid, where Pantech, ZTE, LG, Huawei and others fight it out. I have a very neat diagram of this, but I think you get the idea. So this comment on the roadmap is I'm sure nothing more than a tip of the hat to that super-high-end market spot and not a "superphone" that'll rescue Microsoft like Superman.
Our IT team is really the best. They are hugely popular with the staff and I can't imagine a better team. It's a 100+person R&D facility with 3 IT people. Here's how they do it:
1. Invisible firewall - there is one, but you can FTP, ssh, etc. to your heart's content without noticing it. It's even possible to run P2P apps. Of course, if it's non-work related then you're signing your own pink slip. Also, they do audit all PC applications on the network remotely, but I've never been queried and I run some really odd apps sometimes.
2. Simple to use Help ticket system - and they're fast in responding.
3. Adequately staffed - that helps.
4. No restriction on smartphones hooking up to the Exchange server - company doesn't pay for any phones or service though.
5. Multiple VPN services available, so if one doesn't work, try another. Worse case, SSL VPN is available or webmail over SSL. Helpful when traveling abroad or visiting companies that block VPN ports.
6. Support for Windows & Linux, but if you want to run a Mac you can. They'll support you as much as they know.
7. Software purchased under $2000 doesn't need to be vetted, reviewed, quoted or anything else. Just buy it on the dept credit card - with your manager's approval of course.
8. Printers everywhere - we are a printer company, so that helps, but we have competitor's products too, so if one fails and you're waiting for it to be repaired, you have at least two others to print to easily.
9. Copious amounts of network storage for shared files. All RAID. All backed up.
10. Large email quotas, which are instantly upgraded for power-users.
11. Overall a can-do, but pragmatic response to requests - want a load of email or docs archived? They won't waste their time or yours burning DVD's, but they will copy it to an HD and vacuum pack it for you.
12. Finally, no, and I really mean no, draconian controls or policies. Just don't set up a rouge WiFi AP or download porn. Basically, the cardinal rule is - get your work done and be a star.
One clarification - the heart may need those pulses, but the rest of the body does not seem to need them. From NPR June 13th 2011, "Heart With No Beat Offers Hope Of New Lease On Life": "The pulsatility of the flow is essential for the heart, because it can only get nourishment in between heartbeats," Cohn says. "If you remove that from the system, none of the other organs seem to care much."
http://www.npr.org/2011/06/13/137029208/heart-with-no-beat-offers-hope-of-new-lease-on-life
I just watched a number of the course previews for a variety of the online professional development courses from Stanford as I was seriously thinking about doing one of their certificates. I also checked out ClassX, which has some classes on it. I'm having second thoughts because I fear I'll be bored to death by the experience. I've been out of university almost 20 years, but it's clear that they haven't changed much and the flow of information from instructor to student is agonizingly slow. Maybe I'm spoiled, but these lectures are essentially academic death-by-powerpoint experiences or even worse, death-by-writing ... very .... slowly ... on ... the board experiences. Just taking a Standford (or any other) lecture, slapping it on the web and putting even a fancy control UI like ClassX has is just not good enough. I think the courses have to be completely redone with online learning in mind. And if they were really well done, then I'd bet lectures would end up being the *last* place you'd want to go to for the course.
Here's some tips for improving on the online UI experience (for Stanford people if they read this):
1. Add a Skip Forward 30s/Back 10s control, because the instructor often dithers around on non-educational topics.(Copy Tivo/Dish/etc.)
2. Enable the video to be viewed faster than real time. I can easily process 2x speech or higher and the instructors often speak slowly. There's no need to force onliners to listen at 1:1. (Like Livescribe Pen desktop playback or software DVD players)
3. Have the instructor repeat the comment/question from the audience for the microphone - it's a classic problem, but they need to do it.
4. Add in chapters for each topic - this will enable us to skip to the next point/slide should the instructor belabor the point - okay I get it! (Livescribe pen / available on some ClassX content)
5. A number of times, the instructors mentioned how questions couldn't be asked by the online participants, but this isn't true. If the video is surrounded with a forum UI then viewers will easily be able to ask questions and a TA or the Professor can answer later - or other students could. (Like Hulu/YouTube/etc) Partially implemented.
6. Allow bookmarking/resume on the videos because it'd be really useful (like BBC iPlayer/Hulu)
Maybe Stanford's real online system has these functions, but if not, they should. Based on the cost of the courses, you'd think they could have a decent system banged out pronto.
Cliff