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Raw Bytes Computer News KPBX FM 91.1 Radio National Public Radio Network Frank Delaney Producer Broadcast on Wednesday Morning 7:35 AM During Morning Edition Support Public Radio ! The Theater Of the Mind |
In computer news this week 03/10/2010 I saw
recently where a 1939 Batman comic book sold for over a million dollars .. but my favorite was Tarzan,
created by the novelist Edgar Rice Burroughs back in 1912 - a white man
raised by apes in the African jungle who had super strength and intelligence.
One of the wise things he would do sometimes was to climb a tall tree and
look around the jungle, to see what was happening, and to see what might be
coming. We need
to do this periodically in our pc world too; get up above the usual level of
turmoil and chaos and try to get a new perspective on where we are and
what’s coming down the technology line. Here’s some things
happening: Flashdrives
are getting bigger. Their
capacity has increased and their price has dropped over these few years, and
now you can buy a 32 Gb Sandisk Flashdrive for under $ 100. The
technology problem here now is that you can also buy an external hard disk
– Seagate or Western Digital – which will store 500 Gig –
for the same or lower price, with better backup software. So the question is
– do you want to pay for the convenience of having some of your data
on a device you can carry on a
keychain, or have all of your data backed up regularly on a larger sized
media that’s not quite as portable. Wireless mobile
computing is getting better and cheaper. Verizon offers Mobile Broadband,
which is a USB device flashdrive modem you can plug into any computer that
lets you access the web via their nationwide broadband network which
supposedly covers 90% of the country. Netbooks
are getting cheaper. You can buy a HP Netbook from
Verizon for as low as $ 99 with a 2 year mobile broadband contract. Costco is
selling netbooks at similar prices. But there
still is no good combination cell phone/netbook
available from any vendor. The PC
itself has become such an entertainment gaming/internet surfing device that
sometimes I wonder if people today know that it’s a computer. It kind
of reminds me of in the early days of pc computing where you’d see a little
calculator attached to the keyboard of an IBM pc, as if they didn’t
know that the entire computer was a calculator, and that there’s been
some kind of calculator built into all version of Windows since the start. And the
future of pc computing is facing the biggest change ever – with the
concept of cloud computing - using computer software and resources on some
online company servers – with one of the major companies now being
Google. So your
computer resources – the server and the IT staff – are somewhere
up in the clouds. To access your
business data in this framework you can use less powerful computers –
netbooks and portables – to access your data and to get your work done.
And most important – you don’t have to pay for the office suite
software associated with Microsoft office. Microsoft’s position
now is that cloud computing raises and lot security and confidentially
issues, and it does. So
that’s some of the things I see from the top of this tree
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For Raw Bytes This is Frank Delaney (C) 2009 MTA Micro
Technology Associates http://www.mtamicro.com/kpbx.html PO Box 31522 Spokane, Wa 99223-1522 (509)624-7230 |
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