I'll give one management schmuck's experience with my apple watch.

I got it about a year ago as a toy. Expecting nothing. However, somewhere around 4ish months ago when I went on a trip to south america without it, how much I missed it. And realized that dumb watches were just... dumb. For me.

Again, I'm a people leader in IT. My day is meetings, email, and texts. For that, having a glance and quick canned reply to texts and emails while I'm sitting in meetngs with VPs is a lot less disruptive than pulling out my phone. All fine and good. But that still just makes it a toy, right?

Well, not quite. It tells me where my next meeting is at a glance, right there on the face. It tells me how many to-dos I have for today, again right there. It tells me how I'm doing on my fitness goals.

It tracks my heart rate and exercise, which really came in handy when I discovered I have high blood pressure. I just handed my iphone to my doctor with the health app open. I've since got a blood pressure cuff that also syncs to health, and that really helps my cardiologist.

When I'm at home, I leave my iphone on my desk or wherever, and just go around the house or yard getting stuff done. When you're on wi-fi, it does a decent enough job pinging you with your texts and reminders... and even phone calls. Right there on your wrist, without your phone nearby, as long as you're in wi-fi range.

Something I've started doing is using it to wake me up it the morning instead of my alarm. A silent tap on the wrist that does't wake my wife up. I also use it to track my sleep habits, which I've found useful.

When I travel, I take it with me now. Switch the face to show the time at home, the local weather, and the local sunrise/sunset. If your airline has an app for it, it will alert you if your plane is delayed, or changes gates. I can even use it for some airlines as my boarding pass.

Apple pay works pretty good. I usually pull out my phone to do it, but when I'm in the self checkout line, it's easier just to put my wrist up to the device to pay.

At the end of the day, it's not an earth shattering device. But for me, it has become a pretty useful one, and I'd say I've gotten my $400 use out of it. It's tough now to go back to a watch that just tells the time.

Agreed but there's a point where you get tired of ideologies for the sake of not getting something done.

Pulseaudio... the bane of my KDE life. It's 2010 and we're f'ing around with sound?

I hear you and know why you feel that way but the fact of the matter is that the old packages work, and if you manually download and forbid-upgrade the packages they work again. Some package manager screwed up and it's another half an hour on google and mucking on the command line to get a couple songs on my wife's ipod.

Hey man I really appreciate the counterpoint before I jump in to the apple realm. My mind's not set and your points are exactly what's holding me back. Especially the last one.

It just seems to me that the amount of f'ing around with desktops to do basic things should have gone down over the past 5 years on linux, and it seems to have gone up instead. Lots of fanciness but lotsa bugs. I was hoping in the apple realm that because you pay more maybe you get what you pay for. I've had family, friends, etc go this way and all proclaim this. But you've got me thinking. Maybe I'll hackintosh one of my linux machines and see how it goes.

I'm a dedicated linux user for the past 5 years and I'm thinking of dumping it all and going to macs.

I spend way too much time fiddling and screwing around trying to get normal things to work. The other day for example my wife wanted a sound to come on when she got an email in thunderbird. Should be easy, no? Doesn't work on ubuntu without some serious googling/screwing around. Google earth which for some reason vanished from the medibuntu repository... same deal. For some reason the installer set the symlink to point somewhere else. And still the fonts are screwed up, don't know why.

Or one of my favorites? Kdenlive, a great video editor, can't export to h.264 out of the box on ubuntu because it uses lame so you have to put your own custom export in. Or a recent clean install of Kubuntu 10.10 that left the master mixing channel muted (not through kmix but through alsamixer). Or the fact that the newest ubuntu amarok packages kill it's ability to talk to my wife's ipod. On and on. I'm not pointing fingers here, the devs and packagers do a fab job for the most part but it's always just shy of the goal line it seems.

Look, I loves me linux, but I have 3 kids, a wife, a job, and a life. And I won't do windows not for the least part because of the safety factor for my kids and wife not downloading shite. So do I want to come home from my IT job and have a nice safe controlled environment for my wife and kids to hop on, do email, surf the web, etc in a reasonably safe way where I don't need to spend hours on end fiddling when something doesn't work? Sounds f'ing great to me.

If someone using a laptop or a screensaver kicking in a few rows away distracts you that much, then you are *fucked* in real life.

I cheated my ass off in university in two classes. They both had the same prof, were required courses, and the prof was known to be a dick.
He would give these wicked exams (which I never cheated on) that would be so ridiculous that my 45% would be graded a B+. He would also give mandatory assignments once every other week that took ~60 hours to do and would be worth 1% of your grade. But they're mandatory so if you don't do one, or fail it, you're done. I cheated big time on these with a group of other guys... even wrote a parser/compiler that would take someone else's code, refactor it in random ways, and recompile it. We never got caught. And I didn't give a shit about cheating.

But in my discrete math course I struggled big time. Was a straight C+ student, and even though I was fascinated by the course, couldn't "get it."

I completely gave up on the final which was worth the bulk of the course. The prof was very good and helpful but I just couldn't do it. So I went out and got completely wasted the night before the exam. Stumbled my way in on a couple hours sleep, still drunk, sat down in front of the prof and aced the course. The prof was so flabbergasted by my exam that he told me that if he didn't know me and hadn't watched me write the final he would've accused me of cheating. He stopped me on the way out of the exam and offered to have me do post-grad work under him. I didn't.

But you know what? I've done just fine in my IT career. One of my most valuable skills I think is knowing when work isn't worthwhile doing, and when shortcuts are going to work.

In my opinion Songbird became irrelevant anyway the moment it dropped ipod support. I don't know how they think they can gain any semblance of marketshare, or cred for that matter, by dropping key features from it's codebase. It ran like crap anyway. Who builds a music player on top of mozilla?

Say "No" gracefully.
My strategy in my household: All 3 systems run Ubuntu. 5 users, some 4 years old. Only I have admin. Problem solved.

In the office I'm forced to use XP. However most of the extended family now has issues with Vista... and since I've never run it I can quite honestly say that I have no idea how to fix a Vista machine. So, I say as gently as possible: "I can't help you."

For the ones I have a real soft spot for, like my mom:
- XP machine isn't running any non-licensed software. No WGA hassles (hopefully!)
- AVG installed & autoupdates.
- Windows autoupdates.
- Firewall enabled.
- Behind a cheap $20 router (surprising how much this helps)
- Use only FF (hid the IE icon and warned her about using it)... make sure you set FF to the default browser.
- As little local apps as possible... only openoffice and picasa.
- She doesn't get an admin account. Only myself and my brother in law do.

Surprisingly, the only time I've had to fix it is when my 14 year old nephew was on the box trying to install some hacked game he downloaded...

Once it's released you may be able to Install from a PPA such as this https://launchpad.net/~openoffice-pkgs/+archive/ppa.
It's currently for 3.1.1 in 9.04 which I'm using.
More instructions here:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/How-to-Install-OpenOffice-org-3-1-on-Ubuntu-9-04-111105.shtml.
However you'll probably have to wait for a little while after 3.2 is actually released in November.

...isn't the technology, the UI, or anything else.

Granted, it loads slower than Vista from a cold boot, looks fuglier than outlook using 8-bit colors, and has usability problems up the wazoo (try explaining to a vp wtf replication is).

It's that execs don't get it. Is it email, a shared spreadsheet, a bunch of discussion databases... why spend millions on it?

This is why I got out of the notes game years ago. Sure, I could monitor a 10K user system distributed world-wide from home over a modem. But I sure couldn't sit at the boardroom table and get them to understand the value prop.

Now the SAP folks, they know how to market to the c-level folks.