baldysblog.co.uk

Posts Tagged ‘The Web’

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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With headlines such as “Hollywood vs BT” (British Telecoms), because of a court case brought against BT as an Internet Service Provider, the High Court in London has ordered BT to block access to Newzbin2 at the behest of Hollywood film studios, who say it is a “notorious pirate website”.

In fact and as I understand it, the particular site only acts as a “pointer” to other web sites from which material can be downloaded although whether it actually stores the data or acts as a conduit for it must be considered a technicality, that it is knowingly enabling the theft of intellectual property, is the reality. But all that said, is this the right approach ?

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“The longest way round, the shortest way home ?” I was reminded of this saying recently as I reflected on my recent stay in the US with my Uncle. That unbeknown to me, I really needed that break but mainly to “break my past trail” to free up future progress, became obvious to me by just having made the trip but there was/is more.

Since my return I have had various things to do that were set up before I went on my trip plus and due to the weather whilst I was away, a veritable jungle of garden weeds to tackle in a town where the use of napalm is frowned upon so…

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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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Here we go, the “Left Wing metropolitan classes” strike again ! Off the back of the government being advised to halt all further “ennoblements” to the House of Lords because it is “Full”, the Independent in yet another air headed Editorial, declares that it is urgent to reform the Lords… http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/leading-articles/leading-article-lords-reform-must-be-delayed-no-longer-2271056.html

I know I keep saying it but because the Editorials in the Independent are consistently so intellectually lightweight, I swear they are written by 6^th Formers on Work Experience placements. The proof will come if we get an article on saving Wales !

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This may seem strange or, merely prove that I am a very strange person all together but, the other day when considering graphics software updates from Adobe, I saw a stark relationship between the situation in Libya and especially from the perspective of of the Rebels based in Benghazi, the US company Adobe and a software update to their range of products.

I will tell you that this essay is essentially about graphics software rather than Libya but, there is a relationship between the latest Adobe ‘upgrade’ and calls for arming the rebels in Libya…

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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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It is quite funny how in life, change often creeps up on you and you just suddenly “notice it” although in all truth, only change is a constant in our lives. I always liken it to a spectrum made up of a gradation from black at one end to white at the other. At any moment in time, you are looking at the colour grey but suddenly you realise that this is a darker/lighter grey than the one you had in your mind.

Physical changes as you get older, just creep up on you, it is the way of things but the real difficulty really lies in your own mind because it needs to update the “self images” we hold of ourselves, to adjust to the change in our circumstances and to also appreciate that by being smart, we can create new opportunities for ourselves which accommodate our reduced physical abilities whilst enhancing our intellectual ones. By clinging to the past and ‘resenting’ that we can no longer do rather than looking forward, eagerly to a new and different future, is foolishness.

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