Last Monday I wrote in this space that I had succeeded in getting my Multimedia Computer running and that I had installed Ubuntu on it. This was a great victory for me. At the time, it gave me a great feeling of victory that I didn't want to dilute. A few days have passed now, so I feel I can share more of the truth without spoiling that feeling of victory on my part.
It is still running and functioning fine as a computer, but I there are certain issues involved with making it function as a Multimedia computer. One of these is the fan. The original fan that it came with didn't have a plug to attach it to the fan plug on the motherboard. I thought I'd fixed that by buying an adapter. The adapter arrived; it is male. I needed a female. (Insert joke about Ubuntu computer geeks here.)
No problem. I had an old cheap fan purchased for an old project laying around. I installed it. I now remember reading a review of it with PROS--it is cheap, CONS--it is noisy. That noisy part is being glossed more me even as I write this. I currently have a female adapter on order. Ten minutes of work will suffice to fix this.
The next issue is software. Windows 7 comes with Windows Media Center installed. You just sit down and run it. The Ubuntu experience is different. And it now becomes clear to me what the Ubuntu experience is all about. To fully explain it, at least to my own satisfaction, I need to go back to the Bible.
In Genesis, when Jacob and Esau are introduced it says: And the boys grew: and Esau was a cunning hunter, a man of the field; and Jacob was a plain man, dwelling in tents. To me this says that Esau like to push the edges of existence and do things that were hard. Jacob, on the other hand, liked to enjoy the fruits of what was then modernity. Were this written today, the description of Esau would remain the same while Jacobs might be described as a man who like living in houses with beds and indoor plumbing.
Some of you may already be ahead of me in transferring this to the context of computers. Esau would be pushing to that more challenging mode of existence with Linux while Jacob would use Windows 7. (Macs would correspond to whatever they were using in the fleshpots of Egypt for those of you who wish to push this a little farther.)
I grew up on the frontier, starting with a TRS-80 and moving to an Apple IIe and then finally hitting the PC river, as it were, more than twenty years ago. I've been watching the frontier disappear ever since as we've moved from floppies to hard disks and CDs and DVDs and USBs. Then came the Internet and the Cloud may supersede it all. I've gone through all of the contortions that we had to back in the good old days just to get something to print for Heaven's sake.
All of those contortions are why we developed things like Windows 7 and Snow-frickin-Leopard and all of those other things. Friends, let me tell you, as much as we gripe about these OSs, they ain't so bad. They beat the Hell out of walking three blocks across campus to access your e-mail from a Unix account and download the file that was sent you using Kermit. I was younger then, everything did work right, but that rosy glow doesn't make me think I'd like to do it that way all over again.
That being said: This is a hobby. We do hobbies to stretch ourselves in safe, controlled ways. I can pretend that I am back on the Computer Frontier as it was in the days of old, but do it while safely living in the modern world.
In other words, I've moved out of the hardware faze and into the software faze which is presenting a new challenge to me. I will keep you updated, but now the smell of the spring flowers is calling to me.
Showing posts with label the Cloud. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the Cloud. Show all posts
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Multimedia Computer: Part 5
The first real (I don't count the PCjr) computer I bought twenty years ago had a CD-ROM drive. It wasn't a 48X or a 32X or a 16X or even a 2X. There was one speed and that was the speed it ran at. There wasn't even a tray; there was a CD caddy which was a little case that you put your CD in and then slid it into the computer. Since those days we've seen an increase in speed in the CD-ROMs, a switch to DVDs, and now a switch to blu rays.
In those early days, there was an idea that CDs were a better way in which to store your information. This was because CDs are not affected by magnetic fields, so there wouldn't be a change of them being damaged in that way. Well, as the old Indian said, only the rocks live forever and it is now known that CDs and their successor optical media aren't perfect. This having been said, if you are going to have a computer, you need an optical drive. DVD drives are now standard; Microsoft assumes you will have one if you are going to install its operating system. If you are going to build a multimedia computer, then, it stands to reason that you will need a blu ray drive as that is the bleeding edge. (It might be a significant insight that entertainment is leading the way in technology. Maybe that has always been so.)
I've chosen this particular blu ray drive. The first consideration for me was brand name. Samsung is a name I trust. It could be that they are famous for producing crappy optical drives, but I've not heard that. The second consideration was price. At $70 this was within my comfort zone. For this I get at 48X CD drive, a 16X DVD drive, and a 12X BD drive. It will also write DVDs and CDs for me, but not blu rays. I don't think this last will be a handicap, and I do know one thing. The blu ray drives will become less expensive after "the next big thing" comes along.
This raises the question, what is the next big thing? Well, as I mentioned earlier, entertainment leads the way. Entertainment seems to be pointing toward the Cloud, as it were. The success of Instant Netflix and all of the other services that are trying to copy their model is leading me to say this.
With something that is on a media, you have to have space to store it. You if there is a format change, then you have to buy it again on the new format because your old player will break down and they don't let you fix stuff anymore. The Cloud eliminates that. While there will always be collectors and folks who like to hold it in their hands, what most people want is access. With the Cloud, you can have access to your movies on something like instant Netflix.
We are already beginning to have the same sort of model with our photos. You upload them to your favorite sights and they will store them for you and every once in a while insist that you buy something. It is but a small step from there to charging a small monthly fee for the storage not only of photos, but other media as well. Remember, the computer/information industry operates under a drug-dealer ethic. Today we give you a free sample and once you are hooked you pay, pay, pay.
Amazon lets you buy access to electronic books and allows you to access them from different devices. Wouldn't it make sense if iTunes started doing something like that as well, rather than just allowing you to move your songs from computer to computer a limited number of times?
I don't know if they'll be a new format beyond blu ray. Maybe there will. But to me it looks like we will be moving to the Cloud.
In those early days, there was an idea that CDs were a better way in which to store your information. This was because CDs are not affected by magnetic fields, so there wouldn't be a change of them being damaged in that way. Well, as the old Indian said, only the rocks live forever and it is now known that CDs and their successor optical media aren't perfect. This having been said, if you are going to have a computer, you need an optical drive. DVD drives are now standard; Microsoft assumes you will have one if you are going to install its operating system. If you are going to build a multimedia computer, then, it stands to reason that you will need a blu ray drive as that is the bleeding edge. (It might be a significant insight that entertainment is leading the way in technology. Maybe that has always been so.)
I've chosen this particular blu ray drive. The first consideration for me was brand name. Samsung is a name I trust. It could be that they are famous for producing crappy optical drives, but I've not heard that. The second consideration was price. At $70 this was within my comfort zone. For this I get at 48X CD drive, a 16X DVD drive, and a 12X BD drive. It will also write DVDs and CDs for me, but not blu rays. I don't think this last will be a handicap, and I do know one thing. The blu ray drives will become less expensive after "the next big thing" comes along.
This raises the question, what is the next big thing? Well, as I mentioned earlier, entertainment leads the way. Entertainment seems to be pointing toward the Cloud, as it were. The success of Instant Netflix and all of the other services that are trying to copy their model is leading me to say this.
With something that is on a media, you have to have space to store it. You if there is a format change, then you have to buy it again on the new format because your old player will break down and they don't let you fix stuff anymore. The Cloud eliminates that. While there will always be collectors and folks who like to hold it in their hands, what most people want is access. With the Cloud, you can have access to your movies on something like instant Netflix.
We are already beginning to have the same sort of model with our photos. You upload them to your favorite sights and they will store them for you and every once in a while insist that you buy something. It is but a small step from there to charging a small monthly fee for the storage not only of photos, but other media as well. Remember, the computer/information industry operates under a drug-dealer ethic. Today we give you a free sample and once you are hooked you pay, pay, pay.
Amazon lets you buy access to electronic books and allows you to access them from different devices. Wouldn't it make sense if iTunes started doing something like that as well, rather than just allowing you to move your songs from computer to computer a limited number of times?
I don't know if they'll be a new format beyond blu ray. Maybe there will. But to me it looks like we will be moving to the Cloud.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
One piece at a time: Parts 2 and 3
One of the basic pieces of the computer, of course, is the storage. This has manifested itself in a number of different ways across time. The first computer I ever had use of was a TRS-80 that was bought by McLish School back in the late 1970s. Originally, its storage was just the RAM. You keyed in the program and if you kicked the plug out of the wall you lost it. Eventually, we used a cassette to save programs on. In order to put more than one program on, you had to listen to the sound on the tape, which was not unlike listening to a fax machine, and wait for a gap. Once David Stewart, who was in the grade below me, didn't leave enough of a gap between his program and mine and I lost the end of one. It didn't bother me; it's not like I've remembered it for 35 years or anything.
Then came the five-and-a-quarter-inch floppies and then the three-and-a-half. I am leaving out a few details like the double-sided, double-density disks, but the point is we've gone through some changes on storage technology.
Last Saturday, I ordered the hard drive for my twelve-year-old daughter's computer. You can look at it here. It is a one terabyte drive. Let's get some perspective on this. That TRS-80 held 4 kilobytes before it was upgraded. Those three-and-a-half-inch floppies that were just the cat's whiskers when they first came out were one megabyte disks. My first serious computer had a 320 megabyte hard rive. At some point, we started talking in gigabytes. Now this is a terabyte drive. So we have a progression of units kilo, mega, giga, and tera. Usually, we talk about each of these steps being a factor of 1000, but it is really a factor of 1024 because the computer world works in powers of 2 and 2 to the tenth power is 1024.
The 1 terabyte drive I am getting for my daughter holds about a quarter of a billion times more information than that old TRS-80.
Damn.
Now, as I said, those three-and-a-quarter-inch floppies cost a buck back in the day. They held one one-millionth of what this one terabyte drive holds. It costs $60. That works out to $0.00006/megabyte. The growth in businesses offering to store your data in the Cloud makes sense in those terms. The disk space at least is practically free.
By way of contrast, I feel real richer when I say that if I'd bought this much storage on those floppies it would've cost $1,000,000. And that many floppies side by side would stretch half way from my house in Pittsburg, Kansas to Tulsa.
I had set out a one part a week pace, but Lydia had a hard day on Thursday so we rushed the process a bit and we bought her motherboard. I looked at all the deals taking cost versus utility into account again and bought this one. It was only as I was writing this up that I discovered this was exactly the same one I'd bought for my own itty-bitty box. This is quite affirming in its unconscious consistency, but it's kinds of disappointing as I was wanting to work with a different one.
In any case, this process has made me think about the future of computing. My desire over the years has always been for a bigger computer. I wonder if that is just a function of the fact that I started out working with such a small one that it wasn't useful. The desire for a larger computer was really a desire for a more useful computer.
Now we are in a more mature age where we use our computers as communication devices. It seems to me--and I claim no originality in this--that we are moving towards a day when storage will be largely on the Cloud and we will have small hand-held devices like our cell phones to interface with that cloud on a personal basis. I suppose those of us who do a lot of writing will want a keyboard and a big monitor, so there will be docking stations. Those who use computers for presentations will have a special sort of interface as well, but I've not thought about that as much.
Then came the five-and-a-quarter-inch floppies and then the three-and-a-half. I am leaving out a few details like the double-sided, double-density disks, but the point is we've gone through some changes on storage technology.
Last Saturday, I ordered the hard drive for my twelve-year-old daughter's computer. You can look at it here. It is a one terabyte drive. Let's get some perspective on this. That TRS-80 held 4 kilobytes before it was upgraded. Those three-and-a-half-inch floppies that were just the cat's whiskers when they first came out were one megabyte disks. My first serious computer had a 320 megabyte hard rive. At some point, we started talking in gigabytes. Now this is a terabyte drive. So we have a progression of units kilo, mega, giga, and tera. Usually, we talk about each of these steps being a factor of 1000, but it is really a factor of 1024 because the computer world works in powers of 2 and 2 to the tenth power is 1024.
The 1 terabyte drive I am getting for my daughter holds about a quarter of a billion times more information than that old TRS-80.
Damn.
Now, as I said, those three-and-a-quarter-inch floppies cost a buck back in the day. They held one one-millionth of what this one terabyte drive holds. It costs $60. That works out to $0.00006/megabyte. The growth in businesses offering to store your data in the Cloud makes sense in those terms. The disk space at least is practically free.
By way of contrast, I feel real richer when I say that if I'd bought this much storage on those floppies it would've cost $1,000,000. And that many floppies side by side would stretch half way from my house in Pittsburg, Kansas to Tulsa.
I had set out a one part a week pace, but Lydia had a hard day on Thursday so we rushed the process a bit and we bought her motherboard. I looked at all the deals taking cost versus utility into account again and bought this one. It was only as I was writing this up that I discovered this was exactly the same one I'd bought for my own itty-bitty box. This is quite affirming in its unconscious consistency, but it's kinds of disappointing as I was wanting to work with a different one.
In any case, this process has made me think about the future of computing. My desire over the years has always been for a bigger computer. I wonder if that is just a function of the fact that I started out working with such a small one that it wasn't useful. The desire for a larger computer was really a desire for a more useful computer.
Now we are in a more mature age where we use our computers as communication devices. It seems to me--and I claim no originality in this--that we are moving towards a day when storage will be largely on the Cloud and we will have small hand-held devices like our cell phones to interface with that cloud on a personal basis. I suppose those of us who do a lot of writing will want a keyboard and a big monitor, so there will be docking stations. Those who use computers for presentations will have a special sort of interface as well, but I've not thought about that as much.
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