Ben Shephard

A few days ago I had a delivery of some gig tickets and I had to sign for them. The courier handed me a Windows mobile device to sign with a stylus and doing so it seemed strange to be using a clunky windows device the likes of which I used to own years ago. I was joking about this with someone at work today as the company i work for has just purchased a bunch of similar devices but I was told I shouldn’t knock it and I should embrace all technology.

Granted I probably do bash Microsoft a bit too much and that’s probably a bad thing but I used to embrace that technology. I’ve owned at least two windows mobile devices and in 2005/06 I even picked up a copy of visual studio and started writing apps for them in VB. I decided to get rid of my Dell Axim X51v PDA because it was just too limited in what it could do. I used to use it as a tomtom because that was what it was good at. Skype was good on occasion when I wanted to make skype calls on the go via wifi. Apart from that is was a £320 brick that spent most of it’s life in a draw.

I see that those kind of devices are pretty good for commercial hand held applications but I think that’s only because Microsoft are the only people targeting that market. The mobile market is fiercely competitive when it comes to smart phones but it seems that microsoft smart phones are fairly uncommon nowadays. The whole PDA market seems to have died a death because smartphones with 3g data connections are so much more practical. I’ve only ever seen windows mobile 6 on a few clunky smart phones but given the choice between that and an i-phone I think almost everyone went for an i-phone because they look good and the UI is much better.

Microsoft have released their latest breed of mobile OS to compete with the likes of Apple and Android but it seems they are so late to the market with their offering and people just don’t seem to be buying it. I don’t know a single sole who owns one of the new windows mobile devices.

The clunky gui of windows mobile 5/6 lends it’s self rather well to commercial applications where things have to be signed for on a screen. You just couldn’t do that with an android or apple device right now. I don’t know how well the latest breed of MS devices works in this situation but it seems windows mobile 5 is still the OS of choice for commercial use. Perhaps apple and android are missing a trick there.

As for windows on the pc it seems XP will never die. It’s been around for 8 years and I’ll bet it’ll still be on desks in another eight if not sixteen years. I’m not sure if this is a good thing or not. Perhaps MS are falling behind. It seems the only way they are making money is by the market dominance they have been building up over the last 20 years. Netbooks took off because they were lightweight cheap and simple and a lot of this was down to Linux but now there is little difference between a netbook and a laptop since Microsoft subsidised XP and windows7 basic for netbooks to push Linux out of the market and they seem to have succeeded as last time i went to buy a netbook there wasn’t one anywhere with Linux on it and the prices are on the way up towards that of a full size laptop too.

I don’t think I can’t say i haven’t embraced Microsoft because I did. The problem is that technology moves on and although Microsoft have eventually released new products they were late to market and highly flawed. Even the person who told me I should embrace all technology has said vista and 7 are rubbish. I needed to challenge myself with new things and the only way i could do that was to find something else that had something more to offer which was why I moved over to linux. I invested a lot of time and money using windows and windows mobile but the world has moved on since 2005. Perhaps I’m an early adopter but I think microsoft have reached their peak and are on the way back down now. Granted they still have a few areas that they dominate because they are the best at it but they are being out paced in other areas and they are clinging on using the strength they have built up over the years but they can only fight for so long. There are other alternatives out there and not just Linux and Apple. Haiku is one I’ve been meaning to try for a while. It’s designed to be compatible with BeOS who went bust and got bought up by Palm yeas ago but I’d always wanted to try BeOS back in the day but it was commercial and as a teenager I had no money.

I’d be more than happy to use a Mac but again cost is all that stops me. To me Mac owners are like people who own sports cars. All money and very fancy but if all your going to do is drive to the shops why bother. I can see why certain people use Macs because a lot of software for music and video production is only written for Mac.

I’d be more than happy to call myself a Mac user if only someone were willing to let me have one. I wouldn’t turn down the chance to play around with an old first generation i-mac. As for Microsoft if they did something new that was any good I’d be all over it like shit on velcro but they just haven’t. For me the only thing that is moving with the times and is accessible to me is open source.

My little sister bought an i-phone 3gs recently and I love it as a piece of hardware. It’s well built and feels solid and is nice to use but I’ve not had a chance to get used to the software but I have to admit I did consider getting one myself for a brief moment. Then I looked at the latest android devices and decided to get one of them instead because android makes things more accessible to me as a user.

I do embrace technology but show me something I’ve not seen before. Show me a windows powered i-pad style device that kicks the competition out of the market. Oh hang on there isn’t one but there working on it according to this news article. OK so they might be making one but will it be any good? time will tell but I’ll not keep my hopes up.

I don’t want to be a Linux fan boy but give me something worth embracing and I will welcome it with open arms but when I see stuff as old as windows mobile 5 still in use because it’s the only option it feels like time has stood still and that’s just not right in my mind. I don’t see a reason why that market will stay with WM5 if someone else comes up with something that does the job better for cheaper and I doubt it would take long to sort that out. The only reason I can suggest why it’s not already been done is that it’s such a small market but one well worth getting in to.

In short signing for those tickets reminded me of what I thought was a by-gone era but it seems it’s alive and well in a corner on it’s own. I just hope the the IT world doesn’t go the same way as the airline industry and end up going backwards like aviation did by grounding Concorde.

Anyway it’s high time I wasn’t here

Ben

Today has been a much more productive day. I’ve learned a thing or two and feel much better in general. So my soundtrack for the day is Happy Man by Seasick Steve. Enjoy.

Sometimes no matter how much effort you put in to something there comes a point when you have to give up. I’m not going to go into detail about the events of the last few days so as I have done before in those circumstances I have chosen a song that sums it all up. if the last few days had been more productive I’d have gone for REM’s the great beyond because it feels like I’ve been pushing elephants up stairs and keeping flowers in full bloom but sadly the elephant sat on me so I’ve had to go with pissing in the wind by badly drawn boy from the album disillusion. It’s one of my favourite tracks off that album so I’ll leave you with that.

Enjoy

I was just catching up on my podcasts tonight when I came across this song by Eric Idle that Linux Outlaws ended on in episode 156. It made me smile so thought I’d post it on here. Don’t hit play if you don’t like swearing.

Today has been an interesting day as far as scams go. At work a colleague of mine said his parents had received a phone call from someone claiming to be from Microsoft this morning saying that their computer was infected with something and that they would sort it out for free. I’ve never heard of a scam like that before but Microsoft wouldn’t know if any of their customers had malware on their machines and little would they care and they definitely wouldn’t bother going to the effort of ringing their customers to warn them.

It’s not often I’m on the receiving end of any of the common online scams that are always hitting the news. I can count the number of emails I’ve had fishing for my bank details on one hand. I suppose I’m relatively lucky but today I had a classic and one which I thought had died out years ago. I seem to remember it being called a 419 scam for some reason and commonly originated in Nigeria. Anyway to show what I mean here is the email I got while eating dinner today. If you want to know the detail of how this scam works go HERE for the Wikipedia article that explains it all.

STANDARD CHARTERED BANK OF GHANA,
ACCRA GHANA.

Mr Nana John

Should you know someone who for what ever reason is particularly susceptible to such scams perhaps the example I’ve posted can be used to help educate them.

Ben

= 5.6