[A] I link to this article of a fire in Chicago because you have to see the picture. It’s far out.
[B] Farhad Manjoo is singing the same old tired song about the death of the PC. Bring able to do 80% of PC functionality is enough to use the tablet on the go, but heaven help is if, as a culture, we simply forgo the other 20%. Meanwhile, Rob Enderle hits the mark.
[C] Slate explainer tackles the question of whether states can exile people. Actually, I know someone who was exiled from Arizona.
[D] The few remaining ninjas out – and Americans are fascinated with ninjas – there are financially struggling.
[E] How Newegg fought back against a patent troll and saved the online shopping cart.
[F] Ryan Noonan introduced me to this article on McWorld, the world’s McDonald’s for Times Square. Also, a Disney World movie, without Disney’s approval.
[G] It really is annoying that all-in-ones won’t let you scan images if you are out of ink. Apparently there is a bypass for my Canon, though. Cool.
[H] I’ve never understood tail-bobbing. Tails are awesome! And communicative. It’d be like shaving off eyebrows.
[I] How much does Yelp help businesses that get positive reviews? It turns out to be significant.
[J] Researchers are looking at the Facebook pages of people that commit suicide to see if they can identify warning signs.
[K] Dr. Phi gives us a glimpse into government IT.
[L] XXfactor takes exception to GQ separating out Indian and Asian women from its “Hottest Women List.” It seems to me that you can just as easily chalk this up to “Yay diversity!” rather than get irate. Beyond which, it’s been noted elsewhere that Italians also get their own group. The follow-up on modeling specification is a good point, though.
[M] Some businesses are looking to fix our sleeping habits. I’m a big fan of employee nap rooms. That my wife’s hospital didn’t have one for on-call docs was always baffling to me.
[N] If this is Google, I once worked for the anti-google. Google tries to find ways to make its employees happy. My former employer tried to find employees who would be happy in its oppressive atmosphere.
[O] I pass on a lot of links about alternative housing. Here’s one on alternative hoteling!
[P] Graphic novels rule, books drool. People retain more information from graphic novels than typical books.
[Q] The USPS sent Laura Northrup’s package 1,688 miles out of its way. I had a package from the east coast sent to me in the mountain west that, for some reason, went through Hawaii.
[R] Apparently, the magic number for an economy is $8,500. Once average purchasing power reaches that number, political extremism and populist promises start losing their appeal.
[S] You can always count of Dave Schuler for sober analysis. On the bright side, he has a post on how we can cut health care costs without lowering payments or reducing services.
[T] This is pretty cool: A phone for your smartphone. I really hope that the future of smartphones includes modularization. They need to get everything talking to everything else. In addition to smartphones-as-car-keys, I want an Android fridge.
[U] Apparently, back in the 80’s in fear of a Sam’s Club’s arrival, Oklahoma passed a law requiring a six-percent profit margin.
[W] I’m about as pro-resource-exploitation as you can get whenever the economics warrant it, but I will admit that this makes me uneasy.
[X] Google is hoping that we will trust our personal information to a USB drive. Speaking of passwords, when I read this post at Dustbury I was thinking “Hey, that guy had the exact same problem I had!” Then I realized that “this guy” was me.
R: In The Future of Freedom, Fareed Zakaria had a similar sort of number for making democracy work properly. Probably for the same underlying reason — once enough of the population is rich enough, rule of law and stability become much more attractive.
T: Ask, and ye shall receive; well, at least the beginnings of one. Doesn’t run generic Android apps yet. I’m somewhat surprised that there aren’t more out there. More than a decade ago, when I worked in the telecom/cable industry, we had a demo lab with mock-ups of various smart devices that used a wireless network to connect to a broadband modem and the Internet. People really liked the smart refrigerator that could do all of the shopping list, communication center for the family, and cycle through kids’ drawings.
I heart Samsung.
[D] So… let me get this straight. A ninja tells a reporter “yeah, we’re having hard times, financial troubles” and, effectively, explaining that it’s a dying profession of which we have nothing to fear.
Uh-huh.
An oldie but a goodie:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/disgruntled-ninja-silently-kills-12-coworkers,1575/
A bunch of lethally trained mercenaries hard up for money? What bad could possibly come of that?
(Relatedly, I find the number of Chinese men with no marital prospects to be globally troubling.)
[B] I think the desktop is dead in corporate environments because of one reason, work has changed. It used to be I worked at worked and went home. Maybe I checked some email through a webmail account or a Blackberry, but that was it. If you needed to work late or had a call requiring access to work with India, Japan or Australia, you went to the office. Now working late happens at home. I can take my full work computer home and that flexibility is great. I can’t do my work on my tablet or smartphone, but I can use my work PC at home at 2 AM. As such, I think the laptop is the form factor that PCs will largely maintain.
Depends what you mean by ‘work’ though. Middle management & up probably only needs something that communicates and tracks tasks, but ‘workers’ often need more power to process & manipulate data. (power that sometimes goes away prematurely in the push toward ‘the cloud’ and widget frameworks)
(though my experience isn’t ‘corporate’ per se, it’s the type captured in item [k])
Currently, the usual compromise seems to be the laptop that gets carried back and forth every day. A few years ago, I used to leave my work desktop logged on and remote into it if I needed to work from home [1], but the sorts of IT setup that allow that seem to have disappeared.
1. Fine for server development. Not great for UI development, due to bandwidth issues.
My experience is that all of our execs take home and use their PCs. They may not need the power, but the stuff they work on and read require a better interface and controls. Maybe as Leap devices and the like become ubiquitous and widely used, tablets will be sufficient, but execs still need to manipulate a lot of stuff, even if they are not using the processing power.
Of course, one of the small prices we pay for this is the periodic theft of a laptop with millions of customer/client records with Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, medical histories, and the like. Too many firms and agencies have let their security arrangements fall far behind the tech that they’re handing out.
A couple years ago I contracted for a major company and sensitive data was required to be on my work laptop. All that was really required was to install Truecrypt. Which, when you think about it makes sense. Someone may be able to penetrate it (or not, the feds had to force a guy to give them the password), but the bigger threat is that the laptop is lost or stolen by an everyday thief who wouldn’t have any idea how to even start trying to get by it.
My last two firms encrypted the hard drives. There was a “no harm, no foul” rule if you lost your laptop, just call corporate IT as soon as you lost it so that they could wipe it remotely ASAP.
I admit I was thinking more of government agencies, where walking out with a million client records is generally breaking either state of federal law, whether the data is encrypted or not. And yet it happens a lot. Don’t get me started on the problems of designing a data center that has machines that have to conform to HIPAA or DoJ — different and incompatible — physical security requirements.
Maybe. I think it would be easier just to do what Mike alludes to below. I also think it’s a mistake more generally to think in terms of “a computer.” As in singular. I think this is absolutely true for home use, though even for corporate use, I’d strongly consider it.
(My bias is that I work in IT, so having multiple computers is something I’ve done, off and on, since the 90’s.)
The issue is at the corporate level with the pulling down the barriers of multiple device is that corporate security policies won’t allow it. My company doesn’t want me having sensitive information on equipment they don’t control. Even though my corporate email is on my personal device, it’s sandboxed in the Good app, so stuff from outside the app can’t go in and stuff in the app can’t go app (it even has its own browser embedded in it). The issue is less about technology and more about the IT shop giving up control.
What exactly does Manjoo think non-journalists do at work all day?
A link I got to from one of your links:
A rope-trick cowboy lassooig Ike during his first inauguration .
[N] Google, which has done the math, finds that there is actual profit to be made in treating employees well and acts accordingly. The vast majority of employers remain penny-wise (if that) and pound foolish by doing the opposite. Tell me again about economics and rational actors?
Though I am inclined to agree… I do have to say that I am not sure what works for Google works for everyone. I think my anti-Google former employer found a system that worked for them (find the exact type of employee you want by making working there hell for anyone else), but I don’t think it’s scalable. In the case of Anti-Google, because there are only so many people who are going to accept accumulated lists of restroom break frequency and duration. In the case of Google, because they specialize in all-star and irreplaceable talent. So, while I’d like to see more companies try it, and I think more companies would benefit from it, I’m not at all sure how many.
I’m sure I’ve told this story. Long ago, when I was contracting at BART, the idiots in charge created a computerized time-clock. You ran it in the morning to sign in and in the evening to sign out, and the hours you billed were checked against that. (You couldn’t bill more than 40/week anyway, so this was presumably to catch people coming in late/going home early.) The result besides a competition for creative ways to hack the system, was nobody doing a minute’s more work than 8 hours a day.
I’d be all up-and-outraged by this, but on multiple jobs I’ve had to physically clock in and out. Your thing is stupider, because it actually requires them to do more work. But it’s along the lines of a common type of stupid. Especially if/when you have managerial oversight.
They had stopped doing this by the time I got there, but Anti-Google used to take a list of the employees who had the most and longest restroom breaks (you had to code in to use the restroom), and place it in the breakroom to shame the worst offenders in front of the rest of the company. I think their legal department at some point said that this wasn’t a good idea.
It really did take a certain kind of person to like working there. But those who liked it, loved it.
Never sweat on the clock and never shit off the clock.
[S] I have a plan to actually Lower Healthcare Costs Without Cutting Providers’ Wages or Reducing Services. (Bonus: It will help with the issue of Social Security as well!)
Make smokes a buck a pack again and remove the stigma against smoking.
Cancer is expensive; it’s heart attacks that are cheap.
If the cancer comes young enough, then it’s still money saved because of alltthe later heal hcare unneeded (uncluding the later expensive end of llife care, possibly also cancer.)
Is your iPad Welsh now?
The desktop itself isn’t dead.
The machine as a standalone device providing you a singular interface to that desktop probably is, though.
Really, what we need is modular computing at the consumer level. There’s no reason why we don’t have this already, except that computer manufacturers are stupid.
Your phone, your laptop, your tablet, your media server, your gaming console, your television set, they’re all computers already. What you really need is a way to remove the barriers between those things and let them all do their business properly.
I think the singular interface of the desktop is already going away. But I think it will remain a part of the tapestry for a lot of households, if not a majority. And, where not a desktop, then a laptop. The notion that we’re going to collectively give up on the remaining 20-% of what we do would be scary, if it weren’t so implausible.
U – I knew about, but not the why.
The ironic thing about minimum markup laws is the extent to which they lock in the economic advantages of the deep pocketed chains they purport to control. After all, Wal-Mart has the clout to purchase many things at much lower costs than anyone else – 6% over what the Mom and Pop store must pay just guarantees they can’t even choose to accept low/no margins on price sensitive items if they want to.
Plus, there’s the obvious problem that the Wal-Marts of the word have a much greater ability to devote resources to circumventing the law than non-chains.
A good rule of thumb is that most such regulations invariably do more harm to the little folks than the big players.
There are a few other states, Kansas and Wisconsin for sure, that have similar laws regarding how sales may be advertised – essentially that to say something is on sale, previous pricing has to meet certain criteria. That’s no small part of why advertising circulars are regional and may have little disclaimers on them about the prices/sales not being valid in certain states.
Wisconsin also has minimum markup laws on gasoline and served alcohol. I don’t think they do on packaged alcohol sales but the 3-tier system probably prevents that from happening anyway. Both have been under fire at various times, but I don’t think they were ever changed that I heard.
Oklahoma, progressive paradise?
Who knew?
Did anybody follow Link [A]? If you haven’t do so. Isn’t that frozen building freaky?
I think its beautiful, in a Grimm’s fairy tail kinda way.