Ultrabooks: The Laptops of the Future

Ultrabooks are the new revolution in computer world. They are thin and light laptops with no hard disk (SSD instead) and no CD/DVD drive, but a good battery life (6-7 hours).

Features:

Storage
Solid State Drive (SSD) as the primary storage device, instead of the traditional Hard Drive (HDD) – ensuring incredibly quick boot time.

Dimensions
20mm thickness.

Weight
Ultrabook: 2 t0 3 pounds
Laptop: 20 pounds

CPU
powerful but lower power consuming Intel Core i5 and the Intel Core i7 Sandy Bridge processor.

RAM
4GB of RAM

Battery
Ultrabook: 6 – 7 hours
Laptops: 2 – 3 hours

Display
11, 13 or 14-inches.

Price
1000 USD

Next Ultrabooks wave will be:
CPU: Ivy Bridge architecture
Display: touchscreens.
Input: voice control.

Why Intel pushed Ultrabooks ?

Because the iPhone, iPad and its followers powered by Google, RIM, Microsoft, and Nokia, don’t use portable chips made by Intel. That’s because Intel hasn’t until now been able to achieve the same low energy consumption/high relative computing power output of rival mobile CPU designers like ARM.

Comfort, Panic and Learning Zone

Any task or activity we do is in either comfort or panic or learning zone.
In order to make progress in any field from novice to expert, we need to always stay in the learning zone, because it is where we acquire skills.

Why we can not progress in comfort zone ?
= Because it consists of the abilities we already know and can already do easily. So nothing new we will learn.

Why we can not make progress in panic zone ?
= Because you are so anxious and you can no longer think. Activities in the panic zone are so tough that we don’t even know how to approach them. You may be in the panic zone when attempting something dangerous, far beyond your reach or under high stress.

Why we can make progress in learning zone ?
= Because the skills and abilities that are just out of reach; they’re neither so far away that we panic nor close enough where they’re too easy.

But, the main problem is how to identify the learning zone ?
If the task at hand is boring or too easy, it’s an indication that we’re not in the learning zone.
While the panic zone and learning zone may involve forms of “pain” and challenges, the panic zone is a place where we are lost and in the learning zone we are focused and open to new ideas.

Signs

boredom = comfort zone
losing focus = panic zone
growth, engaged, or enjoyment = learning zone

We’re neither bored nor uneasy; we’re learning.

As you operate in the learning zone, you will get more comfortable with the current skills and they’ll start to move into the comfort zone. As this happens, tasks that were once a part of the panic zone will move into the learning zone and the cycle will continue.

In bodybuilding, doing the same routine leads to a plateau (comfort zone) and it’s not until a new challenge is sought (learning zone) do the muscles have a chance to grow further.

Resource: THE 3 ZONES EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW ABOUT

How do I learn to program?

Inventor of Ruby on Rails – David Heinemeier Hansson :
“Programming because I needed to. Programming because I gave a damn about what I was writing and I wanted it done sooner rather than later.
That’s how I learned to program Ruby. By making it my mission to write Basecamp in it. When you’re learning on a mission, the order of things come really naturally. So what exactly do I have to do to get this messages section working in Ruby? Oh, I’ll need to do a loop here. Oh, I’ll need to get something from the database there.

Before you know it, you’re half-way done with your idea and you’ve accidentally learned how to do it too.

In short, you start with little bit of something real and make it tick. Then you make it tock.

Passion overstates the issue. You don’t have to have that all-flaming, insatiable desire to get going. You just have to want a concrete, real program to work. Starting to learn something without even a shred of a goal feels premature.”

Best Learning Approach:

1- Real Projects that you have to do.

2- Avoid tutorials and books, why? cos they create programs you don’t have the slightest interest in keeping.

Resource: How do I learn to program?

How to Ace your Exams without Studying

Holistic learning is a process for learning more effectively. Some people effortlessly learn new concepts and material while others struggle. The difference between these factors is mostly due to a process called holistic learning.

Holistic learning is the opposite of rote memorization. Instead of learning through force, your goal is to create webs of information that link together.

Your goal when learning anything is to create a construct or an underlying understanding.

Constructs are formed from models, chunks of understanding that aren’t completely accurate but can be used to solve problems.

You create webs of information, constructs and models by visceralizing, metaphor and exploring

Holistic learning works with highly conceptual information where there is an underlying system. It doesn’t work well with arbitrary information or skills.

Resource: Holistic Learning – eBook

The Best of Scott Young – eBook

Coders vs Programmers

Coders are akin to smart assembly line workers as opposed to programmers who are plant engineers. Programmers are the brains, the glorious visionaries who create things. Large software programmes that often run into billions of lines are designed and developed by a handful of programmers.

Coders follow instructions to write, evaluate and test small components of the large program. If programming requires a post graduate level of knowledge of complex algorithms and programming methods, coding requires only high school knowledge of the subject.

Coding is also the grime job. It is repetitive and monotonous. Coders know that. They feel stuck in their jobs.

Resource: A myth called the Indian programmer

Google’s Productivity Secret

A system called Snippets, employees receive a weekly email asking them to write down what they did last week and what they plan to do in the upcoming week. Replies get compiled in a public space and distributed automatically the following day by email.

Resource: Silicon Valley’s Productivity Secret

The Fall Of Once Great Companies

In technology, you can always trace the fall of once great companies to a point in time when they seemed unassailable and/or were at a clear inflection point but missed the opportunity.

The problem for companies is the market has changed at a pace most are struggling to match.

Examples:

Kodak

Kodak, which has just filed for bankruptcy protection missed the shift to digital photography, despite inventing key technology that we take for granted today.

RIM (Black Berry)

RIM, once the absolute master of enterprise smartphones is looking increasingly precarious having failed to make developer life easy and refusing to bend to hardware/software trends in mobile.

Oracle

Oracle insistence on gouging customers – or at least giving that strong impression – will drive customers away at precisely the moment when it believes it is invincible. Oracle database supremacy is going to start coming under real threat as business intelligence solutions built in the cloud eschew Oracle for open source alternatives.

SAP

SAP moves towards cloud with the SuccessFactors acquisition leave far too many imponderables for me to be sure they can transition. They’ve tried before and failed.

Microsoft

Microsoft shift to ‘post-PC’ is dangerous for Microsoft. It’s dangerous because it’s a big transition. Windows is very much a PC product, and much of what makes Windows what it is simply won’t carry forward to ‘post-PC’ devices.

Intel

The world moves towards mobile devices where Qualcomm/ARM play best.
Intel’s smartphone and tablet chips need to show they can push out ARM-based devices. The only sure bet for Intel is that it’ll continue to dominate the data center.

The problem for both Microsoft and Intel is the market has changed at a pace both are struggling to match.

Resource: Wintel: beginning of the end or end of the beginning?

Hardware Will Take a Backseat to Software — Perhaps for Good

Cloud computing is the single biggest reason ……

This year – 2012 – will be one of the worst years in recent memory for new products.

It’s not that manufacturers aren’t trying; it’s just that hardware innovation has taken a backseat to software (and software-as-a-service). Make no mistake, there will be newer, thinner, brighter televisions; higher-powered laptops and digital cameras; and more accessory announcements than you can shake a stick at. But that’s not really where the action is.

The real action can be found around the interoperability of these products.

Displays will be displays. Buttons will be virtual. Glass will be everywhere. The real innovation will only be seen when the device is turned on and used. It can’t be touched, only experienced. It’s not what OEMs do; it’s how.

Press trying to get a photo of the latest new product is gradually becoming a tutorial, in which we need to understand how it changes our lives.

In the enterprise, there is a general move to the cloud or cheap clusters of generic servers.

The vast majority of what we do is now far more dependent on an Internet connection than on 8 cores of processing power or the latest version of Windows running on a Wintel system.

Advancement in hardware are increasingly irrelevant for most users. Incremental improvements in hardware will yield incremental improvements in the capabilities that software can exploit. However, most tablets, for example, can already show movies in full HD and support immersive gaming.

Perhaps the biggest barrier is bandwidth, though. If the ubiquitous broadband issues can be solved, then we’d have a game changer in the other direction, making local hardware even less relevant.

Cloud computing is the single biggest reason that hardware has lost any real importance to the majority of users.

The gaming industry brings in many billions of dollars on new titles running on 5-year old hardware. The innovation is happening with the developers.

It doesn’t take 8 cores to watch videos on YouTube.

The ability to take advantage of many cores and clustered computers is a software issue that needs addressing rather than a computing horsepower issue.

Too much software still has not been optimized for advances in multicore technology or GPU processing. You can throw all the hardware you want at Word and it’s still going to be Word.

As with most things, the real bottleneck isn’t the hardware, it’s the bandwidth and the software. Android continues to lack the smoothness and responsiveness of iOS, for example, even on very fast phones.

It’s a chicken and egg problem. Why push the hardware envelope when the largest group of users struggles with platform fragmentation and poor optimization or spotty data connections?

Consumers as well love their gadgets, but need those gadgets to be inexpensive, have solid ecosystems, great battery life, and access the web at high speed. While hardware innovation is tied up in this, the real story is software and Internet infrastructure, not awesome new advances in hardware. And frankly, awesome new advances have, appropriately, gone by the wayside in favor of evolutionary platform advances.

Resource:

CES 2012 preview: hardware is (almost) dead

Hardware: Does it really matter anymore?

SaaS beats Oracle and SAP

ERP maintenance model is facing a trio of threats:
1- SaaS
2- Third party maintenance
3- Cloud vendors

SAP paid up big time for SuccessFactors in a $3.4 billion deal and Oracle bought RightNow for $1.5 billion just a few weeks earlier.

Oracle and SAP would have laughed off the importance of cloud computing just a few years ago. Now they’re talking the cloud game as much as they can.

1- SaaS

SaaS HR startup Workday is on fire with the best sales pitch in all of software: Buy our brand new HR products for 50% of the cost of your 15+ year old Oracle HR/SAP HR/PeopleSoft maintenance bill and we’ll even run it for you to keep your costs down. Every deal Workday does leads to the cancellation of an Oracle or SAP maintenance contract, which is a 95% net margin business for the legacy software providers.

2- Third party maintenance

More customers—especially those with custom code—are wondering why they should pay vendor support, which typically doesn’t cover specialized programming.

In the end, companies appear to want out of the maintenance game, but realize they have little to no leverage over Oracle or SAP. The only way out is through the cloud with potentially third party support as a stop gap.

3- Cloud vendors

CIO wanted to shed old applicatons, become more nimble and blow up their existing infrastructure. Cloud vendors obviously smelled blood.

Resource: Oracle’s hardware focus: Brilliant, bust or sideshow?

Enterprise software’s maintenance model faces triple threat

Failure not Hard Work is the road to Success

Educational systems are not preparing people for the 21st century. How to fix this problem ? The answer is: New way of thinking.

Success = Risk = Failure

We used to think that more effort means greater ability to succeed, but that’s not how it always works. You don’t get an ‘A’ for hard work, you only get an ‘A’ for delivering results, and that requires us to take risks, which causes us to fail.

The first time we run a real experiment to discover where we actually are … it’s going to be bad news, it’s probably going to reveal that not only are we not at the targets we need to be, we’re probably impossibly far away. It’s going to seem like a total disaster.

Resource: Eric Ries: How The U.S. Education System Is Failing Students