There is going to be a lot said about Steve Jobs in the coming days, but I would just say two things.
1. Jobsian – an approach to product development that was singularly successful and others aspire to.
2. Watch his 2005 Stanford commencement address and be inspired.
Cloud is the key word on the Internet these days. Everyone gets excited about Google, Amazon and Apple for what they give you for quite small amounts of money. However there is something smaller – free. Who gives Cloud for free? Well Microsoft does, as they offer 25GB of storage with SkyDrive. So why are we not raving about it? Well because it is stuck behind the most appalling UI you have ever seen and only has limited integration with Live Mesh to allow only up to 5GB to be used by that service, leavin 20GB completely unused.
However news come about an update…
Microsoft tells me that the June 2011 update for SkyDrive will go live on Monday, June 20, so it should be available by the time you read this or soon will be. Reviewers were not given early access to the service, so I was only able to watch a live remote demo at the time of this writing. But as one of the few people who actually uses SkyDrive pretty extensively, Im excited by what Ive seen and by whats been implied for future improvements. SkyDrive has always been more promise than reality, but this update is going to go a long ways towards fixing that. I cant wait to see whats next.
This update seems to be giving us a way better UI, that looks like it will make it useful to actually sign up for the service. So remember one thing… you can use any email address as a Passport (such an old word) for accessing SkyDrive. Whatever you do, I do not recommend that Cross scripting hack hell that is Hotmail particularly as a logon for SkyDrive.
Can’t wait to try the new SkyDrive Out.
I tweet and have done for over 4 years. Some of you may have found this and other blogs by tweet. It has really changed the amount of ‘connected’ness that I have with everyone I know and some that I don’t. The following video is a bit of an advert but it pretty much sums Twitter up. I particularly love Snoop Dog’s comments. Enjoy and tweet yourself.
There has been quite a bit of talk about this video and how amazing it is to see Windows upgrade from 1.0 through to the present Windows 7. However the narrator and originator of the video pushes the view that it is so commendable that Microsoft has maintained ‘compatibility’ for over 23 years.
If you use Mac, then you have absolutely no hope of doing this and that is not just because of the changes of processor from 68000 to PowerPC and then to Intel, but also because fundamentally MacOS is not OSX. Apple has taken great pains to move its users through several major step changes in platform architecture to improve the user experience and LEAVE the old behind. Through this, in my view, they have always ensured that they give their customers a great experience that builds on the latest features and not the oldest. They do not expend effort now making sure that software produced 10 or more years ago still works for corporate users.
You can see where I am going now with this… think about how much better Windows 7 would be if Microsoft put all its effort on the new features and ensuring programme compatibility with just the last decade and not 23 years+.
There is actually little business case support for Microsoft in keeping ancient software that does not attract revenue still working and actually holds them back in my view. I think Microsoft have begun to understand this, which is why they are finally (albeit slowly) making it clear that they really only support now and yesterday, and not the day before yesterday… so now Windows XP is finally dying and is almost dead (2014 if not already) and the newest software from Microsoft like Windows Live and IE9 will run on Vista or later only. This should improve things all round.
How old are your oldest software apps?
Us mobile people like all the newest gear, particularly when it either speeds things up, saves precious battery life or makes our equipment more robust. SSDs do all of that, however it is bad when they can affect our information security.
I have gone on record stating that for you and your customer’s piece of mind (as well as some laws), that you should fully encrypt your hard drives, recommending that the small business owners uses Truecrypt… a very effective solution. Now comes the (relatively) obvious news that you need to be wary of SSDs
If you’re in a business that handles sensitive information, or are just conscientious about your privacy, you might want to read this study on SSD erasure. As you know, there are ways of erasing traditional magnetic hard drives that are more or less totally irreversible. Writing all zeros, writing garbage, zeroing again, and so on. After a few cycles it’s fresh and clean.
So get the SSD encrypted as soon as you. How much this effects people who have Hybrids like my Momentus XT is probably minimal, but STILL present as you do not know exactly what data ends up on the 4GB Flash part. So Encrypt it now, and encrypt it early.
When you are travelling through another country and you are afflicted like I am by the English disease – inability to really speak new languages, it is a real bind but generally you muddle through with the help of obliging friends and colleagues, and very patient locals. This is fine but then you are faced with trying to figure out exactly how the PAYG 3G Broadband works, how you buy it, how you top up etc. You find yourself scouring through websites in the evening trying to figure out what ‘découvrir cette offre’ means, generally by copying and pasting into various translation services.
This is all a little clumsy. This is where my new found conversion to Google Chrome comes in, as it has a really good feature where it will detect that you are viewing a website in a different language to the settings on your PC and then offer to translate the text in situ.
It actually will show the text in the web page exactly where the original language text was placed. Not only that but it will also pop-up the original language when you mouse over the text, further aiding your identification of context to go along with the converted text (to sort out that engagement is actually contract in this context!). It will even keep context of your selection through this website, thus presenting the entire site for the session in your selected language. This is an absolutely fantastic feature that I use all the time and on its own could justify moving to Google Chrome (as well as the speed, auto-update, and sync capabilities). Obviously it does not work with Flash or graphic embeds, but I am sure that the Google engineers are working on this.
So fire up your current browser and download Chrome, you can run it all in parallel with your existing browser to ensure compatibility with your specific sites but I find that Chrome works with all of the sites I access without problems.
Virgin Media is drawing attention to an anachronism of today’s world – the restrictions in files sizes in emails.
UK ISP Virgin Media Business has revealed that 69% of office workers cannot send or receive emails larger than 10MB MegaBytes in size, which rises to 89% for messages larger than 15MB. These restrictions mean that many people are unable to share large documents, slideshows and video content by email, with big messages often bouncing back.
via ISP Virgin Media Business UK Calls for End to Email File Attachment Bottlenecks − ISPreview UK.
It is not just the file limits though that need to change, it is also the mailbox size limits that many companies are keeping at incredibly low levels of 200MB to 400MB. All this has meant is that employees offload the email to local file storage otherwise known as the black hole. All that body of information is mostly lost to a company after that, and can even be lost by the employee because this storage can be easily lost, destroyed or stolen. In parallel with increasing file sizes, companies should take a leaf out of Google’s book and give employees almost unlimited storage so that all of the email keeps within the company managed realm, and not lost on the 4GB memory stick that was a freebie from the last conference they went to. By the way, unlimited storage is currently running at between 7GB and 25GB … just a hint there. It is also important that employees are taught email/communication management techniques as well as providing archival capabilities where it is possible.
You are on the road with your ultra-portable with its resolution impaired screen and you need a little bit more space to work on multi-documents (particularly Excel!) and you are stuck as this office (or hotel!) does not have a spare monitor to either use as your main screen or extend your desktop. So what do you do?
Well you may have heard of Display Link, it is a set of technologies implemented into hardware and software which allows you to hook up a second (or more) screen to a laptop over USB. This is good where you are port constrained, or where you have a docking station implementing the technology which then allows you to hook up using only one cable – the USB. Well they have now come up with an alternative for those who also travel with an iPad. They have released an iPad app that, in conjunction with software on your PC, allows you to use the iPad over WiFi as a second screen.
Now that sounds a bit screwy but it actually works in a passable way as long as you are not looking for a really dynamic display or trying to handle video. It is generally good enough for document editing and creation but it does have some noticeably lag and screen corruption when the screen is being updated. Of course, there are some other downsides.
Firstly there is a small processor bump on the laptop. Secondly you have to be on the same WiFi network which if you do not have access to WiFi is going to be a killer. Thirdly, if that WiFi is a bit poor or congested then the connectivity to the iPad is not maintained leading to freezes or disconnections. This is an early release of the software so maybe it will improve, but they cannot make up for the lack of good wifi. Note that these issues are because it is a software solution running over WiFi, I have heard good things of DisplayLink hardware solutions connected via USB.
All in all, if you have no other choice and you need the real estate, and you can give it the bandwidth then it is a workable solution. You are always going to be better off with a full proper monitor.
The App is available from the Apple iTunes store for £1.19/$1.99 (introductory price)
A long important requirement for me has been the ability to have the perfect web working environment on whatever machine I happen to be using – the netbook, the ultralight laptop and the clunky desktop replacement at home. I have long been using Mozilla Firefox with initially Google Bookmarks, but have since moved on to a combination of Xmarks and the Delicious extension for Firefox. Fairly recently however I have been moving away from Firefox for no other reason than to have a little spice… in fact I have been using Internet Explorer because of some corporate reasons, and Google Chrome because my main hosting provider for services has become Google, and for some reason Google likes to require Google Chrome for some of the nicer features.
A big problem for me has been getting all my extensions and saved passwords securely on all of these browser instances and I have had reasonable success with both Firefox and Internet Explorer, and in the last few days with Google Chrome. Safe to say, I believe I can now use whatever browser on all of my machines with complete access to all of my bookmarks and other browser stored data.
What is a problem however is making sure that all of my extensions for these browsers is on all of my machines. This has been a manual process but now comes this news: Google Chrome Working on Extension Syncing Feature | Webmonkey | Wired.com.
Now if this sees the light of day, this could start the push for me to change my default browser to Google Chrome. After all, Google Chrome seems way faster than anything else I have…
I have blogged before about using the Microsoft Mesh software for keeping multiple computers in sync so that I can pick up any of my machines and pick up exactly where I left off with all of my most important (actually all of them) files with me regardless of which machine I have in front of me. I also use it to ensure that if I do lose any of these machines then I am safe in my knowledge that I have access to all (almost to be pedantic) of my files still.
Well this week I moved one of my netbooks over to Windows 7 which because it had XP meant that it was a clean install. Of course, as part of the installation I set up Microsoft Mesh and selected the normal folders to pull down onto the machine. Well three days later, the sync had not finished and was looking like it was stalled. A quick check through the logs showed an error WinError 18, with the associated text missing file. Checking around I found that the Live Desktop was at 5GB used (which it was not before) and this immediately sprang an idea in my head. Mesh is pretty dumb at times.
It has always been the case that you could setup sync and exceed your online storage and just ignore it. In fact, Paul Thurrott blogged about it in the early days but what was missed was the effect of exceeding your storage, something that I only saw when I also checked my Broadband data usage through my ISP’s nice dashboard. When the online storage is full, Mesh continues to attempt to sync and in this approach it uses bandwidth over and over again so it creates network traffic needlessly. This is a bit poor, particularly when this also seems to hit the processor usage of the machines involved.
Removing the online data store usage of Live stopped the whole repeated sync and suddenly everything is happy again. The world is good, and I am no longer frustrated with the never ending sync.
So come on Microsoft, fix Mesh and give it better behaviour when online storage is exceeded. Additionally, why do you keep it at 5GB? What is wrong with integrating this with the 25GB Live Skydrive?