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!

Deluxe version still available of course!

And to think my attitude to EA had mellowed in recent years...

Pull out the Ethernet connection. TADA!

MS Office, particularly Outlook (other mail clients work, I've yet to find anything with calendaring that works spot on though), Adobe CS5, the occasional piece of windows only software that I need and of course....games! MY experience with windows 7 is that its a complete piece of garbage with a few less annoyances than vista and slightly faster. It still takes 3 minutes to be "usable" from boot, regularly blue screens (I also have Ubuntu on here and haven't experienced a SINGLE crash) and just annoys the hell out of me.

Personally I cant wait for the day that MS sees the light and releases MS windows for Linux with their own windows compatibility layer. Worse mistake MS ever made was removing the command line post W95/98.

You seem to have a 90s idea about what UI designers actually do. Good UI designers run sessions with actual users at the early design stages to determine if their ideas fly, they use HCI techniques (e.g. KLM/GOMS) to see if their interfaces bring about actual performance improvements, and they run usability tests, gathering both quantitative and qualitative data on the impacts of those changes how their user groups perceive those changes.

Its only THEN that designers who REALLY LIKE CURVED CORNERS come along and bugger-up everything because pretty software is so much easier to sell to clueless managers than pages of research findings and hard applied scientific methodology.

Seriously though, I do know what you are saying; I look at just how much functionality something like Windows Explorer has lost over the years in the name of usability improvements and can't help but realise that there's something seriously going wrong with software development methodologies, even though the "hard sell" for usability has finally paid off. While its easy to blame "clueless managers" etc, I can't help but suspect the real culprit has more to do with company politics and personalities and that's something that I don't believe any methodology can hope to fix....