some energy….

dispatches from the new world of work

Beyond Your “To Do” List.
Waaaay Beyond Your “To Do” List.

Nothing wrong with a thoughtful “To do” list. Everything right about it, in fact, unless your engineer-like devotion to it as such is that you stick to it no matter what—and some “must-do newbies” come along. There is a lot to say for inflexibility—and flexibility. (Go figure—management is an art.)

In any event, I want to use this space to say that “To do” lists are not enough—not nearly enough. In fact I want to urge three other daily “must” lists be added to your morning cogitations.

March 14, 2011

Tablet deathmatch: Apple iPad 2 vs. Motorola Xoom

The Xoom gave the original iPad a strong challenge, but does the iPad 2 knock it back down?

By Galen Gruman | InfoWorld

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Let’s cut to the chase — the iPad 2 that Apple just released pulls further ahead in the battle with the only real competitor on the market: the Android OS 3.0 “Honeycomb” Xoom tablet from Motorola Mobility. In our previous comparison of the first-gen iPad and the Xoom, the Xoom showed its mettle as a serious contender, beating the iPad in areas such as its inclusion of cameras and ability to mirror its video display.

The iPad 2 neutralizes the Xoom’s advantages, giving the iPad an overall edge. But let’s not forget that the Xoom remains a strong choice for tablet buyers — and its approach to app widgets continues to pose an advantage over the iPad 2. A software update could further bolster the Xoom’s areas of strength.eas

[ See all of InfoWorld’s mobile deathmatch comparisons and personalize the tablet scores to your needs. | Compare the security and management capabilities of iOS, Windows Phone 7, Android, and more in InfoWorld’s Mobile Management Deep Dive PDF report. ]

In this rematch, the winner is a clearer call: the iPad 2. But it’s also evident that there are more rounds to be fought, and Apple should not take the iPad 2’s superiority for granted. (If you read the original tablet deathmatch comparison, skip ahead to the sections on the Web browsers and on the tablet hardware capabilities, the two areas where the iPad 2’s changes are concentrated. There are also some changes of note related to applications.)

Deathmatch: Email, calendars, and contacts
For testing these essential business functions, I used personal accounts of IMAP, POP, and Gmail along with a work account of Exchange 2007. Both devices work directly with IMAP, Gmail, and POP; my email, email folders, calendars, and contacts all flowed effortlessly among the smartphones, my laptop, and the server.

Both devices try to autodetect your settings wherever possible, and both do a good job. Setting up Exchange access on both devices was also simple. Unlike most Android devices, the Xoom supports on-device encryption, so it easily connected to our corporate server and passed its Exchange ActiveSync policies. My email, contacts, and calendars flowed into the Xoom’s apps. And whereas the Motorola Atrix smartphone’s convoluted set of email applications had problems sending email in some configurations, the Xoom’s regular Email app allowed me to access and send my messages, as well as easily switch among accounts as needed.

Email messages. Working with emails is equivalent on the two tablets: Both use the large screen to provide common controls at all times, and both let you see a selected email without opening it when in landscape orientation. The Xoom tablet displays mail as black text on a white background (as does the iPad 2), not as white text on a black background in the manner of Android smartphones. Thus, the messages are much more readable.

In both devices, you can reply, forward, mark as unread, delete, and move messages while reading them. You can also delete and move emails to folders from the message lists. On the iPad 2, you can easily delete individual messages from the email list: Swipe to the left or right and tap Delete. On the Xoom, you long-tap (that is, tap and hold) the message to get a menu of options such as Delete and Open.

The iPad 2’s email display keeps a folder or message list on the left and the message preview on the right, whereas the Xoom’s display works more like Mac OS X’s Columns view: If you tap an account, its folders appear at left, while the list of messages for the selected folder appear at right. If you select a message, the message list moves into the left column, and the right column becomes the message preview window. The iPad approach is more predictable, and the Xoom approach more flexible. For example, it allows you to drag a message from the list into a folder, which you can’t do on an iPad because you can’t see the folder and message lists simultaneously.

Test Center Scorecard
	20%	20%	15%	20%	15%	10%
Apple iPad 2	9	8	9	7	9	9	8.4 Very Good
	20%	20%	15%	20%	15%	10%
Motorola Mobility Xoom	9	8	8	6	9	8	8.0 Very Good

See more Tablets

April 21, 2011

RIM BlackBerry PlayBook: Unfinished, unusable

The BlackBerry-tethered tablet can’t do very much, and its tethering requirement means few users can actually use it

By Galen Gruman | InfoWorld

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It’s been half a year since Research in Motion unveiled its BlackBerry PlayBook tablet based on the QNX operating system. This week, RIM began shipping the 7-inch tablet. After spending a couple days with the final product, it’s clear that the PlayBook is a useless device whose development is unfinished.

Not only can it not compete with an Apple iPad, it can’t compete with the second-best tablet, Motorola Xoom, nor even with marginal Android tablets such as the Galaxy Tab that use the smartphone version of the Android OS rather than the Honeycomb tablet version. In fact, if my choice were between a PlayBook and a Windows 7 tablet — my benchmark for unusability — I think I’d rather go sans tablet.

[ Also on InfoWorld: “Tablet deathmatch: Apple iPad 2 vs. Motorola Xoom.” | Compare and calculate your own scores for the iPad 2, Xoom, Tab, and PlayBook with our tablet calculator. | Compare the security and management capabilities of iOS, Windows Phone 7, Android, and BlackBerry in InfoWorld’s Mobile Management Deep Dive PDF report. ]

I knew the prerelease reviews were negative, and I had my own concerns after seeing a PlayBook demo in January. But even those didn’t prepare me for the profound disappointment that is the PlayBook. Why did RIM bother shipping it?

Communications only if the straitjacket fits
The fundamental nature of the PlayBook’s flaws begin with the requirement that a BlackBerry be tethered to it for access to business email, calendars, or contacts. Other than using a Webmail client, a PlayBook without a BlackBerry is unable to communicate. You can’t connect to POP, IMAP, or Exchange servers directly from the tablet, as you can from an iOS or Android device — you must have a BlackBerry tethered via Bluetooth using the BlackBerry Bridge application. In that case, you essentially see your BlackBerry email, calendar, and contacts in a window on the PlayBook when connected.

If your BlackBerry is on the AT&T network, you can’t install Bridge — AT&T won’t allow it. As luck would have it, my BlackBerry Torch uses the AT&T network, so AT&T blocked me from installing Bridge, which meant I could not get my Exchange or IMAP email, work with my calendar, or look up contacts. It also meant I couldn’t use mailto links in the browser, such as in “share with a friend” links — extremely frustrating. This is what happens when you lock in customers before making sure your business partners (AT&T, in this case) will support your particular type of straitjacket. (And note that Verizon Wireless hasn’t yet decided whether it will support the PlayBook.)

Companies that don’t use BlackBerry smartphones will be in the same position as AT&T-provisioned BlackBerry device users like me: The PlayBook will not be viable for business communications. Webmail is a poor substitute for native email.

 

Test Center Scorecard
	20%	20%	15%	20%	15%	10%
RIM BlackBerry PlayBook	8	4	5	2	8	6	5.4 Poor

 

 

 

#sameold

Most people — at least in the US — think of wealth as a source of happiness. Rich people can, seemingly, get what they want, secure themselves from suffering, and improve the lives of others through their philanthropy. While this story true in many ways, it is also very incomplete. The lives of many rich people can be as filled with suffering, stress, alienation, and constrained humanity as the lives of poorer people. But beyond these individual considerations, I want to highlight the historic role for concentrated wealth, a role often overlooked in popular imagination. Concentrated wealth has power, and that power inevitably shifts things in the way societies work, for better and/or for worse.

History demonstrates that concentrated wealth plays a significant role in the evolution of societies by being a source of (a) social injustice, (b) distortions of democratic process and/or (c) positive social transformation. All too often, this evolutionary impact is accompanied by — or even invoked by — tremendous suffering and destruction. If we want societies to evolve more consciously — that is, with more awareness, compassion, intelligence, wisdom, and collective choice — we might work to minimize the injustice and erosion of democracy (a and b) and maximize positive social transformation (c).

CONCENTRATED ENERGY

The concentrated energy contained in concentrated wealth is like the concentrated energy contained in fossil fuels. Coal, oil, and natural gas contain the solar energy of ancient sunlight stored for millions of years and then tapped to fuel the industrial and technological revolutions and the globalization of economy, culture and destiny that have totally transformed our world. Concentrated wealth contains the energy of billions of laborers, thinkers, creators, and players of economic games. It was born from and feeds the industrial, technological and global revolutions. It is almost as if the concentrated energy of fossil fuels has been transferred into concentrated wealth to induce further transformation of society.

This immensely powerful energy has the potential to release the forces of conscious evolution at the whole-society level. As we know, it also has the potential to accelerate the degradation of our earthly home along with the human communities and cultures that live here. And, of course, it has the potential to become historically irrelevant, to dissipate itself in the pursuit of trivial material pleasures and possessions or in charities that serve only ego, the status quo, or current generations at the expense of future ones.

FOUR ARTICLES

The articles below explore different dimensions of the newly rising concentration of wealth.

1. The Rise of the New Global Elite – http://bit.ly/eetSma

While long, this article from the Atlantic is an extremely readable, revealing, and riveting glimpse into the world of “the new global elite”. Along with its extensive chronicle of this elite’s isolation from “regular folks” and the rise of middle classes in some developing countries as America’s middle class collapses, it points out that old inherited wealth is rapidly being replaced by young entrepreneurial wealth. Increasingly, the new hyper-wealthy are not so much basking in pleasures while protecting their investments, as they are ambitiously working to create impacts, often motivated by social vision. Perhaps the most fascinating part of the article, to me, was the author’s suggesting that what excites and motivates these folks is the challenge of finding “‘the new new thing’ — the insight or algorithm or technology with the potential to change the world, however briefly.” Heaven knows, there are some truly remarkable innovations emerging for social evolution that could give such people legacies that would be remembered for centuries.

2. Twenty-two Statistics That Prove The Middle Class Is Being Systematically Wiped Out Of Existence In America – http://t.co/lNFYiK6

This short piece is a litany of statistics demonstrating the now obvious erosion of the US middle class and consequent increase in both wealth and poverty. For me, the three most thought-provoking numbers were
* The bottom 80 percent of American households hold about 7% of the liquid financial assets and
* The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth, while
* 83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.

What is the significance of this dramatic economic disparity for the majoritarian dynamics of a democratic republic? It naturally raises issues of economic justice and social power. But it also shifts attention from government as the primary source of resources for the “general welfare”. Given how much of the nation’s wealth is controlled by the top 1-20% of the population, how they use their concentrated wealth becomes a legitimate concern of the bottom 80-99%. And it is obviously a source of immense potential energy for catalyzing a more just, sustainable, and consciously evolving civilization — one way or another.

Both of these first two articles, taken together, raise provocative questions — questions that should be engaged urgently and very thoughtfully by Americans, among others — about the most useful and realistic role the U.S. might play in the world, given the current seismic shift away from its former dominant roles. With conscious attention to this, the U.S. could become a source — or, perhaps better yet, a clearinghouse or catalyst — for inspiration and innovation in new realms. Without such conscious attention, it seems clear the U.S. will swirl down into an increasing mess largely of its own making, generating more pain for the world as it goes, especially if it attempts to maintain its exceptionalism and bloated military in the process.

3. A Modest Proposal to Transition to a “Cater to the Rich” Economy – http://bit.ly/f7En8D

This one is satire that rides uncomfortably close to reality. Acknowledging the realities described in the first two articles, it explores the emergence of a “cater to the rich” economy. In each of the last several years there have been between five and ten million households in the U.S. with assets exceeding one million dollars. That’s a sizable group of consumers! How might each of us non-wealthy people survive better by developing or working in niche markets for these extremely wealthy people? Furthermore, the author of this odd article asks how the government might help develop programs that allow the super-rich to hire poor workers for life, with all the security and discipline that would entail. With tongue firmly implanted in his cheek, the author dances on the edge of one of the oldest traditions in human societies — slavery — and manages to make it seem not only reasonable but attractive. It is a spooky sign of how far we have come…

4. The Surprising History of Federal Taxes on Wealthy Americans – http://bit.ly/TopTaxHistory

Unbeknownst to most Americans, today’s tax rates on the wealthiest Americans — $30-40% — are LOWER than they’ve been in almost 80 years. They are the lowest since the “roaring ’20’s” that led to the Great Depression, when the top rate was 25%. And I am fascinated by this mind-boggling data-point: FOR ALMOST TWO DECADES — from 1945-1963 — the richest people — those in the highest tax bracket, making over $200,000 — paid 91-94% of their income in taxes! Only in 1987 — after 50 years — did the top tax rate drop below 50%. No wonder the days of major infrastructure development and ambitious national projects like the moon landing are fading into history.

I offer these four articles and my commentary above as one more tree trunk swirling in the flood of events — hoping that, if it catches on something else in the flow, it just might help shift some of that flow into new directions that truly serve the Seventh Generation after us.

Blessings on the Journey…

Coheartedly,
Tom

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is Hiring!

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is the web service that is pioneering cloud computing by providing resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It gives any developer or IT professional complete control of their computing resources and allows them run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. We are looking for passionate, experienced professionals to join us and to help us define and deliver high quality solutions in a hyper-growth environment where priorities evolve rapidly. We encourage you to apply today!

Spotlight Jobs

Build the World’s Most Scalable Load Balancing Solutions

We are looking for software engineers with a passion for building massively scalable network-oriented software for the Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) service. As a member of the team you will have the opportunity to work along-side outstanding engineers to expand the feature set and reach of the service, and improve the availability and scalability of our systems. If you’re interested in working on a small team that has a huge impact on the future of load balancing, learn more here.

Build the World’s Largest Dynamically Priced Market for Computing Resources

We are looking for developers with C++, Java, or Ruby experience to help build and operate innovative pricing models and markets in the cloud computing space. We are solving exciting problems, like: building out and optimizing the software behind our pricing models (think of everything it would take to build and scale a stock exchange for computing resources); empowering developers from around the world to migrate their applications to these new pricing models; and, developing a platform for other AWS teams to build their own versions of our pricing models (e.g. Amazon RDS Reserved Instances). For example, we have already launched the first version of a product called Spot Instances, where a customer can bid for their compute capacity. There are still a huge number of things we can do to dramatically expand this market. Apply by emailing your resume to ec2-spot-jobs-web@amazon.com or learn more here.

Job Openings

Amazon EC2 is a fast-paced, results-driven group where we strive to create the best customer experience possible. We are looking for passionate leaders who thrive when working in a rapidly evolving environment on hard problems with smart people who are all focused on delivering goals together. The current list of job openings for Amazon EC2 by role, include:

Software Development Engineers

As an Amazon EC2 software engineer you will help pioneer the way that the world consumes compute resources. We have tons of fun designing and solving some of the most interesting and complex technical challenges in the industry like: building a rapidly expanding market where customers set their own price for instances; provisioning and managing massive amounts of computing power in data centers around the world in a scalable way; securing of one of the worlds largest distributed systems; pushing the limits of hardware virtualization to create new instance types like Cluster Compute instances; designing and virtualizing massive networks that enable consumption of huge amounts of bandwidth; making cloud computing easy to use for all customers; and so much more.

We are looking for passionate, experienced software developers to join us and help define and deliver high quality solutions to expand our features and continue to scale our operations. You will fit right in if you have a sound understanding of the fundamentals of Computer Science and practical experience building large-scale distributed systems. You should be somebody who enjoys working on complex system software, is very customer-centric, and feels strongly not only about building good software but about making that software achieve its goals in operational reality. Experience with web-based applications and/or web services-based applications, especially at massive scale is a strong plus. To apply, please email your resume to amazon-ec2-sde-jobs@amazon.com or apply online.

Database Administrators

As a Database Administrator within Amazon Web Services (AWS) you will be involved in the design, implementation, enhancement, scaling, and maintenance of highly available Oracle-based distributed databases. The successful applicant is an Oracle expert who is deeply passionate about databases, has a proven ability to learn new skills and concepts rapidly, and is self-motivated and able to work independently. You should have excellent troubleshooting skills and be able to be calm and effective in high-pressure situations. If you are interested, please email your resume to amazon-ec2-dba-jobs@amazon.com or apply online.

Product Managers

As a product manager within Amazon EC2, you will be deeply involved with every step of the product life cycle: evaluating the marketing opportunity, determining the target use cases and customer requirements, defining the product and functional requirements, creating the pricing structure, generating marketing collateral, coordinating the feature/product launch, working directly with customers, and driving adoption once the product is launched. You should have a passion for business and technology, a strong desire to work on both inbound and outbound marketing, and a readiness to get your hands dirty. Historically, successful applicants have a strong business and technical acumen, an MBA, and some engineering or technical work experience that enables them to easily interact easily with software developers and CIOs alike. If you are interested, please email your resume to amazon-ec2-pm-jobs@amazon.com or apply online.

Business Developers

As a business development manager focused on Amazon EC2, you will have the exciting opportunity to shape and deliver on a strategy to build mind share and broad use of Amazon’s utility computing web services within the enterprise, Small/Medium Businesses, and startup communities. Your broad responsibilities will include defining key market segments to target, establishing those business and technical relationships, and helping the sales team drive the day-to-day interactions with these companies in order to build long-term business opportunity. The ideal candidate will posses both a business background that enables them to drive an engagement and interact at the CXO/VP level, as well as a technical background that enables them to easily interact with software developers and architects. You will be able to articulate and communicate customer needs and requirements to AWS product teams so that they can continue to deliver services that delight customers. You should also have a demonstrated ability to think strategically about business, product, and technical challenges, with the ability to build and convey compelling value propositions. If you are interested, please email your resume to amazon-ec2-bd-jobs@amazon.com or apply online.

Completing Your Application

Applying is easy. Simply, submit your resume to the address mentioned in the sections above. Alternatively, please visit AWS Careers home page for all AWS career opportunities.

Location

Most roles are located in the heart of Seattle, WA. If you don’t live in Seattle, we offer comprehensive relocation/temporary housing as a part of our package. Seattle is one of the best places to live in the US and we’ll help get you here if you’re right for the job. We also have openings in other great locations like Virginia or South Africa.

Task/Todo List

why oh why can’t I find on todo list app that works better than paper?

#geekery! get it!