Hardware upgrades can be a blast. Slide 2GB more RAM in your machine and everything just works faster and smoother. Updating a laptop or desktop with an SSD (solid-state drive), however, can be tricky and not so rewarding, as I am finding.
Anyone with the remotest interest in ICT development will have noticed the battle raging at the "bottom of the pyramid," where competing initiatives have been vying for the hearts, minds and dollars of schoolchildren and education ministries the developing world over. This particular battle is being largely fought by Intel and OLPC (One Laptop Per Child), once partners but now sparring in opposite corners after months of wrangling led to an acrimonious split earlier this year.
Solid-state disks (SSD) are probably some of the most talked-about new gadgets of late. They easily distinguish themselves from the mechanical hard drives of the Jurassic period because they have no moving parts. Like USB drives, they use nonvolatile flash memory to store data, but SSDs are wrapped in an enclosure the size of a 2.5-inch mechanical laptop drive and have a SATA interface for an easy connection to the internals of your portable.
You may very well prefer to postpone the task of refreshing your fleet of desktop systems and monitors, an exercise that can be both expensive and time-consuming. But inevitably, machines break down or your needs change, so you have to bite the bullet.
What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away. Such has been the conventional wisdom surrounding the Windows/Intel (aka Wintel) duopoly since the early days of Windows 95. In practical terms, it means that performance advancements on the hardware side are quickly consumed by the ever-increasing complexity of the Windows/Office code base. Case in point: Microsoft Office 2007, which, when deployed on Windows Vista, consumes more than 12 times as much memory and nearly three times as much processing power as the version that graced PCs just seven short years ago, Office 2000.
I guess calling them MIDs is better than calling them unlaptops, or smart nonphones, but not by much.
Multi-core chip rivals AMD and Intel have been beating their chests as of late, but to what end, I wonder, as developers labor to keep up.
Now that loose SSDs (solid state drives) are available, you may be wondering how best to take advantage of the technology. Here's a breakdown of where retrofitting current machines with solid state could reap worthwhile rewards.
Architectural traits reaching back to Pentium remain present in the Intel-powered servers of today. The limitations of those servers aren't likely to be noticed as long as the routine of IT and commercial server buyers is to add capacity by scaling out, purchasing new two-socket servers. But the time will come when adding a rack server, or a rack of servers, is no longer the wise person's path to increased capacity. Smart planning will lead you to handle bigger workloads without more servers.
Ten years ago, every frequent-flying, executive-platinum mobile professional required a desktop PC back at the office and a laptop for the road. "Ultra-portables" or extreme mini computers were an expensive and optional luxury for serious enthusiasts or big shots with expense accounts. But in the last year, all that has changed.
Apple's penchant for producing products with batteries that are not swappable by users brings up a really interesting point - should consumers blindly accept such a strategy?
If you've been waiting with bated breath for XP SP3, you can start breathing normally now. It changes so little in XP that you won't even notice it's there. But hidden and underneath the hood, as I'll explain, there are a few worthy changes.
The One Laptop Per Child mishegas has hit the boiling point, and the hiss of steamed "Give One/Get None" donors has finally gotten the OLPC group's attention.
First, let me say I am a big fan of One Laptop Per Child, at least as a concept. Connecting the developing world's children to the Internet in a seamless and low-cost way is a great idea.
Steve Jobs is, among many other things, the great denier. Second mouse buttons, floppy drives, 56-kbps modems--for decades, he's been perfectly willing to release producrs that lack one or more features that are standard equipment on everyone else's computers if he thinks they're unnecessary or offend his design principles or aesthetic sense.
As I write this it's a little after noon Eastern Time on January 15. I'm sitting in front of my computer (a Mac of course) watching two different live blogs coming from people watching the Steve Jobs keynote at Macworld 2008. I'm watching to see what, if any, "big" announcements Steve will make.
Promises broken, contracts torn up, splashy CES announcements hastily canceled. It was a nasty bit of business all right -- and no, I'm not talking about Warner Brothers' sudden decision to ditch the HD-DVD format in favor of Blu-ray. I'm talking about Intel's abrupt departure from the One Laptop Per Child project, six months after signing on.
As this year comes to a close, AMD executives won't be sorry to put 2007 behind them. Battered by rising debt, shrinking market share and mounting financial losses, AMD is counting on a comeback in 2008. But can the struggling chip maker make good on its promises to customers and investors that better times lie ahead?
When it comes to the "next big thing", I'm usually pretty skeptical. (It's from all those years I've spent trying to get gear to work as advertised.) But in 2008, we will see some long-promised technologies - like the connected home, truly smart "smartphones", and environmentally friendly tech - start to bloom. And even if they don't live up to all the hype, they'll make life a lot more interesting.
In late October, a buddy from my MacWeek days e-mailed me with this half-joking dig: "Apple's worth more than IBM. The Mac wins!!"
