Digital music players

I overheard a conversation the other day that baffled me. The bafflement comes from my own egocentric reality where I assume everybody has a certain level of knowledge. As I no doubt have missed the point on this sort of thing before I thought I should write a little bit on it.

The confusion was two people talking about portable music players. One person was showing off their new player, a Microsoft Zune. The other person said "Ugh. You should have bought an iPod instead. They're much cooler", to which the reply was "I wanted something that works with Windows - I don't have a Mac."

Apparently the Apple marketing machine has not achieved full penetration.

This was followed on by "I think that you CAN use it with Windows, but you have to use iTunes for it to work", which elicited "I don't want to have to buy all my music through their store, and never be able to play the music anywhere else."

Again, maybe a couple of short commercials from Apple to update the masses would help.

I won't go into intense detail, but basically any digital music player will play MP3 files, the general current standard for digital audio. This includes the iPod. Apple prefers the AAC format which up until recently was encumbered with digital rights management (DRM) that did in fact lock the song to your account. Now, however, most of the music in the iTunes store is DRM-free. That said, you can get music from elsewhere into your iPod. The most important one which seemed to escape the people having the conversation is that you can rip the audio from your regular CD and put it onto your iPod.

Also, you can purchase or acquire MP3 files from any other source and put them into your iTunes library.

Disclosure: I myself have an iPod, which was about the fourth digital music player that I bought. I liked the other players just as much when they were playing music (I am not an audiophile and found the quality to be more or less equal) but where the iPod was clearly superior was the user interface and the client software. I use my iPod for also listening to podcasts (essentially recorded radio shows) and being able to easily organize all my audio content was worth it for me to move to an iPod. Your mileage may vary.

So be sure to be clear on what it is you want from a digital audio player, given your preferred operating system and method of acquiring music. You can then make a clear decision based on your own needs instead of being herded into one camp or another. Marketing seeks to push you into a decision based on irrational feelings. See past them and decide based on your actual needs.

Disappearing Data

A software development blog that I read had an entry on alternative data storage. It referred to a tongue in cheek project called PaperBack. The idea is that your data is printed out to paper so that it will not degrade like magnetic or optical storage. There are serious people thinking on this subject. All in all I cannot tell if PaperBack is a joke or serious. Regardless, it highlights something that I often think about.

I look at all the data that I and my family have acquired over time and wonder about it. Documents, audio files, image files, videos and others. I have managed over time to collapse them down to a single large collection, which I have on multiple different hard drives. The collection represents all the floppy and zip disks I'd hauled around for 20+ years plus CD and DVD archives. Luckily external hard drives have plunged in price.

I should have started all this sooner than I did and count myself lucky that catastrophe did not strike. I have personally encountered tape that could not be used for anything or there was no software to read it. Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of data inaccessible. Myself, I have CD's from the late 80's that are no longer readable. I also have a graveyard of dead hard drives.

It makes me think about how fleeting all this is. The fact that hard drives even work is something of a miracle with all the things that have to work JUST so between the hardware and software, at many levels. Every couple of years I have a fit of getting things together and saved. After I spend all the time doing it and making sure I've got it all I worry about the drives that I am backed up to failing. Or that a tornado will come in and annihilate it all regardless, making my efforts futile.

Then I get very philosophical and wonder what is so important with what I have. One time when I thought I had lost about six months worth of photos I felt physically ill and dreaded telling my wife. Luckily I found the files on another backup and all was saved. Regardless, if a tornado came along and annihilated the house and both backups we would be glad just to be alive.

I guess sometimes you have to balance off covering yourself against absolutely everything and what really matters.

Regardless, if you have not already done it, go out and buy an external hard drive and back up all your data. It is only a matter of time before your main hard drive fails. It is the cheapest insurance you will ever buy.

Smart Phones

Ah - a couple weeks of downtime always refreshes.

Lots happened in the last couple of weeks(ish). One was the new iPhone came out. A friend of mine is agonizing over getting one, versus a Blackberry or something else. He believes that government and corporations are all sewn up for Blackberry.

For government - agreed (for now).

Corporate - it's shifting, and shifting rapidly.

With the iPhone OS 3.0 release there is now tighter integration with Exchange servers (really the thing that made corporate folks ga-ga for Blackberry in the first place) plus security items like the ability to remotely wipe a handset.

In many companies that I directly know of the upgrade cycle (starting at the top) is resulting in iPhones instead of Blackberries (execs first, of course). Governments will take longer to make such a change, if they do, and again it will start at the top, with the peons getting the goodies last (naturally).

Me, personally, I do not talk on the phone very much, and if I do it is from a land line. I use a pre-pay phone for the occasional voice call and use a PDA for other functions. When my current PDA (a Palm) dies I'll get an iPod touch (seeing as Palm got out of the PDA business).

If you're going to pay the monthly bill anyways go with the iPhone. Blackberry will probably be what you're provided with by your company.

That said, the market keeps shifting, with the Palm Pre now released and decent UI having been grafted onto Android by HTC.

As always, make a decision based on your own needs and not what the market blares at you.

PDA Migration

Long ago my life started to get complicated enough that I started having to keep track of things on paper because my brain wasn't going to hold enough information anymore. I started with a simple paper organizer and then moved on to more involved ones as time went on like the Franklin.

In the early 1990's I purchased a Sharp Zaurus. Being a computer-guy it seemed appropriate for me to keep my data in an electronic format. I had to pay extra to get a serial cable interface so I could back up my data. It ran on AAA batteries and was super cool (to me, at least).

My the mid-late 90's, though still working, the Zaurus was getting passe so I moved onto a Palm Pilot. Again this was super cool. The device was designed for synchronization so it was very handy to move data to and fro, plus there was a programming kit so I could dabble with software for it.

This was followed by another Palm, then by a Sony Palm incarnation called the Clie (very nice). For a brief time I had a Palm VII, one of the first wireless PDAs. The data plan was way too expensive (data was charged by BYTE transferred). The latest (and probably last) Palm I got was the Zire, the low cost color version of the venerable Palm PDA. This mainly was my calendar, contact list and password storage device.

For a while, I had a laptop and largely used it for my information management needs. Then it died and I could not justify buying another one in light of my other responsibilities.

My work in the past has provided me with Blackberry or Windows Mobile devices. In all cases I have used them but never trust much to them, largely because they were provided by my employer and I keep my personal and professional items separate.

Now, my Zire is starting to fail. The digitizer is hit or miss and the screen is starting to go. Once a week or so I have to do a hard reset to make it go. Palm now no longer makes PDAs so I find myself at a crossroads. I want a small electronic device for handling my personal information, but the market only seems to be producing phones to do this, and I don't want a monthly bill.

I believe that now I want an iPod Touch. I had three other MP3 players before I got my iPod Nano a couple of years ago and I have to say hands down that the iPod is the superior experience. As a computer guy I was able to figure out my other devices but the iPod was just that much better. The iPod Touch is much larger and seems better suited to handling my needs for information management. There are a couple of sticking points.

One is price. At over two hundred dollars (as of this writing) it is not something that I can trivially purchase. It starts to get me into the neighborhood of buying a netbook instead. Admittedly the netbook would not have the portability of the iPod Touch, but it would have other strengths (like a keyboard) to make up for it.

Another is software. I have Palm OS software that I've used for years that will no longer be usable. I have to take that into account also.

For now I will limp the Zire along and see what Apple comes up with on Monday at the WWDC and go from there.

It's been interesting watching the rise and fall of each of the form factors and companies. From Sharp (still around but out of the PDA business) to Palm (with a history of mis-steps and frittering away their huge lead) to Apple (whose Newton venture paved the way for more functional PDAs). It will be interesting to see where things progress to. There are rumors that Apple will expand the iPod Touch into a small tablet and effectively re-launch the Newton. I'll be paying close attention.

The rise of the Netbook

Making computers smaller was a goal from the very earliest incarnations of the technology. Down from the size of a room to the size of a few fridges. Down from that to a largish box that could sit on the top of a desk. Soon someone asked "How about one I can take with me?" Portable (in the sense that they COULD be moved, not necessarily EASY to move) computers themselves iterated through various forms. Of course someone said "What if it ran on batteries?" and computers became truly portable, freed from the tether of the electrical grid (or a generator). The same evolution has continued over the years with portables becoming smaller and more powerful with each cycle.

Until very recently these smaller and more powerful machines commanded premium prices. You could expect to pay much more than you'd pay for a desktop computer with similar power. The intent was that the portable computer should have the same power (or close to it) as a desktop. This meant all kinds of trade-offs had to be made and components had to be engineered to be even smaller. All this engineering did not come cheap and having a laptop computer was a badge of honor and the province of the technological (or just wealthy) elite.

Eventually a kind of tipping point was found, not unlike with cell phones. In the same way that the huge cell phones of the 1980's become smaller and smaller into the 1990's so that design decisions started to rotate around making the keys LARGE enough for human fingers to operate as the phones had become so small laptops started to change also. Two kinds of consumers were looking for portable machines, with two sets of criteria: as SMALL as possible (most often frequent travelers and/or gadget freaks) versus as POWERFUL as possible (the so called "desktop replacement" crowd). Each of these consumer types was provided with what they wanted, but in all cases you continued to pay dearly for the machines.

As time and Moore's Law marched on an intersection occurred. This was the intersection between relatively powerful laptops and the ubiquity of wireless internet. Again something that was once the province of the technical elite became very common, with wireless access available virtually anywhere for a very small fee, if at all. Instead of existing as an alternative to a desktop computer the laptop became basically a terminal to connect into the content of the internet. The need for the terminal hardware (i.e., the laptop) to be powerful was lessened. Beyond a certain amount of power was a waste. A simple machine could be used to read e-mail, surf the web, watch videos, etc. The hardware of a new type of laptop was ready. The other part necessary was the software.

Open source software, which languished for some years in obscurity from the public, leapt to the forefront of these new machines, dubbed "netbooks" as they are basically used to access networks and not much else. Rather than having to pay the "Microsoft tax" for every machine netbook manufacturers started to load open source operating systems like Linux onto their machines, erasing the extra payment. This dropped the price a little bit more, along with the smaller screen, small hard drive and lack of optical drive to produce a netbook for a few hundred dollars instead of almost a thousand dollars.

The effect on the market was slow to build but once it did it ran away, catching the large manufacturers unawares. Coinciding with some economic hard times netbooks flew off the shelves and accounted for most of the growth in the sales of portable computers. Now all the major manufacturers have their own netbooks out and Microsoft is scrambling to try and find a way to ensure that they are a presence in the market, albeit at a lower per unit cost as in the past.

For many people a netbook is all the computer that they need. They can use a web based provider of e-mail, store their pictures on a photo sharing site, use online applications for word processing and generally do what they need to do without very much regard to the computer that they do it on. If their inexpensive netbook bites the dust the only thing you might need to do is rediscover your bookmarks (although even those can be cached away by one of many online utilities).

There will always be a market for the more powerful and expensive laptops for people who need the power of local processing for tasks like video processing or engineering that burns up a lot of CPU cycles, in the same way that there will still be people who will spend thousands of dollars on desktop machines to do very specific tasks. In both cases, though, there are now inexpensive alternatives, often using open source software, that give people just what they need for a small amount of money.

Keeping in mind what you're trying to get done before you choose your technology is a techgnostic thing to do. Think it through the next time you advise somebody on what kind of computer to buy or examine your own needs the next time you put your money down.

Reduce, reuse, recycle.

Being green is seen as increasingly important for companies. Sometimes it's a stretch to find something to trumpet about but you can always find something like using recycled paper in your printers or such. If the new measure actually saves the company some money (not often), all the better.

One place that companies could definitely get more bang for their green buck is with computer hardware. The hardware itself caused a lot of pollution during its manufacture and when it winds up in a landfill it leaches a lot of nasty chemicals. If you can avoid having to buy new computer hardware you can feel better for being green as well as save some money.

Most often the things that will fail on a computer are the parts that move: the hard drive, any fans in the case and the power supply fan. Otherwise, in the absence of a power surge, the rest of the solid state electronics will keep going for years (at least five). It used to be that software always outpaced hardware and you always had to buy new hardware to keep up. Hardware is now ahead of software in most cases (unless you're talking about niche needs like high-demand video games or such). With some more RAM (inexpensive) and maybe some new parts that you interact with (monitor, keyboard and mouse) you will feel like you have a new computer.

If your needs are not directly tied to software available on Macintosh or Windows you can load one of the freely available Linux distributions and get your computing tasks done very handily, while also saving some money and making your computer more secure. If you are not comfortable with such a move you could just back up your data and do a clean re-install of your operating system and again feel the joy of a new space. If you are 100% uncomfortable with either of these suggestions you can go and buy yourself a new computer but keep in mind that the prices are much lower than they used to be and you don't need a lot of power for most things you're going to do.

As always, you need to think about what it is you're trying to do when you are considering a hardware purchase. Do you want what you're getting just because you're "due" for some new hardware, or do you have a specific need for it? Are you tied to a particular software platform? If not, when you get new hardware is an ideal time to take look at alternatives. The computer market is in flux right now and there are lots of new approaches being tried.

Obviously everyone's situation is different, but what I am advocating is not necessarily just going on to the next revision of what you've always done, instead taking a look at alternatives, including keeping your existing hardware and just refurbishing it a bit. You'll save some money and help the earth by being green.

Good Enough Hardware

Used to be, a "cheap" desktop computer hovered around a thousand dollars in price, without a monitor. Those days are now far behind us. Cheap desktop systems with bundled LCD monitors are easily found for less than five hundred dollars. Laptops have similarly crashed in price, with a race for the bottom still underway. There is still a high end to the market, with multi-thousand dollar machines, but only people with very specific requirements should buy them.

If you only drive a few nails a year to hang pictures, you can buy a five dollar hammer and you're set. If you take that five dollar hammer onto a job site and drive a few thousand nails with it you will quickly destroy it, rounding the head of it, shredding the handle, etc. In the same way if you are a hard core video game player you would not buy a five hundred dollar computer and expect to be happy.

All that said, most people can get by with the modern "low end" computer, that has more processing power, memory, disk space, etc. than machines they purchased a few years ago. And that computer will be sufficient for a fairly long time. In the 90's software could get ahead of your computer very quickly, and your hardware quickly became obsolete. With so much time between major updates of software now, plus the power available at the low end of the market, breaks this cycle.

The one place that this is somewhat not true is with the Microsoft Vista operating system, if you want to run it with all the bells and whistles. If you want that then the low end machines might not be exactly what you want. If you are only wanting to surf the web and do e-mail you should consider alternative operating systems that run on the same hardware, such as a Linux distribution like Ubuntu.

The Macintosh computers are more expensive, but come loaded with a lot more bells and whistles that narrow the gap between the low end PC and the low end Mac. They offer a good level of stability and if you are looking for easy they are hard to beat.

When you go to purchase your next computer, consider all the factors, including what you are actually SPECIFICALLY going to use the machine for, and do not fall for the sales pitch of the latest, greatest and fastest. A "good enough" computer is going to be sufficient for 95% of people, so don't turn up your nose at a computer because of its low price. You'll be pleasantly surprised by your new machine, regardless.

Make your choice techgnostically, and don't be swayed by hype (I'm looking at YOU, Microsoft).