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August 26, 2007

Hunting computer bargains

Here at the Bleeding Edge Institute for Internet Inflation Inhibitors, we are beginning to wonder where those chaps at the Reserve Bank – the ones who seem intent on ruining the Prime Minister's record on interest rates – are doing their shopping.
While the RBA economists expect the underlying inflation rate to increase to 3 per cent by the end of the year – at which point they intend to hit us with even higher interest rates – Bleeding Edge's underlying inflation is heading steadily in the opposite direction.
We suspect the reason is that unlike Reserve Bank economists, we are using the Internet to hunt out the cheapest prices on technology, and for that matter on food and other household items.
Bleeding Edge has been doing our bit to help the rest of you, of course, by using the Internet to hunt down the cheapest prices for the components of our three-monthly workhorse PC. We suspect that the economists are buying their PCs from Office Works, Harris Technology and Harvey Norman etc., which couldn't be helping the national Consumer Price Index.
That, however, is only a minor example of what seems to have become a passion for online bargain-hunting.

We've signed up for the Aldi supermarket chain's email newsletter and head there every week for various technology bargains, to say nothing of cheaper food and grocery items.Aldi has become a major ally in our war on inflation ... next week offers the thrill of new slippers!.
We've also bought a subscription to simplesavings.com.au, for a weekly newsletter and “savings vault” of advice from other frugal shoppers that has helped us trim the cost of a vast range of goods and services, ranging from car insurance to shampoo.
For big-ticket items, we've been drawn increasingly to online auctions. The best known of these is eBay, but our favourite is a local operation at Graysonline which seems to have been adopted by technology manufacturers as an outlet for either over-stocked, or run-out items.
A couple of weeks ago, for instance, we noticed an auction of “new HP LaserJet printers with automatic duplex capability” with bidding starting at $9. We checked the details. There were several new monochrome HP LaserJetP3005D printers, with a 400MHz processor and 64MB of memory capable of printing up to 1200x1200 dpi (dots per inch) resolution at up to 35 pages per minute, with a duty cycle of up to 100,000 pages per month. It included a 12-month manufacturer's warranty.
It's a robust printer which we couldn't have afforded at the best retail price we could find: around $1100. There were several units up for sale at Graysonline, however, and we joined the bidding at around $240. Eventually we picked one up with a bid of $384. With the buyer's premium and freight, we had bought a great printer for a total investment of $482.
It still didn't quite meet our needs. What we really needed was the networked version, the P3005DN, but they weren't included in the auction. The cheapest price we had been able to find for that model was around $1500. Fortunately, the P3005D has a slot for a network card, so we drove out to the Hawthorn branch of Harris Technology, and picked up an HP 620N JetDirect card for $459. It took us minutes to install, and it worked perfectly with our collection Windows, Mac and Linux desktops. We had pretty much the equivalent of the DN model, and our total saving was close to $600.
There are potential hazards in the world of online bidding, and we happened to stumble on a couple of them. Part way through the bidding on the printer, for instance, as we flicked between individual items, trying to lodge the lowest bid possible, we discovered that we'd bid on one of several P3005 printers, which we hadn't noticed had been included in the offering of P3500D units. It's about $100 cheaper than the “D”, doesn't have automatic duplex, and it has only 48MB of memory.
With the auction nearing its end, we were forced to make a risky decision. We placed another bid on the “D”, and began praying that someone would outbid us on the lesser model. Fortunately, that's precisely what happened.
The other problem arises from the fact that certain personality types – including Bleeding Edge – tend to get over-enthusiastic at auctions. At the height of our excitement over the printer, we had a look at the other items on sale, and decided to bid $29 for a 2GB SanDisk SD memory card. According to the catalogue, the ORP (Original Retail Price) for that item was $299. While that may have been true at one point, it's certainly nowhere near the current price, as we would have discovered if we'd been as thorough in checking that item out via Google, as we had the printer. At Michaels Camera Store, we would have paid $53, but the current price online is around $35.
Sadly, nobody outbid us on that one. With the buyer's premium and freight, we ended up paying $47.61 for an item that may have been “brand new”, as the catalogue stated, but certainly didn't arrive with its original packaging. We wrote it off as collateral inflation.
UPDATE 9.31am: Oh dear. We did recommend caution, and here's an example of what can go wrong when you don't check the prices, and aren't careful about what you're bidding for. The ORP on this HP iPAQ RX4540 Mobile Media Companion says $499. You can see if you click on the bidding history link, that the previous bid was $219. But J.S. from Port Macquarie has committed to paying $579. We suspect J.S. is going to get quite a shock when he or she discovers that what they've just bought - assuming no one is foolish enough to trump the bid - is not the HP iPAQ RX5765 they thought they were bidding on.

Posted by cw at 08:34 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 19, 2007

Electing Ubuntu Linux

Bleeding Edge has been in election mode over the past few weeks. We know it’s time for a change, but even if the leader of our government is a touch over the hill, possibly economical with the truth, addicted to high taxes and policies that contribute to inflation, you can’t give him the push without just a touch of sentimentality.

He’s been leading us, let’s face it, for around three decades – far longer than John Howard has been in power in Australia. And if we do say goodbye to Bill Gates and that long succession of Microsoft operating systems – an institution we’ve come to know as Billdom - will the incoming government, which calls itself Open Source, be up to the job?

We’ve been diligent about our election responsibilities, having spent the past month or so examining the Linux platform and campaign promises and comparing them with Billdom. We know that it’s going to lead us into
slightly unfamiliar territory, but after several weeks using the Ubuntu Linux distribution which we wrote about in June, we think there’s remarkably little difference between either desktop environment.

The more serious issue, in our opinion, is that there’s a price the Microsoft users pays for the familiarity, beyond the not inconsiderable economic cost. Billdom makes its citizens far too reliant on the prevailing regime, and discourages independence. Users are locked in to constant costly upgrades, as Microsoft changes its formats and retires
its software.

Under Linux, we won’t have to pay thousands of dollars for Windows and programs like Microsoft Office, because the operating system and thousands of programs which use it, are open source, which means that for the average home or small business user they’re free. More importantly, the user community contributes to their development, and shares public ownership of the software code.

While it’s true that there’s no real open source replacement for some programs, like Adobe PhotoShop, for instance (although Gimp does have many followers), our trial of Linux suggests we’ll be perfectly capable of completing most of our everyday tasks without having to pay for proprietary solutions.

Things will be more secure under the new regime, and we’re going to have a lot of fun playing with all that new, free software. And for those Windows programs that we can’t replace ... well, we’re going to allow Bill to continue to run a small corner of our IT commonwealth, which we call Tasmania.

The rest of the place is going to be under the government of a Linux distribution called Ubuntu. We have been flirting with it since 2005, but until now, we didn’t view it as a viable alternative for the average punter.

The latest release, version 7.0.4, codenamed “Feisty Fawn”, has overcome our reservations. In our opinion, the average Windows user won't find it too much of a stretch to adjust to. The advantages, including the financial savings, are a powerful incentive to trying it out, and it’s possible to do so without disturbing your Windows installation.

We do have one suggestion. If you want to make the experience as painless as possible, buy a copy of a book called Ubuntu for Non-Geeks 2nd Edition, by Rickford Grant (No Starch Press, $64.99), which is available from larger book stores. It includes a copy of the software, walks the user through some of the more complex processes, and shows him how to adjust to the different ways Linux tackles common operations. We found it invaluable.

The first thing we liked about the Ubuntu CD was the fact that it contains two versions – the full, installable operating system, and a “LiveCD” version that allows the user to boot up in Linux, while keeping his existing operating system intact.

The live version doesn't have quite the same speed or facilities as a full install, but you can use it to test whether you're going to have problems running some of your hardware under Ubuntu. We found it helpful to have a couple of trial runs before we committed.

The installable version will re-partition your hardware to allow you to dual boot between Windows and Ubuntu if you want to take that route, but we opted for a complete re-format and partition.

We installed it on a four-year-old PC with a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 processor, 1GB of RAM, a Gigabyte motherboard, and Radeon 9700 Pro graphics card. It was not a typical system. There were two DVD drives for instance, and two sound cards, one on the motherboard, and other an Audigy 2 Platinum card. The installation took it all in its stride.

We began the installation process at 4.59pm on a Friday, after spending an hour making sure all our backups were intact. By 5.24pm, newly partitioned and with its new operating system, it had become a much more powerful PC than it had been under Windows XP, and a good deal more stable and powerful that it would have been running Vista.

We thought that we'd be using it only as a test bed, but over the past couple of weeks we've gravitated to it for most of our activities. Unlike the three-month-old Windows XP PC that was our principal computer, it’s been completely stable.

The Windows PC lost touch with the USB printer, then Microsoft Office began crashing, without recovering some of our work.

Ubuntu made it easy to switch, because the installation automatically drops a lot of free programs on to your hard drive, including powerful applications like Open Office. With an installation package called Synaptic, it also makes the process of adding more of them vastly easier than is the case with Windows. Synaptic looks after all the dependencies that a Windows installation overlooks, insulating users from potentially show-stopping surprises. Even more impressive is the fact that most of those programs are updated automatically, along with the operating
system, much more frequently than Microsoft's more limited releases.

You can also install a program called Automatix, that gives users a powerful graphic interface for selecting, downloading and installing other packages, and automatically overcoming the licensing and copyright
concerns that make audio and DVD decrypting and playback such a minefield. It even allows you to write to Windows NTFS partitions on your hard drive.

We found we preferred Ubuntu’s Nautilus file and network browser to Windows Explorer, and we didn’t have any problems mounting peripherals like USB and Firewire drives.

There were some hiccups. The Common Unix Printing System maintained by Apple Inc has simplified the previously complex world of Linux printing, but we knew that we might have some difficulties with our Canon printer, because Canon seems to have a corporate allergy to Linux. As it happened, we hadn't been able to track down a Vista driver for our Canon laser printer either, so we opted instead to spend $129 on a Hewlett Packard LaserJet 1020, which uses the ZJStream protocol developed by Zenographics.

There's a Linux driver for that , and after reading the warning there against using the driver that ships with Ubuntu, we had to resort to the terminal window to install it. That was one of the rare occasions on which we've had to abandon the Gnome graphical user interface that is the Ubuntu equivalent of the Windows desktop, for the command line.

Most Windows users probably find the thought daunting, but – like an increasing number of Macintosh users who also have access to a Unix terminal window - we have found ourselves using it increasingly, simply because you can do some very useful things with a command line. We’ve even found the rare occasion on which we had to compile a program to run under Ubuntu easy, because of the detailed help that’s available on the Web, in addition, of course, to our copy of Ubuntu for Non-Geeks. If only we could buy a book like that to help us choose between the
operating systems that want to run things in Canberra.

Posted by cw at 04:12 PM | Comments (16) | TrackBack

August 18, 2007

Looking at the Vista

Back at the forum, I'm having an interesting discussion with Mr. David. About Vista and whether he wears rose tinted glasses.

Vista is quite a different aesthetic than every previous Windows that came before it. Certainly it is a watershed in terms of whether the Microsoft OS empire will sail on or sink. Empires rise and empires fall. It is interesting to contextualise the demise of Digital Research (CP/M) and the rise of Microsoft on the back of MS-DOS oh, so long ago. Scoble has just run a series of podcasts starting with The rest of the story: How Bill Gates beat Gary Kildall in OS war, Part 1

I would guess a fair number of the computer using public went from Win98 to WXP directly. Traipsed from a good vintage to another good vintage and skipped the unpleasant, tart tasting milestones in between.

When people were running Windows 98, I had moved on to Windows NT 4 after a couple of years. Windows NT 4.0 was a solid and robust system but feature poor and over secure - it could not do USB, device drivers were not prolific in the early days. Microsoft felt that this would not sell to the general public.

In particular, the graphics subsystem was so secure it was unable to host accelerated DirectX games. It's interesting to note that Vista has recently had a scare because an ATI video driver bug allows a breach in security i.e. Vista graphic subsystem security does not appear to be as good as WinNT 4

So, if you were one of those who moved from Windows 98 to WXP, you had the benefit of skipping
WinNT 3.1 > WinNT 3.5 > WinNT 3.51 > WinNT 4.0 > Win2000.

Of course, you might be tempted to say there was no competition to Windows. We didn't have Ubuntu Feisty Fawn nor did we have the platform independent Web 2.0 so Microsoft could take their time to get Windows right.

As Mr. David says - Time will Tell.

Posted by Anandasim at 10:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 11, 2007

Until something else comes along

Several of us write for the Bleeding Edge Blog. It's odd how when one of us writes, nearly at the same time, one or more of the others also write. And then when we fall silent, we all fall silent. While I muse on that, here's a placeholder.

Keep well....Ananda

Posted by Anandasim at 04:40 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack