NeXT computers came with prman, a pretty early version of it: no motion blur for instance. And of course, it was a bit much to expect great results when viewed on a 2-bit gray and white display. It was one of those things thrown into the mix to see if it could fly, like the complete works of Shakespeare, indexed, and NeXTMail, which let you include multimedia in email (predating MIME). Funny that it wasn't bundled with OS X.

The real metric they should have looked at - since it's the main complaint of the managers - was availability. Availability needs are different for different aspects of work. The other half of that is responsiveness: getting the answers and clearances for your work from the stake holders involved.
  Neither of those things have anything to do with location.
In my previous job, a lot of deployments were done in the wee hours of the night, and the fact that most of us were telecommuters meant that communication wasn't any different form a normal work environment.

Yahoo's real problem is that nobody without a legacy attachment to it needs it at all.

Just because it's a piece of curved glass on your wrist, it might not be a watch. I'm thinking of the ring-like projectors in Zardoz. Siri + projected virtual touch interface means lightweight ubiquitous cloud access.

Apple should skip "TV" monitors anyway and go straight to projection.

Also "Dick Tracy" referrers: Detective Tracy was just the end user, the inventor was Diet Smith. http://dicktracy.wikia.com/wiki/Diet_Smith

... as if there were no threat from a comet named "eLenin"!

It's true that the Google Wave UI is pretty confusing. But I've been wanting to design an email replacement protocol that sits on XMPP for a while now and was happy to see that happen. That it also attempts to solve other problems, like capturing threading in a sensible way, allowing data to be presented in multiple forms and allowing robots to participate in these conversations, really sums up and simplifies a lot of issues in communication in general.

The way to make this is to crowd source it, like with Star Wars Uncut. Apply 2010s social networking technology to 1980s sci-fi. Make sure the aesthetic is true to the 80s if you can - pixels aplenty, 320x240, and of course, extra credit for making your scene on an Amiga. Or at least LOOK like it.

It was an intriguing design - trying to solve the problem of more information in a small, foldable space. Maybe someone will pick this concept up, patents willing. Then again, there's the roll-out computer design.

You breezed right by the "Associates" euphemism as well!
A more subtle one was "well above the market based salary range,"
  neglecting to say in which country that range was based on or what "well above" really entails.
 

NSA: we snoop to find terrorist threatS (and whatever else we run into)
IBM: We snoop to find profit threats (and whatever else we run into)

I've got a working Ampico reproducing baby grand piano and lots of rolls, mostly from the 20s and 30s . New rolls have never been important as patching up the decaying paper on the old ones.
Ampico rolls have dynamics info coded in them and they have been considered as accurate digital records of long dead piano virtuosos - although, like all digital recordings, these were heavily edited. I especially recommend any four-hands rolls!

QRS rolls were always more pop oriented - cheesier in their arrangements, but functional.

I'd love to get a roll cutter of course - something always in the back of my mind.

We have an OLPC XO - not the greatest machine, but it does have Pippy, a primitive IDE for python. She already knows basic programming concepts from working with her Lego Mindstorms,

I'd say , do it like I did (late 60s) ... learn one language a little and then drop it and learn another one, and keep doing that. You end up learning how the languages are a like and how they differ, what some are good for and what some are not good for. (VB is good for nothing, for instance). Furthermore, the language you are using is less relevant than the conventions (and patterns, bleah) for interfacing with the systems you want to use.

That kind of learning you can never stop needing to do.

Don't be afraid to go nuts with FORTH, LISP, SNOBOL and the other non "ALGOL" like languages. These three have a kind of fruitful simplicity of concept (while occasionally making some really ugly looking code)

To get up and running, Javascript is really great. It's kind of ugly in some ways, like how you make objects in it, but it's pretty ubiquitous.

And for the future of programming, know those languages, but learn erlang.