Group items tagged

    Saves on travel costs e.g. conference calls over face-to-face meetings·       Saves time with reduced travel, good for working efficiency and work-life balance·       Brings groups of people together from all over the world who could not normally communicate·       Allows you (email) to manage your time and communicate what you want to when you want to rather than having someone drop into the office and interrupt you·       Enables (email again) higher quality communication with all the facts clearly presented in black and white without emotion in an email - at least potentially·       Increase communication flow and supports social networking and knowledge management in organisations e.g. company blogs and wikis ·       Reduces wasted time (people tend to digress and interrupt less in telephone conferences) in meetings

laptop is a personal computer designed for mobile use that is small and light enough for a person to rest on their lap.

As the personal computer became feasible in the early 1970s, the idea of a portable personal computer followed. A "personal, portable information manipulator" was imagined by Alan Kay at Xerox PARC in 1968,[2] and described in his 1972 paper as the "Dynabook".[3]

The IBM SCAMP project (Special Computer APL Machine Portable), was demonstrated in 1973. This prototype was based on the PALM processor (Put All Logic In Microcode). The IBM 5100, the first commercially available portable computer, appeared in September 1975, and was based on the SCAMP prototype.[4] As 8-bit CPU machines became widely accepted, the number of portables increased rapidly. The Osborne 1, released in 1981, used the Zilog Z80 and weighed 23.6 pounds (10.7 kg). It had no battery, a 5 in (13 cm) CRT screen, and dual 5.25 in (13.3 cm) single-density floppy drives. In the same year the first laptop-sized portable computer, the Epson HX-20, was announced.[5] The Epson had a LCD screen, a rechargeable battery, and a calculator-size printer in a 1.6 kg (3.5 lb) chassis. Both Tandy/RadioShack and HP also produced portable computers of varying designs during this period.[6][7] The first laptops using the flip form factor appeared in the early 1980s. The Dulmont Magnum was released in Australia in 1981–82, but was not marketed internationally until 1984–85. The $8,150 ($18,370 in current dollar terms) GRiD Compass 1100, released in 1982, was used at NASA and by the military among others. The Gavilan SC, released in 1983, was the first computer described as a "laptop" by its manufacturer[8] From 1983 onward, several new input techniques were developed and included in laptops, including the touchpad (Gavilan SC, 1983), the pointing stick (IBM ThinkPad 700, 1992) and handwriting recognition (Linus Write-Top,[9] 1987). Some CPUs, such as the 1990 Intel i386SL, were designed to use minimum power to increase battery life of portable computers, and were supported by dynamic power management features such as Intel SpeedStep and AMD PowerNow! in some designs. Displays reached VGA resolution by 1988 (Compaq SLT/286), and color screens started becoming a common upgrade in 1991 with increases in resolution and screen size occurring frequently until the introduction of 17"-screen laptops in 2003. Hard drives started to be used in portables, encouraged by the introduction of 3.5" drives in the late 1980s, and became common in laptops starting with the introduction of 2.5" and smaller drives around 1990; capacities have typically lagged behind physically larger desktop drives. Optical storage, read-only CD-ROM followed by writeable CD and later read-only or writeable DVD and Blu-Ray, became common in laptops soon in the 2000s.

Mike McCue founded Tellme Networks in 1999 as the CEO. He joined Microsoft as the General Manager of the Tellme subsidiary after its acquisition. In 2000, Mike led Tellme to launch one of the world’s first Internet platforms to deliver web data to anyone over any telephone. Starting with simple Web services, Tellme’s innovative platform inspired the migration of large-scale phone services from proprietary applications to open standards applications and drove the global adoption of VoiceXML. Before founding Tellme, Mike worked at Netscape as Vice President of Technology. He joined Netscape after their successful acquisition of the first company he founded, Paper Software, a leader in 3-D browser technology. Mike was honored with a Kilby International Award as a Young Innovator for his work bringing 3-D technology to the world through Netscape’s Web browser.

Mosaic is the web browser credited with popularizing the World Wide Web. It was also a client for earlier protocols such as FTP, NNTP, and gopher. Its clean, easily understood user interface, reliability, Windows port and simple installation all contributed to making it the application that opened up the Web to the general public.[2] Mosaic was also the first browser to display images inline with text instead of displaying images in a separate window.[3] While often described as the first graphical web browser, Mosaic was preceded by the lesser-known Erwise[4] and ViolaWWW.

Microsoft Windows is a series of software operating systems and graphical user interfaces produced by Microsoft. Microsoft first introduced an operating environment named Windows in November 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces (GUIs).[2] Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal computer market, overtaking Mac OS, which had been introduced in 1984. As of October 2009, Windows had approximately 91% of the market share of the client operating systems for usage on the Internet.[3][4][5] The most recent client version of Windows is Windows 7; the most recent server version is Windows Server 2008 R2; the most recent mobile OS version is Windows Phone 7.

Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955(1955-04-27))[3] is an engineer, Chairman/CEO of Google and a former member of the Board of Directors of Apple Inc.[4] He is the author of the lex lexical analyzer software for Unix. He has also sat on the boards of trustees for Carnegie Mellon University[5] and Princeton University.[6]

Schmidt was born in Washington, D.C. After graduating from Yorktown High School,[7] Schmidt attended Princeton University where he earned a BSEE in 1976.[8] At the University of California, Berkeley, he earned an MS in 1979 for designing and implementing a network linking the campus computer center, the CS and the EECS departments,[9][10] and a PhD in 1982 in EECS with a dissertation about the problems of managing distributed software development and tools for solving these problems.[11] He was joint author of lex (a lexical analyzer and an important tool for compiler construction). He taught at Stanford Business School as a part time professor.[12] He lives in Atherton, California, with his wife Wendy.[13] He is also on the list of ARTnews 200 top art collectors.[14]

Virtual Machine Interface[1] ("VMI") may refer to a communication protocol for running parallel programs on a distributed memory system. Virtual Machine Interface[2] is also the name given by VMware to the proposed open standard protocol that guest operating systems can use to communicate with the hypervisor of a virtual machine. An implementation of this standard was merged in the main Linux kernel version 2.6.21. A number of popular GNU/Linux distributions now ship with VMI support enabled by default. Since newer AMD and Intel CPUs allow for more efficient virtualization, VMI is being obsoleted and VMI support will be removed from Linux kernel in 2.6.37[3] and from VMWare products in 2010-2011 timeframe [4].

A workflow is a model to represent real work for further assessment, e.g., for describing a reliably repeatable sequence of operations. More abstractly, a workflow is a pattern of activity enabled by a systematic organization of resources, defined roles and mass, energy and information flows, into a work process that can be documented and learned.[3][4] Workflows are designed to achieve processing intents of some sort, such as physical transformation, service provision, or information processing.

The cultural impact of workflow optimization during this era can be understood through films such as Chaplin's classic Modern Times. These concepts did not stay confined to the shop floor. One magazine invited housewives to puzzle over the fastest way to toast three slices of bread on a one-side, two-slice grill. The book Cheaper by the Dozen introduced the emerging concepts to the context of family life.