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Posts Tagged ‘IT’

I am a fan, generally speaking, of Microsoft and Windows is my preferred OS – Operating System. I have been a user of Windows since version 1, yes there was one and I have a set of original floppy disks to prove it. I have lived with every version both the good and the not so good over the decades and can look back on the highlights in the journey of Win 95, Win 2000 and Win 7 as well as the horrors of Win 98, NT 3.5 and Vista.

Given the opportunity to download a “Windows 8 Consumer Preview”, the other day, I did and when it finished installing on a spare PC I have, I started playing with it and after an hour came to the conclusion that Microsoft have created another “Horror” to match Widows Vista. Whereas Vista was a cods up caused by truncated technology, Windows 8 suffers from a serious case of “Design Delusion”, how on Earth have they managed to do this again in such a short space in time ?

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I was amused by an article in The Economist about Internet Dating and worth a read: http://www.economist.com/node/21547217. Obviously with us about to hit St Valentine’s Day, the topic is “topical”.

I must own up and say that for me, Valentine’s Day is up there with New Year’s Eve as one of those occasions that is always destined to disappoint in the event despite or perhaps because of all the planning effort that goes in to setting the “special event” up in the first place. Oh yes, I do have tales to tell on such things but, I will not bore you…

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I suppose with the passing of Steve Jobs plus the success of the iPhone and iPad, people will be looking forward to what is happening in the “IT & Gadget Space” going forwards and The Economist had a very amusing article which focused on employees using their personal gadgets whilst being connected to corporate networks likening it to “IT’s Arab spring” (http://www.economist.com/node/21531112 ). As with most things, it is not quite that simple I suspect.

As to the future of Apple without Jobs, it will go the way of all technology companies, prosper for a time because of current good products and the iTunes lock in plus it has always been a “cult brand ”. However without him and his instinctive feel for the right products, eventually it will start to fade away as the Circus leaves town and in the end, the brand and its history has more value than its actual inventory.

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We have another year where once again there has been an increase in the number of pupils achieving top passes at “A” Level. But whereas once this might have meant something significant, it means very little today and certainly doesn’t mean any student is guaranteed a place at university, if anything it means guaranteed disappointment for many. I am not interested in the arguments as to whether these exams are “dumbed down” or not but the consequences are interesting if only to further illustrate a society that has lost touch with the basics and is drifting somewhat aimlessly.

Truth to tell, that is not just true of the UK, it is likely true of most industrial and post industrial countries around the globe and shows up in business as much as in education, in some way, the process must be reversed for the sake of our environment as well as world peace.

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It really doesn’t matter how long you live, there are some mistakes that you will tend to repeat as I was reminded only the other day. The mistake is to assume that in some old fashioned way, a supplier that you use regularly, wants to maintain the relationship and keep you as a satisfied customer. Bollocks, they couldn’t give a flying fart.

The absolute farce that operates on car and house insurance is a prime case, move to a new provider each year and you get a good deal, stay with the same one for the second year and they will Roger you Royally by upping the premium considerably. Where the logic lies in that, defeats me entirely unless all sales are outsourced and the outsourcing company only gets commission for new customers. Whatever the reason, it is the business practices of total lunatics.

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I am often amused by the sort of careless headlines/stories one gets on computer technology in the National Press, often written by the clearly technically illiterate. I came across the following headline today: “The PC era is over. The tablet has won. Inside the Enterprise: Internet “enabled” devices will outsell PCs within two years. Businesses need to change tack accordingly.”

I almost fell about laughing because it is a ridiculous headline to anyone with even a limited amount of understanding of the computer market. However, I also check myself on condemning this sort of thing outright, perhaps I’ve been around too long and witnessed some of these changes at first hand, for some acne spotted youth, it probably does seem all “NEW”.

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Recently as I am working on a major redesign of this particular we site, a task made rather more complicated by having to master the unfamiliar technology of database driven content management systems which is really what blogs are all about, I have been looking back at my past entries.

One of the things that you can do is that although this site is hosted “Out there on the Cloud”, I have a local WordPress site on my PC which I’m using for development purposes and I can use a copy of my existing bog entries as ‘data’ to populate my design experiments and doing so led me to some interesting ‘discoveries’ and realisations of the changes I’m personally going through.

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I had an interesting if rather amusing ‘incident’ the other day with a computer magazine I subscribe to, I suspect that it is a sign of the times within the media in terms of an economic downturn. On their web site they have lots of articles which providing you register and login, you can post comments to them.

The current “Big Thing” is called Cloud Computing (I will return to that later) and in replying to a particular article, I wasn’t aware that in effect, it was Paid for Advertising and presumably by Microsoft. My comment was published but later in the day removed. This of course is the tightrope that all such magazine publishers must walk; Give soundly based comments and product reviews for their readers whilst not upsetting their advertisers and “Industry Insiders”, this led to some reflections on my part…

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I am a regular reader of an IT magazine called PC Pro which is very good and one of their regular reviewers and contributors who specialises in ‘graphics related’ matters because he runs his own graphics design business up in Scotland, is called Tom Arah.

I have never met Tom though we did once have an exchange of emails on the subject of Wacom drawing tablets and although I ignored his advice at the time, experience will out and in due course, I came to appreciate the points that he was making. Although I don’t take everything he writes as Gospel, when it comes to computer graphics, an area of great interest to me, he is always worth listening to as I did recently on a rather excellent Photoshop plug-in.

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Really following on from my earlier post and in case anyone actually follows this blog, a minor announcement: There will not be that much in the way of “new posts” over the next few weeks although the “look” may change a couple of times.

I am redesigning this site and that is a bit of a major undertaking because of the very nature of WordPress sites which because they are “live”, the pages being made up on the “fly” as demanded by users requires quite a lot more work than say, changing a simple xhtml site knocked up in Dreamweaver.

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