How about making new versions better, not worse? I have two Nexus S phones (for development). One I upgraded to ICS, the other I left on Gingerbread. Gingerbread is all-round nicer:

* the older Maps doesn't gobble up a bar at the bottom of the screen with a useless menu that clashes with the phone's buttons
* the older web browser makes it easier to switch between windows
* the older OS doesn't seize up as often with what looks to me like resource allocation problems (phone gets no cell-tower reception, I reboot phone, phone now gets reception; same thing happens with GPS)

Seriously, Google, you've lost your way on this. Blame yourself as much as the users or the carriers. And stop bugging me every single day to upgrade my Gingerbread to ICS.

* Please note: advice only applies to mayflies and Cobol programmers.

Try to find a Motion Computing LE1700 on eBay.

It has an active digitiser, a large high-resolution screen (1400x1050), and it's brilliant. I use mine all the time -- for taking notes in lectures, for giving lectures, for Skype sessions where we're talking technical stuff that needs sketches and graphs, for Photoshop, for signing PDFs. I've also tried a convertible Lenovo of some sort, an HP, and a Fujitsu lifebook, and none of them comes close. I think the killer feature of the LE1700 is its high resolution, which helps enormously with fine-motor-control handwriting.

I think you should use complete sentences in Powerpoint slides. Many presenters use sentence fragments, or even just lists of nouns -- but to get your story across, what really matters are the verbs, especially the "modal" verb phrases like "I claim that ..." or "everyone agrees that ..." or "in order to achieve X we must ...". Sentence fragments and noun-lists, on the other hand, are only useful as crutches to the speaker, to help him remember his talking points. Or, in Powerpointese,

• Complete sentences
  • Sentence fragments bad
  • Noun-lists too
  • Verbs important
    • Modal verbs v. important
    • Story conveyance
• Sentence fragments
  • Speaker's crutch

I'm a pixel scrounger too. Do you know, in Office, you can hide the ribbon by double-clicking on the menu bar? After you've done this, the ribbon will only appear transiently while you're making a selection, pretty much like a classic menu.

Internet pricing is a bit like computer security: if you ask most people (or even most Slashdot readers) to design a secure system, chances are it will be hacked; and if you ask them to design a pricing scheme, chances are it will be gamed.

• * For example, if you charge by the bit, then I have no incentive to shift my big downloads to off-peak hours, even if it makes no difference to me when I download.
• * Another example: network operators often charge smaller network operators according to 95-percentile billing. This means they measure the traffic in 5-minute bins, over a month, and find the 95th percentile, and charge in proportion. This way you don't penalize too much for sudden spikes. An enterprising company can set up agreements with 20 network operators, and round-robin between them, so that their 95th percentile is 0 for each operator.

Gaming the system will lead to retaliation by ISPs in the form of DPI, throttling, and other nasty tricks. My point is that it's worth thinking hard about how pricing should be designed, not simply going with a version that "most people would find agreable" and that will end up surrounded by kludges. There is in fact an IETF working group called conex, working on how to measure "how you use it" in an un-gameable way. This should be a sound basis for un-gameable pricing. More reading here.

There is a big difference between water consumption and Internet consumption. With water you're depleting a resource, and whenever you use it or however you use it, the amount you consume is the amount it's depleted by, so that's how much you pay for. With Internet you're not depleting anything -- the links are still there with the same capacity, after you've gone.

Instead, on the Internet, what you need to be charged for is the "hurt" you cause others by your usage. If you use 4Mb/s at peak hours you're causing lots of hurt, if you use 4Mb/s in the middle of the night you're not causing much hurt. Or if you download 100MB at 1kB/s you're not causing much hurt but it's for a long time, whereas if you download it at 10Mb/s you're causing a lot of hurt for a short time. How it all balances out is rather tricky to understand. Arguably, time-of-day throttling as a crude attempt to approximate this idea of "hurt".

Yes we do. It's a stylus and a tablet with an active digitizer, and I've been using one for years. It has some disadvantages (needs recharging, heavier than a notepad, takes 15sec to turn on). But it has advantages too (easier to file notes, can see all your past notes, can copy and paste snippets from PDFs, can annotate PDFs). Sometimes, in a lecture with slides with lots of equations, I'll take a photo of a slide, quickly copy it onto my notes.

These have been around for years, and they are brilliant if (a) you have the money, (b) you work in mathematics, where keyboards are too slow for note-taking. Unfortunately (for mathematicians), (a) and (b) rarely go together.

I've tried an iPad with a stylus, and it's like using crayons -- useless for serious work, except in the hands of a real artist.