I figured it was time to write down a few words about Steve Jobs and his recent passing. It was clear from the published photos of him back on August 29th that he was indeed a very sick man with only a short time left to live, yet of course we all hoped against the evidence that he would pull through once again. Sadly it was not to be and he finally succumbed to the cancer that had afflicted him for years.

I doubt very much if he was at all ‘ready’ to go, but he has of course left an immeasurable legacy behind him, and one that it will be virtually impossible for anyone else to replicate or surpass. Apart from his success as a technological wizard with the release of the early Apple computers, we have to applaud his creation of the (for their time) quite incredible NeXT line of computers after his dismissal from his own company, and then the development of what has been the most innovative animation company to date, i.e. Pixar. Regardless of the fact that he personally couldn’t possibly have developed all the products he is associated with, it remains fact that he was at the helm of some of the most successful companies of recent times!!

I’ve never been an ‘Apple Fanboi’ as such, to begin with I could never afford the inflated prices the company charged. By the time my income had risen and their costs had reduced to a point where I *could* have afforded them, I was too deeply committed to the ‘Wintel’ systems be be able to change horses easily. Nevertheless, I have never doubted for a second the genius of the man or the magnificence of the products Apple produced… they just aren’t for me.

Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs legacy really lies of course in that he was one of those valiant few who forced a paradigm shift onto the world, albeit a world that was actually waiting for the shift. True eventually those changes would probably have come anyway, but it’s possible that the development of that shift may well have gone in an entirely different direction without Steve being there pushing his own vision of that future world. Essentially, the technological revolution he was a part of entirely changed our world in ways we haven’t yet fully come to terms with let alone explored and whatever comes after will be built entirely on the shoulders of Steve and his peer group.
That he did amazing things in his first incarnation with Apple is without question. That after his ‘second coming’ he inspired changes in his company that signalled a revolution in both marketing and design is also beyond doubt. Yes it’s east to say that those devices released under his guidance were already in existence, but they were most certainly not in a form that made them particularly user friendly. Nor were the majority particularly well designed either in form or function! Apple might have a limited product range compared to other companies producing similar devices, but the impact of each release still sends shockwaves through the industry as each upgrade is released.

From Steve’s perspective I suppose if he had to have a time to leave forced on him, then perhaps being made to leave whilst at the top of his game was a good a place to leave as any. He’ll drift into history (and probably hyperbole!) as the inspiration of a thousand imitators, but I doubt our world will ever see the likes of Steve Jobs again, and I’m certain even if one eventually arrives I’ll not be around to see it!

Rest in peace Steve – the world was a richer place for your existence and is a poorer one for your passing.

So here’s the thing. I finally got fed up with the hype and the messing around. Manufacturers are constantly promising their tablet will be “the next big thing” and then I’ve sat and watched as their devices vanish like so much vapour-ware. No more!! Of course, over the past weeks I’ve been hunting around looking for the optimum tablet and found myself on the Lenovo site. I waited for more information from them about the release of their new tablets but I was beginning to think I was going to end up missing out on that one as well!!

Still, I finally got word from Lenovo that they were accepting orders in Australia for the ThinkPad Tablet so off I went to their site to check out the offerings. After a few seconds thinking, i.e. without so much as blinking, I ordered a 32Gb model with 3G. Just to be on the safe side, I also ordered a few ‘extras’ including an extra adapter, a docking station, folio case plus keyboard, and a spare digitiser pen!!

On paper the machine is going to blow the iPad out of the water, but of course now it is having to fight off the advances of the Amazon Kindle Fire etc. Even so, here’s the specs…

It’s got an NVIDIA® Tegra™ 2 Dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 ( 1.00GHz ) running Honeycomb (Android 3.1). It’s got 1 GB 800Mhz DDR2 RAM and a 32 Gb HDD. The display is larger than I personally favour, i.e. it has a 10.1″ Multitouch Capacitive Display, Gorilla Glass  and two cameras; the inward 2MP and the outward camera 5MP but it will suit the purpose as a note-taking business machine!

Apart from those basics, it has a wealth of ports including both a Micro USB *and* a full size USB 2 port, plus a 3-in-1 reader (SD, SDHC, MMC) and even sports a Digitiser Pen!!

Moving on, it weighs in at 742 gms so it’s around 100 gms more than the iPad. Even so, with all the above *plus* built-in WiFi (802.11b/g/n), 3G, and BlueTooth it’s obviously built to be used!! Battery life is reported as “up to” 9 hours (depending on usage) via the Li-Polymer battery so it should be capable of extended use for most if not all of a working day!! :)

There is so much gear coming it’s quite exciting!! Sadly however it’s not intended for my eager hands. It’s going to be passed on to my wife who needs it for her work – such is life.

Of course it’ll be a month before it gets here, but I’ll be having fun for a while when I sort out the configuration. Gee I wish I could afford one for me! :)

 

I was eagerly anticipating the release of the new tablet from Amazon. Reports in the IT media were giving it glowing reports even before it was released and both the specs and price point seemed to indicate it was something I’d be eager to buy. It was something of a disappointment then to arrive on the Amazon site to learn that the new devices are only available in the USA… and not even in the UK let alone Australia!!

If the device required a 3G (or even 4G) connection it might have the excuse of being incompatible with local networks, but it’s 100% WiFi only… so what’s the problem? So far I can’t tell you because there is nothing specific on the Amazon site to let us know just why we’re excluded!

Am I annoyed?? Yes. Am I aggravated? Yes. Will I have decided to buy a tablet from an alternative supplier by the time the Kindle Fire *is* released in Australia? Quite possibly… yes!

 

Following on from the MS collapse – Google Docs has managed to produce another hiccough in the rise of ‘cloud computing’ by throwing itself itself offline as well! It was so well timed to coincide with the MS debacle, you have to wonder if they are conspiring together to dent confidence in offsite data storage and application access?? :D

At least the Goodle Docs issue was resolved in an hour, unlike the MS outage which went on for some time before being resolved once the repaired DNS info propagated. However, any suggestion ‘the cloud’ is mature enough to handle a company’s data and software needs is totally wrong.

I have to admit to being a heavy user of almost anything originating with Google, especially Google Mail after it  left the Hotmail interface for dead and I use a variety of offsite cloud storage sites such as Mozy for my backups, and several commercial sites for storing photographs etc. but in the short term I can’t envisage relying on any one solution, i.e. on the cloud alone, for all my needs.

Yes I take advantage of the ‘freebies’ such as Gmail and so can’t really complain if they fail. In business, as in the rest of the world, you get what you pay for, so when the freebies go down you just have to accept it and move on. However, when commercial sites can fail even for a short period you have to accept that it is *only* as an archiving or backup tool that the cloud is in its element, but even so… for the time being… I think I’ll be backing up my backups with local data storage!!

Before I start I suppose I ought to declare my ‘credentials’. Other than a year or so in college doing my Computer Science Masters I’ve never used any Apple device ‘in anger’, and even that was back in 1990 when computers were still primitive compared even to today’s less than usable monsters. Since those early days I’ve never used anything made by Apple, and have never felt the slightest desire to use anything made by Apple. I’ve never hankered after Mac’s, AirBooks, iPod’s, iPhone’s or iPads… nothing. I accept that for some people they are the bees knees but they leave me cold and always have.

It’s not as if I’m tied to Wintel machines by the navel. I’m quite happy to adopt Android based machines such as my HTC Desire phone and my small format Android Tablet, but despite heavy pressure from friends (both in Australia and the UK)  have never seen anything in the Apple iOS that attracts me.

You might think then that the departure of Steve Jobs from his position as CEO of Apple would leave me cold, whereas nothing could be further from the truth. I wholeheartedly accept and appreciate the contributions he’s made to the computing world and will be very sad to see the man leave centre stage. The fact that he is actually a very young man, relatively, makes it all the more difficult to accept. My only hope is that he is *not* as sick as many believe him to be and that he will continue to foster new projects of the sort that saw the development of the NeXT computer and (perhaps most notably) Pixar whilst in the midst of his hiatus from Apple.

For all that Apple has had its ups and downs economically over the years, there is no doubt whatsoever that Jobs is a technical genius and of course businessman par excellance. Ok Apple had its share of hardware failures thru the Years, the Lisa and the Newton being perhaps the most obvious, but regardless of their success or failure it must be said that it has been *innovation* that has been the hallmark of the Jobs period with his company. He has been at the forefront of a company that has created and developed virtual ‘ecosystems’ to support their products and in so doing has pushed the boundaries of computing into areas that would have been almost in the realms of science fiction just 20 years ago!

As said, despite my not having any intention of ever purchasing an Apple device I do feel great sadness at seeing him leave his role guiding his company. I wish him well for the future and hope his health improves to the extent that he can once again return, perhaps with yet more ground breaking tools and devices. Regardless of that of course, this man has made his mark on the 20th Century in the way that very few others have. The revolution he started in a garage with Steve Wozniak all those years ago, will clearly persist for much of the 21st century as well!!

Despite some people having serious misgivings about Microsoft and it’s hegemony in the computing arena, it’s good to that a recent acquisition i.e. Skype, is doing something *really* user friendly, especially if you’re out of your home country.

The company is expanding it’s “pay by the minute” WiFi access which will mean that people away from their home countries will soon be able to avoid those ridiculously high ‘roaming’ charges that telecoms have been able to carve out of individuals who only want to check their emails etc whilst away from home. Another neat addition of the expansion of the Skype Access service is that it will be available to iOS users as well now instead of being previously restricted to Windows users!

By the way, if you want to try it out Skype is offering us all a 60 minute free try from midnight tonight until midnight tomorrow! So if anyone out there is away from home and wants free international access… go for it!

Ok I admit it’s been a long time coming. but I think I’m finally back blogging in earnest. So where have I been and what have I been doing? Well for the most part I’ve been working quietly on the sister site to Opinion Australia (OA), i.e. Australian Opinion (AO). Whilst OA is a blog, AO is a full blown forum.

Sadly recent events there have begun to convince me that the forum concept is a little outdated and I’ve been considering closing it down permanently and redirecting calls to the domain here instead. Either that or moving this blog to the alternate domain.

It’s quite sad to even consider doing it as the forum has been running for some years and for a while we had built up a membership that felt more like extended family than strangers linked only by anonymous bits and bytes. However, any forum can only be as good as the membership allow it to be and curtently there is a disruptive and, to be honest, rather bad-mannered element in there that simply seems intent on wrecking the place.

Ok both in theory and in practice, as Admin I could simply remove posts I find offensive and turn the place into a vastly enlarged blog, but that would entirely defeat the original purpose of the site, i.e. to give people free expression to discuss issues and topics of general interest and to post their opinions on them!

So, whilst I mull over the events of the week I’ll be starting to post here instead.

Actually, I *do* have to say I’m glad to be back. Yes it’s a little quiet, well after the length of time I’ve been away it would be! After all, who wants to visit a blog where nobody posts? But with a little luck and some hard work we might yet get OA back where it used to be… at the top of the Australian ‘pile’. :)

The concept of ‘cloud computing’ had me very confused for a while, I really had no clue what these buzz words actually meant., or what benefit it would give me. Eventually ‘daylight dawned’ and I not only understood what the pundits meant, I discovered that I’d actually been using it for some time! :)

At the simplest level, even a personal website is cloud computing. Basically *anything* you access/store/manipulate etc anywhere online, and off your own hard drive, could be gathered under the umbrella term. In practice however the term has slowly developed to the point where it’s taking on a subtle difference. Now it’s becoming understood as covering any activity you currently do locally, i.e. on your own computer HDD, but can be done online.

So for me, apart from this sort of site, the most obvious use of ‘cloud computing’ has been Google Mail which I’ve been using for some time. However I’ve slowly been getting used to accessing my *data* online as well. I have been using a backup service called ‘Mozy Home‘ and currently have some 45Gb backed up ‘just in case’. It ‘syncs’ overnight when I’m asleep and ensures that if the machine is stolen or destroyed I’ve not lost all my data… photos, music, documents etc. Diverging slightly from the topic, being with Mozy has some added benefits. If the computer is stolen and used by the thieves, it’s possible I might be able to locate who they are and where my machine is by downloading *their* files which Mozy would have backed up! :)

Moving on, I’ve just started using an online facility called ZumoDrive. It’s still in beta and ‘invitation only’ but still worth checking out. The free account gives you 1Gb of space to give you a chance to evaluate its usefulness. Basically it’s a hybrid system that creates a ‘virtual drive’ on your computer which you can use exactly the same way as any other drive on your machine, with a few important differences.

To begin with the data isn’t stored on your hard drive, it’s uploaded to the ‘cloud’. Secondly, that data can be accessed anywhere you have access to a computer. Thirdly, you can use it as a ‘file sharing utility’ by giving access to other people via your own, or alternate email address logins!

Naturally it has a few drawbacks, the main one being using it for *all* your data needs a fast broadband account… and if you have no web access you have no access to your data. For the most part tho this just means modifying what you upload and for storage/easy access of images etc it’s ideal. I tried using it to ‘stream’ my Lord of the Rings music to my netbook using a free connection at the local Macca’s and it worked perfectly. I’m seriously considering opening a monthly account (10Gb for $2.99/month) and using it for more file transfers!

There are other ways of achieving the same ends, tho perhaps not quite so elegantly. One of these would be the Windows Live SkyDrive. With the SkyDrive, Microsoft has given all users a 25Gb online storage space which they can access, use for file sharing etc. It isn’t as versatile as ZumoDrive, but is free and of course, works.

The point is that as the cloud develops more and more features and functions will be made available for online use. Already Google online offers tools including a word processor, spreadsheets, presentation software etc. Add in the mail service, blogging facility, photo storage etc and you can begin to see a time closing in where purchasing an expensive computer for ‘home use’ will be a thing of the past.

From my perspective – sooner the better! :)

I think I’m finally reaching the ‘end of the line’ as far as actively developing websites. I’ve around 20 sites and domains on the go and sadly none of them particularly fills me with any desire to keep them active. Over the past few weeks I’ve been seriously considering doing something drastic about it, like closing down 90% of them or more. Basically… I’m bored.

Yes in theory I could continue developing’static’ sites ad infinitum because the space I have allows me to make an almost infinite number of sub-domains, but even though, once made, they can continue indefinitely with no further interference from me, I’m still ‘responsible’ for them so in practice I *do* end up looking after them – even if it’s just a 30 minute visit now and then to check the links are all functioning properly. Examples of this sort of site are Talk Tidy, and Hymns and Arias, neither of which require *any* input from me whatever.

Sites I really *should* support with an active presence, apart from this one, include the forums such as Australian Opinion, and Strictly Magic (which is still in its infancy) and I just don’t have any interest any more. Strictly Magic will have to have enough work to get it functioning of course, but I really don’t have any desire now to spend as much time online as I have in the past. There are things I’d rather do… for example write my life story (such as it is) on the netbook, go walking with the camera and record what I see… maybe read books, who knows, just more than sit in front of a computer the entire day.

Of course not all the domains are developed in any way at all. Some have never had *any* sort of website on them! I bought them on the basis that I’d develop *something*… then got bored before the site ever eventuated. Those domains can just be allowed to expire.

I can’t allow all the domains to close of course because some are ‘family’ sites, such as blogs, forum and gallery, which rely on my hosting space for maintaining their web presence, but the rest can pretty much either die off or be passed on to someone else to look after.

Still working out the fine detail, but I’ll be cutting out at least a dozen or more of the active domains and reducing my personal web presence to a minimum. Still, if anyone knows someone who’d like to take over the ODPS or Australian Opinion, let me know and we can discuss the best way to set about it! :D

Sometime in the next few days the world will be celebrating the 40th birthday of Doug Englebart’s ubiquitous pointing device, so common to all computer users… the mouse!!

I’ve never been sure whether the plural of this kind of mouse is mice or mouses but it may not matter soon since there are claims that the mouse will soon be soon be losing its pre-eminent position as the pointing device of choice. In fact some claim its days are actually numbered and soon we’ll be doing without them entirely.

I for one haven’t used a ‘real’ mouse in years, preferring to use a trackball, but even these ‘stationary mice’ use the same principles as their mobile cousins, it’s just that I move the ball with my thumb.

The alternatives seem to be the ‘trackpad’ favoured by laptop and notebook users, ‘touch screens’ favoured by PDA’s and the like, and a new desktop model Microsoft is promoting where you wave your hand at the screen to tell it what you want done.

For my own part, I’ll be sticking with the trackball/mouse until some whizzkid produces a cursor placement device that follows my eye-movements and let’s me ‘think’ what I want done! :D

Will the mouse last another 40 years?

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