ljoshua

Woah, the photos of the charred battery are fairly dramatic:

http://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/2013/boeing_787/boeing_78...

Interesting proposition, but too blanket of a policy to be a long-term solution.

Email is the biggest problem to those who not only receive large amounts (100+) but also have to spend large amounts of time coordinating responses to those emails (it is not quantity of email received, but complexity of replies that drives email overload). Shutting it off to everyone removes a valuable communication channel that, while often abused, is important in the workplace.

One of the best things a company could actually do IMO if they wanted to mandate an experiment, is to have everyone chunk their email checking and responding times. Studies have shown doing so, checking for example 6 times a day, greatly reduces context-switching losses and reduces time taken to complete primary tasks.

Fantastic feedback so far everyone, thanks.

Keep it coming!

My laptop is currently backed up all the time (Crashplan), and many of my important documents, contacts, etc., are either in Dropbox, iCloud, Git, etc. So I really view it as the same difference.

The killer feature to me would be the following:

You may recall that certain Ubuntu phones will become full Ubuntu PCs when docked with a monitor, mouse, and keyboard.

The idea of being able to carry around just one small, main device instead of two separate (though well-integrated) ones, a la iOS/OS X, would probably be just enough to tip the scales and get me to use it, provided the experience was good enough.

For those who have purchased a house before (I may be about to start the process) do the same techniques apply, or is it a different ballgame?

UPDATE: After doing extensive checking with extended family, this has proven to be legitimate (though very unexpected). Please ignore the post and move along, Gmail is still secure for now! My sincere apologies for raising an alarm.

(Emailed PG to ask the post be removed, no need for it to stay up.)

Darn, didn't think to do that, I should have.

Nope, just my wife and I, and she doesn't know the individual.

I opened up the Chrome Web Inspector, switched to the Network tab and verified that a couple of requests had indeed gone through, right clicked, and chose "Save all as HAR." That's how I saved the data specifics like cookies.

Fantastic, Matt, really appreciate it! Hopefully we can fix it.

I love the thinking presented in this article: if you do good by your employees, they will do good to you and the organization.

  OO works best for large-scale, lots-of-people projects. ... The trick in loving any particular tool in the toolbox is knowing when not to use it.

Very well put, mirrors my feelings.

Yes, very likely a calibration issue. There was a similar instance occurring here in Colorado [1], but in the opposite direction (a vote for Romney went in as Obama). The machines definitely need to get better, but it is probably not fraud or a hack of any sort.

[1] http://www.chieftain.com/politics/pueblo-county-voting-machi...

I agree, great summary, thanks for the insight.

This is more of a theoretical question, but at what point does a project become large enough that concerns like this begin to truly matter?

When doing a small, limited-use project, it seems often that trying to follow "best practices" like avoiding fat models would be more trouble than it's worth. And yet I've worked on larger enterprise-scale projects that have most certainly benefited from following this and other practices.

Anyone know of any research or work on where the tipping point is for following increasingly complicated patterns and practices?

It's always a quandary--I will most likely be seeing ads, so would I rather that they are targeted to me and possibly even helpful, or do I want to tighten down as much as possible all possible data dumps of me?

I'm still trying to figure out when I want to turn off these sorts of things, versus when I'd rather keep them on.

I'll be captain obvious here, but these also work great on OS X if you installed Git by a means other than homebrew. Thanks!

Wow, the open/close animation is smoooooth! Almost as impressive as the functionality itself. Going to have to inspect the CSS for that goodness.

+1 for Foundation for the SASS and excellent responsive design.

Great resource, adding on top of other hard-to-find resources that others had pointed out before. (Nice use of a presentation in the browser too.)

Wasn't it fixed for a while up until a month or so ago though? Started using "page" in the query string to give us second and third pages?

The accessibility is a huge selling point, but also (and often overlooked) is the non-prescriptivist nature of PHP. For so many jobs (and yes, even in enterprise) you just need to get the project done and out there. It doesn't have to conform to perfect OO standards and doesn't have to follow certain architectural specifications. PHP is great for that.

When you need to take it to the next level and establish a really good and efficient standard, there are extremely well-done frameworks to assist you. But when you just need to get something done, sometimes PHP's "do it anyway you can" nature is it's biggest feature.

It will be interesting to see what mobile play Gutmans et. al. have. If they can bring that same "let's just get it done" mentality it may have a chance. Interested to see how it goes down.

These are solutions to problems faced by middle- and upper-management, so there are real customers out there that have this real problem. The difficulty, however, is getting this cool, shiny solution into their existing corporate email workflow.

Just a quick note: I'm not affiliated with the app or its creators in any way, but I have been a beta tester for it, and it's working pretty well (the app is bootstrapped so far). The Kickstarter is to add integration with other email providers (Exchange, etc.) and to create a web app that integrates with it.

Good article. I was surprised to see they left out Clayton Christensen and his work on the topic, "How Will You Measure Your Life?" A little more reaching in it's content probably, but still a very influential and thought-provoking book and philosophy.

I thought one of the draws of Android was that no specific licensing was necessary to implement on a device? Can someone elaborate on why exactly Acer would need a contract to use Android?

Great real-world anecdote, it's really refreshing to see busy people (I'm assuming Harj is a pretty busy person) understanding the implications of email overload and trying to deal with it.

Not everyone needs to completely remove email from their phones, but doing simple things like turning off push notifications and trying to push one's self to only check at certain intervals has been shown by research (and substantiated by experiences like this) to have huge upsides to productivity, lower stress levels, and creativity.

I'm learning a huge amount in this arena, it's a fascinating topic. If anyone wants to see a very cursory summary of what I've assembled so far, check out a small deck at http://www.slideshare.net/jlyman/email-overload-13506201

This is definitely a great idea, I've been thinking of different ways to accomplish it myself. The research backs this up too as a very reasonable solution, allowing workers to still be productive in replying, while only checking new email at certain intervals.

In fact, you've even come across the magic number for email checking frequency. Checking it 4 times a day provides the best trade-off between reply speed and productivity gain, as seen in research by Gupta et. al.[1]

[1] Gupta, A., Sharda, R., & Greve, R. a. (2010). You’ve got email! Does it really matter to process emails now or later? Information Systems Frontiers

You will lose up to 24 minutes of full productivity, according to several different pieces of research. For example: "A study by Microsoft researchers tracking the email habits of co-workers found that once their work had been interrupted by an email notification, people took, on average, 24 minutes to return to the suspended task" [1].

The issue is the cognitive load introduced by task switching. You may not realize it on the surface, but breaking away each time to write a reply (or even to a lesser extent just the mere fact that you are now notified there's a message waiting) is causing a huge distraction for your brain, and slowing down your "real" work.

[1] Paul Hemp. 2009. "Death by information overload," Harvard Business Review 87(9).