theOlster.net

Slashdot is quoting News.com:

“‘E-mail is, like, soooo dead’ is the headline at News.com, where a piece looks at youth attitudes towards communication mediums. A group of teenage internet business entrepreneurs confessed that they really only use email to ‘talk to adults’. Primarily, these folks are using social networks to communicate. ‘More and more, social networks are playing a bigger role on the cell phone. In the last six to nine months, teens in the United States have taken to text messaging in numbers that rival usage in Europe and Asia. According to market research firm JupiterResearch, 80 percent of teens with cell phones regularly use text messaging. Catherine Cook, the 17-year-old founder and president of MyYearbook.com, was the lone teen entrepreneur who said she still uses e-mail regularly to keep up with camp friends or business relationships. Still, that usage pales in comparison to her habit of text messaging. She said she sends a thousand text messages a month.’”

If my Dad wants to ask me a quick question, he might send an email, but usually he just sends a text. On the other hand if he wants to ask a more detailed question or send a document then he would definitely email me - for this reason alone I could not work without email! The thing is that we now have such a wide choice of mediums for communicating electronically, rather than one medium being more popular than another, all mediums are being used with a preference for one or another based upon the level of communication/interaction required. So, back to the kids, all this really shows is a preference towards a certain level of detail required for communication with friends, rather than the insinuation that email is not the future…

That said, email must evolve. The basic technology behind email has remained the same for so long now (since 1970’s/early 1980’s) that I’m supprised we’ve not had many problems. Oh, hang on a minute, SPAM!!! The next evolution of the email technology needs to happen, and it needs to solve all spamming issues. A tall order, I know, but we must have the technological skills to be able to solve this now. The biggest problem would be the adoption of the new technology (if it could be designed), since we’re already tied into a huge existing system which would require extensive server and client rebuilds… But it must be possible right?

Over the last year or so my internet browsing habits have changed considerably, mostly because of Wikipedia. Before this change started to take place, my starting point when approaching the world wide web was to visit the Google homepage. Google, probably the most used and effective search engine in the world provides listings for virtually every web site on the planet - but she has her dark side too.

I started to become a little dissatisfied with the results that Google was producing. They are now so riddled with adverts and that distraction feels a little force-fed. The results were also becoming more inaccurate, for example the top twenty highest ranked pages for any given search appear to be attributed to the sites who make the most effort to engage in ‘Black Hat Search Engine Optimization’ rather than the sites which most deserve to be ranked based on the search engine’s criteria. That is not to say that because I think these techniques are wrong, that they are not inevitable. The internet is as much about marketing as it is an information resource.

Which leads me on to Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia. Or for me not really an encyclopedia as much as just an information resource. After discussing Wikipedia with a friend of mine studying Medicine, he admitted using the website as the first port of call for the answer to a quick question - whether this related to his course or not. We discussed the pros and cons of the website as a resource, as well as the influence of vandals within the community. Our pros ran along the lines of constant praise based on how great is was to have a one-stop source of concise information dealing with topics as diverse as quantum computing and Richard ‘the hamster’ Hammond’s dragster crash. Our cons basically went along the lines of how little work we can get done once we start clicking on the links from one article to another.

Which leads on to vandalism or rather the mis-documentation of it. I’ve been getting a little frustrated with the number of news reports documenting vandalism on Wikipedia, and not because the vandalism is happening, but because they consider it to be notable news. The traditional encyclopedias may be keen to market the inaccuracies within Wikipedia, but the news websites really seem to have jumped on the bandwagon. I use Wikipedia every day for about a year, and to my knowledge I have updated a dozen Wikipedia entries at the most. These have been mostly because of slightly out-of-date articles or bad grammar or text. Most of the vandalism within Wikipedia has passed me by because these instances get corrected so quickly I don’t notice them.

What the news sites fail to acknowledge is the concept of a community based project, where errors are corrected by the community. With a website like Wikipedia anyone can edit it and everyone who uses it should! If a user finds inaccuracies they should be corrected by the user since there seem to be more genuine users than vandals. What we are actually seeing is visitors finding inaccuracies and publishing them rather than correcting them - thus missing the point. Their hype is a fallacy!
So, if I need to find out about a new piece of software and don’t want to read the commercial hype, my first stop is my friendly free online encyclopedia. I say ‘my’ because it belongs to me, and everyone else who uses and contributes - not the news websites who constantly miss the point. However, as I have seen with google, not every big thing stays big for ever - so I will keep my judgement eye wide open - I just can’t see any problems yet.

The BBC have recently published a news artificial on the neuromotor prosthesis. A sensory chip embedded in the brain is used to capture a movement command which in turn is connected to a computer used to interpret these commands accordingly. So Matthew Nagel who has been paralysed from the neck down is now able to operate a computer using his brain. This is quite something! The relative freedom he now has is something he must be very grateful for.

This is very cool, very sci-fi, and the potential for this technology is really only just beginning. When you look at a keyboard and a mouse, there aren’t that many variables to control… so it will just take time for the technology to be improved much further and provide help to many similar people. For example Stephen Hawking struggles to write papers because of the limited use of his limbs. This technology would allow him to work.

But I have my concerns… There will always be people who will misuse this kind of technology. As a race we must be careful of our advances and always consider the ethics behind our inventions. Imagine your mind directly hooked up to the internet, and the havoc you could cause with it… much more powerful than a computer alone.

I find this report from BBC news very interesting on two counts.

Firstly, it highlights the BBC’s inept ability to report news. I know that this is a minor point, but both sides of the coin should be highlighted when reporting. Such as the difference between consumers wanting greener PCs and consumers actually paying £64 - £108 more for a PC because it’s an environmentally friendly one.

Which leads to my second point. Everyone agrees (except stupid white men) that we are suffering from a global climate change crisis which we must act upon to sort out. One of the ways of reducing CO2 emissions would be to have more wind farms and become less reliant on fossil fuel technology. So we want wind farms… Oh, unless they are built anywhere near where these people live. If one of the fields near us were building wind farms I might put up with it, but would my neighbours? As one of the most respected men of our time once said: “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.” - Agent K

The same issue applies to these environmentally friendly, but more expensive PCs.  Another options of course, would be if the PC manufacturers gave us no option but to buy these PCs - but that will not happen!

I write this little blurb in a moment to spare in between some particularly nasty exam revision.  Eugh!  Anyway, I have been having a little ponder over my future desktop use.  Win XP is so outdated and should I go down the Mac or Linux route or continue with Windows in the guise of Vista?

I have been using Linux (mostly the Red Hat Fedora flavour) for over a year now, not much as a desktop solution but as a home server.  Linux is a fantastic operating system, especially when it comes to upgrades and server stuff, but it does not have the tools to be quite good enough in the desktop side yet - specifically with office (i.e. OpenOffice.org).  When Microsoft first started to dominate the world back in the eighties it was not because of their superior operating system (some others were much better e.g. RISC OS) but because of their decent office applications like Word.  These may not have been the best office applications but their widespread use have resulted in heavy re-investment and development by MS which in turn has resulted in a fantastic office suite which is highly widespread on a global basis.  Don’t get me wrong OOo and its brother Star Office are pretty good, but to compete they must be able to use MS Office documents perfectly before I would be happy to replace the Microsoft flavour.  Anyway, that’s the office rant over…

I also need to be able to run two other programs on Linux before I could switch.  Firstly, Quicken – my life is not complete if I can’t continue to manage my finances with Quicken.  Some may say that I’m being a little narrow-minded and should try the open-source equivalents (like GNU-Cash) but linux is such a hastle sometimes I just can’t be bothered!  Secondly, Macromedia Studio 8 – I spend about £700 on this fantastic internet development suite and I sure ain’t going to start using an open-source equivalent for free (especially since I have tried some and they are rubbish – with a notable exception of the GIMP which I actually find I use more than fireworks on my existing XP machine – because it’s better…).  OK, so there’s one last argument I can think of to switch me over to Linux which is to use Wine to port over my XP programs MS Office, and more importantly Quicken and Macromedia Studio 8.  I spent about 4 evenings trying to get Quicken to work with no cigars (not even a tiny hamlet) and would happily envite anyone to try and get these three programs working, and I’d make the switch.

So the Mac… If I were to switch over to a Mac I would probably get the MacBook, as I really need to think about getting a laptop (I just can’t seem to stop working these days, sad isn’t it!).  Mac OS X is beautiful; actually I think it’s a work of art.  But before I get too carried away I need to think about the cost.  Bearing in mind my requirements for switching to Linux it goes like this:

£749.00 …. Lowest priced 13-inch MacBook
£297.02 …. Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac Standard Edition
 £92.77 …. Microsoft Virtual PC for all that software I’ve spent so much on…
£197.77 …. The Taxman (VAT)
£1207.01 … TOTAL

Or I could take a risk and try risking Apples version of office at (iWorks) which would bring down the whole price to £923.01 which is much better but still a pretty penny… hmmm.  Still this sounds a lot more promising than a Linux solution even if you don’t get the same value for money.

So how about Windows Vista?  Well I don’t know…  I’m currently 14% through downloading Beta 2, and look forward to giving this a go.  I think the outlook is pretty good, but we’ll see.

Really it’s a bit of a toss up between WinVista and MacBook.  Both would cost about the same amount (once I’ve bought a Notebook with Vista pre-installed) so the next six months (when does Vista come out) could be an interesting wait.  Watch this space.

[UPDATE:  I just realised that I’ve used a transparent png image at the top of this page, for those of you using IE6 - sorry about the white background - I understand MS have sorted this in IE7, but this is another reason to query moving to Vista.  How long will it be before the next update?  By the time it gets to the end of it’s life cycle will it be very much out of date like XP is now?]