Even better than clicking, hit the windows button and start typing - I love it, plus its just the same as gnome 3 which also love...

Yes, I am serious. Really!

I suspect there is a lot of resistance to the concept due to the general early experiences of SaaS and hosting solutions being cloud-washed....

Almost spot on - in fact don't even put all of your assets into the same cloud even because the day IS going to come when an infrastructure issue takes out even the largest of providers.

"Several times and for multiple businesses. Have you?"

I'd actually be interesting in hearing your analysis and experience. I'm looking at this myself and finding that cost advantages differ depending on scenario - there just doesn't seem to be a clear cut point at which one solution costs less than the other for all but the most trivial scenarios.

Oh wait, sorry, I forgot that Slashdot has to make money somehow....

a metric useful in judging the viability of a cloud offering? Personally I want to know about things such as ease of use, integration into 3rd party offerings, scalability, pricing etc. *sigh*

Useless PR aimed at boosting the share price a few points, how did this ever make the front page?

Its probably machine translated from Japanese. Sadly while the Japanese are doing some incredible research in very diverse areas, most of the translations are very rough and ready. If you want to criticise though, how is your Japanese? ("nihongo wa dou desu ka"?)

Interesting. I'm only starting looking into cloud based systems and it strikes me that security is going to be THE big hurdle in making a valid business case and the fact that security seems to be based around policy compliance seems to be a chink in the armour (not that any connected service needs any more than already exist it appears). Looking at the Amazon description for your book though it seems I may be misinformed, I'll have to check it out :)

I thought the same but have been doing some digging of late. I've only really looked at depth into AWS so far, and yes, it can be as simple as sticking a LAMP stack in the "cloud". BUT if you need to scale that up, there's some rather neat stuff for load balancing and auto-scaling, basically being able to build a service/system that could handle the slashdot effect without needing the long term hardware commitments. And its rather easy to do. Add into it the ability to distribute your content across multiple cache servers to speed up access and you have the ability to put together global infrastructure at a fraction of the cost of a data centre deployment.

Now as to the long-term costs, I actually view that as much as a matter of good management of that infrastructure - demand not as expected then cut back on resources used or if there's constant demand then reserve (pay up front for) that capacity and cut costs. While it might not be right for every project cloud based services have enough advantages and make sufficient economic sense that it is fool-hardy to ignore them any longer.

10 minutes is an over-estimate - my research has found RTC fatigue occurs in as little as 2 minutes. Its funny how this mistake keeps being made over-and-over again...I speculate that it is due to a lack of serious research and the general prescriptions of avoiding fatigue, without understanding the full range of human capabilities, when designing Touch-UIs such as this.

Anyways yes, for very minimal interactions this concept is great - so much surface area is devoted to glass that I'm sure Samsung is going to have a massive product here, however I foresee the big interest in this being less to do with the interactivity, more with the transparency of the display. Imagine walking down the high street in 2025 and every shop front having animated displays which complement the internal displays. Imaging mirrors where you can try on different colours of make-up, hair shades, hair styles etc; add on some head tracking capabilities and there are some possibly fascinating AR applications.

The tech seems to be scaling up year by year and they appear to have improved the transparency (its was 40% (?) opaque in 2010) - really an exciting product. Cant wait for it to come on a roll ;)

One of the claimed improvements is near mode, HOWEVER the hardware within the 360 Kinect also has a 50cm minimum distance limit. I can't help but suspect that people are going to do side-by-side tear downs only to find theres little change apart from the SKU number in the firmware.

The annoying thing is....a good near mode (20cm) would be a godsend for certain kinds of research since that class of hardware still comes in at a few thousand $. Have a look at Omnitouch (Harrison et al, 2011) for some examples of what is possible.

I'll be looking at interest at this when released - just not getting my hopes up.

I've been avoiding the US since the Patriot act passed - there is no way I want to visit, work-in or deal-with (business wise) people from a country where as a "foreigner" they can lock me up and throw away the key without due process or oversight.

Dictatorship no......oppressive regime? 'Fraid so!

Indeed you are right, those are generalisations - the general point is as you stated, know the dress code and apply it. However hygiene...sorry maybe I've just had warped experiences but I interviewed too many people (again, waaaay back) whom I could smell before they entered the room even. No its not the majority, but my god they left an impression that makes it seem like they were. News for geeks, stuff that matters? in a job interview D E O D O R A N T !

Oh and teeth...but that really is another engram!

I will advise ensuring that your appearance is top-notch. A loooooong time ago when hiring I interviewed a lot of older candidates (40-60s.....I was in my 20s at the time) since I was determined not to be biased; however the barrier was less the skill set than the general presentation level. Suit REQUIRED, tie REQUIRED, teeth REQUIRED (sorry), male grooming REQUIRED....male/female hygiene REQUIRED!!!

As geeks there is a classical mindset that we can get away with those things and the late tween/twenties probably still can but with age comes the requirements for the complete package to be there (especially the hygiene). I was really saddened to have to reject an older candidate who had skills in spades because he had failed on....well all the above requirements. Others didn't pass the business development side...

Sorry, rambling. Yes its harder..older coders who made that management jump know that the faculties decline (sorry but we do get slower) but the trade off is in code quality and risk aversion which have value in their own rights. Sell the package and you should have no problems.

Actually....seems that I'm actually an idiot, its the physical version that's sold out. *sigh* I think my PC needs to come with a breathalyser!