Presidential Ramblings

 

Issue 0.4

September 2002

 

Every summer for the past ten years or so my family has gathered in a cottage in southwestern Michigan. This started with the mid-western "core" of the family and over the years expanded to include everyone from my parents, my two brothers, assorted children and now my granddaughters. In recent years we outgrew one cottage when one in-law and girlfriends from two different generations helped swell our ranks.

The fact that we all get along as well as we do is the real miracle because at some levels my brothers and I are so different you would be amazed we come from a common gene pool. I am the oldest and have always been the most technically savvy. My next brother was always the most conservative, collected coins when young and is now an investment banker. My youngest brother, too young to be a hippy in the sixties/seventies, was the free thinker who is now a concerned parent of twin teenagers. Our tastes in computers are, of course, influenced by these differences.

Those who have been following these columns know that I lost count of the number of computers in the house many years ago. Two years ago I decided to make life easier by moving three or four machines (the exact number varies) to the basement in what I call the "server farm". A telemarketer once asked if I used a modem. I told her that my home-office looks like the control room of the Death Star. She then said "well then I guess you have a CD-ROM drive."

If my middle brother uses a computer at work, he hides the fact very well. At home they have an old Macintosh--one with a sealed case so no one can fiddle with the insides. For connectivity it has an expired AOL account. His kids somehow managed to get thru school with only minor scarring from this lack of technology.

Over the years my youngest brother has owned several computers starting with an XT clone many years ago. He just bought his third or forth computer, a 2 point something gigahertz Pentium 4 with a nice flat screen monitor and a scanner. Unfortunately, he does not understand this one any better than the XT. He wants to scan pictures, and view and edit pictures from his new digital camera, but he expects everything to be perfectly intuitive and to "just work". Golly, what a concept! When I suggest he read the manuals, he quite rightly asks, "What manuals?" Since they exist only on the computer, they might as well not exist. So then I suggest a visit to a nice large book store. His response is a groan and, of course, he is not alone.

You know, what he needs is a user group like DACS! (And you were sure I'd never tie this in.) A few meetings at the Graphics SIG and he would be scanning and editing in short order. Look in the new issue of PC Magazine and you'll find John C. Dvorak's column on this very topic. If you don't subscribe, you can read his column online at http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,427969,00.asp.

This was the first of Ed Heare's "Industry" talks that I have had the pleasure of attending. I agreed with just about everything he said. (Although I think the media coverage of security problems in Microsoft products has greatly exaggerated the problem when compared to security problems in competing products--but that is a topic for another column.) Ed's assessment of "value" in today's computer products is right on. Since I'm not a gamer, I've never found a need for blazing 3-D graphics performance. This Word document looks just fine in 2 dimensions on a (relatively) flat CRT screen. And, while I wish these words would appear on the screen faster (with less effort on my part), I'm quite happy that nothing is jumping around on the screen right now. On the other hand, I do have one machine that serves as my DVD player. In that machine I do want fast video, but displaying video is not the same as rendering an explosion in a computer game.

During Ed's talk it occurred to me that hardware reviews in magazines that purport to cover the "most popular" machines will be weighted to whatever large corporations are buying at the time. This will be influenced by such things as each company's budget at that moment, the economy, what the computer company-- Dell, Compaq/HP, or IBM--is pushing at that moment, and--most important--the opinion of the person placing the order. In any case, the configurations written up in the magazines are seldom the best "value" for the home buyer. I think this is particularly true for notebook computers (I still want to call them laptops) where the "gee whiz" factor lives on. While there has been no real innovation or even enlightened design in desktop computers, laptops offer the designer an opportunity to shine. My taste runs to a light weight with a screen large enough for me to read. Since I carry my laptop around a good deal, it needs to be durable. And of course I want good but not necessarily fabulous performance at a favorable price. My current laptop is a Winbook X1 (www.winbook.com). This machine is never included in the magazine reviews because it is not "popular" enough. It is suitably thin, has a 13" screen, combo DVD-CD/RW drive, weighs about six pounds with the power brick, and has an aluminum case. This was the only machine I could find at the time with a metal case for less than two grand--but you won't find it in the reviews.

Hope you're having a great summer--ski season will be here soon!

--Jim Scheef
dacsprez@dacs.org


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