Reading this article from The Register got me thinking about my recent laptop purchasing failure. Hannah and I tried to buy a very nice Sony Vaio laptop with bells and whistles, but both of us got refused the credit to buy the laptop. The current financial “credit crunch” is such that your everyday bloke can’t afford to simply spend £1,500 upwards on a nice shiny new laptop. There’s the other end of the rope where the retailers (or rather, the lenders who lend to the consumer so the retailer can sell their products) aren’t willing to give credit to consumers. It’s not a new situation, and anyone even remotely keeping up to date with news will know this.
It fustrates me though when people (even an established name like Intel) are trying to lower the cost of laptops (or in this case Ultra Low Voltage technology) such as the Macbook Air when, even at reduced prices, most consumers still can’t afford them, and lenders still can’t afford to give out credit. All they’re doing is reducing the value of these laptops and (although ULV tech is a bit expensive even for the current climate) making them almost a “cheap” alternative to a decent laptop. Essentially, the market won’t be stimulated until people have money again. How that happens isn’t really my area of expertise.
In my personal situation, I can afford repayments on a laptop but no-one will give me credit in these “exciting” 0.5% base rate times. That means I won’t be getting a new laptop any time soon.
Now is the time I really wish I was one of those fat cat execs with $1.2 million bonuses after 5 months of work. I want a new laptop, damnit!
This bears slight resemblance to the already widely publicised anti-trust/monopolising cases against Microsoft for bundling their own software with their OS, without offering the alternatives (read here (Windows Media Player) and here (Internet Explorer)). Admittedly, the competition for browsers and media player software is much higher than instant messaging software, but it’s slightly related.
Many Windows users will have already seen this install software, which is now downloaded every time you want to update a program, such as Windows Live Messenger. The program itself isn’t my concern, rather the automatic ticking of nearly every other Windows Live software on the list. I only wanted to update Windows Live Messenger, yet the program had automatically selected Mail, Photo Gallery, Toolbar, Writer, Family Safety, Office Outlook Add-on and Office Live Add-on for additional installation. That is an extra 128mb – a paltry amount, by most accounts, yet still an amount I have no need for.
To rub salt into the wound, post installation the default option is to change your search engine as well as fix your homepage. Rumours on the Internet are that if you do not remove the “Set my homepage” link, then the program installs an additional program that forces your homepage to stay the same; apparently (although I have not had first hand evidence) to the extent of not letting the user change their homepage for themselves. The idea behind it is to stop spy ware changing the homepage, yet this seems counter-intuitive to not allow users to change their homepage at all… As I said though, I cannot confirm the legitimacy of this rumour, so it may be speculative.
To summarise, Microsoft shouldn’t have these additional pieces of software automatically selected for installation – a less savvy user (family members come to mind…) might not look at this list and add these unnecessary pieces of software to their system.
It looks like we’ve taken another step towards never leaving our houses. It’s nothing new I know, but Luke reminded me yesterday of it’s existance – Microsoft’s rather impressive stab at mapping software à la Google Maps.
Instead of Google’s angle of just taking pictures of everything, Microsoft are going down the less intrusive route of just making 3D models of all the buildings. When I last saw this last, it was much less impressive, but looking at it today, you could almost say it’s better than Google. Although having said that, Google Earth has this same 3D view, but in a standalone app.
My opinion though, is that they both have their merits – Google Street View is pretty cool, and so is this 3D view… I suppose it depends what you want it for.
Regardless, with competition from these, and probably other mapping software, combined with online shopping, online chat, video gaming, home offices and a whole host of other software, it’s looking more and more likeley that I’ll never have to get off my bum ever again.
If you’ve used the contact form on my site before, you’ll probably recognise it as the bells-and-whistles Wordpress plugin cforms II. It was fairly simple to set up, if a little complex for what I needed.
Today was the last straw really and I got fed up of it. All I wanted was a plugin that allowed me to put a form on my contact page, and that was that. Instead, I got that, plus it seemed every time I logged into my admin UI, I needed to upgrade it.
I don’t mind the odd upgrade, but cforms II just got annoying. When I upgraded to Wordpress 2.7, it because much easier to upgrade it, so I carried on. But now, due to some quarrel which frankly I don’t care about, there is a permanent message saying that you have to update manually – which I just can’t be bothered with really. So cforms II has lost out, and I’m now using a new plugin which I hope will need upgrading less frequently and generally be less bulky… Contact Form 7.
I’ve been having a look at Adobe AIR this evening, just to get an idea of what it’s all about. The first impression I get from reading the website is that it’s a pseudo-browser-come-Flash player. Which isn’t really that new, or exciting. Reading their Browser vs. Desktop app comparison, I’m not sure they’re really selling it well to people like me. Let me start with the way I see technology moving forward at the moment. There’s a slowly growing movement towards Netbooks and cloud computing, and I see that as a really dynamic way of moving forward. The need for powerful clients are hugely diminished, and the power is left at the hands of other people who can afford to buy huge datacentres to power widely used apps like Gmail and Facebook, as well as office tools like Google Documents. There’s movements towards putting everything on the web, to the extent of some people experimenting – and even making a living out of – webtops, such as eyeOS and other similar products. Personally, I think having an “OS” on the web is going a little too far, but there is huge potential for moving to only using web apps.
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