dworin

I agree about software - one cool thing is that there are a number of apps where the traditional PC or tablet is actually a sub-optimal user experience and they've focused on them - for instance, Stormboard is in their demo, and it works OK on PC, but would be a lot better on something like this.

Dragonbox isn't just for kids! My sister was studying for the GRE and struggling with the math section. For people who aren't as into math, there are a lot of things you forgot, and probably a few you just never learned right (for her it was fractions/division). She gives DragonBox a lot of credit for helping her boost her score, and she still plays with it from time to time just because it's fun.

I'm skeptical. Less than 20% of milk produced in the US uses rBGH, and most health organizations, including in Canada and Europe, agree that milk from rBGH/rBST cows is safe for humans. The reason it's banned in the EU and Canada is because it's a health risk for cows, not people. And the reason you're not likely to get US fresh milk in those countries has more to do with transportation costs than production standards.

If I had to guess, I'd say the most likely reasons for flavor differences are 1) different pasteurization techniques 2) fat content 3) consumption temperature (you can't taste sugars as well when they're cold).

I had the same issue with the power connector, and when I contacted Microsoft support (I used the online chat), they sent me a new one right away. It looks like the new one is designed slightly differently so that the fraying won't happen.

For what it's worth, I had the fraying problem on my old MacBook Air charter too.

Charging for hotel wifi is about price discrimination. The only people willing to pay $25/day for in-room wifi are business travelers who aren't paying for it themselves anyways.

That's why you're more likely to pay for wifi at a business hotel (Marriott/Hilton) than you are at a tourist hotel. It's also why you're more likely to pay for it at a more expensive hotel than a less expensive hotel.

Frequent business travelers care a lot more about reward stays than they do about free wifi (because they're not paying for it, and because the loyalty program will give it to them for free).

The article reads more like a press release for a social media agency (which is who they quote in most of the article) than it does an actual analysis of why hotels charge for Wifi.

In the PR industry, this is called "mediagenic research" and it's been around for decades. The idea is that if you want earned media coverage (what people in marketing/communications call the news), you need to have a story. For times when you don't have a great story, finding some interesting data gives you an excuse to make one up.

Part of the reason it's successful is that people are genuinely interested in it, and will read the articles. They don't particularly care if the methodology used to determine which city has the best sex, or which presidential candidate would perform best in an alien invasion (both real examples) is sound. They just like the story.

Before stories were going viral on the internet, marketers did the same thing through local newspapers and radio. That's why so many studies rank cities or metro areas - because local papers want to report a local story.

Most of this is pretty harmless. Nobody is making public policy decisions based on the data, the people reading it think it's funny or interesting, and it gives time-starved media companies simple content to push out.

Senators also have dozens of staff members who support them, especially on issues they're passionate about or committees they're involved in. And the committees themselves have their own staffs. Most likely one of these staff members is both deeply familiar with these specific issues and contributed heavily to this letter.

Electronic Medical Record systems, and their non-healthcare counterparts in Enterprise Resource Planning systems, never delivered the cost savings and efficiency they promised because, at the end of the day, they're designed to streamline the billing/finance department, not the rest of the organization. The user interfaces are universally awful because they're designed to 'get finance/billing the information they need' rather than 'streamline the process for practitioners,' and at the end of the day the people buying the system aren't the ones who have to use it.

Someone once joked to me that an EMR installation was where you replaced all the people in your billing department with the same number of people, at a higher salary, in your IT department.

Air traffic systems aren't a good analogy - for the most part, they're funded through user fees. Eighty percent of the FAA budget [1] is funded through the Airport and Airway Trust Fund, which is based on taxes and service fees levied on operators and passengers. This was designed to allow the agency to grow with the size of the industry, without taking over the federal budget. It's also more progressive, since air travelers are generally wealthier, it makes it so you don't have to subsidize travel for the rich with taxes on the poor and middle class.

Airport construction follows a similar system. Most airports in the United States are public-private partnerships. They issue Airport Revenue Bonds, which are similar to municipal bonds from a tax perspective, but they're backed by airport revenues, not municipal tax revenue.[2] The airport authority has to pay back the debt through the fees they collect from operators or concessions. The latter is why everything from bottled water to rental cars is more expensive in an airport. It's not just that they have a captive audience, it's that concession sales actually pay for the operation and expansion of the facility.

In both cases - the FAA and capital expenditures - it's mostly paid for by the users, not the taxpayer.

[1] - https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/ap... [2] - http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=14041&page=12

Someone in IT at a large bulge-bracket bank once told me that the reason tech was so shoddy despite the amount they spent was because by the time they did something the "right" way, the market opportunity was gone, or regulations changed and the old rules didn't apply anymore. So fast was much more important than good.

Did it? The majority opinion was joined by 2 of the 5 conservative justices and all of the liberal justices. Three conservative justices dissented based on their reading of the law, which didn't seem particularly ideological.

The supreme court is the ultimate court of appeals in the United States - once you lose there, your only remedy is to change the law, or in some cases, change the constitution.

Since the supreme court interprets the law, the way you to change the ruling is to change the law. In a few recent cases, the supreme court has basically said (paraphrasing) "we don't like this ruling, but this is what the law says. If you want to fix it, talk to Congress, not us."

There have been some very notable instances where the Supreme Court has changed its mind or modified its prior rulings (for instance around civil rights), so while its the end of the road for this petitioner, it doesn't bar the law evolving in the future.

I clip mine onto the cover, the same way I used to clip regular pens onto the cover of my notebooks.

It does - at least sliding from the left or right. I'm not sure if there are others I don't use.

There are situations like survey research where percentages matter a lot and absolute values not so much.

There is actually a business reason why this is the case. The general assumption in most investment banks is that either the market or the regulations will change so quickly that by the time you've written software the "right" way, either the market or the government has already moved on. Excel lets you move fast, and make changes quickly, even if it results in a bloated mess later on. Like you say, Excel isn't the issue, it's the nature of the business.

Are you sure it doesn't exist? I've seen a lot of them in a corporate setting, and in increasing numbers. When I ask what people like, the answer is almost universally that an iPad is good for watching movies, but they can actually get work done on their surface so they don't need to bring a laptop along anymore.

I've found that many organizations tend to have a 'dominant function', and CEOs tend to come from that function. So if engineering calls the shots in your company, or is the main driver of success, the CEO tends to come from engineering. If the company is driven by sales, the CEO tends to come from sales.

That's why you see so many oil company CEOs who are geologists or engineers, tech company CEOs who are developers, and CPG CEOs who are marketers.

A less cynical explanation for the same data: a great manager helps many people to be more productive. A great manager of managers help many more people to be more productive. Management scales much more than individual contribution.

Reminds me of this NYTimes article about queuing theory: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/opinion/sunday/why-waiting...

I tell this story all the time to help clients understand that customer perception is more important than reality:

"SOME years ago, executives at a Houston airport faced a troubling customer-relations issue. Passengers were lodging an inordinate number of complaints about the long waits at baggage claim. In response, the executives increased the number of baggage handlers working that shift. The plan worked: the average wait fell to eight minutes, well within industry benchmarks. But the complaints persisted.

Puzzled, the airport executives undertook a more careful, on-site analysis. They found that it took passengers a minute to walk from their arrival gates to baggage claim and seven more minutes to get their bags. Roughly 88 percent of their time, in other words, was spent standing around waiting for their bags.

So the airport decided on a new approach: instead of reducing wait times, it moved the arrival gates away from the main terminal and routed bags to the outermost carousel. Passengers now had to walk six times longer to get their bags. Complaints dropped to near zero."

It took Jobs a while to turn Apple around. He was brought back on in 1997 and profits were relatively minimal for almost a decade. It wasn't until the release of the iPhone that they really started to soar.

I can think of a few faster turnarounds: Lee Iacocca at Chrysler or Gerstner at IBM. Howard Schulz is another example of a founder returning to the company to turn it around.

Some of these have done a better job than others of lasting through the turnaround CEO (and others it's too soon to tell).

I find it interesting how all of the people who complained about how terrible math education was when they were kids turn into grownups who wish they would just go back to the traditional way of teaching math.

My sister is an elementary school teacher, and she's posted some videos on her Facebook page explaining how common core teaches - and they look so much BETTER than the way I learned to do math.

As far as I can tell, the old system was some combination of "memorize times tables" and "structured brute force the answer." The new system tries to teach kids ways to think about numbers and simplify them so that they can use mental math.

The people who developed the standards came up with them by studying which approaches to teaching actually got kids to learn math. I don't think "we did things a certain way for hundreds of years before we started looking at it scientifically" is a strong refutation of that approach.

An even better example is the Acela, which makes fewer stops than the regular Northeast Regional trains, but stops in Wilmington, Delaware (pop. 70,000 and a 30 minute drive from Philadelphia). Joe Biden, now Vice President and formerly Senator from Delaware, used to commute on the Acela every day, and was a strong advocate for Amtrak funding.

As a casual hackathon participant, this is a really great tool. I've seen countless teams with winning ideas go down in flames when they spent two days on the log-in page. And I attribute any success I've had at hackathons more to my ability to prioritize away from those activities than my actual programming chops, which are average at best.

The biggest advantage you'll get out of this system is that it's simple, and you know it in and out because you built it. With all of the other tools that do the same thing, you run into the same problem: you don't have time to learn a new tool at the hackathon. By the time you've figured out Yeoman (which looks really cool), you only have a few hours to implement your app's actual functionality.

The two are similar, and you'll often see them combined. For the most part, president pre-dates the CXO nomenclature. Before there were CEOs, COOs, and CFOs, there were Chairmen, Presidents, and Treasurers. Those titles/roles still exist, but are often merged with CXO functions.

Interesting - I never thought of the Thinkpad niche as developers, I thought of it as business professionals. In an airport, it used to be the way you knew someone worked for a consulting firm was that they had a Thinkpad, especially if it was a tablet.

That might explain some of the keyboard choices. Caps lock, function keys, and the insert key might have important uses for developers. But if you're creating business documents, caps lock is unnecessary, insert confuses you when all your text starts getting over-written, and the function keys don't really do anything.

Definitely more context, but I don't think that paper really backs up the assertion. He asked finance professionals or students, not social scientists. And he asked them at a seminar where I'm guessing they didn't have access to a calculator or computer, so it looks like a lot of them just used a rule of thumb.

The question they asked reads like a trick question to me. And coming up with the right answer would have required working backwards through statistical formula It's the type of thing you do an "Introduction to Statistics" class and then don't think about too often because it doesn't have a ton of practical applications. It seems a lot easier to just ballpark it.

Great additional advice, two other thoughts building on it:

1) Make sure the client knows that you're doing work that's out of scope, but that you're not charging for. Otherwise they just think it's part of the package, and will expect it next time. I've seen consultants get upset that clients didn't appreciate all the extra work they were doing, when the clients didn't even know it was extra.

2) Stay firm on your rates, but offer discounts to clients for things that cost them nothing and help your business. Knock 10% off if they pay up front: it gives you cash in hand, saves you from having to follow up with accounts payable, and makes it harder for them to cancel the project. Offer a discount as part of a retainer or an ongoing support contract. Show them where there are opportunities for someone on their team to do the work, rather than engaging you. If you show them that you're a partner in helping them reduce costs, they'll value your services more.

It's not just startups that have this problem with Lean management. I've told a few clients in more traditional industries that they were confusing "lean" and "thin." Lean is about efficiency, continuous improvement, and learning as an organization - not budget and headcount minimization.

I really like this model and framework - most people underestimate the impact of transaction costs, and I think it's partially why many companies overestimate the value they'll get from outsourcing.

But in the real world, I've worked with dozens of leaders and professionals, and I don't think I've ever seen someone with an over-delegation problem, where they had handed off too many tasks that they should have been doing themselves. Most have the opposite problem: mistakenly believing that delegation will take longer, or will result in lower quality work.

Delegation doesn't just help the person delegating, it helps the person receiving the work as well. It gives other people the opportunity to handle new challenges, feel ownership over their work, learn new skills, and apply what they're good at.