"BYOD is the new norm.... 95% of organizations surveyed allow employee-owned devices in some way, shape or form in the office... These stats underscore a major shift in the way people are working, in the office, at home and on-the-go, a shift that will continue to gain momentum."

Cisco is now able to identify and predict "a shift that will continue to gain momentum," but a year ago, nobody could foresee it?

In 1980, nobody ever brought an Apple to work to run Visicalc?

I have no idea what the real story is. Maybe an upper-management personality clash. Maybe the device just turned out to be really bad. But I don't think the statistics and "new norm" story can be the real story.

Microsoft exerts control on their OEMs and dictates many aspect of the user experience, particularly allowing them to put various Windows logo stickers on their goods ("Vista-Ready" being a case in point). If Microsoft believes users will have a better experience without the crapware--$99 better--if they actually cared about their users, they would make crapware-free systems a requirement for using the Windows logo.

Or, at least, require OEMs to submit crapware to Microsoft for approval to make sure it is a genuine option that doesn't degrade the user experience simply by its presence.

Microsoft should definitely prohibit crapware that overrides decent Windows features that work fairly well. The biggest problem I have helping friends with their Windows systems is that when they want to know how to do something simple like burn a CD, I never know what to tell them--because their system has invariably had third-party crapware installed that takes over the Windows way of doing it, and does it in some entirely different way.

I don't want to get into the rights and lefts of it all, one of my personal frustrations with Apple is that while I've given my granddaughter "songs" any number of times ("gift this song,") when I thought she'd enjoy a funny little application called "The Moron Test," the Apple Store wouldn't let me. Took me days of slow email-like exchanges with Apple for them to finally get back to me and say "It can't be done."

They control the platform, they set the rules, you can do it with a song, why not an app? If they don't want to do it themselves, why are they off patenting it so that nobody else can? Seems pretty dog-in-the-manger...

Honesty is the best policy.

The customer service goal for world-class organizations is to not only satisfy customers, but to delight them.

That isn't rocket science, that's just Retail 101 and it has been for the last century.

There's a perfectly ordinary chain drugstore in my town, but I'm their customer for life, because they just do everything right. It's nothing that grabs you in particular. But the advertised specials are always there. They put more people on the cash registers the lines build, nobody greets you obtrusively when you walk in the store but when you want help you get it. All the silly little retail things you take for granted. Nothing special, nothing they shouldn't be doing, it's just that they do it all the time, every time.

And they always do the right thing on returns. Whether the package is opened or not. Whether you have the receipt or not. Just because you say you want to return it.

Returns matter. Customers worry about buying the right thing or getting a lemon, knowing you can return something makes you more likely to purchase. Returns are unpleasant; you always fear rejection. Returns are especially important with gifts. The best way you can convince someone to buy that gift is to convince them that it's easy for the recipient to return it.

Best Buy? I don't think they're such an awful company really, but the time I tried to return a cheap DVD player that just plain didn't work and they hit me with a restocking fee, I got a cold prickly. I wasn't going to fight them about ten bucks or whatever it was, but it was just plain wrong, they shouldn't a done it, and I remember it. Do I still shop at Best Buy? Sure. But do I love the store? No.

Accepting returns graciously, quickly, and efficiently is one of the best ways a store can build loyalty. Best Buy is screwing themselves by getting a reputation for being difficult on returns. It's the kind of thing that spreads by word-of-mouth. "Don't buy stuff there, it's a hassle if you need to return it."

As an occasional Wikipedia contributor, I guess I helped kill the Britannica, and I won't say I'm sorry, but it is sad, nevertheless. In the 1970s I spent a year at a marine laboratory in the Caribbean that had a small library, including a 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, and I fell in love with that wonderful work--eventually picked up a "Handy Volume" edition for $50 at a used book store and I love browsing it for pleasure.

The "up-to-date" Britannica of my high school years was OK--quite a lot of it unchanged from 1911, such as the articles on Beethoven!--but the new material was not as wonderful. The Britannica 3 revamp was really darn good, despite Mortimer Adler's pompous pretentious Propaedia, and the Micropaedia was a great innovation that really worked quite well.

Circa the mid-nineties... the media was gushing over the latest trend, how great it was going to be, and how it was going to solve our update problems. One example would be this piece by Brian Livingston. In the wondrous world of the future, "the user does little or no work, other than clicking a menu button to start the upgrade process. Sometimes not even that is necessary. The software dials up[sic] the vendor's BBS or the World Wide Web site automatically installs any components that are newer than the than those on the currently installed version.... This level of automation, of course, assumes that the user's PC is equipped with a working modem." But once we get to that point, nirvana is at hand. No more software bugs, all our software constantly and updated to the latest version, effortlessly.

These days, it seems as if I a significant amount of time unproductively waiting while my computer downloads and installs some massive update--most recently over one gigabyte for a recent Mac OS X point update. Sometimes, even after the download, the installation process itself can take ten minutes, during which time everything else the machine is doing typically slows to a crawl. Or involves the machine rebooting itself once or twice. Or involves the update program politely requesting that I shut down every application I'm running.

Not to mention the time wasted checking the forums to find out whether the current update is likely to break my computer, and figuring out how to block my system from automatically installing it until they release the improved patch.

But I'm not worried, I'm sure a car manufacturer would never release buggy update. They have far better SQA departments than all the rest of the software industry... don't they?

It looks exactly like an Ames trapezoidal window--designed, or discovered, or invented by Adelbert Ames in the early 1950s. It is a stunning illusion; you can see a version of it on YouTube but it is completely convincing even when seen with two eyes in real life. The window is a perceptual illusion. It is a flat panel, with painted tromp l'oeil mullions. It actually turns continuously and steadily in a circle but appears to be oscillating back and forth. The illusion is so compelling that the brain is more willing to believe that familiar objects like pipes or pencils are bending, than to believe that the window is doing what it is really doing--turning continuously rather than oscillating.

I do hope that Windows 8 will include an animated version of this window doing its twisted, skew, perversely deceptive thing. But then I've always wanted an animated version of OS/2's logo of two gears meshed with a single worm gear all turning, and I never got that wish either.

I haven't been this upset since I heard that they weren't checking IDs in the voting for Miss Rheingold. Commercial promotion is what a free society is all about. Unless the integrity of national consumer elections is assured, how can we assure efficient allocation of resources to the most-needed colors of M&Ms?

How reliable will the system be? All the sensors keep working, every parking spot, all the time, five nines? No damage from cutting into the pavement for utility work? Salt will never find its way through cracks and short them out? The maintenance crews will be just as diligent in the low-income parts of town as they are in the high-income parts?

How reliable does it need to be? How does it degrade? At any given moment it seems like maybe 2%-3% of all streetlights are out of commission, let's say the failure rate for sensors is about the same; what happens? What is the failure mode like?

How will drivers react if the system directs them to drive a long way for a parking space that turns out to buried in snow? Or occupied by a motorcycle that didn't trip the sensor?

Is this thing robust, or is it just a fantasy that makes a good demo but becomes useless the first year there isn't enough money for perfect maintenance?

The important atomic bomb secret was that it could be done.

The important secret here is that "university-based scientists in the Netherlands and Wisconsin created a version of the so-called H5N1 influenza virus that is highly lethal and easily transmissible between ferrets."

Assume that there are terrorists out there who wish to develop a virological weapon, and have the smarts and the wherewithal to do so. They now know that the H5N1 virus is a good place to start and that there's a winning combination to be found. Holding back the precise blueprint isn't going to delay things much. You have to assume the terrorists are capable of doing research-quality work. It sounds rather as if researchers in the Netherlands and Wisconsin both found answers indepedently. It's quite possible that the terrorists, working on their own, will find something original and better than either of them.

What suppressing the research might do is make it difficult for other researchers to experiment with protective measures against them.

The Manifold Clock not just a clock with a pretty face. It's a paradigm shift. A quantum leap. It's revolutionary, disruptive technology. This is bigger than than flush toilets and the atomic bomb. It's going to blow syzygies out of the water and catalyze our synaesthesia of space and time. It's going to change the world. It's the biggest thing since Microsoft Bob.

The article says "A swallowed pill is essentially at the mercy of the movements of the GI tract. Not so with the microswimmer." Another Googled article informs me that the colon undergoes "Segmentation contractions which chop and mix the ingesta; antiperistaltic contractions propagate toward the ileum, and giant migrating contractions... a very intense and prolonged peristaltic contraction which strips an area of large intestine clear of contents." So among other things this little gadget is swimming downstream when the colon is trying to push things upstream. What does it feel like? Tickling? Gas pains?

When you have a colonoscopy, they give you a sedative (often Midazolam), a pain-killer (often Fentanyl), and sometimes general anesthesia. Of course that's a lot more invasive, but it probably doesn't take as long because the colon is a lot shorter than your whole GI tract. Sometimes the doctor has a little trouble getting a colonscope around a tight corner. Does this thing ever get stuck and how do they deal with it?

I was one of the original G1G1 participants, and I'm sorry to say that the gap between what was promised and what was delivered would never have been forgiven in any commercial enterprise. The "20 hour" battery life turned out to be 3-4 hours, and despite much talk about improvements to the power management software, nothing ever came of it.

The biggest disappointment for me was that the much-heralded "show source" button, didn't. I never quite worked out the tortuous explanations/excuses, but one of the original premises was that all of the machine's source would be available for inspection and modification--to kids, if sufficiently bright. In reality, all the enthusiastic video demonstrations of the "show source" feature were just showing ordinary browser HTML source, and as nearly as I could tell, the "show source" button never did anything more than that.

"Sugar," which I'd hoped would educate me in a brand new model for computer interaction, was, at the time, a bad joke with poor usability. The only way to locate journal entries was by remember to enter text tags for each one when complete, and doing text searches on the tags. It was explained that "fortunately kids like to describe everything they're doing." All usability objections were answered with the retort that I was not part of the machine's intended user base--true enough, and I have never verified for myself whether eight-year-old kids using the OLPC laptop really do type in text tags to enable them to locate their documents.

The one practical use I meant to put it to, as an eBook reader for PDF documents, didn't work because the PDF reader program was buggy, crashprone, and--even when it didn't crash--didn't save your place in the document (and didn't have any bookmarking mechanism). If you stopped reading at page 56, when you reopened the document, you'd be at page 1 and would have to remember what page you were on and scroll to it.

Hopefully all of these problems have long since been dealt with, but it left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

It's from an O. Henry story. Or, at least, O. Henry wrote a story about just such a scam, involving a painting. What WAS the title? Google, click, click. Nothing. Where's my dead-tree copy? Aha. "Babes in the Jungle."

Used to be REALBasic. It is or used to be Mac-centric, though, and I can't speak to how good it is on Windows.

It's sort of what Visual Basic used to be. Or what HyperCard used to be.

Tighter integration between the drawing tools and the code. Less awareness of all the moving parts and the build procedure. You can get to the equivalent of "Hello, world" as easily as you'd hope. Open a blank project, drag a BevelButton and a TextField into the window. Double-click the BevelButton. Type in

textfield1.text = "hello world"

as the code for the "Action" method.

Then you can start typing in fancy things like textfield1.text = str(sin(0.5)) and build up incrementally from there.

Big library of built-in functions and stuff. Not terribly expensive. Pretty good built-in help system. Pretty good customer support. Pretty good community.