In the US, speed-dial will probably not be of much help. When my friend was arrested, they took her phone and stored it with her personal property and did not allow her to access it, even to get a needed phone number.
I know it sounds that simple when you think of it from a "computer guy" direction. But the business situations are rarely that clean.
You say, "store the data", but what data is that? Some of it comes from some file we get from Finance that they've manually put together. The finance database doesn't hold all the pieces and some of it's coming via PDF scans of hand-written notes sent from our factory partners.
Or like another said, say I just got tasked to collect these bits of data from each of our country teams. No country has the data stored in a single database, and if it's in a local database, it's not stored in the same way. So I write a simple excel sheet to serve as a template that they can key/copy in the numbers I need and see some of the summary calculations. They'll send that back to me so I can aggregate it and generate a "global" report by tomorrow's 8:00AM meeting. While I wait for the countries to send their data back, I'm staying up all night, writing some VBA macros to automate some of the production of the powerpoint slides that are needed for that meeting.
I'd love to do this with IT and store the data in one of the IT provided systems. But they'll only laugh if I go to them saying I want to store this data we're collecting via spreadsheet. "No. It's not term-aligned". "No. It's not been approved by data governance.", "Oh, and by the way, can you deploy a web-app that allows them to key in this data? I need it in an hour." and so on. They won't touch this with a 10-foot pole.
Meanwhile, I have a VP who's going into a board meeting tomorrow morning and expects to have a polished report with the numbers he's asked for. I'd like to think he could have asked for these reports sooner, but it turns out that it was a meeting he had today that revealed a new problem in the business that these numbers are needed to explore and explain.
And that's just one scenario.
The problem is that Excel is not only a tool used to make a finished report. It's used for a wide variety of things, from data collection, to data analysis, and yes, even finished reporting. But the people who have to do this work aren't database technicians and are lucky if they can write a few lines of VBA to simplify some of their work. Your prposed approach means that any time there's a change the need for some data or a report, there is a required engagement with IT people who can change the database and write a new program. I know my organization doesn't have those kinds of resources available.
I agree with you completely. And if I had control or even influence to get that kind of headcount, I think it would be a fantastic "force-multiplier" in our organization. I dream of the idea of very small teams of IT implementers that could spend a little time with various departments and help streamline their data collection and reporting using standardized tools.
Sadly, in my large company, our IT organization just isn't willing to "invest in throw-away" tools. They only want to do huge capital projects that can be billed against the business in the millions of dollars. The idea of an 8-hour bit of work with some macros or a small database is just not something they're willing to consider. In fact, a friend of mine tried to push this and was quietly told to stop because he was running the risk of pissing off people who could harm his career. (Generally, this is a good place to work, but you apparently don't want to piss off the IT gods).
Anyway, you're singing my song. In my own job, I've morphed from a business analyst into a "stealth" database developer just so that I can properly support our data collection and reporting needs. It's great for our department doing amazing things, but it's hard on my career because I'm not growing as an analyst, which is what I want to. Instead I'm growing into a database developer, which is what I don't want to be. But... we either do it by hand in excel with no automation and control, or I write a quick little database application. I hate doing things by hand.
At the very least get them using a real DB and not VBA. Trust me you will be far better served in the long run.
The problem is in most organizations, IT is not responsive to requests to set up these kinds of databases. They especially don't deal with requests that are not precise and require a fast turn-around. Thus you end up with analysts and accountants using Excel and sometimes VBA because they can get the job done quickly and effectively.
And frankly, I don't want my accountants and analysts wasting their time creating databases and learning to write database applications. Their job is to be very good at accounting and analysis, not administering databases.
I've written an in-house reporting system and early on I implemented a progress bar. The key reason was to show people that the system was doing something, since a report could take a minute or two to run.
I set it up so that while a report runs, it ticks off a counter at certain steps (each row and column, etc). The progress bar is measured against that count. At the end of running, it stores that count to be used the next time the report is run. It's accurate until the report specification is changed.
However I never try to estimate time remaining. The first part of the report running is collecting the specified data from the database, and the second half is usually drawing shapes on powerpoint slides. These don't usually take equivalent amounts of times. Since it only shows the percent of the tasks done so far compared to the total number of tasks, sometimes it will rush up to about 50% and go slower, or other times it will go slow up to 50% then rush to the end. But for the most part, I tried to put the update events at locations in the code that result in a reasonable balance.
Anyway, that's the approach I took. Even without predicting a time to completion, it's far better than a spinner or hourglass.
One would hope... that you would hire the exceptions.
The problem is that most people have been promoted to the level of their incompetence (Peter Principle) yet most people believe they ARE the exceptions (Dunning Kruger Effect).
This problem pervades society and is not limited to Boeing. But it could be related to process. Some companies have the mentality of "hire the very best, so why worry about process" Others (like LEAN organizations) go the other direction: assume we have average employees, so design the most reliable processes possible.
Frankly, given the complexity of what they're trying to do, I'm surprised they're as successful as they are.
Think about it: in any university or college, NONE of your teachers are actually posess the skill you are trying to acquire. Unless, of course, you want to become a teacher or academia type scientist.
I have to say that for the most part, that has not been my experience. For example, when I was in business school (one of many areas I've explored), most of my professors were consulting on the outside, making more money doing that part-time than they made as professors. My accounting prof had his own accounting business, my marketing prof did "motivational and leadership speaking", my business law prof was a practicing lawyer.
Currently, my prof that teaches computer modeling & simulation has years of industry experience and is leading a student-based consulting group. My Operations Research prof is an EE but also does significant consulting doing OR projects. Even my AI professor from last term is involved in several large OSS efforts and does contracting on the side as well.
When I worked in an engineering school, more than half the profs either came from industry or were still actively involved in work in their fields.
Now, could any of them walk into my job, which is a weird combination of supply chain analyst and application developer and be as effective as I am? Probably not, but several of them could be after time.
But you raise an intersting point. One challenge younger students have is that they have no idea what it's like to work as a professional. So they tend to be somewhat unfocused in their studies. They take classes because they are convenient to their schedule of sleeping in, or whatever, and don't focus on the classes that will get them the skills and knowledge they really need. Internships can help, but I consistently see that students coming to school after working tend to be much more focused and driven - and tend to perform better.
It's a graduate certificate in data science. It's my understanding the guy behind it (J. Nathan Kutz) is the same one who teaches a couple of the data science courses on Coursera for free. So for some money and a bit more rigor in your work and assignments, you get an actual certificate you can put on your resume.
I've been using NavFree USA on my Nexus and it seems like a decent program. I don't know why he has a problem with 3rd party programs.
With this one, you download entire maps for entire states. It even seems to do a nice job with navigation. The only downside that I can see so far is that it's not aware of stores and such. It can navigate from here to 3rd & Main, but it doesn't know where Fry's is.
At work, I have a Lenovo "convertible" laptop that has a stylus for the touch-screen (finger works too). You can write and it will do OCR, but it seemed more like a toy functionality and the novelty wore off after about an hour.
The only other major flaw I see with it is that you can't plug in a headset with a microphone. The port is not a combo port like you find with a phone. So as far as I can tell, you're stuck having to use its built-in microphone if you want to use something like Skype with it.
Netbooks and tablets, while seeming to be similar, are really designed for very different uses. A tablet is designed to conusme media and it's really good for that. A netbook is essentially a scaled-down laptop that allows you to produce things as well as consume them.
I have an Acer netbook, and a Nexus 7. The tablet is great as a "carry it around with me" computing device that lets me browse the internet, keep up with my email, write short replies, etc. It's also great for watching videos, and even reading books. Even better, it does all this and will last 8 hours or more on a single charge. This is fantastic if you're spending a day in an airport and on planes. It's an entertainment device that also allows for some productivity. And sure, I can do much of this on my small andriod phone, having the larger screen makes it enjoyable to use.
The netbook, on the other hand, is a lightweight and portable working computer. It's great if you have some place to sit down and actually use it. But it's not so handy when you're standing on a train or trying to look something up quickly. I use mine for school and have done quite a bit of programming on it. I put Linux Mint on it, and frankly, I think it IS sexy, especially when I can run Virtualbox to do whatever windows things I need to do.
If I had to give up one, I'd grudgingly give up the tablet. Though I'd strongly consider giving up the netbook and my larger laptop (home computer) for a smaller but more powerful laptop and keep the tablet.
It's not a matter of people being sheep, but wanting to do different things. A friend of mine was complaining for quite a while that her old laptop was slow and wanted me to work on it. She got a larger android phone and stopped talking about her laptop. Pretty much everything she needed to do computer-wise was on her phone - and for her, a netbook wouldn't fit her needs as well as her min-tablet phone.
Last summer I got one of the Acer Aspire One netbooks because I took up bike commuting and needed to have a small computer I could easily take between work and school. For the most part, I've been thrilled with it. It's essentially the same machine as the Acer C7 Chromebook (http://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/acer-c7-chromebook.html)
It has an Intel Celeron processor and not the Atom, so it's actually pretty usable. I bumped the memory up to 8GB, so it even does OK with running a Windows XP session under Virtualbox (I'm running Linux Mint). As a test, I used it exclusively while working through the Stanford Machine Learning course on Coursera, which made a lot of use of GNU Octave. I also used it for writing the programs in an AI course I took this fall (in Python). I'll admit, the keyboard is a bit cramped, and it's not as nice having to hold an option key to get home and end keys.
I really like that it has a wired gigabit ethernet in addition to wireless and an HDMI output. My only real issues are driver support problems from the Linux side: the SD card slot doesn't work, the microphone part of the combo jack doesn't work. These do work with the Windows 7 it came with.
So some of the netbooks are actually pretty useful for general computing. Of course, a quad i7 is a lot nicer, but that costs more money. And it looks like they're still being made, as Chromebooks, but not as Windows computers.
So many people have my gmail address that, I would never want to lose my gmail account.
Well, they currently have pretty decent forwarding. I have my gmail account forward all mail to another account, and that's been working for years. Even better (for me), it still filters the spam before forwarding it.
It's a pain to change emails, to be sure, but you could always set up with something you prefer, forward from gmail to it, and then get people to change your address.
As far as I can tell, the newest Acer Chrome-book is nearly the same computer as their celeron-based Aspire-One computers. I have one of those and as far as I can tell, the computers are nearly identical. So I'm suspecting it should be easy to put any flavor of Linux on it, since it doesn't appear to be an ARM computer.
And check the "little things" and not just main support. For example, I have this little Acer Aspire One (AO756) that I like a lot. It has a celeron processor and linux runs on it well. EXCEPT: I've tried everything I can and there seems to be no way to get an external microphone to work (it has a combo jack, like a cellphone). Also, the SD card slot does not work in Linux either. Both of these things work fine in the Windows 7 that the machine came installed with.
I have hopes that future kernel updates will fix these problems, especially since the newest Chrome-books are Acer computers with nearly the same specs as my netbook.
But what I'm trying to say is to check all the smaller details. It may not be enough to just make sure it boots and the video works.
When I got my first "salary job", I wrote to my pen pal in Austria, very excited that I had a whole 2 weeks of paid vacation. She was shocked that America was so barbaric that we got so little vacation. She was evel less impressed when I explained that this was a special benefit and not normal for everyone here.
I dont see the problem. These classes are free for students and they get as much as they want out of it in terms of what they learn.
The class providers are partnering with businesses to give access to student performance as they seek out potential hires. Among that data is the test and homework performance. But there's also other data about how much the student is involved in the forums, etc.
Nobody is saying the employers must use that data or even take it into account. It's their choice to get what they want out of that. If they value the "soft skills", then why shouldn't that data be made available to them?
Plus, there's a big difference between "slimy schoozing bullshit" and participating in the class forums to get help and help others. In the meat-space world, the first is equivalent to brown-nosing the teacher like "Mr. Smith, wow, your theories on blah are so wonderful", and the second is like attending a study group and helping other students out. Do you not see the difference?
Additionally, from a couse-provider point of view, it benefits them to have people in the forums talking about their problems and helping others solve theirs... it adds to the value of the course. They "pay" for that by making it another data point that employers can choose to use when looking for potential candidates.
Students are free not to participate in the forums if they don't want to, and employers are free to use that data if they want. Don't you think it's a bad match if the employer wants these soft skills and the candidate doesn't like to exhibit them? I mean, if a company is one of those pansy-ass companies that wants soft-skills, wouldn't you want to know that it's not a company you want to work for? It's a win-win-win.
I've had a 11" netbook that I've been using all summer and really enjoyed it. I took up bike-commuting and it's great having a small computer I could take to work and to class.
I also recently got a Nexus 7 tablet. And I love it! It's even handier to carry around on my bike and is great for general entertainment.
But for getting any kind of work done (the kind of work I do anyway... Excel, SQL, VBA, Python), I really need a keyboard.
When I'm out on my bike or flying somewhere, the small tablet is awesome and a great way to do things like keep up on my email, mess around on the web, look things up, etc. But if I had to only have one, I'd give up the tablet and keep the netbook. Just too much of what I do, even in entertainment, requires typing a lot - and typing all those odd characters that don't show up by default on a tablet's virtual keyboard.
If you think of them as tools, they're really designed for different jobs. One can be used in place of the other, but neither does well replacing the other.
I dont' know about CPUs, but some apps seem to only work with specific versions of Android. When my Nexus 7 upgraded to 4.2, several apps stopped working. And there are lots of apps for my Android phone that when I try to find them on the app-store say they won't work with my device (and these aren't phone-dependent apps).
Maybe the difference doesn't come from different CPUs on different platforms, but there is a problem with apps not working universally. I suspect the problem is that different devices are running different versions of Android.
When I used to work at a university maintaining computers, my kit always had cleaners and wipes, and the first thing I'd do to a computer is wipe it down (screen, keyboard, any obvious dirt on the case). This was not only for my own sanitation, but our seemed seemed a lot happier with a cleaned off computer. Even if it didn't work much better, they seemed happier, since because it was cleaner, we clearly did "something" to it. In customer service, perception is just as important as actual performance.
I also sit here looking at the 24" monitor I'm using and imagining how my arms would get really tired if I had to spend all day swiping and poking at it.
Also, one of my pet-peeves is when someone touches my monitor with their finger, or worse, the tip of a pen. It drives me crazy! So I don't think I'll ever be happy with a touchscreen monitor for normal work.
But I do have a small android phone and recently got and fell in love with my Nexus 7. However I've come to this conclusion: touch-screens are great for entertainment devices, but for most real work, you need a keyboard and decent monitor.
Well, in my world, "real work" tends to be using things like answering emails, using Excel and typing code (SQL, Python, VBA, etc.). Typing a long email on my little phone is ridiculous, but it's sure handy in a pinch and for monitoring my email when I'm away. But even on my Nexus, where I have the "hackers keyboard" (a "must" because it shows numbers at the same time as letters and has a tab key), an "Office Suite", GNU Octave, and can even ssh to other computers, it's still not very easy to do productive work. A spreadsheet on a touch screen is hard to use, and typing out python code via ssh is something you only want to do for a quick fix. The only real work thing I do with any frequency on my Nexus is answering emails, and even those tend to be short. For longer emails, I've actually hooked up an external keyboard to it.
Now at work I recently got a new computer. Because I've taken up cycling and bike-commuting, I wanted a smaller computer (my last laptop was this HP Workstaion behemoth that always brought chuckles as I brought it into a meeting because it was so huge). But because I do virtualization, I wanted an i7 processor. Among those options at work, the only one that matched that was one of the Lenovo "convertables"... laptop by day, then swivel and pivot into a tablet by night. It even has a little stylus for precision work. Now this was cool when I first got it but since that first day, I haven't pivoted it into a tablet again.
Now, as for my Nexus 7, it's been a fun little computing device. It's great because it's light and fits in my trunk bag on my bike. It also decent for browsing the web and looking things up. I also use it a lot for reading (more than I thought I would, but I just bought a bunch of my O'Reilley books for $4.99), and for playing audio books as I go to sleep at night (there's an app that will stop the player after some specified time, which is great for picking up where it left off).
So all said, I love my 7" tablet but it's not really that great for serious work, and I really doubt a larger tablet would be much better. For real work in my world, I need a keyboard, multiple windows, and a mouse.
But that's just my case and experience. That said, I do want to go to a store and play with the 10" Nexus, but I doubt I'll buy one. In the 10-11 inch size, I'm much happier with my little Acer Netbook... it's nearly as portable, but has a keyboard. But then that leaves me with 4 main computing devices in my personal space.
Note: if I had been on my Nexus, this post would have been much, much shorter.
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In the US, speed-dial will probably not be of much help. When my friend was arrested, they took her phone and stored it with her personal property and did not allow her to access it, even to get a needed phone number.
I know it sounds that simple when you think of it from a "computer guy" direction. But the business situations are rarely that clean.
You say, "store the data", but what data is that? Some of it comes from some file we get from Finance that they've manually put together. The finance database doesn't hold all the pieces and some of it's coming via PDF scans of hand-written notes sent from our factory partners.
Or like another said, say I just got tasked to collect these bits of data from each of our country teams. No country has the data stored in a single database, and if it's in a local database, it's not stored in the same way. So I write a simple excel sheet to serve as a template that they can key/copy in the numbers I need and see some of the summary calculations. They'll send that back to me so I can aggregate it and generate a "global" report by tomorrow's 8:00AM meeting. While I wait for the countries to send their data back, I'm staying up all night, writing some VBA macros to automate some of the production of the powerpoint slides that are needed for that meeting.
I'd love to do this with IT and store the data in one of the IT provided systems. But they'll only laugh if I go to them saying I want to store this data we're collecting via spreadsheet. "No. It's not term-aligned". "No. It's not been approved by data governance.", "Oh, and by the way, can you deploy a web-app that allows them to key in this data? I need it in an hour." and so on. They won't touch this with a 10-foot pole.
Meanwhile, I have a VP who's going into a board meeting tomorrow morning and expects to have a polished report with the numbers he's asked for. I'd like to think he could have asked for these reports sooner, but it turns out that it was a meeting he had today that revealed a new problem in the business that these numbers are needed to explore and explain.
And that's just one scenario.
The problem is that Excel is not only a tool used to make a finished report. It's used for a wide variety of things, from data collection, to data analysis, and yes, even finished reporting. But the people who have to do this work aren't database technicians and are lucky if they can write a few lines of VBA to simplify some of their work. Your prposed approach means that any time there's a change the need for some data or a report, there is a required engagement with IT people who can change the database and write a new program. I know my organization doesn't have those kinds of resources available.
I agree with you completely. And if I had control or even influence to get that kind of headcount, I think it would be a fantastic "force-multiplier" in our organization. I dream of the idea of very small teams of IT implementers that could spend a little time with various departments and help streamline their data collection and reporting using standardized tools.
Sadly, in my large company, our IT organization just isn't willing to "invest in throw-away" tools. They only want to do huge capital projects that can be billed against the business in the millions of dollars. The idea of an 8-hour bit of work with some macros or a small database is just not something they're willing to consider. In fact, a friend of mine tried to push this and was quietly told to stop because he was running the risk of pissing off people who could harm his career. (Generally, this is a good place to work, but you apparently don't want to piss off the IT gods).
Anyway, you're singing my song. In my own job, I've morphed from a business analyst into a "stealth" database developer just so that I can properly support our data collection and reporting needs. It's great for our department doing amazing things, but it's hard on my career because I'm not growing as an analyst, which is what I want to. Instead I'm growing into a database developer, which is what I don't want to be. But... we either do it by hand in excel with no automation and control, or I write a quick little database application. I hate doing things by hand.
At the very least get them using a real DB and not VBA. Trust me you will be far better served in the long run.
The problem is in most organizations, IT is not responsive to requests to set up these kinds of databases. They especially don't deal with requests that are not precise and require a fast turn-around. Thus you end up with analysts and accountants using Excel and sometimes VBA because they can get the job done quickly and effectively.
And frankly, I don't want my accountants and analysts wasting their time creating databases and learning to write database applications. Their job is to be very good at accounting and analysis, not administering databases.
I've written an in-house reporting system and early on I implemented a progress bar. The key reason was to show people that the system was doing something, since a report could take a minute or two to run.
I set it up so that while a report runs, it ticks off a counter at certain steps (each row and column, etc). The progress bar is measured against that count. At the end of running, it stores that count to be used the next time the report is run. It's accurate until the report specification is changed.
However I never try to estimate time remaining. The first part of the report running is collecting the specified data from the database, and the second half is usually drawing shapes on powerpoint slides. These don't usually take equivalent amounts of times. Since it only shows the percent of the tasks done so far compared to the total number of tasks, sometimes it will rush up to about 50% and go slower, or other times it will go slow up to 50% then rush to the end. But for the most part, I tried to put the update events at locations in the code that result in a reasonable balance.
Anyway, that's the approach I took. Even without predicting a time to completion, it's far better than a spinner or hourglass.
It probably has just enough fruit juice to get around school districts and states that prohibit sodas but allow fruit juice in schools.
One would hope... that you would hire the exceptions.
The problem is that most people have been promoted to the level of their incompetence (Peter Principle) yet most people believe they ARE the exceptions (Dunning Kruger Effect).
This problem pervades society and is not limited to Boeing. But it could be related to process. Some companies have the mentality of "hire the very best, so why worry about process" Others (like LEAN organizations) go the other direction: assume we have average employees, so design the most reliable processes possible.
Frankly, given the complexity of what they're trying to do, I'm surprised they're as successful as they are.
Yikes! That reminds me of what a monochrome Mac Classic looked like 20 years ago.
Think about it: in any university or college, NONE of your teachers are actually posess the skill you are trying to acquire. Unless, of course, you want to become a teacher or academia type scientist.
I have to say that for the most part, that has not been my experience. For example, when I was in business school (one of many areas I've explored), most of my professors were consulting on the outside, making more money doing that part-time than they made as professors. My accounting prof had his own accounting business, my marketing prof did "motivational and leadership speaking", my business law prof was a practicing lawyer.
Currently, my prof that teaches computer modeling & simulation has years of industry experience and is leading a student-based consulting group. My Operations Research prof is an EE but also does significant consulting doing OR projects. Even my AI professor from last term is involved in several large OSS efforts and does contracting on the side as well.
When I worked in an engineering school, more than half the profs either came from industry or were still actively involved in work in their fields.
Now, could any of them walk into my job, which is a weird combination of supply chain analyst and application developer and be as effective as I am? Probably not, but several of them could be after time.
But you raise an intersting point. One challenge younger students have is that they have no idea what it's like to work as a professional. So they tend to be somewhat unfocused in their studies. They take classes because they are convenient to their schedule of sleeping in, or whatever, and don't focus on the classes that will get them the skills and knowledge they really need. Internships can help, but I consistently see that students coming to school after working tend to be much more focused and driven - and tend to perform better.
Here's a program that actually looks appealing, and I'd consider paying for it (I think about $2k for the year-long program):
http://www.pce.uw.edu/certificates/data-science.html
It's a graduate certificate in data science. It's my understanding the guy behind it (J. Nathan Kutz) is the same one who teaches a couple of the data science courses on Coursera for free. So for some money and a bit more rigor in your work and assignments, you get an actual certificate you can put on your resume.
Here are the Coursera courses:
https://www.coursera.org/course/compmethods
https://www.coursera.org/course/scientificcomp
If Andrew Ng and Stanford offered some kind of real credit and certificates, I'd be all over that.
I've been using NavFree USA on my Nexus and it seems like a decent program. I don't know why he has a problem with 3rd party programs.
With this one, you download entire maps for entire states. It even seems to do a nice job with navigation. The only downside that I can see so far is that it's not aware of stores and such. It can navigate from here to 3rd & Main, but it doesn't know where Fry's is.
At work, I have a Lenovo "convertible" laptop that has a stylus for the touch-screen (finger works too). You can write and it will do OCR, but it seemed more like a toy functionality and the novelty wore off after about an hour.
The only other major flaw I see with it is that you can't plug in a headset with a microphone. The port is not a combo port like you find with a phone. So as far as I can tell, you're stuck having to use its built-in microphone if you want to use something like Skype with it.
Netbooks and tablets, while seeming to be similar, are really designed for very different uses. A tablet is designed to conusme media and it's really good for that. A netbook is essentially a scaled-down laptop that allows you to produce things as well as consume them.
I have an Acer netbook, and a Nexus 7. The tablet is great as a "carry it around with me" computing device that lets me browse the internet, keep up with my email, write short replies, etc. It's also great for watching videos, and even reading books. Even better, it does all this and will last 8 hours or more on a single charge. This is fantastic if you're spending a day in an airport and on planes. It's an entertainment device that also allows for some productivity. And sure, I can do much of this on my small andriod phone, having the larger screen makes it enjoyable to use.
The netbook, on the other hand, is a lightweight and portable working computer. It's great if you have some place to sit down and actually use it. But it's not so handy when you're standing on a train or trying to look something up quickly. I use mine for school and have done quite a bit of programming on it. I put Linux Mint on it, and frankly, I think it IS sexy, especially when I can run Virtualbox to do whatever windows things I need to do.
If I had to give up one, I'd grudgingly give up the tablet. Though I'd strongly consider giving up the netbook and my larger laptop (home computer) for a smaller but more powerful laptop and keep the tablet.
It's not a matter of people being sheep, but wanting to do different things. A friend of mine was complaining for quite a while that her old laptop was slow and wanted me to work on it. She got a larger android phone and stopped talking about her laptop. Pretty much everything she needed to do computer-wise was on her phone - and for her, a netbook wouldn't fit her needs as well as her min-tablet phone.
Last summer I got one of the Acer Aspire One netbooks because I took up bike commuting and needed to have a small computer I could easily take between work and school. For the most part, I've been thrilled with it. It's essentially the same machine as the Acer C7 Chromebook (http://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/acer-c7-chromebook.html)
It has an Intel Celeron processor and not the Atom, so it's actually pretty usable. I bumped the memory up to 8GB, so it even does OK with running a Windows XP session under Virtualbox (I'm running Linux Mint). As a test, I used it exclusively while working through the Stanford Machine Learning course on Coursera, which made a lot of use of GNU Octave. I also used it for writing the programs in an AI course I took this fall (in Python). I'll admit, the keyboard is a bit cramped, and it's not as nice having to hold an option key to get home and end keys.
I really like that it has a wired gigabit ethernet in addition to wireless and an HDMI output. My only real issues are driver support problems from the Linux side: the SD card slot doesn't work, the microphone part of the combo jack doesn't work. These do work with the Windows 7 it came with.
So some of the netbooks are actually pretty useful for general computing. Of course, a quad i7 is a lot nicer, but that costs more money. And it looks like they're still being made, as Chromebooks, but not as Windows computers.
If you ever paid with anything other than cash, they already have your identity associated with the card.
So many people have my gmail address that, I would never want to lose my gmail account.
Well, they currently have pretty decent forwarding. I have my gmail account forward all mail to another account, and that's been working for years. Even better (for me), it still filters the spam before forwarding it.
It's a pain to change emails, to be sure, but you could always set up with something you prefer, forward from gmail to it, and then get people to change your address.
As far as I can tell, the newest Acer Chrome-book is nearly the same computer as their celeron-based Aspire-One computers. I have one of those and as far as I can tell, the computers are nearly identical. So I'm suspecting it should be easy to put any flavor of Linux on it, since it doesn't appear to be an ARM computer.
And check the "little things" and not just main support. For example, I have this little Acer Aspire One (AO756) that I like a lot. It has a celeron processor and linux runs on it well. EXCEPT: I've tried everything I can and there seems to be no way to get an external microphone to work (it has a combo jack, like a cellphone). Also, the SD card slot does not work in Linux either. Both of these things work fine in the Windows 7 that the machine came installed with.
I have hopes that future kernel updates will fix these problems, especially since the newest Chrome-books are Acer computers with nearly the same specs as my netbook.
But what I'm trying to say is to check all the smaller details. It may not be enough to just make sure it boots and the video works.
When I got my first "salary job", I wrote to my pen pal in Austria, very excited that I had a whole 2 weeks of paid vacation. She was shocked that America was so barbaric that we got so little vacation. She was evel less impressed when I explained that this was a special benefit and not normal for everyone here.
I dont see the problem. These classes are free for students and they get as much as they want out of it in terms of what they learn.
The class providers are partnering with businesses to give access to student performance as they seek out potential hires. Among that data is the test and homework performance. But there's also other data about how much the student is involved in the forums, etc.
Nobody is saying the employers must use that data or even take it into account. It's their choice to get what they want out of that. If they value the "soft skills", then why shouldn't that data be made available to them?
Plus, there's a big difference between "slimy schoozing bullshit" and participating in the class forums to get help and help others. In the meat-space world, the first is equivalent to brown-nosing the teacher like "Mr. Smith, wow, your theories on blah are so wonderful", and the second is like attending a study group and helping other students out. Do you not see the difference?
Additionally, from a couse-provider point of view, it benefits them to have people in the forums talking about their problems and helping others solve theirs... it adds to the value of the course. They "pay" for that by making it another data point that employers can choose to use when looking for potential candidates.
Students are free not to participate in the forums if they don't want to, and employers are free to use that data if they want. Don't you think it's a bad match if the employer wants these soft skills and the candidate doesn't like to exhibit them? I mean, if a company is one of those pansy-ass companies that wants soft-skills, wouldn't you want to know that it's not a company you want to work for? It's a win-win-win.
Nearl all but 1,000 humans volunteer for a suicide mission to remain on Earth.
I've had a 11" netbook that I've been using all summer and really enjoyed it. I took up bike-commuting and it's great having a small computer I could take to work and to class.
I also recently got a Nexus 7 tablet. And I love it! It's even handier to carry around on my bike and is great for general entertainment.
But for getting any kind of work done (the kind of work I do anyway... Excel, SQL, VBA, Python), I really need a keyboard.
When I'm out on my bike or flying somewhere, the small tablet is awesome and a great way to do things like keep up on my email, mess around on the web, look things up, etc. But if I had to only have one, I'd give up the tablet and keep the netbook. Just too much of what I do, even in entertainment, requires typing a lot - and typing all those odd characters that don't show up by default on a tablet's virtual keyboard.
If you think of them as tools, they're really designed for different jobs. One can be used in place of the other, but neither does well replacing the other.
I dont' know about CPUs, but some apps seem to only work with specific versions of Android. When my Nexus 7 upgraded to 4.2, several apps stopped working. And there are lots of apps for my Android phone that when I try to find them on the app-store say they won't work with my device (and these aren't phone-dependent apps).
Maybe the difference doesn't come from different CPUs on different platforms, but there is a problem with apps not working universally. I suspect the problem is that different devices are running different versions of Android.
When I used to work at a university maintaining computers, my kit always had cleaners and wipes, and the first thing I'd do to a computer is wipe it down (screen, keyboard, any obvious dirt on the case). This was not only for my own sanitation, but our seemed seemed a lot happier with a cleaned off computer. Even if it didn't work much better, they seemed happier, since because it was cleaner, we clearly did "something" to it. In customer service, perception is just as important as actual performance.
I also sit here looking at the 24" monitor I'm using and imagining how my arms would get really tired if I had to spend all day swiping and poking at it.
Also, one of my pet-peeves is when someone touches my monitor with their finger, or worse, the tip of a pen. It drives me crazy! So I don't think I'll ever be happy with a touchscreen monitor for normal work.
But I do have a small android phone and recently got and fell in love with my Nexus 7. However I've come to this conclusion: touch-screens are great for entertainment devices, but for most real work, you need a keyboard and decent monitor.
Well, in my world, "real work" tends to be using things like answering emails, using Excel and typing code (SQL, Python, VBA, etc.). Typing a long email on my little phone is ridiculous, but it's sure handy in a pinch and for monitoring my email when I'm away. But even on my Nexus, where I have the "hackers keyboard" (a "must" because it shows numbers at the same time as letters and has a tab key), an "Office Suite", GNU Octave, and can even ssh to other computers, it's still not very easy to do productive work. A spreadsheet on a touch screen is hard to use, and typing out python code via ssh is something you only want to do for a quick fix. The only real work thing I do with any frequency on my Nexus is answering emails, and even those tend to be short. For longer emails, I've actually hooked up an external keyboard to it.
Now at work I recently got a new computer. Because I've taken up cycling and bike-commuting, I wanted a smaller computer (my last laptop was this HP Workstaion behemoth that always brought chuckles as I brought it into a meeting because it was so huge). But because I do virtualization, I wanted an i7 processor. Among those options at work, the only one that matched that was one of the Lenovo "convertables"... laptop by day, then swivel and pivot into a tablet by night. It even has a little stylus for precision work. Now this was cool when I first got it but since that first day, I haven't pivoted it into a tablet again.
Now, as for my Nexus 7, it's been a fun little computing device. It's great because it's light and fits in my trunk bag on my bike. It also decent for browsing the web and looking things up. I also use it a lot for reading (more than I thought I would, but I just bought a bunch of my O'Reilley books for $4.99), and for playing audio books as I go to sleep at night (there's an app that will stop the player after some specified time, which is great for picking up where it left off).
So all said, I love my 7" tablet but it's not really that great for serious work, and I really doubt a larger tablet would be much better. For real work in my world, I need a keyboard, multiple windows, and a mouse.
But that's just my case and experience. That said, I do want to go to a store and play with the 10" Nexus, but I doubt I'll buy one. In the 10-11 inch size, I'm much happier with my little Acer Netbook... it's nearly as portable, but has a keyboard. But then that leaves me with 4 main computing devices in my personal space.
Note: if I had been on my Nexus, this post would have been much, much shorter.