I have a Windows Phone as well, a HD7. (I use a Galaxy SII on a daily basis, though.) I *loved* using it. The Windows Phone team got a lot of things right, especially with their UX. The Zune application is, hands down, the best mobile music player out there today and its integration with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn is phenomenal (i.e. makes a third-party application for this useless).

The problem is that UX advances isn't nearly as important for users as it was when iPhone broke ground. There is definitely a baseline that competitors in this market need to meet, but like regular computers, people (at least in Europe, Asia and US where smartphones are king) care way more about apps and looks than anything else. Windows Phone is still very light in this department, which is preventing it from really taking off. Case in point: Angry Birds is free on almost every OS (even Chrome!)...except on Windows Phone (2.99). Words with Friends, another super hit, isn't even available there.

He's been vehemently against Nokia's decision to leverage their smartphone strategy on Windows Phone. For more awesome reading explaining why, check this out.

As explained in the link above, it's not Nokia's decision to use Windows Phone on their smartphones that is the chief problem. They are, essentially, hedging their entire existence on the platform, which is a very bad bet for a company whose popularity has always been stronger in Europe, Asia and developing nations. It's almost like a Kodak in reverse in that they are, more or less, giving less importance to their bread and butter and more importance to a huge, HUGE risk. (Notice that HTC and Samsung, the top dogs in the non-iPhone smartphone world, use more of their resources for building Android and their own OS's than Windows Phone.)

The sole fact that, to this day and despite a very recent system update, Windows Phones still have the crippling text-message-of-death bug clearly demonstrates where Microsoft thinks they're at with the OS. I haven't seen any of the major players on Android/iOS commit serious time to Windows Phone yet; until this happens, it's a sinking ship.

For many people, handing out a business card is much quicker than using something like Bump. They also add a layer of expression and professionalism that is easily lost with other mediums. There are people who charge companies a bunch of money per hour just for customising cards, and for good reason; some companies get hoardes of new business just from their cards alone.

I'm not giving up my cards anytime soon. Actually, I need to refresh my design soon! (I take pics of all the cards I get and store them in Evernote; no more mountains of cards or clouding up my address book.)

Cooperative education (at the college level) and intern/externships (at high school or college level), more or less, give people the same experiential value described here. I was part of the co-op program at my school (which boasts a 99% placement rate, which I found to be true), and I had no problems landing a great (and extremely well-paying) job before graduation. A lot of the people I interviewed with were impressed by the year and a half of work experience I accumulated during school. Most good co-op or internship programs also teach you how to interview, create a sharp resume and make good first impressions, which is an absolutely essential skill to have (that so many people seem to lack, at least if my limited recruiting experience is indicative of anything).

Community college or technical school would have been way cheaper (free in the former case), but I'm not sure if I would have had the same network, accessibility or approach to things I do now had I gone down those routes.

I would think that most people who absolutely needed to remote into their machines over the Internet would use some kind of tunnelling to a jumpbox or remote access appliance to RDP to an internal server...

Memory management has improved somewhat in their later releases and I believe Mozilla has changed the plugin system to be compatible with their new release cycle. Additionally, the JavaScript engine is so much faster in later releases and HTML5 support has improved a lot as well.

Let it die.

(Then again, I became a Chrome user recently and haven't looked back. Their plugin and web app support is fantastic and built-in Firebug capabilities are great. Really love how well it synchronises with Google services and their Android version is looking very promising.

I really doubt the efficacy of this privilege when it's currently completely optional and advertising companies, by their definition, rely on less privacy to make a profit.

Until the do-not-track feature becomes a law (which I hope it does, though I'm sure these companies will find ways around it), there should be more education about NoScript and other such alternatives to those who really care about controlling their privacy and exposure.

HIIT and sprint/shot training is great and all, but most people will quickly shrug it off (or try it for a little while and quit it). Many (I'd argue most) people equate exercise to work, and many people hate work. Instead, most people envy those with fast metabolisms (even in they're "skinny fat" and are, on average, about as healthy as someone pushing obesity) and attempt to copy their lifestyles by becoming skinny with as little work and time investment as possible without changing eating patterns.

It's the same reason why microwave ownership exploded and is the raison d'etre for the oil change and car wash businesses, amongst many other things. Most people would rather pay a heap of money for other people to do the easy, simple things they can't/don't want/don't have time to do than take the few minutes and do it themselves. If people could pay other people to manage their own weight and make them look good, they would; a $60B strong weight-loss market proves this. It's not entirely their fault; it's very, very difficult to make time for things with work, kids and wife around unless the body is put first and foremost.

To make matters worse, a lot of people who try to lose weight or "look good for the beach" have horribly unreasonable plans for getting there. ("Looking good for the beach/girls/Facebook" feeds into that.) If many people (I'm tempted to say most) didn't think they could lose 30 pounds in 30 months or get rock-hard solid abs (and nothing else!) in a few weeks, then things like the South Beach diet and P90X would have failed immediately. It doesn't help that lots of parents, who were also very busy and didn't make the time to care for their bodies, didn't make the time to teach their kids proper eating habits and forewent breakfast and simple, reasonably-portioned dinners for McDonald's and frozen TV dinners. (The biggest irony about most people's weight-loss ideologies is that instead of eating the most sugary, fattening crap at breakfast time when their bodies need it the most, they make breakfast the lightest meal of the day and eat heavier as the day progresses! Willing to bet it's all because skipping breakfast became a habit.)

Staying in good shape and good weight isn't rocket science and isn't something made exclusive to sports professionals and Olympians. (Funny enough, a lot of these people have HUGE problems maintaining their figure post-career. Michael Jordan and Greg LeMond are kind of fat now, for example.) Eating reasonable portions appropriate to workload and moving around a bit are all that's needed to NOT gain weight. Moving around a LOT and/or eating reasonably is the way to lose weight, and working, stressing and RECOVERING muscles is the way to gain muscle. (Lots of dudes hit the gym and over-stress their bodies with barely enough sleep to let their muscles recover and grow.)

That's it. It's so easy, but is a HUGE mental challenge for lots of people.

Disclaimer: I lost 30 pounds from biking and walking a lot, dropped 3" from my waistline and have been able to keep it off for the last 4 years now. My metabolism isn't naturally great, but I don't think I've ever gained holiday weight.

A "classroom education model" could mean a completely virtualised classroom similar to today's online colleges. It could also be the concept of 'teaching anywhere' like some charter and experimental movements are currently exploring. Hell, it could even be a resurgence to home schooling. Regardless of what this means, I think it will be many, many years before virtual education becomes politically and socially acceptable at the college level and even longer before it works its way down (partially). (Online universities definitely exist now, but they are still very taboo to many companies. I think this will change, especially since more and more families are unable to pay for college without loans and more and more colleges struggle to strike a balance as a result.)

Real classrooms will always exist when poverty is a deciding factor. Think about many of the families living in today's "urban economic zones." Those moms and dads (if present) have to work 10-15 hours a day to make ends meet and barely have time to take care of their kids' basic needs, let alone home schooling duties. In many cases, this means that those kids are taking care of their siblings and have other issues going on that have to be dealt with. Does effectively removing the teacher completely in their first years of schooling help pave the way for their academic journey?

For the sake of argument, let's say some surprising research comes out in support of this idea. This means that the cost will fall on the parents amd the cities which these "zones" reside in. It's a huge lose-lose situation: parents will have to come up with more money to buy all of the new technology they'll need to make it work for their children, and the cities will have to spend a whole bunch of money laying down the infrastructure and up those parents' taxes to recuperate the costs.

Of course, this means that the 99% will grow even greater since the wealthier districts that can afford, comparatively, anything would have no problems laying this down, in turn giving their kids even more access to stuff kids in the former situation won't. The politics are obvious here.

iOS might not, but good chance the management tool that will be baked into their phones is. I'm also confident that Apple's staunch refusal to accommodate corporate customers got pushed to the side here.

Now we know that RIM is dead. You heard it here first.

A few days ago, I was in Best Buy looking for a new external hard drive. While I was trying to get over the insane price markups, a very svelte-looking laptop caught the corner of my eye. It was one of Samsung's newest models, and it was beautiful. Maybe a little too beautiful, as it reminded me up, down and center of the MacBook Pro it was obviously trying to compete with.

Anyone that has good working vision can see that Samsung, more or less, copies Apple's designs wholesale. They might not be complete replicas of their products, but the "nods" they include in their designs are pretty obvious. Not a bad thing when you consider the technological advancements they provide with their clone-killers, but not surprising when Apple throws down the legal gauntlet as a response.

Its been well known that RFID cards are suspectible to this kind of threat. The only reason why jammers and blocks havent been enforced as much is because there haven't been enough cases of this happening to justify wide-scale enforcement. I really like the convenience of contactless payment systems and hope jammers and guards become ubitquitous enough for banks to provide them along with these cards.