From Sleek to Geek

I have finally got around to selling my iMac G5 which I bought in Nov 05. Although it still served its purpose and wasn't causing any problems with speed, I couldn't wait any longer else the value of it would have dropped too much and would have made it pointless to sell it.

So, instead of selling an olde computer for £150, I sold a reasonable computer for £450. It was snapped up on ebay for the Buy It Now price, much to my suprise - maybe it had something to do with me including a USB TV tuner and Command and Conquer Generals also. But anyway, I digress.

To replace this icon of stability I have decided that I am not paid enough to buy a new mac and am buying a PC instead. The ability to chop and change the generic parts makes it perfect, as I can upgrade it as I go, depending on my monthly financial situation.

My new box is now ordered and for the princely sum of £435 inc P&P I have grabbed myself an Intel Core 2 Duo E6300, with 1GB DDR2 667 RAM, a 250GB 7200RPM SATA2 HDD, in a stylish (but not annoyingly gamerfied) case, onboard Intel GMA 950 graphics (upgradable via PCI-E), an 18X DL Multiformat DVD writer and a 19" Widescreen HDTV/TFT screen. Not bad at all. Oh, and it comes with a 3 Year RTB warranty!

The next thing I shall be buying will be a new graphics card so I can play the new Command and Conquer game, followed by more RAM so I can experiment with Vista.

Now, if you'll notice, I have paid less for my new computer than I sold my old one for. Amazing isn't it? It is a shame that Apple machines still demand such a premium in the home market, because if they didn't, they would be unstoppable in my opinion. (eg. I didn't re-install OS X once in the 18 months I had my Mac, it crashed maybe once every couple of months and I had one hardware issue - with the mouse scroll ball).

technorati tags:PC, Mac, New, Price, Stability, Ebay

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Losing some of the weight!

It looks more and more like we will be moving forward with at least one room of thin clients at the school. The main product we like the look of is the Jack PC from ChipPC, an Israeli company that specialises in Thin Clients and their management. The management package for the JackPC's is called 'XCalibur' and it looks excellent compared to many.

In the mean time, before a decision is made, I have been tasked with creating a test setup using one of lesser used servers (moving its various programs to the other servers and dedicating it as a Terminal Server) and using 2X ThinServer to create a thin client network on our existing, aging, fat clients.

Once we have this set up and running it will be thrown at the kids to try out and we will then be able to tweak and play to see how it goes.

Fingers crossed eh?

And all that could have BeEN

I've been having a nose at the various 'BeOS' clones, redevelopements and spin off projects and wondering what we would have now on Mac's if Be had accepted the $200 million dollar offer for their OS? Of if Apple had bought Be?

OK, Steve Jobs might not be back at the helm of Apple but we'd still have a variation of BeOS!

However, things are looking up for fans of that quaint little OS as the various projects are steaming along and creating brilliant new ideas and bringing BeOS back to life.

If you fancy paying for a fully working (ish) modern version of the OS, head over to Zeta or if you fancy taking a look at a community driven open source copy, have a look at Haiku. Both are excellent and with a bit more work either will be ready for a general userbase.

This (rather young) BeOS fan can't wait!

Dealing with Geriatric computers

I was recently brought in an old laptop to fix for one of the school's staff - as a favour sort of thing. It turned out to be an old Pentium 1, 133Mhz with 32Mb of RAM and it was running Windows 98 SE. Now this caused me to have to think way back to when I last supported these sort of machines in anything more than a 'OMG you have a machine that old' manner. The thing was, after mentioning how old it was to the staff member, the response was 'it does the job just fine'.

It got me thinking, with the ever present push for faster, sleeker, more 'feature-rich' computers, are we forgetting the actual purpose of a computer? Being blinded by gimmicks and shiny features we will never use? Many will go to a shop and spend £1000 on a PC that they will only ever browse the web on and email their brother. Would we do the same for a car? Would we spend £10,000 on a car that we are only going to drive to the corner shop with? I doubt it.

It makes me think that there is a major gap in the PC market. This gap being a well structured second-hand/refurbished PC company. We have many little shops that sell the occasional pc, but no-one 'big' like PC World or Dell.

If this market were combined with an OS which is up to date, namely Linux, it would be an excellent way of getting computers into the homes of those who can't afford to go out and buy the latest and greatest.

Furthermore, it would be another way of reducing the environmental damage caused by old PC's. True, this company wouldn't provide CRT monitors as they use far too much electricity, but there are plenty of refurbished TFT's around from liquidating companies etc...

So, this is to one of you 'venture capitalist' types or someone with money to invest somehow. How about looking into this?

EduGeek Local Groups?

So, EduGeek.net has over 2300 registered users now, resulting in 2.2million hits in the last 3 months. This number has to be something close to the number of users on the national Linux User Groups lists I believe.

So, it is my idea to start up some local edugeek meetups/groups where those of us in an area can get together and engage in those extra-vocational tasks that we all enjoy, namely drinking, geeking and ranting.

For example, I know in the area I'm in there are at least 3 members of the site - and that is in one town! Expand that to the West Somerset and Taunton areas and we could be talking at least 10 or so. Plenty for a meetup!

Goog-all!

Our trusty internet overlords, Google, have according to some fans bought the root of all that is evil on the internet, DoubleClick, purveyor of the internet filth that is 'animated online advertising' (you know what I mean; those annoying adverts with a series of ducks to 'shoot' or a fly to 'zap' by clicking on it), for $3.1bn dollars.

Whilst some, as mentioned, do not like this acquisition, I personally think it could be a good thing for the net. Google have a style of business which utilises 'silent ubiquity' for its services. In other words, they provide the services in such a way that they do there job without imposing upon you in some outlandish way. Whilst I doubt Google are suddenly going to refuse animated adverts via DoubleClick, I do think they will introduce some tougher forms of quality control on those adverts - scaling down their annoying nature.

Another issue with DoubleClick was its perceived privacy invasion and large 'nefarious' customer base (warez sites, spam sites etc...). Hopefully, Google will put an end to these problems and force the illegitimate sites elsewhere.

Whilst I am in no way a 'fanboy', a term which is used widely and indiscriminately on technology sites, I do think that this purchase is A Good Thing™ and could lead the way to a nice 'clean' advertising arena. Here's to hoping anyway!