Update 5/9/2012:

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Yusnier Viera, a former co-worker and current world record holder in calendar mental calculation, brought to my attention the concept of cross multiplying.  After learning the basics and practicing over time, I have been able to successfully multiply upto four digit by four digit computations in my head.  Since the exercise is stimulating and to a certain extent entertaining, I decided to build an iPhone application to easily practice.

Unlike paper and pencil, using an iPhone app allows for immediate feedback while entering the answer.  I've been learning how to develop iOS apps for both iPhone & iPad and I am on the verge of releasing this application.  Since I'm anxious to get it out to the world, I have defer creating the tutorial, the statistics page as well as game center integration, until future updates.

I decided to give the app a representative iconic person, so Einstein fit the bill.

Once loaded, you are presented with the home screen where you can link out to a video tutorial or simply start the app.

Once started, you can interactively create up to 4x4 multiplications to test your mental calculating abilities.  In a future update, I'll hook it up to game center and keep track of best times for each type as well as increase the scale up to 8x8.

I believe I have a solid work around for the the wifi issue where disconnects occur. First it appears only to happen when connecting to wireless-n connections. Wireless-g doesn't seem to have any problems.  Note this is only for the repeated disconnects and has nothing to do with the low signal issue some have mentioned. For the record, I have a 32gb Verizon iPad.

The symptoms are as follows.  

Symptoms:

• You connect fine and surf fine. Put the iPad to sleep or come back to it later after sleeping automatically and your wifi is not connected.
• When tapping the previously connected wifi to reconnect you are usually asked to enter the password again.
• When you connect the first time, it says failed to connect but re-tap the join button it connects.
• If you turn off wifi and then turn it back on  it doesn't reconnect.
• Once connected to the wifi, if you click on the right arrow to go to the details you will NOT see the "forget this wifi" button even though you are connected.

 

If you fall in any of those scenarios, this WILL solve your problem in the interim until Apple updates software. In short it seems as though the wifi is not stored or remembered.

Solution:

Configure wifi manually, explicitly typing your wifi's broadcast name, explicitly choose the security your wifi is using (wep, wpa, wpa2, etc. ) and then proceed to enter your password. Once connected if you go to the details of the connection you should see the "forget this wifi" button. If you do, you can now rest assured it will allways reconnect and  the above symptoms can no longer be reproduced.

4/12/2012 Addendum:

Not sure if this is related or not, however I have the "Ask to Join Networks" feature off in the wifi settings too. 

4/13/2012 Addendum:

Here I show how easily I can reproduce the automatic disconnects because the iPad doesn't remember the wifi connection.  My solution, and working now for weeks without a problem, has been to set it up manually.  Interestingly, after setting it up manually, I haven't had to set other networks manually as they connect and remember fine.  It's only the first one it seems or my home one.

5/2/2012 Addendum:

Updating the router firmware has resolved this issue in two separate situations (my home and a friends home).

Good luck!

All electronic devices, with few exceptions, decrease in value over time.  With Apple products, this is notoriously accelerated because Apple tends to release products on a yearly basis across most of their product line.  Take for example iPhone and the five releases thus far from 2007 to 2011.

Apple traditionally upgrades the specifications of their products while keeping the pricing the same.  So a new iMac 27" may still be $1699, however this year's model has a much more powerful video card and larger capacity hard drive.  Apple rarely, only once that I can recall, adjusts their price prior to a new model announcement -- and when they did this, with the original iPhone, it created an uproar in complaints from early adopters despite the price being reduced.

Since Apple normally doesn't adjust the price on their products and is almost guaranteed to have a new model 12 months later, one could argue you get the best bang for the buck buying the product as soon as it's released.  Buying it 6 months later or near the next release sets one up to either delay the purchase again for the next release while at the same time remorse the previous purchase under the pressure of desiring the latest innovation.  It is true there are times where one doesn't want the new one because it is not incrementally more valuable to justify.  I for example didn't move up to the iPhone 4S having the iPhone 4.  Yes, I desire Siri, but I decided to hold off.  In doing so, I went ahead and purchased the Apple care warranty and guess what?  Since i purchased it on launch day, my warranty expired roughly around the time  as the iPhone 4S ( arrived and the extended warranty will cover me through a whole year until the next model arrives.  The warranty purchase couldn't have been more efficiently calculated -- and it was only possible because I purchased as soon as the product was released.

In summary, you'll get the best bang for the buck and the best options when buying right away.

Apple in October, shortly after Jobs passing, promoted Eddie Cue to SVP awarding him 100,000 shares.  In November, they distributed an additional 1 million shares among all the SVP and key players.

• Peter Oppenheimer
• Bruce Swell
• Scott Forstall
• Philip Schiller
• Bob Mansfield
• Jeffrey Williams
• Eddie Cue

All of them received 150,000 shares with exception of Eddie who received 100,000.  So where is Johnny Ive?  He's a SVP also, and a very important one.  My hunch is either he will receive a separate award, a hefty one to convince him to stay, or he has indicated his intention to return to England as rumors claimed a year or so ago.  Previous rumors indicated he asked to work from England to have his family grow up in their native town, but Apple's board allegedly did not approve as being close to headquarters was more important.

The shares provided were restricted, so they are not issued until a certain date.  In the case of the above shares, half vest in 2013 and the remainder vest in 2016. So with Johnny Ive missing from the list, there are only three possibilities:

• Johnny Ive is on the verge of resigning.  His intentions of leaving to Britain as was rumor some time ago with the desire to raise his family
• the board is creating a special, too good to deny, package for him to stay and didn't want to delay the package for the other SVP
• they are currently negotiating other more complex options such as having him work from Britain, possibly even relocating his lab, etc.

Battery Life Resolved

I was extremely delighted with my iPhone4 battery life.  With my work exchange mail and gmail set to push and normal use, I could go about two days sometimes without needing to charge.  I would go to bed with say 60% charge and wakeup with 58% remaining.

When I installed iOS5, this all came to a crashing halt.  Initially I though it was the new iCloud stuff doing an initial sync or backup, but after a few days the drain continued.  I tried the multitude of things from rebooting, to turning off location services, removing some unnecessary items from the notification center, pretty much everything in the book.  While this alleviated the situation partially, it was nowhere near what it was pre-iOS5.

I read through most of the postings on the Apple forum regarding this issue ( https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3387864 ).  One posting in particular mentioned a process taking up 50% cpu.  I'm not sure how he measured this process, but it dawn on me to cold boot the phone rather than warm boot.  Unlike a computer, warm booting (sliding the red slider after holding the sleep wake button a few seconds) the iPhone saves the state of the apps and presumably the running processes and returns them back to the original state after the phone starts up.  If you don't believe, try warm booting and then go into to running tasks (double clicking home bottom) and you'll see all your previously launched apps still there.

To make a long story short, while I did turn off some features (I'll list them below in case it helps some folks) I feel the cold boot is truly what returned the iPhone back to its pre-iOS5 battery consumption.  Cold booting is simply holding the home button down while simultaneously holding the sleep/wake button for a few additional seconds after the red slider to shut off appears until it turns off on its own and then pressing the sleep/wake button to turn it back on.

Today it charged to 90% while driving to the office and by lunch time it was 87% -- now that's definitely pre-iOS5 battery life!  During lunch, I used it for a while dropping it to 83%.  By the time I arrived home in the afternoon it was 80% (I didn't use it much for the remainder of the day).  Once home I did a 20 minute jog with RunKeeper gps-tracking me all the time while listening to streaming podcasts via stitcher.  Looking at my phone now after a few hours after the jog, its at 69%.  So I can claim with certainty, the pre-iOS5 battery life has returned.

So, first thing you should try is cold booting the phone.  Just in case it's another culprit, I'll list a few of the other changes I made.

I'm going to reactivate some of the features below one by one over the next few days, even though I do not believe they are the root cause but here they are anyways:

• turned off location services for the weather
• (since it's on the notification center, it's probably always checking location)
• turned off all iCloud features except the features I like the most:  contact sync, find my iPhone, photo stream, documents & data, & iCloud backup
• (i thought bookmarks where probably the culprit after realizing the bookmarks are constantly in sync and it coincidentally has a history folder I presumed was syncing constantly as I surfed on my work and home iMacs).

Imagine if Microsoft, a similarly comparable large company like Apple, would all of a sudden gain 54% in profit. Would its stock tank 5 or 6% because they didn't sell as many licenses of Windows as economists had projected?  No, on the contrary it will rise like 10% on such profound news for typically lethargically large companies of their size.  The funny thing, this is not a one time event, this is a continual event every quarter for sometime now and will continue for a few more as the world settles into the iPad as they did with the iPhone and of course the App Store, the only place you can legitimately buy apps for it, will continue growing too.   The 4th quarter is going to be that much more of a smashing success with iPhone projections as the 3rd quarter wasn't because the sales of iPhones, which dropped in 3rd quarter due to lack of product launch in June, will fall over to 4th quarter from the iPhone 4S product launch.  So of course, when comparing Q3 2011 to Q3 2010, there is inevitably going to be some differences -- especially with the successful iPhone4 being the growth factor then.

To blatantly compare Q3 2011 with Q4 2010 in gross iPhone sales and fuss over the unsatisfied expectations has got to be the most misconstrued news I have ever heard.  This only reinforces Peter Lynch investment style of investing in what you know and you'll beat the analysts every time.  No matter which way you slice it, AAPL has 81 billion in the bank accruing at 6.5 billion per quarter, no debt, 54% increase in profit and product portfolios which are no where near becoming stagnant.  New product revenue lines like App Store, iPad, & strongly increasing revenue from existing product lines like iPhone, MacBook, iTunes (#1 digital music store) -- it's a 100% no brainer this stock will continue to push upwards for the near future.  Any drop should be considered a discounted buying opportunity.  

Oh, and this is before the announcement of their touch based iMacs which will lay slightly inclined on your desk similar to the iPad, still with a slide out keyboard for keyboard dependent apps , and any other new upcoming product line.

I'll write again when the price is at 500 and I'll reassess the situation then to see if we can expect more.  Buying now will give you roughly a 25% return from 400 to 500 within 12 months.

UPDATE 11/28/2011

Apple Stock today closed at 376.12.  It's an extreme bargain.  I just read various articles which simply justify my gut feeling.  One reported iPhone4S sales so large in Britain, it became the #1 in sales, even beating Andriod -- a feat many people thought was impossible given the diversity of Android devices at various price points.  Another article, states teens have listed iPhone & iPad with the same level of desire as cash and clothes on their holiday wish lists.  Yet, another, from a financial perspective, compares Apple stellar performance in comparison to it's current stock price.  Every financial metric used to value the stock have it as extremely undervalued.  Anyone buying at today's price will reap an easy 30% gain on the way up to 500.  Lets just hope the financial crisis doesn't bring a general recession/depression -- the only thing which could drag down the stock.

Do you have a drive partitioned half NTFS and half OSX format just so can utilize the drive on both operating systems or resorted to the unreliable FAT or FAT32 for the convenience?

FAT was never designed to scale to the large storage systems available today. so modern operating systems evolved their own sophisticated file systems (Linux Ext3, Windows NTFS, & Mac HFS+) with various features to handle not only the enormously large capacities, but also provide fault tolerance among other valuable features.  FAT, once ubiquitous, still survives today as the defacto file system for flash cards and USB drives. So why is a new file system called exFAT necessary?

It turns out, the modern file systems have significant overhead and are considered to be an overkill for flash drives -- some times making them slower.

exFAT (Extended FAT) was devised specifically to address these issues and more.  Since the latest versions of Microsoft and Apple operating system support exFAT, it coincidentally serves as a great file system to interchange data between the operating systems too!

On OSX's Disk Utility application, you can easily select exFAT during the erase process and similarly on windows as shown:

In summary, exFAT borrows some valuable features modern file systems such as transactional file system TFAT among others.  I'm personally using this as the filesystem for my external USB drive, however I did notice some applications on the Mac side, which rely specifically on Apple's HFS+ file system, are disabled.  For example, I cannot move a Final Cut Pro X project to my external drive to work remotely -- it simply doesn't let me drop it there as it would an HFS+ partition.

I was at the Apple store the other day and was quite surprised the Apple store iPhone app interacts with the store once you are within the vicinity.  I was going for a Mac genius appointment and the process was so smooth words cannot do it justice.  Checkout these screenshots I took of the whole process.

The pictures left to right speak for themselves...super smooth.   Notice iPhone's time indicator from for the duration of the screen shots from 3:07 to 3:22.

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