Technology – Page 9 – Graham Chastney

30 years of technology heritage

Today I read a news report on the BBC and decided to go out into the garage to commemorate the occasion.

In the stack of boxes out there one box has this visible on the side:

For those of you who’ve watched the news then you probably know that this is the side of the box for a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. This is, as the picture shows, the 48K version, before I go any further let’s just stop there and think about that, this machine had 48K of memory.

I did think about going the whole hog and plugging it in, but after considering all of the messing about with a television I decided against it, especially as I realised that I no longer had a tape player to allow me to load in any of the programs.

What I settled on was a bit of an unboxing, so here are the pictures:

The ZX Spectrum was my first experience of personal computing so hold a special place in my memory. It’s difficult to explain to a generation that has so much technology embedded in everything that they do how significant this little box is. But this box opened my eyes to a world of software possibilities. It’s the rise of software that has been the defining feature of the 30 years since the release of this box.

There were also some games on tape cassette. I don’t remember all of the games but I do know we spent hours playing pool and jetpack (the one in the glare at the bottom):

Yes this really was a lot of fun:

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ZX Spectrum Pool

This little lot represents a significant investment from my paper-round money, birthday and Christmas presents. I think that’s one of the reasons why I can’t part with it all.

I wonder what another 30 years will bring?

Dilbert: Technology Planning

Over the next few days I will be spending most of my time in Technology Planning activities. It’s nice to see that Dilbert has a take on it this morning:

Hopefully the people reading my reports are little more understanding Smile .

The Economic Power of the Internet in the U.K.

It makes a change to see the U.K. at the top of a league table, especially one that relates to economic factors, but that’s where we were this week in figures released the the Boston Consulting Group:

In the developed markets of the G-20, the Internet economy will grow approximately 8 percent annually; in the developing markets, it will grow more than twice as fast—at an average annual rate of 18 percent. Argentina and India will grow the fastest, at 24 percent and 23 percent a year, respectively. The leading developed markets—Italy and the U.K.—will grow about 12 percent and 11 percent a year, respectively

And:

In 2010, the Internet economy in the U.K. accounted for the highest percentage of national GDP, followed by South Korea (7.3 percent) and China (5.5 percent). In each of these three countries, the Internet economy would rank among the top six industry sectors.

Although not shown in the press release the GDP figure for the UK is 8.3%.

The interesting thing is that the report expects that by 2016 the "Internet economy" will account for 12.4% of the U.K. GDP.

In other words:

The economic impact of the Internet is getting bigger—just about everywhere—and it already has an enormous base. In the U.K., for example, the Internet’s contribution to 2010 GDP is more than that of construction and education.

The report also states that in the U.K. we do far more online retailing than any of the other G-20 countries.

I have mixed feelings about this information.

One of my feelings is puzzlement. I see the Internet used all day by all sorts of people, but it’s very low-key. Perhaps that’s just the British way, we are best when we are just getting on with things. The infrastructure is dominated by BT who, let’s face it, never give over the impression that they are a world leader. To quote a friend of mine "Hacked off with BT-Each time we get 10 days from our Infinity available date it slips 3 months." It’s also a country where communities are having to make things happen for themselves.

Another feeling is concern. Is it actually a good thing to have our economy ahead of others in this respect, does it just show that our manufacturing and other industries are so weak? That said, the level of growth would suggest that this is something real and not just a statistical quirk.

The final feeling I’m going to cover was pride. People like to paint the U.K. as a bit old and bit stuffy when actually we love new things and revel in change when we are at our best. In a world of Generation Flux I suspect we might do quite well.

My Tools: CrashPlan

Like many families the Chastney’s are producing data at a formidable rate. I have a son who edits music and a daughter who is into photography, add to that a reasonably sized music collection, my photographs and a bucket load of other documents and there’s over 150GB of important stuff. (Did I tell you about the days when we used to argue about people wanting 20MB hard disks (yes I did mean Mega Bytes)).

That’s where CrashPlan comes in by creating a safe remote continuous backup.

Getting all of this data copied to a location away from the house has always been an aim for a number of reasons. The main reason being that there are so many situations where a backup solution in the house wouldn’t be sufficient to protect it – fire, flood, etc.. There’s also the added advantage of being able to access data that you haven’t taken with you if you need to. CrashPlan Central provides a remote backup location that is always there to write to and to read from.

Another great thing about CrashPlan is that it doesn’t matter where the devices are. My son is at university and living away from home during term time. Because he has internet access all of his work is still backed-up and protected whether he’s at home or at university.

The CrashPlan agent runs all of the time on all of the devices and is continuously backing up the data. This means that we don’t really think about it making a backup it just happens.

We’ve had need to recover some files too and that works a treat also.

There are a number of other features of CrashPlan that are really good, but I don’t really use them.

The pricing is pretty good to. I use the CrashPlan+ Unlimited Family which covers the household for a few pounds a month.

Comparing Apples and Apple

I promise I’ll write something more thought provoking soon, but I couldn’t resist this infographic:

Thank Mashable

Seasonal Gratitude

It’s been a great year for infographics, almost too good (they’re starting to become a bit formulaic). At this seasonal time I thought I would highlight one to make us grateful:

(I’d link back to original, but I don’t know where it came from originally. I got it from here)

Email is broken (and my embarrassment)

I thought I would connect together two things that are in the news this week:

Symantec highlight that SPAM has fallen to 70% of all emails.
Atos boss Thierry Breton feels the need to defend his internal email ban.

I’m not going to give much more comment than to point out that if in any other arena 70% of something was clear rubbish (and much of the other 30% was less than valuable) we would be up in arms.

If 70% of the music I listened to was hiss – I wouldn’t listen.
If 70% of the TV that I watched was white blur – I wouldn’t watch.
If 70% of the post coming through my door went straight in the bin – I would ask the post office to stop delivering.
If 70% of all of the words in all of the documents I read where rubbish – I’d throw the document back to the author (something I do have to do from time to time).

And that’s not even accounting for all of the inappropriate use of email.

This is the point where I have to admit to a classic email mistake last week which, to a certain extent, just demonstrates the brokenness of email.

We run relaxation days at work where someone comes into the building, takes over a meeting room, and provides massage and other relaxation services. We get invited to these events via email.

For some reason I clicked on reply-to-all rather than just reply.

This resulted in me sending an email to the whole of the building, several hundred people, with the immortal words:

"have you got any slots left for back, neck and shoulder massage?"

You can imagine my embarrassment.

I’m with Thierry, let’s find better ways of communicating.

Because it’s Friday: Wind Powered Cheese

There’s a famous cheese in these parts called Garstang Blue.

It’s described like this:

A unique, rich, mellow and indulgent blue cheese with an open body and a velvety, smooth and creamy texture.

Creamy white in colour with blue vein radiating from the rind. It is best served at room temperature.

What it doesn’t say in the description is that the main source of power for the production of this cheese is a huge wind turbine right next to the factory.

The turbine has become a bit of a landmark because it sits in the middle of what is quite a flat area stretching for miles around.

Anyway, the purpose of the post, I love to see ‘how it was made’ videos and here’s the one for the turbine:

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Dewlay Turbine

So that’s how you get wind powered cheese.

(If you’re wondering where I sit on the Wind Turbine debate – I like them!)

Are tablets already changing the workplace?

I regularly have people telling me that tablets are already radically changing the workplace.

I’m a sceptic about the speed of change.

I am absolutely convinced that the workplace will change radically over the next 10 years, and that tablet type devices will have a significant part to play in enabling that new way of working.

Where I’m not convinced is in the rate of change.

I get particularly sceptical when people’s starting evidence is the number of these devices that have been sold. My retort is that games consoles have also sold millions, so why wouldn’t they be having an even bigger impact on the workplace? I’m not really being serious when I say that, but sometimes I just like to be provocative.

A recent study, does suggest that my scepticism might have some grounding:

A much greater number of tablet owners are using these devices at home rather than on the move, a new European study has found.

CCS Insight, the research firm, polled 4,500 people who had already purchased a slate such as Apple’s iPad in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK.

When looking at home usage, 79% of consumers used their tablet in the living room, reaching 60% for the bedroom, rising to 70% in France and the UK. Another 38% did so in the kitchen and 39% did so elsewhere in the house.

In other words, the tablet is a convenient home entertainment device for most people, a role, at which, they excel. They are used in this role a lot as well:

In all, the study discovered that more than 90% of the sample used their slate for at least an hour a day, hitting 95% in the UK.

More specifically, the British panel posted the largest average usage time, on 2.8 hours a day, and 11% utilised the web via this route for over five hours on a daily basis.

That’s a lot of usage for a device that is being used in ‘spare time’. So the people who should be worried are the other people making their money out of home entertainment. There impact on the workplace is limited by their lack of usage outside the home.

Just to be clear though, I’m not saying that the tablet isn’t going to enable a radical change to the way we work, I’m just sceptical about the rate of change.

In the words of Bill Gates:

"We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten."

Microsoft Future Vision 2011

Lots of people posted about this last week. I was on holiday so didn’t, but thought I would for anyone who hasn’t seen this.

The video shows a Microsoft perspective on the 5-10 year future of how "people get things done at work, at home and on the go".

It’s an update to a concept video that I posted about back in 2009, so is as interesting as a comparison as it is for it’s current content.

The interesting part for me is the view of how many people will still be working within an office at a desk, and how many people will still be travelling the globe to get work done.

I was also interested by the limited use of gestures, but judge for yourself: