Author: Fred

Is Software High Tech? If not is it a Commodity?

I was reading Is Software High Tech? If not is it a Commodity? « Tech IT Easy. It struck me that the question is not entirely meaningful. I agree with the statement “software by itself is no longer high-tech.”

However, the same question may be asked of many other aspects of technology. Take electronics, for example. There is no denying that there is a great deal of electronics which is obviously “high tech”, but being electronic is not, by itself, is not enough to make something high tech. Is a transistor radio high tech?

In the same way, there are many, many kinds of software out there which are decidedly not high tech (including much of the web). This is not to say they are not innovative – being innovative is about much more than the technology.

ASUS’ R50A UMPC goes legit – Engadget

Post on Engadget about the new ASUS UMPC. It is interesting that the main complaint they have (and many of the comments agree) is the “lack of a QWERTY keyboard”.

When are people going to grasp that the whole point of this form factor is to not have a keyboard? Of course, people predicted doom for the iPhone because it did not have a keypad, but Apple was smart enough to point out that that was the idea. People are so locked into one way of interacting with their hardware that they cannot think beyond it. I went through the same thing when I got my first slate Tablet PC. At first, everything I tried to do seemed extremely cumbersome and awkward. I was constantly hooking up a keyboard and mouse to create eMail and documents. Then I got rid of all my other computers, and my keyboard, and my mouse, and tried to work entirely within the Tablet paradigm for a couple of months. What happened is that I discovered that how I did things on a laptop did not work well on a pure tablet. In addition, there are things that a pure tablet is good for, and there are things it is not. For example, I find the Tablet extremely useful for:

  1. Taking notes and leaving them in hand-written form (using OneNote)
  2. Brainstorming with tools like MindManager
  3. Reviewing and marking up documents in ink (using Word, or PDF Annotator)
  4. Reading eMail, and responding, if I want to send a written response (anything more than a few lines is inconvenient to do with the TIP)
  5. Web browsing for research (and sending results to OneNote)
  6. Reading eBooks
  7. Watching video contents
  8. Dictating documents (if you have good microphones, and enough processing power)
  9. Delivering Presentations (with the ability to annotate slides on the fly, save the annotations, and distribute the marked-up slides)

Things it is not great for:

  1. Creating long documents or eMail in text format.
  2. Creating presentations without dictating
  3. Anything which would normally be done with a lot of typing – again, any amount of text input using the TIP is a pain.

What it comes down to is that Tablets and UMPCs are very useful without keyboards, but not for everything. That does not mean that they should have built in keyboards – it means they should be used for what they are good for.

Second Guessing Second Life: Branding Strategy Insider

Second Guessing Second Life: Branding Strategy Insider – it is nice to see that I am not the only person who is not terribly impressed with Second Life (see my previous post on the subject)

Random Thought

I was watching a rerun of Boston Legal the other night, and this quote caught my attention – not all of you will understand why, but some might… 

“It’s sad, how you go from intimacy to nothing, cold turkey. I mean, how many people along the way have true meaning in your life, and to suddenly have no contact, and….it’s sad.” – Denny Crane (Boston Legal)

Interesting post – Conspiracy Theorists and free software

Here is an interesting post on the prevalence (or at least existence) of conspiracy-theory-types within the free software movement (actually, they exist within any community). However, this article points out something which I have said before, which is that these people, and other zealots in the open source world, do far more damage to the credibility of open source as a whole than any opponents of open source ever could.

Eventually, the pitch “we are better because we are not Microsoft” is just not enough, and in fact, begins to hurt the movement.

Must you be either 100% Microsoft or 100% NOT Microsoft?

I was reading this interesting post Coté’s Excellent Description of the Microsoft Web Rift « SmoothSpan Blog, as well as the post to which it refers. It is an interesting discussion of the fears many have with respect to choosing to work with Microsoft technologies versus non-Microsoft. The chain is worth a read, whether you agree with the ideas or not.

One statement I found particularly interesting was

This thing he calles “lock-in fear” and the extreme polarization (encouraged by Microsoft’s rhetoric, tactics, and track record) that you’re either all-Microsoft or no-Microsoft is my “web rift”.

While I would not disagree that Microsoft strongly encourages the use of its tools and technologies (after all, that is what most companies do, isn’t it?), I see far more rhetoric and tactical positioning on the part of non-Microsoft, anti-Microsoft, and Open Source communities insisting that one must be 100% non-Microsoft (and preferably not even play nice with anything Microsoft), or you are obviously a Microsoft fan boy.

I guess that the point that I am making is that a large part of the “lock-in fear” is created not by Microsoft’s behaviour, but by the behaviours of the anti-Microsoft crowd.

Christmas Break time

Time to take a few days off. I do not plan to post anything over the holidays – in fact, I intend to avoid being online to the greatest extent possible.

Also note that I will probably not be on reviewing comments either, so if your comment does not get moderated/approved right away, do not assumed I have rejected it. I probably just have not looked at it.

Cheers, and Happy Holidays. Enjoy time with your families, and whatever deity you’ve chosen (or not 🙂 ). Remember that none of this technology stuff is that important, and remember what is.  

More stupidity – Soviet Microsoft: Stockholm Syndrome Among Unswitchable Windows User?

 

Soviet Microsoft: Stockholm Syndrome Among Unswitchable Windows Users

This crap is getting ridiculous. First Microsoft is the Soviet Union, and now anyone who does not agree with the “Microsoft is an evil empire” crowd and switch to inferior desktop environments such as Linux, or closed, over-priced systems like Mac (both of which I like in the right context, and both of which I have developed software on) is obviously mentally impaired and suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.

People, get a freaking life. This is bloody software, nothing more. If you like it, buy it and use it. If you don’t like it, DON’T. Either way, stop playing amateur psychologist, political analyst, or whatever else you are playing, and please, please, please STFU. 

More absolutely moronic Anti-Microsoft rhetoric

Soviet Microsoft: How Resistance to Free Markets and Open Ideas Will the Unravel the Software Superpower. « VistaSucks.WordPress.Com

This is a very amusing analogy, since it was the “free market economy” which created Microsoft’s success, and continues to sustain them. They are not being propped up artificially through government subsidies or bailouts, as so many companies in other industries seem to be. They are not trying to force governments or the courts to force their competitors to give up proprietary information or abandon markets to make it easier to compete.

In reality, it is the open source community, the “capitalism is evil” crowd, and those lobbying to take Microsoft down legislatively or litigiously who more resemble socialists/communists – “all intellectual property belongs to everyone”, “the government should intervene to level the playing field”, and other such crap.

The reality is, if you truly believe in the world of “free markets and open ideas”, the you believe that better ideas, smarter people, and better business models will ultimately prevail. This is the world in which Microsoft has played successfully for 20+ years. It is this model by which others can ultimately defeat Microsoft. It is Microsoft’s competition which seems unable to live within this model. 

Some very cool Silverlight demos

These are referenced elsewhere (in the gallery on the Silverlight.net site), but here are a couple of the samples I find particularly interesting:

Definitely worth looking at, and seeing what is possible.