Archive for May, 2009
Canon Employees Are Forbidden to Sit Down, Walk at Normal Pace
You might think your job sucks, but at least your boss wasn’t insane enough to remove all the chairs and install security so an alarm goes off if you don’t walk fast enough.
The president of Canon Electronics, Hisashi Sakamaki, is also the author of a book proposing some of the same measures he takes with his own company. His theory is that forcing employees to stand not only saves money but increases productivity and enhances employee relationships.
In the hallway, if an employee walks slower than 5 meters every 3.6 seconds, an alarm and flashing lights are set off, reminding the poor startled worker that he’s an inefficient waste of air. Even better (or worse), there’s a sign on the floor in said hallways that reads, ‘Let’s rush: If we don’t, the company and world will perish.’ The big boss, as a reward for thinking up all this stuff, gets to lounge in a nice, relaxing chair.
(Via Gizmodo)
Steve Jobs Returns to Apple Campus, Sources Say
If true, this is great news: According to setteB.IT, a good-looking Steve Jobs was spotted yesterday at Apple’s Cupertino campus by ‘more than one source.’ There are no details, but I want to believe.
(Via Gizmodo)
Eton College closed after positive swine flu test
Eton College, Britain’s most prestigious public school, has been shut down for a week after a pupil tested positive for swine flu.
A 13-year-old boy at the boarding school in Windsor became ill yesterday afternoon and was confirmed to be infected with the H1N1 flu strain that has sparked fears of a global pandemic.
The unnamed pupil is said to have only mild illness and is recovering at home. However the school, founded in 1440 by Henry VI, will remain closed as a precaution until June 7.
Eton is the 15th school in England and Scotland that has been advised to shut its doors in order to control the spread of swine flu.
Palm Pre syncs with iTunes on a Mac just like an iPhone
Palm’s upcoming Pre handset is again making headlines after it was discovered that early production units contain native support for syncing with Apple’s iTunes software as if they were built by the iPhone maker itself.
Fortune notes that this isn’t an entirely new revelation, given that it was mentioned back in January during the Consumer Electronics Show, but only recently has the tech media really clamped down on the matter.
‘Plug a Pre into a Mac and it syncs, seamlessly, with Apple’s iTunes,’ the financial publication reports. ‘In fact, the iTunes Store treats the Pre just as it would an iPod or an iPhone with one exception: it can’t handle old copy-protected songs.’
Ratifican a Manuel Sánchez González como subgobernador de Banxico
El Congreso ratificó a Manuel Sánchez González como nuevo subgobernador del Banco de México, un cargo con derecho a voto en la junta directiva vacante desde diciembre.
El nombramiento de Sánchez González fue hecho en abril por el presidente Felipe Calderón y tenía que ser ratificado por el Congreso, que lo avaló por unanimidad en una comisión de diputados y senadores que sesiona en los periodos de receso.
El nuevo subgobernador, que ocupará el cargo hasta el 31 de diciembre del 2016, entra en reemplazo de Everardo Elizondo, que terminó su periodo a finales del año pasado.
La Junta de Gobierno del Banco de México está compuesta por un gobernador y cuatro subgobernadores, quienes cumplen periodos escalonados de ocho años.
Barcelona Style Triumphs Over Manchester United
Patience, flair and beauty dominated over force Wednesday night as Barcelona defeated Manchester United, 2-0, to win the Champions League, Europe’s most prestigious club soccer tournament, before 72,000 fans at Olympic Stadium.
Barcelona controlled possession with its relaxed and pinpoint passing and incessant attack, held tight with a patchwork defense and made a tactical switch at forward, placing Lionel Messi as a central striker and shifting Samuel Eto’o to the right wing. Each responded with a goal, and Barcelona won its third European title and second in four years.
It will be left to Barcelona’s supporters to decide whether this is the Catalans’ greatest team ever, now that the first-year Coach Pep Guardiola has guided his squad to the Spanish League title, the Spanish Cup and now the European Cup.
Steve Jobs sounding “energetic” a month before return to Apple
Steve Wozniak had to opportunity to speak with Steve Jobs recently and said the Apple chief executive sounded ‘healthy’ and ‘energetic’ a little over a month before he’s scheduled to return to the company.
The Apple co-founder made the comments Wednesday from the sidelines of the Wall Street Journal’s All Things D conference, where Jobs has been a guest of honor on many occasions.
Although Wozniak admitted to having never asked Jobs about his health directly, he told representatives for the financial paper that his one-time pal ‘doesn’t sound like he’s sick,’ nor does he appear to be battling a dire health problem.
The upbeat comments contrast with those made by Jobs’ real estate attorney Howard Ellman last month during a town council meeting to determine whether the chief executive should be free to demolish a historic but abandoned mansion he owns in the Woodside Hills.
Santander scraps historic high street banks
The British banking names of Abbey, Alliance & Leicester (A&L) and Bradford & Bingley are to be scrapped, it was revealed today.
Santander, the Spanish banking group that owns all three brands, announced that it will re-name them under the ‘flame-logo’ and Santander moniker by the end of 2010 – bringing an end to high street names dating back as far as 1851.
Abbey, which was bought by Santander in 2004, and Bradford & Bingley’s savings business, rescued by the group last year, will be the first to be renamed, with 1,000 branches changed to carry the Santander brand between January and March next year.
Work-Life Balance Is Especially Difficult in Finance
The big influx of highly educated workers into finance in the last two decades has been the subject of some national hand-wringing lately. President Obama, college presidents and economists have all worried aloud that Wall Street has hoarded human resources that might otherwise have gone to science, education, medicine or other fields.
Now, new research is suggesting that the shift also brought another cost — a cost that fell mainly on the people, especially women, who took jobs in finance. Among elite white-collar fields, finance appears to be uniquely difficult for anyone trying to combine work and family.
Finance, on this score, is worse than law and worse than academia. It is far worse than medicine, which emerges from the research as the highly paid profession with the most flexibility. Near finance at the bottom of the list is consulting, another field that became more popular in the last two decades.
Desempleados en México ya pueden usar Afore
A partir de hoy, los trabajadores que posean una cuenta en una afore, ya podrán hacer uso de sus recursos para el retiro, en caso de quedar desempleados.
Y es que tras publicarse en el Diario Oficial de la Federación, ya se hizo oficial, a partir del día de ayer, que los trabajadores afiliados al IMSS puedan retirar parcialmente recursos de su subcuenta de retiro, cesantía en edad avanzada y vejez, después de 46 días de haber quedado sin empleo.
‘Con la nueva medida, los trabajadores podrán disponer de más recursos y tendrán la oportunidad de recuperarlos en cuanto encuentren otro empleo’, afirmó Vanessa Rubio vocera de la Comisión Nacional del Sistema de Ahorro para el Retiro (Consar).
MacBook Air to Finally get Built in 3G?
SiliconRumors (formerly MacScoop) reports that Apple is preparing an update to the MacBook Air that could finally include built-in 3G wireless networking.
The most notable feature our sources expect to be added to the new MacBook Air is a built-in 3G modem allowing connectivity to high-speed cellular networks.
The rumor site also suggests that the entry level MacBook Air could find a lower pricepoint between $1300-$1500. The possibility of 3G in future Apple laptops has been suggested before through both job descriptions and evidence in Snow Leopard.
Apple has already released a minor update to the white MacBook today and there have been rumors that they be readying more update for WWDC. SiliconRumors was formerly known as MacScoop which has had some reliable information in the past.
(Via MacRumors)
Leaks All But Confirm 32GB iPhone
A surprise it isn’t, but it’s nice to know that at the very least the iPhone is about to get a storage boost, doubling its internal flash memory to 32GB. Up until the euthanization of the 160GB iPod Classic, Apple could always be relied upon to increase drive size in iPods.
The rumors/leaks come from two independent sources, and both are the results of either incompetent slip-ups or a genius-level marketing strategy. First, T-Mobile Austria posted a placeholder on its site listing a ‘iPhone 32GB’ starting at €0 (that’s $0, for the mathematically challenged), and the blog Area Mobile was sharp enough to grab a screen shot.
Next up, Rogers. The much ‘loved’ Canadian carrier has posted a list of upcoming handsets according to the Boy ‘Genius’ Report. Here’s the relevant line: ‘# iPhone — ETA: unknown (July/August), outright: not allowed, 3-year: TBD.’ That’s right folk: three years. This doesn’t point to a 32GB model, but it at least offers some confirmation of an early Summer launch.
Finally, Vodafone Australia has issued an end-of-life notice for the 32GB iPhone. This could, of course, just means that the 16GB iPhone 3G is about to be replaced by a newer 16GB iPhone, but we agree with MacTalk.au that it looks like there will be a bigger model along soon.
And you know what else this means? The iPod Touch has always had double the capacity of the largest iPhone, which probably means a ridiculously large 64GB model is on the way.
(Via Wired.com)
Apple quietly bumps white MacBook specs
The $999 MacBook may not feature the same swank aluminum togs as its older siblings, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t get its share of the family love. On Wednesday, Apple marginally bumped the specs on the base configuration, giving customers a little more bang for their sub-thousand bucks.
Strangely enough, the white polycarbonate MacBook actually now sports a 2.13GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor—faster than its nearest relative, the $1,300 aluminum MacBook. Other specs on the $999 configuration have been brought closer to the mid-range model: it now sports 2GB of 800MHz DDR2 RAM (up from the previous incarnation’s 2GB of 667MHz DDR2 RAM) and a 160GB SATA hard drive instead of the last model’s 120GB drive.
Otherwise, though, the MacBook remains unchanged, retaining a mini DVI port instead of the aluminum’s mini DisplayPort connector, the Nvidia GeForce 9400M graphics it added a few months ago and—we’re sure you’ll all be happy to know—keeping its FireWire 400 port. Clearly Apple isn’t ready to put the white MacBook out to pasture just yet.
(Via MacWorld)
Review: Nokia 5800 en Mexico
La semana pasada he adquirido el nuevo Nokia 5800; es el primero en su categoría de los Nokia que es touchscreen. Muchos pensarán que es el equivalente del iPhone por parte de Nokia, lo cual no es cierto, es un buen teléfono, pero yo diría que es una versión diferente a la línea del iPhone con sus pros y contras.
Pros:
Se pueden realizar videos, es una buena cámara fotográfica con flash integrado, para los que están acostumbrados al Symbian es también otra ventaja ya que mantiene la misma estructura.
Uno de los pros que a mi en lo personal más me gusta es la posibilidad de poderlo usar como módem para mi PC y para mi Mac. Esto es, puedo conectarme a Internet donde sea, conectando mi teléfono a la laptop, cosa que con el iPhone hoy por hoy aún no es posible.
Otra ventaja que tiene es su buscador interno. Te permite buscar en todo (nombre de imagenes, agenda, calendario, etc.) alguna palabra o frase que estés buscando. Muy útil.
Copiar y pegar. También una cuestión muy útil ya que hay veces que necesitas un número telefónico que por alguna razón se puso en agenda, o un número que te mandaron por mensaje y quieres ponerlo en otro mensaje sin reenviar todo el texto original. Solo subrayas con el stylus y una opcion de copiar aparecerá.
La recepción es muy buena, mejor que con el iPhone, hasta el momento los lugares donde había batallado para que recibiera la señal con el 5800 se puede hablar muy bien.
Viene con su propia tienda de música gratis durante un año. Así que a bajar canciones.
Satchel Paige vs Pedro Lopez
Leroy Robert “Satchel” Paige was born on July 7, 1906 and passed away on June 8, 1982. He was an American baseball player whose pitching in several different Negro Leagues and in Major League Baseball made him a legend in his own lifetime.
Paige was a right-handed pitcher and was the oldest rookie to play in the baseball major leagues. He played with the St Louis Browns around the age of fifty and represented them in the all star game. At the end of Paige’s baseball career he was the first African American to be inducted into the National baseball hall of fame. His professional playing career lasted from the mid-1920s until 1965. He appeared in the Major League All-Star Game in both 1952 and 1953.
I learned that Guy Kawasaki went to Kansas City and visited the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and took this picture with Satchel Paige’s statue. When Satchel Paige was a rock-star back in the 1940s and 1950s he played against Pedro Lopez, my grandfather, and the Mexican team lost by 1-0. Satchel Paige was pitching for the African-American team and my grandfather was the pitcher for the Mexico’s team. I’ll look into the treasure to see if there are any pictures available.
Apple’s new TV ad: Elimination
Microsoft, take that!
Fan of Claudia Schiffer? Fail!
No comments!
The eye! The smile! The pose!
WTF?
Star Wars Wedding
Interested for your wedding ceremony?
Very nice, very nice. How much?
The Mime: one of the funniest people of Twitter
You’d think, after a while, a mime who posts silent tweets would start to get boring or not-funny. It doesn’t.
Look at this!
The new Kindle DX
Engadget has just wrapped up live coverage of Amazon’s press event introducing the Kindle DX, the next generation of Amazon’s eBook reader. The Kindle DX, now available for pre-order at a price of $489 for shipment this summer, contains a 9.7″ screen and is being positioned as a device for reading documents such as newspapers, textbooks, and research journal articles whose formats have not worked ideally with the smaller 6″ screen of the current Kindle 2 model.
The Kindle DX features a built-in accelerometer that allows for auto-rotation of content between portrait and landscape orientations, and increased storage over the Kindle 2 of 3.3 GB, which provides space for up to 3,500 books periodicals, and documents. Like the Kindle 2, which will remain available at its current price of $359, the Kindle DX offers free 3G access through Sprint’s network to allow downloading of content on the go. Native PDF support is also included.
The Boston Globe, The New York Times and The Washington Post are all planning to offer long-term subscriptions for Kindle newspaper editions at discounted prices.
Many people have viewed the Kindle as a competitor to the iPhone’s eBook capabilities, with a Kindle for iPhone application also offering compatibility with Amazon’s service on the iPhone. Rumors of an Apple “media pad” that could provide more direct competition to the Kindle on the eBook front have also been circulating in recent weeks.