Sarah Kessler:
After an early wave of enthusiasm for bulky backpacks with solar-powered chargers, the new bet is on kinetic energy, or energy that can be generated from movement, including the stride of a walker or the turn of a bicycle wheel. The beauty of kinetic energy is that the more something weighs and the faster it moves, the more energy it can generate.
25 minutes walking to charge and iPhone = sign me up.
Paul Thurrott:
I know that, internally at Microsoft, many people do not agree with the direction the company is going. And all you have to do is read the tech press and, heck, the mainstream press, to see who’s getting all the press these days.
It ain’t you, Microsoft. And that is indeed bad news.
I have to agree with that whole heartedly. Microsoft for all intents and purposes has dropped off the radar of the press. This is never good for a company, even when Apple is in lock down developing a new product there is still tremendous buzz about the company.
But Thurrott had to go and say this:
And if you’re looking to copy Apple’s success–and you are–then at least do it right. It’s not about the products at all. What Apple does right is marketing. It’s form over function, plain and simple. How else could the world be so excited over an unnecessary over-sized iPod touch? Because it’s from Apple, that’s how. And the press markets it for them, and makes people believe that this is somehow a big deal. It’s a self-replicating back-patting, buddy system, plain and simple.
And you’re not part of the circle, Microsoft. How else can you explain the ginormous Windows 7 sales that get no attention, and certainly no love from Wall Street? You’ve sold over 100 million licenses of this thing in record time and all anyone can talk about are lost iPhones and the iPad. I mean, give me a break.
Actually it is about the products, marketing will sell your products initially, growth comes from having a great product. This is how you explain Apple’s success, amazing marketing to get the early adopters to buy and then the product will carry it the rest of the way. The iPhone / iPod / iPad sales are nuts, and growing still.
Windows 7 has been a financial success I am sure (compared to Vista) and it has sold a lot of copies. That does not make it good however, because unlike with the iPad or iPhone people are not buying it because they want it. People are buying Windows 7 because they don’t want to use a slow, 9 year old Operating System. That and the fact that all new PCs comes with it helps.
From the Website:
Central Desktop for Office enables multiple users to simultaneously co-author Word, Excel and PowerPoint files in real time, eliminating the need to upgrade to Microsoft SharePoint/Office 2010 for the same functionality.
I am pretty surprised that it took so long for this to come to Office. Looks like it could be pretty neat for those that need this level of collaboration. I would think though that their user base is very limited in size. Be sure to check out the video for a better understanding of what the software allows.
Frederik Joelving:
Despite the encouraging findings, Longhurst said he was concerned about President Obama’s call for rapid implementation of the electronic system.
“It should be rolled out by experienced experts,” he said. “And there are only so many experts in this country.”
I too agree that it should be rolled out by very experienced people. I think the bigger picture with regard to digitizing the healthcare system in hospitals is going to be privacy and security. I think in general everyone agrees that better information (getting all the medical charts at once with computer alerts to allergies) will save lives.
The real question is what the cost to our privacy will be.
Monday April 5th, 2010 at approximately 10:30a I received my 16gb Wi-Fi only iPad. I had just gotten off a plane in Portland, OR – a red-eye from Honolulu to Portland – and drove 2 hours and 30 minutes to Tacoma, WA to pick up my iPad waiting at my office for me. Then I drove another 44 minutes home.
I unpacked from being gone for two weeks, played with the cat and ate food. Then I did the ceremonial opening of the iPad and plugged it in to my Macbook Pro. Now came the longest hour and a half of my life as I synced the iPad and put music and videos on it.
For the next week of my life and really took the iPad everywhere with me, showing it off and using it for every possible thing I could. We have all read those reviews, some are great and some leave you scratching your head. I thought it would be useful for people to get a look at how I am using the iPad one month into it. I have broken my usages down by the time of the day as that seems like the best way to go about this.
After I check some websites on my Mac, I read through my RSS feeds (Fever°) and save the ones I want to read to Instapaper. From there I grab my iPad and head to the couch (I don’t like to look at Fever° on the iPad as it is still a little problematic, but usable). Once I hit the couch I go through my apps, here is the order that I read the apps and email links to Instapaper:
When I see an article I want to read in any of the above I email the link to Instapaper for reading later. If I have time left before I need to leave for work I try to read articles in Instapaper.
This is the period of the day that I rarely use the iPad. Not that it doesn’t have its business uses, just my work day is not tailored towards those uses. I rarely go to meetings – which is a place where the iPad shines. Most days I will use the iPad as a scratch pad (Penultimate) while on the phone and will take it with me to different places I go. If I find myself with some downtime I will flip on the Verizon MiFi and catch up on some Instapaper reading.
The iPad shines during this period of time. Spend a lot of time on different websites, reading in Instapaper / iBooks / Kindle / Zinio. I post to WordPress, play games, and control VLC on my Mac mini (hooked to the TV). The entire night is spent on my iPad, rarely do I touch my Macbook Pro.
Take Pre-work and After work and press them together omitting the ‘work’ stage. That is my weekend usage. 10% is on my Macbook Pro and the rest is my iPad with about 0.5% being my iPhone.
One thing I think is most telling about a new gadget is to ask yourself if you would purchase it again given what you know today. The answer to this for me is an overwhelming ‘yes’ I would buy the iPad again no regrets. I also would not buy the 3G, nor do I need any more space than 16gbs affords.
The key to my enjoyment of the iPad is that after work period of time, whereas before the iPad I used to use my Macbook Pro until my wife got annoyed and then just my iPhone. With the iPad it is all sorts of different. I can turn the iPad off and on to start and stop what I am doing in an instant – allowing me to stop reading and focus on a conversation with my wife, picking it up again easily. With a laptop there is always a lag between sleeping and waking the computer – a lag that becomes annoying once you use an iPad.
Hands down the battery. Apple was not joking when they rated it at 10 hours of battery life. This device has an outstanding battery. While the life is nice, what the battery really means for the user is:
Wireless devices are great so long as the battery is charged. They are worthless once the batteries are dead, or you have to us them tethered to a charger. The iPad makes this a non-issue.
I had a lot of trouble deciding what I think the worst feature to be, but I think I finally discovered. Lack of privacy is the iPad’s worst feature. I think Craig Hockenberry said it best:
The iPad was naturally passed around amongst the partygoers. Many people interacted with it during the evening, and I lost track of who had it at any given time. And therein lies a fundamental problem.
My iPad has a lot of personal information on it: email, business documents, and financial data. When you pass it around, you’re giving everyone who touches it the opportunity to mess with your private life, whether intentionally or not. That makes me uneasy.
I could not agree more so be sure to read that whole post to get the entire picture. We need better security when we show / share these devices with others.
Instapaper. Hands down, the reading, usability, speed are all top notch. This is the best app on the iPad no doubt about it.
I can’t speak for all the apps, but of the ones that I have tried I hate the Wall Street Journal app the most. This has nothing to do with the subscription pricing, and everything to do with the look, and usability.
Why do I have to download the entire newspaper for the hour / day? Why does it take forever to download it, NYT and USA Today reloads quickly. Why do you feel the need to nag me all the time to subscribe when I already said no? Not to mention the giant pop up ads. Such an annoying app.
I really am looking forward to the future of the iPad, more so than I am with the iPhone. I think OS 4.0 is going to give quite an amazing boost to the iPad. I think that future hardware updates are only going to make an already fast iPad into an instant iPad.
Also on another note the iPad has made me want an SSD drive for my Macbook Pro more than ever.
That’s my iPad take after one month of using it.
Brad Stone:
The idea of a monthly subscription service that allows people to jump to the head of airport security lines by submitting to a fingerprint or iris scan may be getting another chance.
If I traveled even 5 times a year on planes, I would pay for this in a heart beat. Why we don’t have faster screening methods after nines years of the TSA is dumbfounding. Let’s get moving on this people.
I was just informed by a friend of mine that he has not been able to login to his online banking with Harborstone Credit Union for all of 2010. The problem is that Webkit was updated and now no longer works with the banks system. He has reported the problem and the bank is more than aware of it, however he was told:
We use a third party company for our online banking, and they have not been able to fix it yet.
Why the hell not? This is not 10 years ago, the Mac is very popular and gaining in popularity. IE’s market share is now below 60% and you don’t support two very popular web browsers? (Safari and Chrome both use Webkit’s engine) If you think for one minute that it is really not that big of a deal then you are an idiot.
Last October I decided it was time to switch banks – I made that decision because the Internet banking at my bank (Rainier Pacific Bank, now Umpqua Bank) was ungodly slow.
So I switched to USAA.com impart because they have a nice iPhone app, and also because I have never heard a complaint about them. They have a phenomenal internet banking service, it is fast and works on everything from my iPhone to Macbook Pro.
It is not a matter of technical hardship, or not being able to do anything about these changes. It is a matter of companies not caring to help their customers.
This day and age you should be looking to support Firefox, Chrome and Safari, then Internet Explorer.
Harborstone, tell your third party company that you want it fixed this week or you are leaving them. Because either you leave your software supplier, or your customers will start leaving you.
MG Siegler:
Again, this is still the early days for all of this. And I do believe these publishers (moreso in the magazine industry, but we’ll give the newspaper industry some time to catch up) are onto something. All I know is that I haven’t read this much print media in years. Or, let me rephrase that: I haven’t paid to read this much print media in years. And yet I’m happy to do it. It’s a weird feeling.
This is a very interesting take on the direction that magazines are taking with the iPad. I for one use Zinio Reader to subscribe and read magazines on my Mac and iPad. I have been using it for years now. That said it is not that great of a reading experience (basically a PDF version of the magazine), so if Magazines started releasing apps that I could subscribe to them in – well I would be all for it.
That being said I am not paying $4.99 an issue. Get it to the same price as paper subscriptions and we can talk.
When I traveled to Japan a few years ago we took an AT&T data card with us and enabled the international plan. The fees were horrendous and almost made it cheaper to lose business than to pay AT&T to stay connected.
Now with the iPad AT&T is charging $200 a month for a lowly 200mb of data. That is absurd.
Especially considering this tidbit from John Brownlee:
What’s most absurd is that since the iPad is sold unlocked, you should be able to just travel abroad, pick up a 3G micro SIM from a local carrier and use their iPad 3G at local rates without a contract. Who is AT&T trying to fool here?
That would seem logical, and if you have tried this please be sure to write and let me know if it works.
Stephen Hawking:
The slowing of time has another benefit. It means we could, in theory, travel extraordinary distances within one lifetime. A trip to the edge of the galaxy would take just 80 years. But the real wonder of our journey is that it reveals just how strange the universe is. It’s a universe where time runs at different rates in different places. Where tiny wormholes exist all around us. And where, ultimately, we might use our understanding of physics to become true voyagers through the fourth dimension.
Also I love this line:
If I had a time machine I’d visit Marilyn Monroe in her prime or drop in on Galileo as he turned his telescope to the heavens.
This release adds support for custom fields on WordPress installations:
For WordPress and other blogs that implement the WordPress API, you can configure custom fields in MarsEdit to customize the post editing interface.
This is something I have been waiting for, and I am so happy that it has now been released. MarsEdit is the best blog posting software you can get for the Mac, this release only ups the ante.
Nick Bilton:
Both agencies have received complaints about Apple’s new iPhone policy, according to a person briefed on the matter, who asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to speak about it. In such situations, the agencies typically negotiate with each other to determine which one will initiate an inquiry.
I saw rumblings of this yesterday on the NY Post, but the Post being what it is I had decided not to post it. Now the NY Times and WSJ are reporting this. Don’t be too concerned as these are lengthy processes and do not always result in anything happening.
Jean-Louis Gassée:
The upstart doesn’t signal the end of the previous generation. We still have mainframes, and we’ll have PCs for a long time. But give it time and, as stated at the beginning of this note, the Center of Money will shift as customers become more comfortable with the new, lighter, sexier model, as the nascent devices gain muscle and polish. This is the future Google and Apple have in mind for their Android/Chrome and iPhone platforms.
Indeed, after using the iPad for as long as I have, it is becoming clear that for a great many people there is no need for anything more than an iPad. Once OS 4.0 hits the iPad will be a great only computer for a great many people.
David A. Graham
With so few effective tactics for preventing low-tech attacks, the major consolation is that these measures seem to have driven attackers away from more lethal explosive devices, which are more easily detected, and toward primitive incendiary devices, which are more likely to fail and less deadly.
This is good news indeed. A month ago I was coming back from Canada with a couple of friends at the Major crossing on I5 into Washington. One of my friends had under went medical testing 4 days prior, that require a radioactive isotope to be injected into his blood stream. Within 30 seconds of getting into the area where the explosives detectors are housed there was an Customs Agent out with a Geiger counter. We were stopped brought inside, my friend was questioned and they verified the medical testing. Took us an extra 15 minutes, but was still one of the most impressive things I have ever seen.
The Gear Junkie:
Traveling in Nepal last month, the AdventurerOpti was constantly at my side. The product is small, easy to use and quick: Press the button, dip the lamp into your drink, and wait 90 seconds to purify a liter of liquid.
As a hiker we take water filtration and purification for granted. In the grand scheme of things these little devices are amazing, and hopefully we can get them into the hands of more people who need them on a daily basis.
Chris Foresman:
PTC [ed note: Parents Television Council] agrees with Jobs that this is a problem, as no other smartphone platform offers a system like Parental Controls. “We plan to draw attention to other platforms, such as Android, or Verizon’s Vcast service, that aren’t really doing anything,” McKiernan told Ars.” We definitely want to see progress from some of the other handheld devices.”
Ruh Oh.
Copy/Cut/Paste does not work for many users (including me). This is not good at all. I can’t copy and paste meaning that I can’t compose posts on the iPad (I don’t write them in the WordPress app).
This is a major flaw and I hope it gets fixed yesterday.
A month ago I, like many others, got and iPad. One thing that has really interested me is people complaining about not being able to print. Leading to dozens of iPad apps that allow you to print documents from the iPad via many different methods.
I have none of these apps and probably won’t buy any, the simple fact is that I am 90% paperless in both work and personal facets. So I asked myself, is printing still relevant. With email and signed PDFs, do we really need to print things, and when we do, does it really matter?
(Let’s put aside photo printing, as we all do it and we know just how important high quality is.) I think that now more than ever printing is very important.
Not so much in the sense that we desperately need printouts in order to survive in today’s world. The opposite is actually true, we truly can get by without paper these days – though most choose not to. It is for this very reason that printing is so important.
We need to change the way we think about printouts. Printing should be the new marketing materials that we use. Each printout should be high quality with thought put into it.
We no longer print for portability, we print to impress.
WSJ Staff:
The chairman essentially has three options. He could do nothing and simply ask Congress to pass legislation that gives the FCC authority to enforce net neutrality. (It’s unlikely lawmakers could pass legislation this year or possibly even next year.)
He could say the FCC made a mistake in 2002 when it deregulated Internet pipes and reverse itself, saying it will now apply rules written for traditional phone lines on Internet networks. Phone and cable companies are extremely opposed to this option, since it presents serious uncertainty about which rules will be enforced on Internet providers, like rate regulations and line-sharing provisions.
Finally, Mr. Genachowski could say that the FCC has plenty of authority to enforce net neutrality under its current scheme. The agency would basically need to take another shot at convincing the courts that it’s right. This is likely the easiest option for the FCC chairman, since he’d have the backing of phone and cable company lobbyists who could otherwise make his professional life a bit unpleasant. It would also likely take several years for the courts to rule on another attempt. It’s not clear if Mr. Genachowski will even still be at the agency then.
Everyone should be worried about how this will turn out.
Computerworld poses the following seven ethical questions (my answers shown below each):
Question 1: You open an e-mail to find a huge file of your company’s HR data that was sent to you in error. You can see how much everyone makes, their performance reports … everything that is pertinent to their employment. So, do you a) take a quick skim through before notifying the sender; or b) close it immediately and notify the sender? Is it wrong to look even if you keep the information to yourself?
This is the trickiest of all the questions. There is a line between what I believe to be right and what I would actually do. I think you should close it and delete it, notifying the sender of the error. However, I would most likely take a peek at the file, before notifying the sender.
Question 2: You find that you can examine people’s expenses claims and you see that your boss is cheating for a hundred or so dollars per month: Would you a) report him if you wouldn’t face any consequences; or b) report him, consequences be damned, or c) forget about it?
B) Report him who cares the consequences. My wife would say that I feel this way because I have never really had a boss, but I know I could never work for someone I knew to be cheating the company.
Question 3: Now assume the false claims amount to thousands, not hundreds of dollars: What do you do now? If your answer is different to your answer from question 2, explain.
Same as above.
Question 4: In these tough economic times many people are desperate to get a job. Is it unethical to intentionally and significantly underpay a highly qualified candidate?
No, I don’t believe this to be unethical. I see hiring the same as sales. The person hiring wants to pay as little as possible (just like a buyer) and the person trying to get the job wants as much money as possible (just like a seller would). If one party sucks at negotiating a good salary it is not unethical, however it is not a sustainable business practice. Resorting to underpaying employees will always lead to them leaving as soon as they can.
Question 5: You “know” you are underpaid. You can pad your expenses and get away with it and in the grand scheme of things, your overbilling would be virtually negligible. Is this wrong? If it isn’t, why not? If it is wrong, why?
Yes it is wrong, who would think it is right?
Question 6: You discover that a service provider has violated their terms of service and should have refunded some small portion, say a few dollars, of what they charge your organization, but they don’t make a correction on their bill. If you say anything, it’s going to be a huge fuss and could make your life difficult. Do you a) keep quiet or b) make a fuss. If you keep quiet because it’s only a few dollars then how much would it have to be before you took action?
There are a lot of factors at play here, I am inclined to answer A, remembering the info if there are later problems. I look at it as a cost factor, if I spend an hour trying to get back $3, then is my time worth less than $3 and hour? Certainly not. So I would wait until the amount was equal to or more than the amount I feel my time is worth to deal with the claim.
Question 7: You are part of the team looking for a new CIO. You are down to three candidates and, given the importance of the job, you have the candidates’ backgrounds investigated by a private investigator to see whether there is any “dirt” on them. Is it ethical to probe their backgrounds like this? If you were the candidate, would that change your answer?
I think it would only be unethical if you did not inform the candidate that this was part of the process. Made even more unethical if this is not something that you do for all applicants, only ones that you feel are hiding something.
There you have it, my moral standing.