Financial & Travel Musings » Computers

Non-global brands

Arnold — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 15:33:19 +0000

A few years ago renaming brands so that a single product name could be used across the world was all the rage. Thus we have Snickers instead of Marathon, Starburst instead of Opal Fruits and so on.

Oddly though it seems to have passed by gateway laptops who sell as Gateway in America but until quite recently as eMachines in Europe. Quite why that should be so is something of a mystery as computers are a product that you’d expect to see marketed similarly around the world these days.

Why, of course, leaves the puzzle as to why they’re absorbing eMachines into Acer at the moment and offloading a lot of eMachines at bargain basement prices.

Do you ever get attached to technology?

iPod or not?

Arnold — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 13:38:49 +0000

The iPod was a nice idea when it first came out but now there are so many different models that it’s quite confusing at first glance.

The ipod reviews are really no better as they tend to go into incredible detail about minor things that nobody’s really that bothered about but at least they list the full technical specifications should you want them.

Basically there are three different iPods. The nano is the baby of the bunch and basically aimed at people who just want an MP3 player although it will also play videos. The shuffle is basically the same thing but without the screen. The original iPod is a larger version of the nano but with a whole lot more memory which means that you could load your entire CD collection; personally I don’t really see a place for this model these days. Finally there is the iPod touch which is probably the best one to go for as it has by far the best facilities available; get the the one with the largest amount of memory that you can afford as you can use this to play videos and they just eat up memory.

But why get an iPod anyway? There are much cheaper versions of the nano, original and shuttle around (think around 90% cheaper) but the iPod touch is largely unique for the moment and is worth getting.

Is document management worth doing?

Arnold — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 10:12:16 +0000

Between one thing and another I ended up becoming something of an expert on the in-house document management system over a number of years.

Are they worth doing though? Well, at the outset I’d have said that it was a definite “no”. After all, there’s quite a bit of work to be done before you get any benefit from such a system. Whilst it’s clearly a good idea to be able to find things and certainly handy to be able to pull up the documents onscreen rather than hunting through a whole bunch of files to find something, there’s quite an effort to go through before you reach that stage. For one thing, it takes time to enter a document into the system with a minute or two to scan documents and adding all the meta-information in the form of dates, titles, keywords and so on.

Moreover there’s the problem that you don’t get any of the advantages for a few months (how long the delay is depends on your business) so you’re plugging away for ages before you can really see why. Sure, you could process all the historical documents and get the advantages sooner but few people have the time, money or inclination to do that.

Once you get over that hump you soon wonder how you did without the system. The only problem then is that it becomes increasingly difficult to find documents that predate the system which for many means a period of a few months more ’til those historical documents cease to be quite so relevant.

So, very worthwhile doing but put some thought into how you’ll motivate staff to enter details for the several months it takes before the system becomes one of those “can’t do without it” systems.

Doctoring photos

Does DIY give you the necessary quality for printing?

Arnold — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 09:31:34 +0000

Over the last 10 years we’ve all become very much DIY printers for all kinds of things that would previously have been the exclusive province of professional printers, but should DIY always be the only option that’s considered?

It’s certainly true that the software available these days is right up there with that which professional printers would use in pretty much every circumstance. The home-use page setting software of today is way beyond the capabilities of the professional page setting software of a few years back and most word processors are pretty much up to that standard too these days. Moreover, there’s the major plus point that doing it yourself means that the page looks just like you want it to ie there’s none of the interpretation that professionals apply to your ideas.

However, when you print it out it’s a whole different matter. Everything from business cards to wedding invitations is turned out on home printers these days and usually on inappropriately light card and with none of the embossing that gives such things the appropriate level of impressiveness. Usually that printing choice is down to a combination of perceived cost and perceived speed but neither really stand up. For reasonable volume there’s little difference in the cost since your own printer ink is pretty expensive and moreover you’re getting better quality printing, paper and potentially embossing too for the price. Whilst it’s true that you’re never going to get the stuff back in your hand immediately if you use a printer, for the likes of business and invitation cards the day or two delay is hardly going to be an issue, is it?

At the very least you should consider professional printing for specialty printing jobs.

Souping up the performance of your website… for free

Arnold — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 18:43:30 +0000

Although you can pay a whole lot of money to some consultant to soup up your website, there’s an awful lot of free seo tools knocking around which can go a long way to checking out what needs doing (if anything).

Free doesn’t mean low quality either. There are excellent tools around to analyse the keywords on your site and compare it with those of your competitors. In years gone by that would have cost your serious money but these days very good tools are around to do it free.

In fact there are a whole raft of excellent free tools. The problem is working out what to do with them, what the results mean and what you can do to correct any problems that are thrown up. Take, for example, the incoming links. Although more is better, how many is “enough”? That depends on what your competitors results are (you can use these tools on them as well as on your own site). If you don’t have “enough”, what do you do about it? That’s easy too: just subscribe to one of the many directory listings services and stand back as the incoming links start rolling in.

Just what IS a netbook anyway?

Arnold — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 11:45:40 +0000

When they first came out it was simple to tell a netbook from a notebook computer. The netbooks were much smaller (7″ screens were typical), didn’t have any hard disks and the batteries lasted for four or five hours compared to a typical two for a notebook.

Then they started putting out versions of the netbooks with hard disks and the screens started getting bigger and the definition became rather more difficult.

These days there’s quite an overlap in the things. Fairly low end “netbooks” come with 10″ screens and 250GB disks these days. Move up just a little and you can be talking in terms of 12″ screens and 7 hour battery life. Right now it seemed that the only difference was in terms of the battery life but even that’s becoming dodgy as what would previously have been called a notebook can sport 8 hours of battery life and have a processor that runs somewhat faster than low end laptops.

Coming soon is the final nail in the coffin ie the inclusion of a DVD drive in a “netbook”.

At the moment the only real definition seems to be one of price although even there there’s an increasing overlap in the prices of high end netbooks and low end notebooks.

Getting some custom software

Arnold — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 09:23:32 +0000

These days many small software firms specialise in niche markets essentially tailoring off the shelf software to the needs of companies within their niche. That works fine if your needs are fairly standard and it’s a very economical way to go but what if your needs don’t fit neatly into some vertical niche market?

That’s where custom software comes into play. With bespoke software basically you can ask for anything although obviously that flexibility comes with a cost and, sometimes, a substantial one.

However, regardless of the upfront price of your software solution, it’s worth considering the ongoing cost of maintenance and upgrades with bespoke software. Whilst with standard software it’s simply a matter of paying up for the latest upgrade, in the case of bespoke software you’ll generally need to specify your requirements as they change and, eventually, the software may need to be rewritten (allow for this cropping up after no more than 10 years).

Do you ever get attached to technology?

Arnold — Sun, 03 May 2009 20:11:41 +0000

Isn’t it odd how we can sometimes get particularly attached to a piece of technology?

I’m sure there are still a few people around who still fondly remember the Model T Ford which was the car that really started the motoring habit around the world. Just think that without that we’d not have McDonalds!

Even now I’d still quite fancy having my own PDP-8 since it was the first computer that I really got to know. Sure, it’s seriously outdated but even so. Would you believe a maximum memory of the equivalent of 48k bytes and 2MB of disc space was enough to support 11 users simultaneously?

However, even the humble compact flash card has a place in my heart if only because it’s so similar to the little memory cards that Mr Spock was forever shuffling in and out of the computer in Star Trek.

My current favourite item of technology is the Acer Aspire One that I’m typing this on now. It’s so cute that I’m expecting to keep it around for long after I would ordinarily have replaced it. This is the computer that really gives the phrase “portable computer” a proper meaning. Sure, it’s not so fast as its bigger siblings but it only adds a second to load times for the wordprocessor or whatever and, let’s face it, all computers have long since become far faster than we really need them to be. It wasn’t that many years ago that you’d never have thought that a computer would ever be fast enough to place full screen video but this little baby hasn’t a problem with it.

Isn’t it peculiar the technological items that we get attached to?

Specialised printers

Arnold — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 22:58:27 +0000

It used to be that specialised printers were exclusively the domain of the professionals but that’s not been the case for quite a long time now.

Commonplace are the photo printers which can roll off the prints that you’d ordinarily have had to go to the camera shop to have done and the prices for those are now so low that they make DIY a very cost effective and simple way to produce your holiday prints. Also moving into the mainstream are less common types such as the receipt printer which you’d normally encounter in supermarkets but which are handy add-ons for even the smallest business these days.

Although, in principle, you could buy one printer and use it for all these tasks clearly it’s a whole lot simpler to get the specialised printers for their specific tasks and it’s finally become a fairly economic option.

Isn’t memory technology confusing these days?

Arnold — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 10:52:03 +0000

In days gone by it was very easy to get “memory” for your camera it was all 35mm film so the only real choice was in the brand in regular shops.

These days though chances are you’ve gone digital and have a wealth of choice to make to find something that will both fit and work in your camera. There’s the old-timer compact flash which is still used in the very latest professional cameras because of it’s speed. Then there’s a whole range of SD cards and it’s far from obvious if these will work in your camera because some cameras only support up to 1GB (rarely indicated), others up to 2GB and then there’s the high capacity versions starting at 4GB and running up to 16GB at the moment which will actually work in some “normal” cameras too even if they don’t have the SDHC tag on them.

So watch what you’re lifting in the shop!