Beat The Recession: Use Linux April 8, 2009
Posted by granthamtech in Cloud Computing, Linux.Tags: Cloud Computing, Linux, recession, t31, thinkpad
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Recently I decided to spend a little money on (yet) another computer. This time the machine in question is an IBM ThinkPad laptop, T31, built in Greenock by IBM more than a few years ago. This, I argued to myself, was needed because I had to have something much more portable to write with than the huge seventeen inch Acer I normally use. To be fair this is a reasonable argument because the Acer is pretty tough to move around with. It’s more akin to a desktop than a laptop. On the other hand it’s great as an entertainment machine.
So the ThinkPad turned out to be a great little machine. I think that the older IBM built ThinkPads are generally regarded as being of superior quality and this one, despite it’s age, feels very robust. Unfortunately the mobility I was hoping for is hampered greatly due to the fact that the ancient battery is now past it’s best and will only retain charge for around 15 minutes. I am, therefore, rather tethered to the mains cable whilst I’m writing with it. It is, however, still much more portable than the weighty Acer.
The installed RAM on this ThinkPad is a paltry 256Meg. By today’s standards that’s not very much at all. Vista, for example, will scarcely open one of it’s bloodshot eyes for 256Meg let alone actually get out of bed. But if you install a lean version of Linux then 256K is more than enough. I chose to use Puppy Linux and, out of the box I have wired and wireless networking, a browser, a word processor, a spreadsheet and the ability to play MP3s and Flash video plus a grab bag of other applications. On top of this I was able to share files with my other machines.
Adding a separate installed Firefox gave me ninety five percent of the desktop features I had on my bigger machines. With it’s slow Pentium III I probably wouldn’t want to watch much video on it but given that all I really wanted from it was the ability to do some word processing then it wasn’t bad for a hundred quid.
Which leads me to the thought that paying high prices for laptop, but especially desktop, computers today is hard to justify. Unless you are a serious gamer who needs top end compute and graphics performance it often isn’t necessary to have the newest and most powerful. I’d bet that right now the chip and other hardware manufacturers are scratching their heads hoping that new resource demanding software will come along to force us all to upgrade. At the moment though I don’t see it. On the contrary, as the trend to cloud based computing continues I can only see the need for increasingly powerful desktop computers falling away.
Perhaps in these belt tightening times it is no bad thing to consider stepping off the upgrade escalator and instead think more about making the best of what is already available.
Google Data Privacy Failure: Nothing Is For Free March 9, 2009
Posted by granthamtech in Cloud Computing, Google.Tags: Cloud Computing, Google
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Being an old mainframe chap means that I was always going to be sympathetic to the notion of the “cloud”. Remote, centralised computing resources were meat and drink to me at one time and Google’s Documents and Spreadsheets services are excellent examples of where this has led to today. But seeing a story on TechCrunch about Google inadvertently sharing user data with other users not authorised to access it has given me some reason to pause and think.
Google’s Documents and Spreadsheets service are generally free but there is a price to pay. The fact is that as soon as you entrust management of your personal data to another party you are ceding some control of it to that party. In this case the issue is data security and there is also the major question of access failure, perhaps due to network issues, perhaps due to hosting problems.
In owning up to the problem Google has admitted that mistakes were made and, despite it’s assurances that it was an isolated event, it is in fact very likely to happen again. Data privacy failures are not uncommon and occur both in private and public sectors – witness the major losses of personal information by various government agencies in the UK.
For small businesses and organisations Google Apps are still an excellent option, lifting much of the burden of data management from the shoulders of managers. But, as with so much else in life and business, nothing is for free.
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