You are spot on. I work in a basement lab (electron microscopy) constructed with Hauserman partition walls (metal over drywall type core). These act like a Faraday Cage and cause cellular reception to be awful. To make matters worse, my management - trying to cut cost - decided that everybody had personal electronic devices these days and eliminated voice mail on our desk phone. What a mess. I have a hard time reading Dilbert these days -- it is too close to my reality...

The statement that caused me most concern was, "'We stand by the forensic review that we've seen." Excuse me? Somebody didn't look closely enough. Wouldn't a deal this big require a bond? Were I an HP shareholder, that statement would start my petitions to the BOD that Meg should go. Were I an HP shareholder, I would expect at least a statement like: "We have commissioned an independent review to insure that our forensic accountants used due diligence. HP will actively support the authorities with appropriate jurisdiction in the prosecution any fraud." Hindsight is always 20:20, but the shareholders deserve a specific analysis of what went wrong and assurance that the company will support prosecution of fraud.

I couldn't get the latest Ubuntu disk to boot on mine (Summer 2009). Any tips?

It is one thing to have an older MacBook and think about moving to a Linux distro when the current OS no longer supports your hardware, but unless you are a hobbyist who get pleasure from tinkering and wants to see "if I can...", it seems like a waste of time and money. Note that I am writing this on a 2009 MacBook Pro with Mountain Lion but I also use Linux for many aspects of my work. If I wanted a Linux laptop to just "get my work done," I would look carefully at one of these: http://zareason.com/shop/Laptops/ The key is to let your supplier work out the hardware details. That is part of why one buys from a given supplier. We are all free to tinker to our hearts content, but if our objective is to use the system to do something useful, it is typically more productive to get something that works on the OS of choice. This is hardly a new concept...

As a couple of others have noted, there is no reason to posit a false dichotomy - that one must use either Kahn Academy (or similar) or a "live" teacher. Short lessons like Kahn does are useful to review concepts/unit operations where a student is rusty. My wife teaches physics, statistics, and calculus at a small high school and is an adjunct at a local community college, teaching the CC classes in the high school. The best bang for the buck for college credits around. Anyway, her biggest complaint is that too many of her students have been coddled in lower level classes and have either never mastered the pre-requisites or simply not retained them. Kahn's videos are one of many helpful resources for such students. The goal is to transform students into self-directed, life-long learners. This is really the only path to success, because the half-life to obsolescence of any technical course of study is so short.

Prof. Jean-Claude Bradly at Drexel discovered that students actually preferred pod/vodcasts of lectures (they could pause and watch on their schedule) and it freed up class time to work problems and answer questions. I see Kahn Academy videos in this same light. Are they perfect? No. can they be improved? Yes. Will polite, constructive criticism be better received than snarky comments? Absolutely! In this regard, the cliche "everything i needed to know, i learned in kindergarten" has some merit - things are a lot better when everybody is polite and plays nice in the sandbox.

The authors found this in mice. Seems premature to assume that this same mechanism exists in humans.

http://www.cell.com/molecular-cell/abstract/S1097-2765(12)00341-3

Not quite that simple. The complaint is that revenue projections were selectively disclosed to insiders. That is a violation of SEC regulations.

The purpose of these new releases is to drive sales, not really improve the customer's work flow. With decreasing margins, most corporate customers - and indeed all of the rest of us - need to ask "do I really NEED this?"

Your point about updates breaking critical workfows is something Windows users have struggled with for years. The problem is that it is typically difficult to find out until it is too late unless one spends a great deal of time following all the development mailing lists on all software in one's toolchain.

I detest the modern versions of Office. Word 5 was a productive tool - versions after that were increasingly bloatware; Office 2010 was the last straw. I spent the last year transitioning to LaTeX. I have templates for technical reports, presentations, and reports of analysis (I specialize in microscopy and image analysis.) The combination of R, Sweave, and LaTeX, and shell scripts or batch files makes many projects very fast to reproduce when new data is added. This tool chain works quite well with git for version control - much better than the Microsoft "track changes." Microsoft keep breaking VBA to the point I will not use it for anything new.

The best part that I have found as a scientist is that I can create a directory hierarchy for a project, keep the source code and report under version control with git and have all the needed data in the appropriate place in the path. When the project is done, i do one final build of the analysis/report as a quality check and then use tar/gzip to make a compendium for archiving. When I need to reproduce an analysis, months later - everything is there. This has improved the quality of my work significantly compared to when there was a lot of point/click/copy/paste involved. it is also especially helpful in the middle of a project when I want to try a "what if" scenario or if a client wants to fine tune the sample set - or tosses in "just one more" before a tight deadline. Really reduced the number of "Mylanta moments" for me.

Been there. Done that. Don't need another T-shirt... Most of our machines are on 24x7 and I tried to convince our WWIS folks to schedule updates and virus scans for after 7 p.m., but no.... Made my job impossible - I'd be on deadline with an internal client screaming for analytical results because a production line was down or a customer was upset about some imperfection and we needed to diagnose and fix the problem yesterday and some auto process would kick in. Our IS folks treated us all like office workers writing memos. That's why I wiped all the lab computers and and set them up as stand-alone systems in my own workgroup. My office system is the only one left in the domain and there are still times I am trying to generate a big report with R, Sweave, and LaTeX and some IT autoprocess starts sucking up all my CPU and thrashing my disk. I really want to move to a model of scientist as artisan - where I administer and use my own system and send results to my internal and external clients in the cloud. I am starting the transition, trying to use OpenSource tools wherever possible.

I could not agree more. Nvidia has been very responsive.

The latest version on Ubuntu 12.04 beta2 doesn't cut it on my hardware. I am thankful for Nvidia's support of Linux.

I agree. I was recently pulled into a project to develop some software that was going to run on a system with a highly-customized real-time Linux kernel built from scratch from the 2009 version of Ubuntu (Karmic Koala.) I needed to make sure my code ran on that platform, so I grabbed an old (2007 vintage) laptop and installed Karmic. I was surprised how peppy it was. I suspect that it would do 99% of what most students and office workers would need. The problem is that designers keep putting out content that use new versions of Flash and other plug-ins and I suspect that these kind of annoyances are what will force people to upgrade otherwise fully functional systems. Note that vendors do this to force upgrading to new hardware and software to drive sales, not because of true need by customers. But that IS how the world works...