Why Dont You Blog?

Trying with a smaller sized picture

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As part of the drive to improve the quality, and quantity, of the photos on the blog, here are two more - taken in December 2006, with a Nokia N73 mobile phone with the first using the “negative” settings.
Let us know what you think.

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This is a one-liner to let our readers know we have added a few more categories.

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This is really just to see how easy or hard it is to make entries over wap (actually gprs but never mind)
while it is actually quite easy, entering long text on this phone will cripple me.
I think blogging is still best done by key board.

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Well here we are in the year 2006 and well I remember the hype of the late 1990s when the “paperless office” was the next big thing! (Dont get me started on that web 2.0 nonsense). Towards the end of the decade every one was getting scanners and it seemed a certainty that in a short time everything you would ever need would be available electronically.

Now, everyone who remembers these years will no doubt remember the “joy” of 28.8k dial up modems and internet access that was billed by the minute. However, this did little to deter the online pundits from proclaiming that books were dead and the future was online.

Now, fast forward to today and what do we have?

Has anything changed?

Not really, no. High speed internet connections are almost commonplace. Almost everyone who isnt a luddite or lives in a remote hill farm community has access to upstream speeds of around 8 meg. Amazing. Despite all this, has anything really changed?

Well, MP3 has obviously made its mark. If you listen to the record companies the file sharing demons are destroying the music industry (this has the potential to be come a major off topic rant so I will drop this here) and most people in the developed world have at least 1 mp3 track. Its a good bet that everyone in the west, under the age of 20 owns an MP3 player of some description (phone, iPod etc).

This says to me, that the predicted uptakes of MP3 was spot on. It is great. Instead of a crackly old Walkman with 60 minutes of music on, now we have iPods with 20gb of data (around a millions years worth of music isnt it?). How great is that. Now we can have more songs on an MP3 player than we have time left alive to listen to it!

Anyway, dragging this back on topic.

My question is, why havent we done the same for books? While I have no real “love” of Adobe, the PDF format is great. Even if you hate them you can get millions of books in .lit or .djvu either free or paid for. Almost all new software has its manuals as PDF, magazines give away their back issues as PDF. What a fantastic electronic world we live in.

Except it isnt.

I can listen to my MP3 player on the bus, on the train, on the toilet, in bed, in the gym, ANYWHERE. Yet when it comes to PDF files I am tied to my PC or at best the laptop. The laptop is handy, however its hot, heavy and eats batteries like a demon. Imagine being forced to listen to MP3 like that.

Why on Earth, can’t I walk into a high street retailer and buy a sensible sized eBook reader? Surely its not so hard. I am not talking about a mini thing the size of a watch either, it needs a readable screen. The size of a paperback is excellent for reading, so why not have something about the same size, mostly screen, which lets you read PDFs where ever you are?

Does something like this exist? If so, it needs to be marketed better. If it doesnt exist, then the idea is now my copyright. If anyone wishes to explore developing this let me know. I am sure, using something like a transmeta chip, linux and basic text readers / PDF readers this could be a device for under £150. Volume will make it even cheaper.

Can anyone think of anything wrong with this idea?

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Well under the advice of the CompuSkills web design team (ie “apache”) we have added a feedburner feed to the blog - you can see it at http://feeds.feedburner.com/WhyDontYoublog

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Leading on from the previous rant about people trying to divert attention from the real issue in debates, this months .net magazine gets a look at.

In the “the Big Question” section it outlines a quote from the Wall Street Journal which quotes Peter Sealey as saying he knows of “no other industry where marketers knowingly introduce a flawed product.” Now Mr Sealey is currently a marketing professor at UCSB and was the chief marketing officer at Coca-cola.

Overall, the “talking heads” (typing heads?) who reply give a reasonable description of the issues involved. None really justify the eternal-beta some software companies live in (can you hear this Google?) but one is interesting. Read the rest of this post

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Well the latest .NET magazine is out now and in it you can see the 12 winners of the 2005 .net awards.

Not much to surprise anyone - 1&1 won the best web host (again) which is more than acceptable as that is who this domain is ultimately hosted with …

All the others were standard names - BBC, BlueYonder, Blogger, Faceparty, Amazon, Motley Fool, Cheap Flights etc.

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Well, it looks official now. Charon (Pluto’s moon) has no atmosphere.

Why any one thought it actually had any is beyond me, and probably no longer open for debate…, however as reported by the BBC.

By watching as Charon eclipsed a distant star last June, they were able to determine that the speed the light (from the star) was cut off signalled the lack of any atmosphere.

You can read more at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4588628.stm

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One of the advantages of compuskills having set up this weblog is that now our staff can make submissions from all manner of places and by email, web or even, as with this message, by mobile phone.

This message was submitted by using a Nokia phone to send an MMS message via the O2 gateway. Sadly it was far from an unqualified success as the email that arrived simply stated “you have recieved a message…” etc. For some reason O2.co.uk feels it neccessary to retain the content of an email on their own servers. This somewhat undermines the value of sending MMS messages to emails.

If anyone has any ideas for a work around or how to alter this please let me know.

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