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Recently a friend of mine sent me an email that related to looking at the small stuff we buy because you never know where something is being manufactured. Sometimes an item that is of equal quality or better is cheaper and made in the United states. There were several examples of things like toothpaste, dryer sheets, light bulbs and even candy. If we all bought the brands made in this country it would help put people back to work in good jobs. I agree with this and recent events have made me think a bit further.
Along with the jobs issue is the loss of self-reliance. The situation in Japan has created issues for companies as diverse as Apple Computer and Boeing. Apple and other tablet makers have been getting several critical pieces of their tablets from Japan. In the aftermath of the quake they are now faced with shortages of these parts and many feel that this will result in shortages and an increase in tablet prices in the next couple of months.
Boeing has several parts for the 787 that are being produced in Japan and they don’t know what this is going to mean to an already laggard production schedule.
We have indicated that the unrest in the middle east isn’t bad enough to hurt us (not sure that $4 a gallon gas and $110 a barrel oil is not considered hurting) but if Saudi Arabia has any major disruptions the world economy (and most assuredly ours) will take a major hit.
We have just had Washington in a fit of insanity almost award the contract for military refueling aircraft to Airbus – a company that is owned by foreign governments. Okay for the moment these countries are our friends and allies, but we also fought two major wars in those countries in the past century. Fortunately some sanity prevailed and the contract was awarded to Boeing who has been making these planes for the past many years.
We no longer have the ability to shuttle men to the Space Station – we will be paying Russia (again one of those interesting bed-fellows) $750,000,000 to shuttle our people up and back in the next year. We have retired the Space Shuttles without replacement and our government is telling private industry to pick up the slack and provide the service. (Wonder whose rockets we will be using – ones made here or elsewhere?)
I could cite several more but I guess the point that I am trying to make is that along with shipping our jobs to other countries we have also put ourselves in thrall to those countries and their ability to supply the things that we need.
As far as energy is concerned we could reduce our needs for foreign energy by just using what we have here. We are considered the Saudi Arabia of natural gas. Our reserves are tremendous. We should figure out how to make coal work better for us without the pollution. We have oil in many places that have artificial barriers preventing us from getting to it. We built the first nuclear reactor. Solar, wind, water, and tidal generation are within our grasp – not soon but maybe for the future. Why are we so dependent on others? Are we worried that development in this country could cost money and we would see $4 a gallon gas – Whoops! We are already there.
We used to have the lion’s share of the electronics manufacturing done here in the United States. Now even US based companies do most of the manufacturing in some other country, thus leaving them susceptible to factors that would be more controllable here in the US.
Our steel manufacturing capacity was second to none until it became cheaper to ship the ore to another country, let them make the steel, and then ship it back to us. One of those countries is Japan. Since Japan is currently a logistical nightmare – we will have wait and see the impact on cost and supply. Perhaps we should find out why we cost so much and ramp up our production to take away some of this reliance.
We have been buying lots of items from China, many of them that have created issues here in the United States – baby toys, pet food, wall board. Perhaps we saved a bit when we bought them, but repairing the problems that they created may have cost us much more in the long run.
Shipping our technology overseas has let many countries start developing their own goods on the back of the developments we made. And with the manufacturing in place, that we helped build, are now undercutting us on our own products.
We put a man on the moon, because we had the drive, the wherewithal, and the government paving the way to make it happen. I currently see a government who is doing everything but, and a populous that is currently either apathetic, or confused as to how to make ourselves what we once were. We are still pretty strong, but we need some leaders that can kick the butts of the apathetic, point the way to the confused and misguided, and that know how to smooth the bumps and potholes in the road. We got to the moon, partially because we weren’t told how to do it, but were given a goal, told to make it happen, and were provided with what we needed to help do it! And we did!
I hope that is our foreseeable future!
You can’t turn around in the computing world today without bumping into another announcement of a new tablet. At the moment we have Apple with the iPad 2 running iOS, a number of companies with Android 2.2, 2.3, and 3.0 with the Xoom from Motorola being the newest and the only one supporting version 3. Rim will be delivering the Playbook which is a little different than some of the others in that it is used tethered to a BlackBerry phone and supports true multi-tasking. HP bringing out a line of WebOS based tablets and Windows based tablets, and other bringing out a variety of Windows and operating systems like MeeGo based tablets. For many the selection of a tablet will be done for them by their company, their associations (who wants to the odd person out at a tablet party) or an application requirement that only runs in one environment. For others there is a plethora of choices and hopefully this will help.
One of the first considerations is screen size which runs from 5 inch (generally considered to be a large phone), 7 inch with offerings like the Galaxy Tab and Playbook and 10 inch like the iPad and Xoom. There are a few oddballs in that are slightly smaller than 7 and larger than 10, but for the moment let’s deal only with the 7 and 10 inch pads since this is the popular group. The 5 inch pad is generally considered to small for application use and the larger ones are a bit cumbersome. Contrary to Steve Job’s statement that the 7 inch pad has no place in the world, the world has shown some acceptance for this format. The 7 inch format works very well for those who want a smaller tablet that will fit easily into a purse or jacket pocket. It is extremely effective as a book reader especially for those of us who read in bed where a 10 inch tablet is too heavy and cumbersome (the B&N Color Nook is a good example of this – not a general purpose tablet but based on Android it provides services outside of its book reader siblings capabilities). The 7 inch form factor also works well as a tool on planes and other vehicles. The 7 inch table does well as a general tool that can provide entertainment, and also has the ability to work with a variety of apps including textbook applications, access to the internet for email, calendaring, browsing, etc. It also works well for editing small documents and presentations and is generally more portable than the 10 inch pad. Performance of the 7 inch is similar to the 10 inch since most of the internals are similar.
The 10 inch tablets are the most prevalent and for many apps where the size and/or weight doesn’t matter, more appropriate. Having twice as much screen area as a 7 inch, provides many applications such as forms, a full page view that would not work on the smaller format. The reading periodicals or newspapers formatted for the screen provides a much better experience than the scrolling on the 7 inch screen. So sitting at your desk or at a table at home or in a coffee shop or even trying to view a manual on a shop floor – the larger format would be more desirable.
There are a few other considerations on the hardware side. Size and weight outside of the screen size vary considerably and will have some impact on the decision. Additionally there is battery life, connectivity, and expansion capacity that come into play. Current Windows tablets, while providing a great deal of capability when running internal business applications, have somewhat shorter battery lives 3-5 versus 8-10 hours of life. iPads have little or no hardware extensibility when it comes to storage and other types of devices i.e. your memory stick does not work here. Data transfer is strictly through an iTunes connection or from online storage such as DropBox or SugarSync. Android tablets provide a number of these features but are faced with some lack of standardization which prohibits them from running some of the Android apps and are a little rougher around the edge than the iPad since they are much earlier in their development. But they are catching up quickly and have some long term advantages over the iPad in terms of extensibility. HP hasn’t released one of its WebOS tablets so we don’t have info on it as yet, but they may be a force to to reckoned with when they hit the shelves.
Now, onto the operating systems themselves. The obvious place to start is with iOS – Apple while not the first to have a tablet is definitely the start of the current craze. iOS has a number of pluses and minuses. Among the pluses is that in having a small number of platforms to support and having total development of both the hardware and the operating system and total control of the apps, allows for Apple to control (perhaps too closely) the life and times of the iPad. Close control allows apple to insure that things work and that security is maintained as much as is possible. Because of there penetration of the market with both the iPhone and iPad, they have generated a huge amount of development and have at last count 65,000 apps written for the iPad and some 350,000 apps written for the iPhone – many of which can be run on the iPad. These numbers are high but there is huge amount of duplication in the market so while it does cover much of what you would ever want, most users don’t exceed a couple of hundred apps at the very most, and many more much less so quantity is not everything.
The minuses for iOS come in the form of extensibility. It is not a true multi-tasking environment. There are a few apps such as the iTunes player that will continue running in the background while you are in another applications but most go to sleep until you re-activate them and are effectively task-swapped instead of running all of the time. Also iOS does not have a true file system, this means that with few exceptions files created by one application are not available to another. This creates weird workflows where files are transferred back and forth with a personal computer or with cloud based storage, with which many applications share access. (There seems to be a bit of a workaround here in that in some cases one app can send the file over to another for processing – still a bit clunky but not as bad.)
All applications and now much of the content is being filtered through Apple. This means that you are subject to what Apple feels is good for you and itself. A recent decision by Apple that you can’t access subscribed material with an iPad app directly from a publisher. The content must be passed through iTunes and Apple gets a chunk of the subscription price as well as their piece of the app. This is making some wonder if they can afford to support the iPad. All development for iOS is currently limited to the MAC operating system, which does leave out a number of Windows and Linux based developers who might have contributed to the mix (because of the high availability of apps this may or may not be an issue). Additionally iOS does not support some of the current web standards such as Flash (interesting battle between Apple and Adobe) so many sites on the web are not accessible from the standard Safari browser. There are some work-around browsers available that will let you access some of these sites through some behind the scenes trickery, but they are not 100% reliable.
Next would be Android – Android created and supported by Google is based on the Linux kernel and is an Open Source entry into this field. It has gone through several iterations and is presently represented by several system at the 2.2, 2.3, and 3.0 levels with the Xoom currently being the only entry at 3.0. The levels previous to 3.0 were not considered to be optimum for use on a tablet while 3.0 and above are designed to support the tablet format as well as the phone. Being Open Source it has attracted many developers, especially those that felt left out by Apple. While the number of apps available for Android is less than the number for the iOS (approx 250,000) – the vast majority of the popular apps are either represented directly or have a viable alternative in the Android market. Because of the differences in the Operating systems and the fact that some of the later versions of Android do support standards such as Flash, there are some applications that are available on the Android that do not have equivalents in iOS. Android offers a more significant file system and the multi-tasking is slightly different but on a par with Apple. Since Android is Open Source it is not as centralized in control as iOS and some malware apps have slipped through. These were caught by Google and purged from the system. In fairness Apple has had to remove apps from the Apple App Store when they were found to have security issues as well.
The BlackBerry Playbook operating system offers true multi-tasking. The Playbook is a unique device that operates strictly within the BlackBerry world – apps are limited but typically highly functional within a business environment. Cellular coverage is through a tether to the BlackBerry phone. The interface and the device are ones that a person who is attached to his BlackBerry should consider barring the need for the tablet to be a gaming console. With the PlayBook very close to release and Rim not being near as secretive as some of their competitors we have seen a number of good reviews of this product.
WebOS – this is the operating system that HP purchased along with the rest of the Palm phone properties. This operating system is also based on the Linux kernel but the interface itself is a bit different than Android. From reports (since this is not a delivered product yet but has had previous invarnations) WebOS has a great deal of power and extensibility – along with phones and tablets HP will be including a dual boot into WebOS on all of their notebooks starting later this year. WebOS is not a new product and has had some vetting in its previous life aboard the PRE from Palm – HP has updated the system and extended it into the larger system arena. There are a much smaller number of apps available for WebOS than some of its contenders since the PRE did not break any sales records. However, this could be a real contender in this market as HP intends to push it hard and has the hardware, software, and monetary oomph to “Make it so!” and to draw in a number of developers to make up for the lack of apps in short order. But, it won’t be the only fish in the sea of tablets when it is released and whether it is big enough and shiny enough to make it a good catch will remain to be seen.
Windows is Windows with all of its power and warts – there are some extensions put on to allow for the touchscreen environment, but this operating system requires some horsepower to run and the need for a disk-drive albeit a solid state drive and a bigger processor makes this a bit of a power hog – so reasonably sized tablets typically have much less run time than other tablets – typically in the 3-5 hour range. However if you are in a business environment where you need a true Windows machine to run your applications, this might be your best choice. Additionally there is a new version of Windows – Windows 8 that is due out later this year that is supposed to have some significant changes to deal with the tablet market. This of course is futureware and will need to be vetted when ready. The question then is whether it supports the applications that Windows users will need or want to run on the tablet.
In conclusions I would love to able to make specific recommendations but the market is in too much of a state of flux to make that a realistic goal. However, here are a few places to start your adventure into “Tablet Land”. For those who are
Apple mavens you will select the iPad v1, v2, v3, v4, etc since there can be no others. Additionally because of the penetration and the consistency of design, accoutrements such as cases and cables, etc. are readily available for the iPad. Others will opt for the iPad because it is the most ubiquitous of all of the offerings. Because it is a closed and controlled system security is a little tighter on the applications with the iPad then some of its competitors.
The Motorola Xoom appears to be real contender in the latest and greatest Android pool, but carries a pretty steep price tag – but will be upgradable to 4G later this year which the current versions of iPad will not (the Xoom will be being released soon in a Wi-Fi only package that will be under $600). Currently however it is suffering a bit from the lack of apps that are designed to run on Android 3 – that should pick up soon as there will be other Android 3 tablets available and many of the apps written for 2.2 and 2.3 will work with the Xoom.
The Galaxy Tab is good selection for a 7 inch Android tablet and it too is rumored to be dropping in price.
For those who want a fairly solid lower cost entry into the tablet arena, the ViewSonic G is a pretty solid performer (you will need to apply patches to get the performance you want but for $400 you get a more than workable system with expansion).
The BlackBerry Playbook for BlackBerry users seems to be a solid choice if you want the tethering to their phone.
HP, ASUS (with a 12” entry), and Acer (and more) have Windows 7 slates (read “tablets”), Dell has an unusual looking windows convertible.
HP will be releasing their WebOS systems this summer (which isn’t that far away).
Not trying to slight anyone here since this is a market that is a massive state of flux and the winners and losers have yet to be picked and may not even have reared their heads. This is a market that is new enough that the next good idea may be in someone’s garage waiting to be discovered. Let’s revisit in 6 months.
It appears that two current trends in the computing world could be mutually supportive. The rise of the tablet computer and the growth in cloud computing are somewhat symbiotic. Tablets by their very nature do not house large quantities of data and most of the applications written for tablets are more aptly designated as applets, so to provide many of the services and data for tablets we turn to the cloud where we have applications and data storage and databases that allow an expansion of the capabilities of the tablets alone.
Perhaps here a brief definition of cloud computing would be appropriate. Cloud computing in a very general sense is the use of the internet or in some cases an intranet to provide access to data and applications that are written to be run either wholly through a browser or with a small client service running at the user end of the transaction. Google applications, Microsoft Live, and others are good examples of this type of application. Gmail can be access wholly through a browser, or through a number of applications that run under varied devices and operating environments. For many of the applications the service provided is by a hosting group outside of the company running the software but we are seeing some companies applying this technology to internal usage as well.
Products like Evernote, DropBox, SugarSync and even Google Docs and Microsoft Live and others allow a tablet user to access data and applications that are beyond its local capacity. While providing a platform for entertainment, news and some personal items such as email, time management and calendaring, the tablet needs to connect to the larger sets of data that will allow it to access corporate databases and work with larger documents. With many of the tablets having both Wi-Fi and cellular connections this provides the tablet with the connectivity needed to work with the cloud data and applications that are being created today.
One ready market for this type of combination is in the vertical application market. Many of the companies that used to supply their software to be run internally on servers at the client location, are now providing that service as SAAS (software as a service) and requiring companies to have good reliable internet connectivity versus an internal server and local data storage. Tablets can work with these applications and others bringing data to the field or the shop floor where previously a computer and network were not practical.
Additionally, education will be able to make good use of the tablet in providing materials and other services to students through various cloud applications and video streaming. More on this later when we discuss how the multi-media text books might impact how we learn.
Just got my first look at the new Color Barnes and Noble Nook. It is billed as reader but is really a bit more – it has a very good reader function – high resolution screen and using Wi-Fi can browse the web, run videos etc. It is built on a modified version of Android – modified enough that you can’t simply put Android apps on it, but they do have a few apps on board already and they are opening up development to get apps specifically aimed at the product.
The product fills a kind of niche – it is more than the traditional readers like the Kindle and the original Nook but it is less than the new pads like the iPad or Galaxy, etc. The only major item that I saw from a user standpoint that was missing was a mail app that wasn’t browser oriented. The browser was reasonably quick and responsive on several sites that I tried and non-Flash video worked well. (The product is supposedly scheduled for an Android update that will include Flash sometime early next year.)
I am going to be looking over the new crop of pads as they come out – and there will be a multitude. Already mentioned is the Galaxy and there are also pads from HP, RIM, Dell, and other major players. The pads are coming out with a number of different operating environments. Many are based on Android, including the MeeGo and the system underlying the Nook. Windows is also represented by HP who is also bringing WEBOS into the picture, Rim is providing there pad as an adjunct to the Blackberry which you can tether and use online through the phone.
The next few months will be interesting at least and we will see how many different variations the market can handle.
By the end of the year we will have in place several mobile phone operating systems that are either new or newly upgraded. These include iOS4, Blackberry, Android 2.2, Symbian, Microsoft Mobile 7, WebOS and possibly a couple that I have missed.
Just read an article that indicated that Gartner predicts that Android and Symbian will be the two top players by 2014 and pretty much tied for market share. In fact they had Symbian, Android, iOS and Blackberry with close to 90% of the market.
Not sure that I agree with the article as it pretty much discounted any penetration by Microsoft or HP and they can both be contenders for market share if they get their products right. Might not be tops but I could see each of them with 10% or better. Additionally, they have iOS running a weak third to Android and Symbian – I definitely see Apple loosing significant market share if they stay with their preset plans for iOS but if they add additional function to iOS such as a file system and expand their market through other vendors – they could hold a significant portion of the smart phone market. The weakest link in this is Symbian – they are making moves with Maego but do not have the broad base of development that the others bring to the table.
It will be interesting to see who succeeds and who is actually still a player 4 years from now.
Well my first experience with our new telephone company was bad – we now have Frontier instead of Verizon. I tried to pay my bill. After fighting with one of the worst automated systems that I have seen in a very long time, I wound up talking to a CS rep who took lots of information, tried to sell me additional services for 15 minutes, and then told me that he couldn’t take my payment. He then told me to try the online payment system - I had to tell him that his online system was down - he was unaware of it as he was outsourced and his job was really sales and not customer service. Was then sent to an automated telephone payment system but failed because I needed a number that I couldn’t get because the online system was not working and I don’t get paper bills anymore. Can you say “Catch 22!”
Just reading an article about the usage of different operating systems on personal computers. It is interesting that when I went to define a personal computer it pretty much these days is defined by a computer using an Intel or AMD processor running the x86 command set. That would include Window’s PCs, Macs, and most Unix based systems running Linux or BSD.
It wasn’t that long ago we had alternative systems from Motorola, TI, and other processor makers that ran operating systems that have either disappeared, been converted to work with the x86 set, or have been beaten into obscurity (see recent articles regarding the 25th anniversary of the Amiga). Since I think that the current set of operating systems is probably providing as much flexibility as the market will bear in the arena (I lived through the years of Babel and it wasn’t pretty) then maybe this isn’t all bad. There is enough consistent competition among, Microsoft, Apple, and Linux to keep everyone honest and enough consistency of applications to keep us from rebuilding that Tower of Babel. Unfortunately it does make some things somewhat homogenized and despite claims to the contrary – there isn’t a huge amount of difference between the various graphical interfaces for these products. Part of this is due to the fact that there is just so much variation that the more global market will bear. They may be open to other formats on other devices – I give you iPhone/iPad, Android and Windows Mobile 7, but when we sit down to our desktops and notebooks, we expect things to be familiar. This may or may not change as we introduce devices that are now pretty much upscale toys into the serious business of workaday computing but it will take something new with all of the right features to upset the current apple cart.
The last big jump we did was when we went from the text based screens with a few graphical applications to the graphical interfaces on Windows and Mac OS. Unix had X-Windows and other offerings from graphical workstation companies like Sun, DEC, IBM, and others and later came out with Gnome and others on Linux. Keeping in mind that the total personal computer market right now exceeds 1 billion units, some of the current wannabes like iOS and Android (which is really a modified Linux) have a tough road to hoe to grab a significant market share of those users.
For those of you who would like to see the current numbers for operating system usage on PCs – here is the article I referred to:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/windows-7-up-mac-os-x-down/9157?tag=nl.e550
I have been working with SharePoint 2007 for a while now and have used a variety of tools to customize the product, but for some reason have avoided using an obvious one – SharePoint designer.
SharePoint Designer has a significant amount of power but has a number of foibles that make it somewhat less than intuitive to use. I have recently decided to use Designer to modify some forms – specifically to use linked lists (two or more lists that are joined to incorporate data from each into a single entity) – I knew it was possible but was having some difficulties in figuring out exactly how to do this in Designer.
Fortunately the world has provided a plethora of books on just about any subject – Designer included. Found some of the answers I needed in Microsoft Press – Office SharePoint Designer 2007 Step by Step.
I also have the SharePoint Designer 2007 Bible – unfortunately for the items I was looking for, this book was biblical in the use of parables. I was unable to decipher the process for doing what I needed.
My brief experiences so far with SharePoint designer 2010 show that it has been re-written and is much easier to understand. Again, unfortunately this product cannot be used with SharePoint 2007 due to the structural differences between 2007 and 2010.
Some of these processes are obscure enough that I think that I will be doing a couple of white papers on the subject.
Just upgraded my notebook to 8GB of memory – doing more work with virtual machines so the additional memory is a must. When I attended the SharePoint 2010 Intro a couple of weeks ago the presenter had 16GB in his notebook and was running 6 or 8 virtual machines – most of them servers and while not blazing or capable of supporting 200 users – they did quite well in being able to demonstrate the capabilities of the new systems. I don’t think we are far from essentially having all of our systems delivered with a virtual machine manager and then we just load our virtual machines onto the new hardware. Hardware breaks or you are upgrading hardware, grab a new system copy on the backup of the virtual system from the previous one and you are up and running in short order. The virtual machine manager would not care what operating system you wanted to run – you could even run a copy of Windows, Linux, and Mac OS (only on a Mac since they wouldn’t deem to run the OS on someone else’s hardware) at the same time and depending on what you had for resources do it pretty reasonably.
Doing a system software upgrade – create a new virtual system – get it checked out – migrate programs and data onto the new virtual system – turn off the old one and away you go. Something isn’t running right and you are critical – bring back the old system until you can troubleshoot the new one. Desktop and server hardware is now at the point where we can afford to loose a couple of CPU cycles and not overly suffer for it.
Virtual systems are not new although we are just now using them more on the desktop. IBM had virtual machines running commercially back in the early 70s (see VM/MVS). But that was big iron then, not something you could tuck under your arm or even put in the back of a pickup for that matter – portability was not part of the feature set of the 370/390 series but virtualization was. So we are looking at 40 years of working with Virtual Machines and it is becoming clearer that we can do some very interesting things with this technology. We can cut the number of systems in a server room – though we still need to consider failovers for hardware failure – if a system running 6 virtual machines has hardware problems that takes it down – you had better have someplace else to bring up those 6 machines. But in the meantime you have saved on energy, cooling, and overall complexity of the server site.
On the desktop we are using virtualization to run multiple operating environments in one system – you need to have multiple versions of Windows or want to run Windows and Linux at the same time you can pretty much do it. Macs virtualize Windows to run apps that were only written for Windows.
Have recently had a couple of incidents that required some means of looking at a Windows drive while not running Windows. In the first case the registry had blown on the disk and the system would not boot up. Had put a bootable copy of Linux on a flash drive and booted up from there and was able to retrieve files from the hard drive. Not only that but had we so desired OpenOffice adequately handled a PowerPoint presentation so that we could have given the presentation from the same system even with a bad registry.
Unfortunately this particular system did not have a backup of the registry handy otherwise it would have been possible to copy the registry over with the saved copy and perhaps have made the system bootable. I will try this with a non-critical machine at some point and post how well it worked out.
In the second instance we had a new Lenovo laptop that was running out of space quite prematurely. Standard Windows utilities were showing that there was only 20GB free on a 250GB disk but only 135GB were being used. Tried several programs including TreeSize and WinDirStat and they didn’t show where the space had gone either. So I again pulled out the flash drive and booted up under Linux and was able to quickly find a folder called rrbackup that contained a large amount of data and was set to be hidden in every way possible under Windows. Was able to make some corrections and got the space back, but the ability to examine the drive using Linux made finding the problem significantly easier.
As to the latter – not really sure why Lenovo felt they had to hide this folder and make it so difficult to find, especially when it was eating up a major portion of the drive. BTW – this seems to be a popular problem on the web and has been so for a while, so if you have a Lenovo and are missing space check out this folder – haven’t tried it yet since I had other options that worked but some of the tech blogs indicated that hitting F8 and going into safe mode made the folder findable.
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