Better Late, Back to Keyboard, Then Never..

As many of you know , in spite of best intentions and plans, Real Life gets in the way. Projects such as writing and publishing their blog or other personal projects get put on hold. Essentially this is what has happened to me.
This last July, not long after I put out the last article, on the publishing industry, My family and I moved and had to essentially start over again. Needless to to say I have had a lot of other thing going on theses last few months, and not having a fast easy to access connection had made it difficult to work the way that I was used to.

So instead of trying to cover news I should have been commenting on for the last six months, Let me start fresh, so to speak.

Verizon now has the holy grail of Smart phones,,, the Apple IPhone,,,
But is it enough and soon enough? Yes it is a big deal, However, it seems to me if it had happened before Android had gotten a serious foothold in the Verizon market base it would had a much more of impact. many folks who would have loved to get a Verizon IPhone and couldn’t are now solidly in the Android camp and are not interested in jumping to the IPhone, now they have their Android.
I know if and when I get into a position that I can get a Smart Phone I’m going Android. Yes Apple will make inroads into Verizon but it will take time and not as much as they would like.


CES, this January was the grounds for the first round of the tablet wars. Apple true to form, created a monster when they created the IPad, As I’ve said before in other article, tablets have been before, by various manufactures mostly by trying to shoehorn a standard desktop operating system into a platform that was never designed for it. The most common of those being Microsoft and their various Windows versions. which never did completely work right or stable.
Along come Apple, building on the success of the small tablet form factor, and a custom os, The IPhone and the IPod Touch which they had sold millions of and had all of those millions already familiar with the platform, now its scaled up to a 9 inch screen with better functionality .. A immediate hit. Needs to say.

There was a lot of talk before it was actually released to the masses of weather it would work, It did, once consumers got their hands on it and used it they loved it.
Of course everyone started jumping on the tablet bandwagon. CES saw the announcement of no less then 18 tablets from everyone from Blackberry, to Samsung, and many others. How many will make it to consumers shelves and get a fair chance is another matter. Most of the competing tablets are running Android, which makes sense because the next biggest platform on phones next to Apple IOS is Android. Android scales up to a tablet nicely and can be offered with just wifi, or with ¾ G bundles with the major carriers. However, that this point there is abig downside to using 3 or 4G that, being bandwidth caps, not that they’ll cut you off if you use too much, they just charge you for the privilege of going over, by the megabyte. I haven’t had the chance to play with the IPad or Android tablets, So I can’t say which I like better. Both offer comparable features and both will fill a certain need for certain consumers, while others will want the specific features of one or the other, thus driving their choice. On the whole a consumer should be able to use any tablet easily and do basic web surfing and media playing without having to do a learning curve to figure out how to do essential functions, they should be self-explanatory .

The FCC is pushing a plan to get broadband to rural areas, that is nothing new.
They have been fighting with the cable and wireless companies for years trying to get them to invest in rural technologies for years. However, the companies in question see investing in rural broadband as dumping money into a big black hole, where they will be forever getting their money back, if ever. Yes its probably true they may never get all their money back. But the bigger issue is public safety and supporting the communities they are supposed to be serving. Yes they are in business to make money, However, the bigger picture is they are granted these big essentially monopolies to serve their communities. All of their communities, not just the parts the make them money. of the are easy to support . Telecommunication companies have a obligations to provide at least reasonable access to good phone service, and should be able to provide at least DSL speeds if not faster, where they can lay fiber and increase the speeds. It goes with out say the should be no limits on use and and throttling is no acceptable.
With the increased options for streaming material form the net directly, ie You Tube and the like, and NetFlicks, and other streaming services putting caps on monthly downloads would result in a consumer revolt to rival the revolutionary war .

Well, Folks I seems to have run out of steam for now, This is the first article in at least six months, and I hope that I can continue to put more out in a more timely fashion as the summer goes on.
I hope you found my ideas interesting and worthy of reading and commenting on.
Ken Lawson

Welcome to VISTA -Land

This last weekend I ventured in to new territory.......... Vista-land...

Due to problems with one computer, and not knowing if it could easily fixed or have to be replaced, we decided that getting a laptop, that everyone could use would be a good idea, and help fill the void if we needed to replace one of the desktops. Of course thats not even counting the general connivance of having a portable around.
Any rate, the end result was, as usual, we spent less and got more. The choices for a laptop are varied and in some ways very few. One needs to think about what the primary use of the machine will be, and keeping in mind you eventually want to do more then you ever figured you would, and thus need more machine then you think you do..
There are several things to consider, the primary one for most folks is price, how much bang can I get for my buck? Nowadays quite a bit actually..
How much portability do you need? do you want some you can carry in a small bag and take almost anywhere, or do you need the bigger screen to run more intense programs and watch movies and screen big enough to see from a distance. Then there is the processor, the question is a little more involved; Intel, or AMD, and a desktop processor or a mobile processor. and then dual-core, and how fast. As you see, the choices in Hardware abound, depending on what you want to spend. You need lots of RAM, or memory as its often called. at least a gigs worth. more is better.
The primary reason for all the CPU power and ram is the operating system. Operating systems are famous for using too much of a systems resources. Every generation of OS had its quirks and problems. Vista, is no expectation.

A very brief primer; the operating system is the interface between the computer and the human using it. It converts what the user want to do into binary code which the computer can understand and act on. There have been a number of version over he years, first there was windows 3.1 which was a very early version of the GUI, or graphical user Interface, this made it relatively easy for the user to tell he computer what to do and have it do something useful. Then there was windows 95, then windows 98, each version was a huge leap in processor power and usefulness and functionality. However, all was not well in Windows land... Each version fixed problem form before and also brought new problems. I'm not going to delve int a history of the problems of earlier operating systems, they are well document. One can easily find volumes about older windows .
The Operating system in question today, is Vista, which I think is a stupid name, But then I thought XP was a stupid name too. not that anyone ever asked me. Name aside, XP was a huge jump from 98se. There several major improvements, the most important one to me was stability. Which meant it tended not to crash as often or as bad as older versions. Usually one program would crash and close and not take the whole system with it, forcing a complete reboot at a inconvenient time. There were other issues, which I'm not going into now, primarily security.


So, I went to the famous big box stores and shopped. We had set a budget, about 1/3 of what we had spent on the first laptop many years ago. and then it was seek and find..
The first thing I asked was if they had any XP units, None. so that left VISTA. then it was what they had on sale. and what features it had on it.
We finely chose a Compaq/HP that was on sale, This machine has a dual-core processor and a gig of RAM. Something VISTA needs, and even more is better.
I have not been looking forward to working on a VISTA machine, having spent the summer reading horror stories about it.
So far I have been impressed, and was not prepared to be a very happy camper.. I booted it up and and set it up and it found the wireless network. using Explorer, I downloaded FireFox and Sea monkey and then closed Explorer and haven't opened it since. I have deliberately left it plugged in and running and kept it going and it hasn't even blinked. I plugged in a very old web cam in the USB and it not only found it went out and found the drivers and installed them and it just worked! The promise of USB finely fulfilled..

As much as I hate to say it, at least, on this particular VISTA box seems to be working good. It seems to be responsive and it definably has a MAC like quality in the way it opens and closes windows and I get the feeling that it wants to emulate a MAC, without directly copyng it. Something that has been noted many times before. What will happen as time go on and its used more remains to be seen. I have a XP disc just waiting to jump in and replace VISTA if it ever becomes necessary. basically, when one a buys something like a computer they want it to just work and this particular one seems to be working right now. I am not going to use it as a excuse to vindicate the operating system as a whole, It is still bloated and full of problems that should have been solved long before it was released, if they had been, I wouldn't have spent the summer reading horror stories about it. Linux is also a option, doing s dual-boot and putting Ubunta, on a 2nd partition is something the geekier among us might do, a few will even get rid of windows altogether and run Linux solo, I can't bring myself to do so only because of dependency on windows programing for my pda , see earlier post about changing PIM platforms. In a ideal world I would be able to put the MAC OS on my XP/VISTA box and dual-boot, But I doubt that'll happen very soon.


I know lucky when I see it.. I just got lucky and got either a manufacture that knows how to install and tweak VISTA to work or just plain got a box that works.. at least for me. So Far....