Foreign Perspectives

Archive for January, 2010

For me Vista was the final straw that decided me upon dumping Windows at the earliest opportunity. Never before had I seen such a poorly tested system.

That was a couple of years ago but moving out of Windows wasn’t possible for me then as I’d heaps of mail in Outlook which I wanted to take with me. Now it’s different though as the mail import facilities available in the Ubuntu mail programs have come on considerably so at the moment I’m in the process of cutting down the size of the PST below the 1GB import limit which seems the final barrier. Still, it’s on the home run so later today I should have everything moved into Ubuntu.

Aside from the email the move has been incredibly easy to do. Backing up everything in Vista and restoring it all in Ubuntu worked just fine. The only preparation required for that was making sure not to use the Office 2007 file formats though even that’s not really a requirement these days as OpenOffice can read those just fine.

What’s the benefit of the move though? Well, the Vista computer was quite simply becoming unuseably slow thanks to all the junk that’s associated with Vista. One notable improvement that I did make on Vista was disabling the “indexing” facility. That’s there simply to speed up searching for text within the files on your computer. Sounds like a useful facility, doesn’t it? How many times have you ever used it? For me, it’s at best once every couple of years yet enabling indexing has a major impact on the day to day speed of your computer (it’s the reason why your disk is in almost constant use even when you’re not doing anything). Even disabling it takes hours though as it needs to switch off indexing on every file on your computer which probably means hundreds of thousands of files these days for almost everyone.

The other major benefit is that Ubuntu is smaller. A lot smaller. It runs just fine on the netbook computer with 512MB which isn’t an option for Vista. That smaller size means that it runs a whole lot faster. Running SkyPE works great on the Acer 751 in Ubuntu; the same computer can’t deal with video when running Vista. It takes a lot less discspace too. The basic Windows 7 installation needs about 25GB, the basic Ubuntu installation needs less than 10GB. That’s not comparing like with like either as the Ubuntu install includes a fully working Office installation.

It’s almost always the case that the best Christmas presents are things that you’d never have bought for yourself but which seem perfect when you get them.

This year my best one is very definitely the Sony Reader which Wendy bought me. It’s the one that’s with me almost constantly and in use throughout the day. Why? Well, I’m doing a couple of Open University courses at the moment and that means up to four books totally around four inches in thickness to carry around. Instead of that pile I’ve a pocket sized electronic book which means that I can carry all those books around with me and read them when I get the chance rather than having to plan in advance to take them with me.

In fact I can carry around all the course books for all the courses which would have been pretty much impossible without the Reader.

The ebook technology is one that’s quietly zoomed ahead in recent years with the arrival of e-paper. The screens in these readers aren’t the same as those that you see in laptops. They’re not backlit, they’re quite slow to refresh (fine for reading, useless as a computer screen) but most importantly use virtually no power which means that the batteries last for weeks for even the most voracious reader and probably months for most people. Even my initial flicking around all the options and from book to book barely made an impression on the battery after a week. One thing to note is that the battery is only required when you turn the page and it makes virtually no difference to battery life if you take a second or a minute to read a page.

Thanks to Google Books there are millions of free books available for download. Beyond the free ones you can buy a great many books in ebook format these days though for reasons which escape me they are currently at pretty much the same price as the paper versions.

Downsides of it all? I miss the colour and the PDF scaling feature needs work. The metal casing makes for a cold read compared to actual paper though there are fancy covers that would fix that. The Pocket Reader doesn’t have an SD card slot so you’re limited to the 1/2GB internal memory. It’s not permanently online like the Kindle so no buying books on the fly although I usually mull over book purchases anyway.

Upsides are that the 1/2GB “limit” to internal memory means that it’ll hold over three hundred books which doesn’t seem like much of a limit to me. Copying books to the Reader is a whole lot faster than I’d expected: even copying a couple of hundred books was a matter of a few minutes. For normal books the 5″ screen is more than enough to display text at the normal size and in sensible chunks. That it’s not permanently online like the Kindle is a plus to me: Sony can’t see what’s on my Reader and neither can they delete things from it as Amazon have done.

In a word, this is brilliant.

Of course, for the pedants, the new decade actually starts on January 1st 2011 but, as with the millennium, I guess we may as well take the opportunity to celebrate twice.

What a decade we’ve had, eh?

Financially, the first one of the 21st century has been very much a rollercoaster  ride for the world and many of the people within it. The 21st century didn’t start overly well and the last decade finished on the worst downer for many a year. The last time it was so serious was way back in the 1930s and that took the 2nd world war to pull the world out in the end. This time, supposedly, we know better and have had loads of time to develop economic theories which’ll pull us out. Sounds good, but the minor fly in that ointment is that we went into this depression with those theories in place and they obviously didn’t work too well, did they?

Technologically the 21st century has been a major disappointment. Not only do we not have the promised flying cars predicted (well, not yet) but we’ve lost supersonic commercial travel, almost lost the hovercraft, lost the amphibious cars that we had in the 1960s and still don’t have a moon base. On the plus side we do have a space station, the beginnings of commercial space travel and the Mars mission is back in the frame. Electonics-wise the computers are lots faster, the storage lots bigger and we think nothing of “image processing” these days because even the cheapest digital camera does much more of it than the NASA computers ever did for the moon shots. From the science fiction world we can buy the Star Trek communicators for virtually nothing and the PAD (ebook reader) sales are finally taking off. Yet to come are things like warp drive (several theories postulate potential ways of doing it but it’s on the distant horizon) and the transporter (one that seems to have all kinds of theoretical and ethical problems at present).

Socially, we have all the tools in place from 1984 and have only the totalitarian state remaining to complete the picture. That’s perhaps the most worrying development in many ways as the technology making the 1984 scenario possible seems much more effective than the version sketched out in the novel would ever have been. On more positive fronts, the derogatory “self-publishing” of yesteryear is now everywhere and so widespread that we don’t even have a collective term for it these days.

So what’s likely to come up during the coming decade? All being well financially things will get back on an even keel though somehow I suspect that it’s likely to be past the mid-point of the decade before we can truly say we’re getting through to the promised land. We still won’t have a base on Mars but at least we should be seeing the first stages of serious design for the mission well before 2019. Computers will, as always, be a whole lot faster and the storage will fill up just as quickly. Somehow I can’t see us going for the 300 megapixel cameras that would be doable by 2019 but I imagine that 3D ones will be the order of the day by then. Books may well have bitten the dust by then as the ebook readers should be in full colour and probably 3D capable by 2019 with a price close to that of a single hard back book. Time travel seems to be gaining a growing interest so perhaps we’ll even see the earliest developments on that front during the decade which is the one thing I reckon would spur on the first contact with aliens (sorry guys, but warp capable civilisations would present virtually no danger compared to those that could travel in time).

What about moi? Well, James will have gone through primary school and be close to starting university by 2019 which is a whole heap of changes to think about. Assuming that I continue on my present rambling journey through the OU I will have clocked up at least one more degree and perhaps getting around to settling down to do a doctorate by then. Dear knows where we’ll be living by then. I’d be betting that it won’t be France but aside from that who knows? Work-wise, it’s hard to believe but I should be within spitting distance of retirement by that point.

So Happy New Decade! Here’s hoping that the new one will at least finish much better than the last one did.