If you approach problems on a big scale I definitely would suggest solve the problem of developing nations and their misery. I know actually it is a whole bunch of problems but I think that there is a solution which could be successful in the long-run: Educating people. Let them know what is possible and how to achieve things. Help the people, e.g. in Africa, to keep up with the world and especially also their elite which at the moment often is dominating them because they don't know better.
The OLPC project took a shot at this but besides creating net-books it wasn't too successful, to summarize, the OLPC project was ambitious but rubbish ;-) I don't know yet how to solve the problem of educating people ion those countries, especially when it comes to basic things like literacy and/or math but I definitely think it would be worth quite a lot of effort and also be a business opportunity because of scale (if not now maybe also in the long-run).
in my opinion this article (and maybe the book written by the 37signals guys) only looks at part of the equation. To what it boils down for them is being better than your competition. The old credo was being better in total which the article describes as one-up the other. The 37signals approach is being better at a subset. They say you have to focus on things where you can be better.
What this leaves out completely is the approach of being different. Why do it the way everybody else is doing it? IMHO there is a huge potential in a lot of areas which could be used by a different approach to solving problems that have already been solved.
You don't necessarily need to give people a specific task.
For example, just ask them to discover the site, watch them in what they do, watch what they spend their time with, discover which problems they have while surfing your site. As always this can, of course, only be a part of your whole testing effort. Watching people solving tasks is also important.
Additionally I have to say, that I am not against A/B or multi-variate testing, in my experience it just is very time consuming (and therefore expensive) and the effort to get results is bigger than with direct testing IMHO. If you think you have the money or have exhausted the possibilities with direct usability testing, A/B or multi-variate testing is a valid option.
To reiterate what I meant about costs. For sure Web Optimizer is Free, but the software isn't the only thing you need, for multi-variate testing you need many variants of the item you want to change, you somehow develop without directions,which can be very time consuming and (maybe) expensive.
On the other hand you can also have direct usability testing for free, think family, friends (I would use my mother, because she is a user who is interested in the Internet in general but not very tech savy)
I was responsible for Web Analytics in a Web Agency in Switzerland.
In my opinion A/B and multi-variate testing only has a real use if you have very high volume. If you have lower volume or are in a Beta or even a closed Phase of your site development cycle I would suggest to use direct usability testing where you watch people interact with your site and interview them about what the think about your site. This way I think you would get much better results for the same or less time and money.
I'm also having trouble. It also seems like the counter stoped! The load seems to be a bit much, either through the downloads or through the viewers of the counter :-)
The problem with Sharepoint from my point of view is that it is too slow. The Document Management Part is very nice but only effectively useable with the Internet Explrer. So for a MS Shop it can be a very nice tool in smaller companies or a startup I would use a Multiblog System and/or Wiki to discuss and as knowledge base.
For me it's not only interesting when i started having ideas (probably because I can't really remember) but also when I'm having "interesting" ideas...
For me it's mostly when I'm stressed out. For example when I was learning for exams I very often had interesting ideas I started to dissect and analyze. Even though the ideas were interesting and intriguing, I quashed most of them because from a business perspective (and that is my background) I could see the idea prosper. I too write most of my ideas down so I can use them later or use them as inspiration.
A friend of mine bought a MacBook Air. It is nice if you don't have to high expectations performancewise. Another problem is, that the Air gets very warm. All the other limitations you can work around.
I would get the MacBook Black because it is more bang for the buck.
One could ad Neal Stephenson books in general. Especially Snow Crash. Jointly, with Cryptonomicon, one of the best books I've ever read! In Snow Crash, the author envisioned stuf like Google Earth or Second Life, only in a much more advanced way. The book was written in 1992 :-)
I owned a T42 and now a T61p. Even tough the build quality hasn't improved speaking of it having gone downhill is drastically exaggerated. The quality is comparable between the two, the nice little ideas still exist (like the keyboard light etc.) the only real change I saw was that i had to loosen 4 screws to extend the memory instead of four :-)
But one person probably isn't truly a reference... So more references are needed.
Back to the original Question: IMHO Thinkpads are very good and especially reliable Notebooks, but they also aren't cheap. When getting a Thinkpad then a T-Model most of the others don't differ that much from Notebooks sold by HP or Dell.
The OLPC project took a shot at this but besides creating net-books it wasn't too successful, to summarize, the OLPC project was ambitious but rubbish ;-) I don't know yet how to solve the problem of educating people ion those countries, especially when it comes to basic things like literacy and/or math but I definitely think it would be worth quite a lot of effort and also be a business opportunity because of scale (if not now maybe also in the long-run).