For no good reason, I've been excited about the Ryder Cup. I'm your typical "casual" golf fan, in other words I'll watch if Tiger and/or Phil are involved (or if Daly is bent over yakking on the 16th green).
But I've been looking forward to this weekend Ryder Cup matches. I'm getting ready for my morning, reading the Boston Globe and watching the Ryder Cup (in HD - nice!!). Then, in a sudden brain-cramp I go to ESPN.com and see on the front page the outcomes of the matches they are showing on TV!!!! Bastards. I knew the coverage was tape delayed, but I didn't care. I Tivo so much stuff now, I'd probably watch the New Years ball drop at 10:30AM the following morning. I think there needs to be a web standard for posting results of big events. Would it be too hard to create a collapsable item (i.e. click here for results??). They are so happy to provide "teaser" headlines anyway - why not help everyone out. We can get standards for everything else online, why can't we get this done?
Quick "Daily Geek" comment. A few months ago I bought a Convertable Notebook. The screen rotates around and allows the computer to be used as a tablet, you can write and take notes on screen. It has totally changed the way I work, I can scan in documents and mark them up. Take notes during meetings and conference calls (no more binder notebook), I can also record audio and review my entire meeting if I choose. I have become infinitely more organized now, as I am no longer shuffling through endless stacks of paper notes. It is really amazing. If anyone is in the market for a new laptop I would check out the convertable models and give the Tablet PC a try. It costs an extra $300 bucks for the "feature" (when compred to similar speced notebooks) but well worth it in my opinion.
3 comments:
funny you should mention the tablet. We were looking into those and decided that they were complete crap. Now these were just solely the tablet without a keyboard. They tried to demonstrate how the writing could work and it was a joke. The software could only pick up maybe 10% of our handwriting. Great idea, poor execution. Now the combo thing I saw the other week and that seems to be much better. The only other question we had was the durability of the tablets. Since our normal Dells run a 40% fail rate, I can only imagine what the tablet would be.
Which Dell laptops are you using that are running a 40% fail rate? That's seems awfully high.
Jay, what type of combo laptop did you get? I've been thinking about one of those, but I haven't done much research into them yet. I'm sure there's probably quite a bit of difference in quality between the various brands/models of those combo laptops and it'd be good to know which one you're using that works out so well.
I totally agree that going 100% no keyboard and mouse is WAY too geeky - even for me. I'm not ready for that.
First of all, the biggest misconception of the Tablet PC is that it is going to be used for handwriting recognition. That is not the strength of the tablet pc. I've *never* used the recognition feature. The main strength is using digital ink in Windows Journal or Microsoft One Note. Ink just like you use a pen and paper to take notes, brainstorm ideas, mark up handouts, etc. This ink will NEVER be converted to text. There is no reason to do so. But with digital ink, you can cut and paste selections of what is on your screen and send it via email (or insert that snippet into your "notebook"), you can move sections of your notes around, insert audio and graphics, direct links to websites, etc. Things you could never do with a pen and paper notebook.
With all of that said, I still use my notebook as a laptop more often than not. I still like having the widescreen (14"), and having a powerful Duo Core processor for doing the development work (Visual Studio is a resource hog). But, when I'm out of the office and in a meeting I take my notebook with me. Not only can I take digital notes, but I have my Outlook with me, my documents, anything right on my screen at the meeting. No annoying typing while in a meeting setting.
The laptop I have is the Gateway M-285. It is a 14 inch Duo Core 2.0 Ghz processor with 2 Gig RAM. It is too heavy (6.1 lbs in lightest config) for use if you are "in the field" standing up and using the tablet all day. But you have to sacrifice screen size to get the lighter (4 lbs) tablet convertables. If you are willing to go to a 12" screen, there are also more models available. Since I like to use my laptop on my lap occasionally to do development work, a 12 inch screen is way to small.
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