Financial & Travel Musings

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.

Popularity: 1% [?]

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).

Popularity: 6% [?]

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?

Popularity: 30% [?]