Newsletter


	Where Gaming is no Longer Virtual - You just fought your way up a wind tunnel, scrambled through a ventilation duct, clambered across 40 yards of rope netting, rolled under a fence, and burrowed through a mass of grapefruit-sized plastic spheres. Now you're facing two doors. One leads to freedom. The other to a room with something nasty in it, possibly involving torture. Welcome to the reality game - La Fuga. The company behind La Fuga is called Négone. It was founded by a sister-and-brother team, network engineer Silvia Garcia Alonso and former investment banker Jorge, who owned a piece of a dotcom that sold to Yahoo! for $400 million. Creating the game presented both physical and intellectual challenges; they needed to erect a maze of steel and exposed concrete, and they also needed to build a database to track the progress of each player through the labyrinth. Currently only one facility in Madrid is operational. The company does have plans to open a game center in Manhattan early next year - with plans for 60 more worldwide in the next decade.

	ENIAC Myths Busted - There are two epochs in computer history: Before ENIAC and After ENIAC. The first practical, all-electronic computer was unveiled on Feb. 14, 1946, at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electronics. While there are controversies about who invented what, there is universal agreement that the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) was the watershed project that showed electronic computing was possible. It was a masterpiece of electrical engineering, with unprecedented reliability and speed. The two men most responsible for its success were J. Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly. On the the 60th anniversary of the unveiling of ENIAC, a newly discovered interview with "Pres" Eckert explodes some ENIAC myths.

	Computer Fact or Fiction? - One thing is true about urban legends; people love to repeat them. Better yet, they love to e-mail them. According to Laurianne McLaughlin, of PC World, "owning a computer opens the door to a host of myths and tall tales about the care and feeding of your pricey info system. And because a computer can be an expensive, mysterious piece of equipment, many cautious people take some of this maintenance 'advice' as fact. But rest assured, most of it isn't." Here's a simple true-false quiz designed to help get to the bottom of common computer misconceptions. Finally, here's some information you can feel good about e-mailing to your friends.

	The Quest for Productivity - Does the fact that so many workers are constantly connected via email and cell phone translate into greater productivity than say ten years ago? According to recently released research, workers completed two-thirds of their work in an average day last year, down from about three-quarters in a 1994 study, according to research conducted for Day-Timers, an East Texas, Pennsylvania-based maker of organizational products. If this is the case, then what is the answer to achieving greater productivity? Just unplug ourselves? No, that not realistic. But it's important to set reasonable expectations. Companies that are flexible with workers' time and give them more control over their tasks tend to fare better.

	Introducing the Agile Bookshelf - So you WANT to be Agile but you don't know where to start! Start by reading! And we've made it even easier by assembling a list of our favorites at The Agile Bookshelf and made them easy to order by providing links to Amazon. Then build your own Agile Bookshelf. Learn from the design books that influence Menlo's High-Tech Anthropology® practice. Learn about Extreme Programming. Learn about the organizational development and management books that we use to build and reinforce our culture. Enjoy! We look forward to hearing your suggestions as well.

	Menlo's Free Seminar on Software Development Techniques - It's the start of a new year. Before you embark on the next major software development initiative, learn the secrets that can ensure its success. Come to our next free 90 minute "Taste of Success" seminar focused on High-Tech Anthropology®. Our approach will show you techniques for creating the right software for the right application. We encourage you to share your software development war stories so we can all learn from them. See you on April 6!

	Can Technology Make us More or Less Human? - Will enhancement technologies damage our sense of our humanity or will they make us better humans, even creating a new breed of super- or post-humans? If we are unsure of our ends and goals, enhancement technologies won’t help us. If we are enthusiastic about life, and sure of our ends and goals, enhancement technologies will enhance us. Life extension offers tantalizing possibilities: Just imagine if we had 200 years to play with, the possibility for accumulated experience and achievement would be immense. Think of all those past geniuses who were cut off in their prime, and what might have been possible had they lived a few decades more. What exactly is so marvelously human about dying early, or forgetting things, or not being able to see properly? But on the other hand, if we are down about life, and unsure of our ends and goals, enhancement technologies won't help us. If a life limited to 100 years is devoid of meaning, why would living to 200, or even 2000, improve matters?.

	What Happened to the Robot Age? - Sony's decision to ditch its Aibo robotic dog, along with its entire robot development team, is a reminder that we are still a long way from the age of automated domestic servants. Architects of the Robot Age have been busy rethinking the future. While computer technology advanced in leaps and bounds during the Nineties and Noughties, it remained firmly rooted in stationary beige boxes under desks. Desperate housewives, who'd been banking on robot servants to take the weight off their feet, have largely been disappointed. Honda's Asimo robot, which looks like a scaled-down Star Wars storm trooper, can walk, run, greet people and go up stairs. But it remains, for the time being at least, a research project.

	Why Windows Vista Won't Suck - Many users view Windows XP (and Windows 2000, and previous Windows versions) as unsafe. No matter how many patches and updates Microsoft releases, the foundation of the OS itself—the kernel—is designed and built in a way that prevents it from being truly secure. The only solution, it is argued, is to redesign and rebuild the kernel with a focus on security and stability. Well, that's exactly what Microsoft is doing with Vista. The whole kernel has been reorganized and rewritten to help prevent software from affecting the system in unsavory ways. In Vista, it should be much more difficult for unauthorized programs (like Viruses and Trojans) to affect the core of the OS and secretly harm your system. And, that's not all.

	Digital Borders - In the 1990s, many pundits and scholars believed that the Internet was eroding the authority of governments. At the time, Yahoo! was the entrance point for more Internet users than any other website. Jerry Yang, Yahoo!'s billionaire cofounder, was confident and brash. When Yahoo! received a summons from Judge Jean-Jacques Gomez of Le Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris, a French trial court, Yang shrugged. Reflecting conventional wisdom, he believed French officials had no authority over a computer in the United States. A bordered Internet was and still is widely viewed to be a dreadful development that undermines the great network's promise. So what's changed? People have discovered that they can make a lot of money by targeting goods to a specific on-line community. This is one reason why national boundaries have survived in the virtual world—and allowed national laws to exert control over the Internet.

	Smart ways to Spend a few Days this Winter - The Menlo 2006 class schedule is out. Spring is almost here. So now is the time to sign up for a Menlo class. We'll provide the coffee and donuts. Now you have no excuse to learn the real secrets of software success.

	Need a Speaker for an Upcoming Event? - We love public speaking (Rich Sheridan is the best) and are happy to deliver inspiring messages focused on business success with information technology. Call us at (734) 665-1847 to schedule your next event. Look here for a list of some of the topics that we’ve spoken about in the past.