Aug 3, 2009 | blog
It struck me today while using my netbook that economy computers have reached that baseline of being good enough at more than the minimum set of tasks. With their very portable size and impressively growing battery life these minimally powered laptops can meet the needs of many folks.
The interesting thing to me is how we continuously discover how we really only need the basics. In the age when we’ve pushed computing hardware to levels that we never imagined, the utility of a basic computing platform is quite impressive. Because we’ve pushed the upper end so aggressively, the side affect is the low end has benefited in reductions in power requirements and size.
Making these low end systems so useful is the way they’ve been packaged into great “mini†laptops. Whether they’re a 9â€, 10†or even the larger 12†models that stretch the definition of “netbookâ€, the ultra portability of a 2 to 3 lbs. laptop is a game changer. It’s just another case of less being more.
Of course, they can’t do everything. In fact, they really are only good for the basics as I mentioned. Anything more than web browsing, email, reading, and some light office apps like spreadsheets, word processing, and presentations. If you need much more than that, you’ll quickly find the limits of these systems.
However, therein lies the catch, the majority of the work done is in this basic range of computing tasks. Writing ideas out, answering email, reading news and information, keeping in touch… the bulk of what we do can be done with a netbook. Especially if you’re a web worker since most everything one does is web-based anyway.
While I’m not suggesting that netbooks will be the main computer for the majority of folks, I know some will be tempted to try.
Good enough. This is where good design and reasonable feature sets reign. The benefit of a simple, cohesive design with a feature set that meets the expectations of the user can be quite successful.
Mar 1, 2009 | blog
Spending a week with a different operating system on my laptop is like learning a new religion. It’s intensely interesting, insightful, a true learning experience! Ultimately it teaches one what they took for granted about the things they already knew and cherished.
So I spent a refreshing week on the linux side of the operating system fence last week. In the end, I had to come back to Windows. It wasn’t the operating system, it wasn’t the software, it wasn’t the stability, nor was it any of the big things that people run into when trying to run any flavor of linux.
Instead, it was the little things – very little things. Like not having the play/pause, and volume buttons on my laptop not work with the media player. Or the media player not playing WMA files by default without a trip to the command line to make it work – yeah it matters, I have 15GB of tunes in WMA that I’m not re-encoding.
I ran into a number of things that simply needed a little tweak or manual intervention. Any one of them nothing at all a real problem. All the really important things just simply worked. For example, I didn’t have to find one single driver for my laptop hardware for Ubuntu 8.10 – it all worked out of the box. My favorite Firefox plug-ins, and therefore my main work environment, were all set up in the same amount of time that it takes on Windows – and worked just as expected. Email was set up in Evolution quickly and, again, just worked.
No, it was all the little things that added up made me decide I still needed to be running Windows. I’m less a “techy†person than I have been in the past, and while it’s fun to try new things, and experiment, I need a system that I don’t have to think about or fight with. I need something that simply works on every level at any point, and for me, Windows is that system.
So I’ll test Windows 7 a bit and then go back to Windows Vista until Win7 is released later this year.
Jul 17, 2008 | blog
The more time I spend working in the Information Technology field, the more I see opportunities. Usually, it’s simply a an old technology being consumed by a newer one – like traditional telephones being taken over by VoIP phones on the corporate desktop. I’ve championed that notion for nearly a decade, and only now is that really happening at an increasing pace. Cool stuff if you get a chance to use it too.
However, that’s not what I see happening right now. It’s much simpler and much more fundamental than another Microsoft Windows server taking on another role from another team or technology. The changes that are afoot are at the root, the foundation of enterprise computing and it has a social media tie-in. I have a message for my peers in the Information Technologies field. Your world is already changing, and if you don’t see what’s happening, you’ll be left behind.
The change that’s taking place renders the corporate desktop as we know it, obsolete. The disparate servers, inefficient. This is something that I’ve been watching for some time, but only recently have seen some indications that convince me that the world has turned the corner.
What are these things that change the entire game? Why, virtualization, thin clients and “web 2.0” software of course. You already are talking about these things. You are probably working with a couple of them if not a combination of all in some way. What’s convinced me that IT ten years from now will be a wildly different landscape than it is today is the fact that virtualization works, thin clients are actually viable now, and “web 2.0” software is past the “wow” stage and into solving business needs. Add the idea that many software solutions don’t care if they run on Windows/Unix/Linux and you now have a broad base of reliable, sustainable open source systems to choose from.
There is also the introduction of Gen Y into the workforce, who bring a different expectation to work. By being more mobile, working remotely via the web, and having social media & networking as second nature, this workforce alone will bring an impressive amount of change.
So what is the bottom line I’m saying for corporate IT? I’m saying that the desktop as we know it is dead. Windows “7” may be the last “legacy” operating system to be deployed. Desktops will disappear completely as well as individual servers. Servers in general will all be virtual machines run from high availability clusters (OS does not matter) in remote data centers. If you don’t have room for one, it’ll probably be cost-effective to simply lease them from companies like Amazon and such.
While Microsoft Office will still be the “gold standard” that we compare things to, it will become irrelevant in the coming years as open source and online versions of this type of software bring more options faster, and simply chip away at the venerable office suite.
Windows itself will still remain – remaining a popular option for the consumer computing device, all of which will end up being the laptop format. Windows, along with OS X and a couple popular Linux distributions will continue to drive these machines, merging more business and entertainment functions together.
The coming change is huge, and with it the opportunities as well. Like the change that started 20 years ago where mainframe and minicomputers were starting to be replaced with microcomputers, our current definitions of enterprise computing will change radically in the next few years. Are you ready? Will you be a part of it? What else do you see?
Dec 20, 2007 | blog
Some of you know that I have no hesitation to re-format my system and install whatever version of OS that I influenced by at the time. Well, this time I really took the opportunity to re-build my laptop from the ground up.
The opportunity was created by some hardware purchases, a RAM upgrade to 4GB and a 250GB USB HDD. I was running out of space and wanted to get rid of the original dual partitions that were configured at the factory. The laptop (Acer Aspire 5610) came with two 70GB partitions on it’s 160GB HDD – and I hate having to split things up.
So with the new external, I backed it all up, wiped the disk, created the new partition and installed Vista Ultimate back on the clean machine. No Acer software, no other "value adds" that end up causing problems. And finally got a change to take a snapshot of the cleanest Vista install I’ve done to date.
So, I’ve now spent the last 30+ hours rebuilding all the additional software and tools that make up my "kit" for what I do, and there is still probably 10 hours of configuration work left. Yes, I have a lot of software, tools, utilities, tools, VMs, tunes, scripts, and such that takes a lot of time to configure.
The best part, for what I do, is that I have over 120GB free just for Virtual Machines which I use for a substantial amount of testing and proof-of-concept. Along with the extra memory, I just became much more productive in this area.
Anyway, this is the kind of IT geeky stuff I find interesting. Later!
Jul 17, 2007 | happiness
Happiness is requiring only a cell phone, laptop, Wi-Fi, and a coffee shop to get the job done.
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