I've just picked up an Acer 1810TZ (all those model numbers are piling up in a blur). It's an SU 4100 energy saver dual core light weight machine with longish running time on batteries. But there is so much overlap in price, machine size, generation of cpu, corporate model vs consumer model line, if you haven't established a firm bead on what you want, it's like being a child in a candy store - everything looks yummy and sweet.

A recent broadcast email by a notebook retailer notes that some models are indeed 50% off RRP given that they are Vista/XP without free upgrade to Windows 7. Of course, they may not feature the latest generation of CPU chip but they're competent machines nevertheless since mobile CPU chip trends are towards energy vs performance tradeoffs, not sheer speed championship.

Some month ago, one of the staff in a retail chain noted that notebooks were boring as anything, preferring to discuss digital cameras. Not any more. Not only are there different technical specs and CPUs in different machines, the machines themselves are cosmetically diversifying.

With the Apple iPad entering the fray and possibly Microsoft tablets in three different sizes coming soon after, this should be an interesting year.

Do have a happy and safe holidays.

In training and education, I find it’s more effective to strip away distractions from side issues and focus on the main topic of delivery. All well and good in the training environment. However, re-purposing such videos to other tasks like reconciling customer expectations, ah, it’s NOT such a good idea. Viewers see it as a negative. As a dumbing down. Guess Westpac has to live and learn.

Getting over the Bad Times (I)

Whether it's another version of Windows or a completely different operating system, one's preparedness to embrace the new comes easier if one does not have lots of baggage. What sort of baggage?

Email

Many veteran Windows XP users started their personal involvement with the internet using desktop email and POP3 accounts. These were all the rage, it was sooo cool to be "on email". Evnetually, the Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail web clients came into being - that liberated people from worrying about their local email storage. And then IMAP4 for home use and Outlook - Exchange Server for corporates. All these subsequent incarnations of mailstores freed us from worrying about our local mailstores. But, if you're stuck on email desktop clients like Thunderbird, connected to POP3 servers and local address books, aah, you've got to be careful with your baggage.

As long as your current machine was healthy and you ran your email without issues, you were fine. But when you move to a different machine, a new one, or a new install of Windows, by gee, where's your mailstore? Are you really sure you've got the right files, backed up? Really. Well the crunch comes when you try to re-constitute said dessicated mailstore back to your new platform. Aren't you itching for the "it went alright experience?" Hmmm

Reading The Age’s article on the retail launch of Windows 7 in Sydney, I came across this cute quote, offered in response to the question of why this was probably the quietest launch of Windows for a long while.

“Were not about big events any more. We are about listening to what users have got to say," said James DeBragga, general manager of Windows consumer product marketing.

It so reminded me of Siegfried and Shtarker as they bumbled along with Max(well) Smart and Agent 99. The media keeps repeating how Microsoft wants to distance itself from Vista – maybe that’s the reason behind the different style of Microsoft marketing. Or maybe Ballmer is playing low key… No, that can’t be it.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

It has often been said that inkjet printers and the ink cartridge replacements are like razors and razorblades – brands are quite happy to sell you a cheap razor, they make money on the blades. Now, some time ago, Kodak decided to challenge that idea. They had escapee scientists from Hewlett Packard, lead by an escapee head honcho, also from Hech Pee. Kodak derived most of their income from selling photographic film and paper – but the film business went north (well they did close that factory in Coburg) so the Kodak teams were keen to make up for lost income. When Kodak first launched their own inkjet printer line with their own special recipe pigment ink (as opposed to dye based ink), their printers cost a bit even though their ink was typically half the price of competitors’ product. Here was an interesting phenomena, how were they going to grab market share where the market appeared to dictate that the up front printer cost should be cheap? HP sure weren’t taking it lying down.

After a week or so of having to reboot the thing once or twice a day, and a polite, but not terribly productive conversation with iiNet’s tech support department which elicited the news that we were suffering from a “port error” – a vague diagnosis which could mean anything from interference on the phone line to a faulty line filter or possibly a challenging astrological transit – Bleeding Edge opted to replace the modem.

It’s not the first time we’ve tangled with the Belkin modem, and we weren’t prepared to mess with firmware or engage in another one of those isolation tests in which you uncouple every telephone device and hope that whatever transitory fault you’re suffering from manifests itself before the people who are no doubt trying urgently to ring you start assuming you’ve left town, or been arrested ... pardon us for a minute while we pop another one of those anti-paranoia pills.

As it happened, we’d already made the same decision in relation to the small business system we administer. While we haven’t had any problems with the Billion BiPAC 7404 modem/router, we had become increasingly worried by the fact that it lacked an essential feature for any small business: automatic fail-over capability.

Internet connectivity has become as critical to small – even very small – businesses as it is for large corporations. The need for reliable access to email and the Web and the increasing number of useful cloud computing applications is obvious, but with an increasing number of home offices and small businesses also relying on VoIP (Voice over IP) to provide cheap, reliable telephone calls, losing Internet access can be a disaster.

Fortunately, it’s possible these days to build voice and data connections that are even more reliable than conventional phone/data services, by adding a low-cost ADSL, cable, or wireless service to the primary Internet feed. In the past, these fail-over systems were a big-budget luxury. They’re now within the reach even of SOHO operators like Bleeding Edge.

So, when Long Zheng facebooked the link to short video clips of the individual Office 2010 applications, it was a little bit of down to earth come-down to see a Bernie Fraser-like presentation explaining Office Webapps (as delivered by Sharepoint 2010 server).

Now that Sinofsky’s helming Windows 7, I guess his old gang’s concentrating on implementing incremental improvements after the major update of Office 2007.

Our iiNet ADSL 2 connection was slowly breaking down, and we didn't have the energy to deal with it. Every second click on a web link sparked a prolonged delay, followed by an error message informing us “The requested web page is not available. The address may not be correct, or there may be a temporary problem with this site.”

Each of these problems was temporary, as temporary, in fact, as the space of a second click, although second time around, the pages loaded only very slowly. And yet we remained in the grip of IT ennui.

The will to deal with the issue arrived only when Bleeding Edge started a LogMeIn IT Reach session to add a new voice recording to the Asterisk PBX box at the spouse's practice and activate it as the Easter voicemail message.

The remote control, file transfer and diagnostic tools of LogMeIn IT Reach have been remarkably responsive using fast ADSL 2 services of iiNet and at the other end, Internode, and we recommend it highly. But with a flawed connection, it kept dropping out. If the spouse practice was to have an Easter voicemail message, we'd have to make a trip. It was more sensible to end our procrastination, and deal with the problem.

With the EP-1 now on the scene, and hopefully to spawn a new genre of digital cameras, the camera etymologists will have a fun time classifying camera types. The non photographer layman, however, may just prefer to ask - “How big is it” or “How much does it cost?” and leave it at that. (The latter is often uttered by long suffering spouses (spice?) of camera fans. Let’s review some camera mis-categories…

His attitude seems to be that Telstra owns the customers in perpetuity; that it's the only body capable of building a network; that it ought to be left to the business of screwing the community, its competitors, the ACCC, the Government etc., which it has done so well, for so long, at everybody else's expense.

That seems to be the point of his column, "Let Telstra get on with what it does best". Or am I missing something?

He claims that the people who are running telecommunications policy are Luddites, that the declaration of telecommunications services is a rort, that advisers on the Government's NBN policies are on a gravy train etc., etc.

I can't see any difference between Telstra's view and Kenneth's view. They're equally myopic and tendentious. Which tends to undermine my opinion of Kenneth Davidson.

The average Web user probably isn't aware of the significance of the Web analysis algorithm developed by Google co-founder Larry Page, and the increasingly manic fixation of an entire industry of search engine optimisation and marketing experts on understanding and honestly (and in some cases dishonestly) exploiting it.

You could remain entirely unaware of the existence of the PageRank universe unless you installed the Google Toolbar and started observed the movements of a tiny green band in the toolbar's central white slot, as you navigate from one site to another.

It's a long way from our paltry 3 to the maximum PageRank of 10, but that sudden elevation from zero was enormously encouraging, if symptomatic of an increasingly obsessive state of mind.

We're beginning to wonder, in fact, if OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) isn't an inevitable consequence of PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising, which was revolutionised by Larry's eponymous rating system, and Google's multi-billion-dollar AdWords system.

Point: You might speed up Firefox if you reduce the the history cache.

IT person’s response: Ok, let’s do it now and check out the effect.

Considered “normal” responses:

If I change that setting could my machine worse?

Where is it in the menu again? Do I need to write this down? What if I forget how to switch it back? Is it in the manual? Does it have a manual? Can I ring you if it doesn’t work?

I wonder whether MYOB will go faster?

Do you think it will work on all my machines? Even the one that my cousin’s son has? You know, the one who just came back from London and is backpacking with around Australia…

I don’t use Firefox. I use the one with the blue e.  Do you think it will work the same way?

Why can’t Microsoft have come out with this discovery? I mean, we pay them enough.

Note to self: make an effort, bridge the gap.