With airports and highways more congested than ever, new steel-wheel and maglev lines that move millions in Europe and Japan have the potential to resurrect the age of American railroads
Sphere: Related ContentMonthly Archive for November, 2007
The Federal Trade Commission has just slapped Do Not Call Registry offenders with $7.7 million worth of penalties. With a figure like that, it’s clear that telemarketers are finding that boundaries are a problem. But that doesn’t mean you have to take their abuse — fight back using these 34 tools and tactics.
Ideas
Get guidance and suggestions for the best ways to get telemarketers off your back.
- Counterpitching: This Web designer suggests that you offer your services to the telemarketer on the other end of the line. Alternatively, you can also pretend to be in the business that they’re selling from and make them feel silly for calling.
- Time to Fight Back: This article details ways to get back at telemarketers. You can waste their time, attempt conversational techniques and more.
- Do Not Call: Check out this list for ideas to use when called by a telemarketer. You’ll find toilet humor as well as guilt tactics.
- How to Deal With Those Damn Telemarketers: Follow these tips when you get a telemarketing call. Some of the most important are: Don’t just hang up, and make sure you say both “no” and “take me off of your list.”
- Having Fun With Telemarketers: Here, you’ll find 20 fun ideas for making telemarketers wish they’d never called you. Highlights include a marriage proposal and a few ways to waste their time.
- Anti-Telemarketing Action Kit: This guide from UCAN (Utility Consumers’ Action Network) details ideas for keeping telemarketers at bay. You’ll learn how to hurt them financially, waste their time and get payback.
Apple’s new operating system and its massive new feature set challenge users and developers to explore new and better ways of working. I don’t think Leopard is a perfect 10, but the author, Tom Yager, opines that Leopard’s many new features and underlying capabilities allow Leopard to “stay out of the user’s way while being a microsecond away from answering any user demand, and to make sure that the user never has to do anything twice.” This article is worth a read.
“Gadgets and gimmicks, featured in the Holiday 2007 SkyMall catalog, prove without a doubt that the human race is going straight to Hell”
Sphere: Related ContentFour members of an underground “cultural guerrilla” movement known as the Untergunther, whose purpose is to restore France’s cultural heritage, were cleared on Friday of breaking into the 18th-century monument in a plot worthy of Dan Brown or Umberto Eco.
Sphere: Related ContentSomeone thought it would be a good idea to model their home theater after the Enterprise NCC-1701D from Star Trek: The Next Generation. The result is super geeky, but actually rather cool. The system also features “one of the largest Kaleidescape hard-drive based storage systems” ever created, amassing eight servers with 3,816 DVDs.
Sphere: Related ContentFrom the NYT: Intel plans to announce a family of microprocessor chips on Monday that it says will speed the availability of high-definition video via the Internet.
As consumers clamor for more Internet video, a huge computing burden is placed on companies like Google, Microsoft and providers of digital video, who must compress the video files so they can be streamed to desktop and portable computers.
Intel’s new family, made up of 16 processors, would first be used in servers and high-end desktops that compress the video. They are the first chips based on a new manufacturing process that Intel says will give it a significant competitive advantage by increasing computing performance while reducing power consumption.
To get better video compression, Intel has added a set of 46 instructions it calls SSE4 to the new microprocessors.
The leading designer of the new processor, Steve Fischer, said the new instructions would make possible a new generation of servers that enhance the compression of digital video. “Video is becoming ubiquitous on the Web,” he said.
“This is a step in the right direction,” said Richard Doherty, president of Envisioneering, “and it’s probably the best use for this 45-nanometer technology over the next couple of years.”
Sphere: Related ContentMark McGuinness over at the Business of Design Online blog has written a series of articles (see links bel0w), on getting organized and improving creativity. Often many of us pitch creativity versus organization and structure erroneously. I believe organization and structure create (pun intended) an environment where creativity can flourish. Here is was Mark thinks:
There, I’ve said it. Organisation, structure, discipline and habit – these often seen as threats to creativity. Not to mention corporate-sounding phrases such as ‘time management’ or ‘workflow’. We like to think of creativity as a space for untrammelled imagination, free from all constraints. Yet while freedom, rule-breaking and inspiration are undoubtedly essential to the creative process, the popular image of creativity overlooks another aspect: examine the life of any great artist and you will find evidence of hard work, discipline and a hard-won knowledge of the rules and conventions of their medium.
Here are links for articles 2 through 5. This is a seven part series so be sure to catch the conclusion.
- Time Management #5: Get Things Done by Putting Them Off Till Tomorrow
- Time Management #4: Avoid the ‘Sisyphus Effect’ of Endless To-do Lists
- Time Management #3: Ring-fence Your Most Creative Time
- Time Management #2: Prioritise Work That is ‘Important But Not Urgent’
Cliff Sullivan from BusinessWeek writes,
But I won’t be getting it soon. While the technology is mostly in place, the players—from cable companies to film studios—can’t agree on how to make it happen.
I want to listen to music, have a box pop up on my screen telling me who’s phoning my home, or watch a vacation-themed slide show before forwarding it on to bore my friends on Facebook—all while sitting in front of the set in my living room. No one has yet put this wish list together in one nice, easy-to-use package.
They sure haven’t. As the author correctly points out, the reason is not the technology, but protection of existing business models. No one is addressing the gap between online content and the television.
While new technologies like IPTV bring digital content over IP to a STB connected to a TV, they do nothing to bridge the gap between online media and the TV.
So read the article at the BusinessWeek site and weigh in. What do you think? Is anyone addressing this gap? Do you want to watch online media on your TV? What features would you like to see in an iTV offering?
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