Calls to the U.S. and Canada will be free for at least the rest of the year and calls to other countries will be billed at our very low rates. We worked hard to make these rates really cheap (see comparison table) with calls to the U.K., France, Germany, China, Japan—and many more countries—for as little as $0.02 per minute.

Now you can make phone calls from Gmail at extremely low rates — so you can share your two cents with France (or Argentina, or Iceland, or Guam…) for $0.02. Check out some sample per-minute rates below or see the complete list. For more information, visit gmail.com/call.

When compared with Skype, Google Voice calling rates is definitely cheaper and lower.

]]> http://netnote.us/2010/08/03/organizing-board/feed/ 0 http://netnote.us/2010/08/02/the-best-car-exhaust-collection/ http://netnote.us/2010/08/02/the-best-car-exhaust-collection/#comments Mon, 02 Aug 2010 10:47:53 +0000 admin http://netnote.us/?p=8070 If you want to get the maximum performance for your car, you should apply the car accessories to replace your factory made part. It is not difficult to find the car accessories because there will be a lot of online car accessories store. However, it is important for you to make comparison about the product that they offer. One of the best online stores is Carid.com that already provides the high quality car accessories from many years.

The most important part in your car if you want to increase your car speed is the car exhaust. You can find the best exhaust collection on the website and the entire product collection is made from the high quality material so it will durable and resistant to rust. You do not need to worry if you only have limited budget because the website also provide the exhaust with the affordable price. The website also offers the best service and you can get the installation service if you are difficult to install the exhaust. You can easily order the product by online and the website will deliver it to your house quickly.

Now, you an get the best exhaust that will perfectly increase your car speed.

Each one of these is a hat.

The term hat is slang for the title and work of a post in an organization. It is taken from the fact that in many professions such as railroading the type of hat worn is the badge of the job. For example, a train crew has a conductor who wears a conductor’s hat—he has charge of the passengers and collects fares.
In an organization, there is a flow along these hats.

The result of the whole board is a product.

The product of each hat on the board adds up to the total product.

Working It Out

The waste of people involved in no org board and the loss of product justify any amount of effort to work out, make known and use a proper org board.

Man instinctively uses an org board and protests the lack of one. The rawest recruit walking aboard a ship assumes the existence of an org board, if not a posted one, at least a known one. He assumes there will be somebody in charge and that different activities will be under different people. When there is no known org board he protests. He also feels insecure as he doesn’t know where he fits into this organization.

Almost all revolts are manned by people who have been excluded out and are not on the country’s org board. This is so true that a ridiculous circumstance occurred in the US. A president found he had “professional relief receivers.” Certain people had assumed the status of “government dependent” and were giving this as their profession. It was of course a post of sorts. And because it wasn’t admitted as a post by the government, there were some riots.

The effort to belong or to be part of is expressed by an org board. A person with no post is quite miserable. A person with an unreal post feels like a fraud or a mistake. Morale then is also considerably affected by the quality of an org board or its absence. The overall test for the group, however, is its viability, which means its ability to grow, expand, develop, etc. Viability depends on having an acceptable product. Groups which do not have an acceptable product are not likely to survive.

The volume and acceptability of a product depends in no small measure on a workable, known org board. This is true even of an individual product. An individual or small group, to get anywhere at all, requires a very exact org board. The oddity is that the smaller the group the more vital the org board. Yet individuals and small groups are the least likely to have one. Large groups disintegrate in the absence of an org board and go nonviable in the presence of a poor one.

The quality of a product, usually blamed on individual skill only, depends to an enormous extent upon the org board. For example, one disorganized mob that was trying to make a certain product was worked to death, harassed, angry at one another and had a wholly unacceptable product at about twice the usual cost; when organized to the degree of a third, still without proper schedules, still largely untrained, they began to turn out an acceptable product at about half the effort—so even some organization worked.

The product volume and quality depends utterly and totally upon the org board and hats and their use. You can train individuals endlessly but unless they are operating on a workable org board they will still have a poor or small volume product.
Lack of a known and real org board can spell failure. And lack of knowledge of the subject of organization has to be substituted for by pure genius at every point.

Thus to make anything at all, to improve any product, sustain morale and distribute work equitably and make it count, one has to have a real and a known org board.

So how do you make one?

The Rubik-cube-solving robot race continues. After the and the classic 3x3x3 cube4x4x4 cube, here comes the Lego Mindstorms robot that can solve a 7x7x7, powered by an Android phone. We are headed to mass self-destruction, I tell you.

Normally hyper-intelligent robots terrify me, but this little guy has officially won me over. It uses Lego Mindstorms parts, a Lego programmable robotics kit and—of all things—a Nokia N95 mobile phone to unlock the mysteries of Rubik.

It’s by no means the first Rubik’s Cube solver we’ve seen, but it’s definitely the first I’ve encountered that runs on phone. The ARM-packing Nokia N95 rests above the cube, scanning it with its camera as it solves. Double bonus points for working with a 4x4x4 Cube instead of the standard 3x3x3.

According to one intrepid YouTube commenter, the trial above took 15 minutes and 109 moves, which is more than my personal best of “a few months” and “I lost track.” I just hope that when we’re all assigned a robot overlord, mine is as neat as this one.

Unless, of course, you happen to be the current world record holder, who can solve a cube in under 20 seconds. This Lego Mindstorms ‘bot was built by ARM, and managed to solve the cube in 25 seconds flat.

The Mindstorms robot was programmed using a Motorola Droid, which runs on an Arm A8 processor clocked at 550MHz, to show the speed of their chips. A specially-built app takes a photo of the cube’s side facing the camera, with the commands being sent to the Mindstorms robot over Bluetooth.

]]> http://netnote.us/2010/07/22/motorola-droid-lego-robot-solves-a-rubiks-cube-faster-than-you-can/feed/ 1 http://netnote.us/2010/07/22/organization/ http://netnote.us/2010/07/22/organization/#comments Wed, 21 Jul 2010 18:03:46 +0000 admin http://netnote.us/?p=8043 It may be that in trying to get something going, the basic of organization may be missing. The word  organize  means to form into a whole with mutually connected and dependent parts; to give a definite and orderly structure to. From this, one gets the term organization. Organization is the subdivision of actions and duties into specialized functions.

One can organize a series of actions to be done by himself or herself.  This would consist of seeing what has to be done, doing what one can do first and then the remainder as a feasible series of events, all to accomplish a finalcompletion of an action which forwards one’s assigned or postulated purposes.

A group is organized so as to permit flows and accomplish specialized actions which are completed in themselves and from which small actions or completions the group purpose, assigned or specialized, is forwarded or accomplished.

There is a difference between directing and doing, which some people have trouble separating apart. A person in charge of an activity is sometimes found deficient in organizational understanding and so tries to do all the actions himself. This, if done to excess, effectively can break up a group and render it useless since all members but one have no function, having been
robbed by this one-man monopoly on action.

True, an active and competent person  can do things better. But he can really never do more than he can do. Whereas a well-organized group, eachwith specialized functions, coordinated by the in-charge, can accomplish many times the work only one can do. Because it is organized makes a group harder to defeat than the individual. A competent individual who has been let down too often by groups tends to take it all on himself rather than whip the group into shape and get things
organized.

The correct action when faced by urgent necessity arising from incompetence of a group or other causes is to:
1. Handle it,
2. Organize the group to handle such things and do their jobs. One can get stuck on (1) and, if he or she does, then will have trouble and overwork from there on out. Because he or she omits also doing (2). The major failure of any group is to fail to organize.

Workers of the world may arise, but if they are not quickly organized before or after the fact, they will promptly be put back down!
The major cause of not organizing is just not understanding what is meant by it.

For example, an executive is told he is in charge of seeing that the X project is done. He doesn’t know much about it. He has two men who do know. The incorrect action is to try to do the X project himself or issue a lot of unreal orders about it.

The correct action is to call up the man who does know, give him the other as an assistant and tell them to get on with it. Then, without interfering, the executive who received the order should get more knowledgeable about the X project so he can be sure it is done, while still letting the designated people get on with it.

This comprehension of organization is as simple as this—put somebody on the job and let him get on with it. On a project, make a survey of all the things there are to do, group types of actions into single jobs, assign people to them, provide the routes on which communications travel between group members, materiel and liaison and let the group get on with it.

Any job, no matter how junior, has to be organized. Anyone in charge of people has to be able to organize functions and work. Failing that, one gets very little done and is badly overworked. And the rest of the group is wasted. By understanding that there is a subject called organization, that the subject has been codified and that it can be learned and applied, any individual or group can succeed in its endeavors.

“They are serious about making a change,” one person familiar with the matter said. Nokia board members are “supposed to make a decision by the end of the month,” that person said.

The CEO of a major U.S. high-tech company recently spurned Nokia’s approach after meeting with Chairman Jorma Ollila, because the candidate wasn’t interested in moving to Finland, this person said. Nokia also has flown in at least one other U.S. based executive to interview for the CEO job, the person said.

Mr. Kallasvuo has held the CEO job since 2006, the year before Apple introduced the iPhone and roiled the market for mobile phones. The company has stumbled several times in its efforts to catch up.

Let’s hope this leadership shakeup does something to help Nokia.

Redbox, the Coinstar-owned company who puts those nifty DVD rental kiosks everywhere, is apparently plotting how to take down Netflix. Step one: Offer more than 200 or so movies.

The company hopes to achieve their goal by using a web service—which appears to be a direct step into Netflix’s territory. It’ll have a long way to go though as Netflix currently offers “100,000 titles by mail and 20,000 older films online” and there’s plenty of other competition:

Redbox also faces competition from Apple Inc. and Best Buy Co., which sell movie downloads. Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world’s largest retailer, bought the Vudu Inc. online entertainment service in February and Sears Holdings Corp., the largest department store owner, said on June 22 it plans to sell and rent movies online through an agreement with Sonic.

An accord with Novato, California-based Sonic would spare Redbox the time and cost of negotiating Web rights with studios, Schackart said. Sonic technology is already in DVD players and TVs, and the company has rights to thousands of movies.

Whatever happens, I just hope that those little Redbox kiosks don’t ever disappear. I kinda like seeing them tucked into odd corners.