Convergence HAS arrived! Goodbye laptops!
p2pnet news view P2P | Mobiles:- Since 1973 (when I sent my first CQ CQ CQ on Father Allardyce’s Ham Radio at St Patricks College in Silverstream, NZ) I have officially been a Geek.
This was compounded during my University days in New Zealand, Australia and Hungary where I joined every radio club available.
In Hungary, radio clubs were frowned on, unless a party (communist) member was also a member of the group. Then we could use our illegal Kenwood TS120S to talk to the world as long as comrade party member was present. In fact it was because of comrade party member that I became a hacking geek. How could we utilize the Universities radio tower with the Kenwood and talk to CB radio operators in the West.
First we need a 27mhz crystal and then a repeater mode looped inside the TS120. Voila – we could now sit in my dorm room with a discrete halfwave wire antennae on the roof (looking like a clothesline) to use the Universities 160W Peak output power to talk to the world and talk we did, about comrade this, comrade that and the price of luxuries in the west. Specifically which shops in Austria had them so we could border hop on the weekends.
We also played favourite music tracks to each other and the DX sessions quite often had 3 renditions of the same tune – first in English then in German then in Hungarian.
But lets get back to geeks.
In the 80’s, geeks were those strange nerdy types with pencil pocket protectors that actually housed jewelers screwdrivers and not actually pencils. And I moved from radios to computers (IBM running CPM).
In the 90s, the geeks started incorporating soho businesses that assembled PC’s with funny brand names and started writing and distributing shareware; then the Internet arrived.
The commercial geeks started setting up ISPs whilst a new class of geek was quietly born. The UBER geek.
UBER geeks only did technical stuff and weren’t interested in the final dollars and cents. They probably were not an academic and probably worked in a little bedroom at mums place with the curtains pulled and never coming out of their room.
UBER geeks were on a mission. They want peer review. They wanted fame. They wanted to be Bill Gates.
When any new business first starts up there is a predictable growth curve. There are the early adopters (4% of the Population) followed by their friends and relatives (11% of the population) followed by their friends and their relatives (17% of the population) so that by the end of the 3rd year the business has a 32% market penetration of its intended customer target population.
In my years on the net, I have met a fair few UBER geeks, usually at NANOG meetings and the like, and usually I get on with them rather well and because of the talk – they accept me as one of their own. We speak a secret language. The language of knowledge. For example – no UBER geek I have even known has even considered that Australia’s Internet Filter can work.
Why ?
Because we know about the holes in Bind version 9.0.; and if we know about the holes, then there are some black hat UBER geeks running phishing, warez and other nefarious activities that also know. So we don’t mention it.
Recently an UBER geek (whom I’ll call AK) visited me from the UK. And we sat down in my Bonsai ‘garden’ and started the normal ‘Hey dude what’s up’? and as AK was talking I looked down on the coffee table noting the Nokia, the TRIO and the iPhone but no laptop. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with the brand of phones that AK has – its just that in the 12 years I have known him, he has always carried a laptop.
“Dude, where’s your OQO?” – I interrupted.
“Tom, I’m trying an experiment. This is my first trip ever without a laptop and so far so good. I haven’t needed it. I can everything I need to do on these three phones and I even have redundancy.”
There it was. My friend and colleague admitting that HE, UBER geek (at least in the top 10 listing of UBER Geeks) no longer needed a laptop to achieve all of his connectivity, email and data requirements whilst on the move.
So I now cheerfully predict that by next year laptop sales will have dropped at least 4%, the following year at least 11% with 17% the year after that.
On the positive side, I see a massive increase in Smartphone alternatives with the appropriate price reductions.
Convergence HAS arrived. Now we just need to get the billing right.
Tom Koltai – p2pnet
[Koltai is an economist in Sydney Australia. He's been online for 26 years, has run several ISPs and, "lobbied governments in four countries to prevent Internet restrictive usage legislation from being enacted". He says he's a strong believer in P2P, "as being a technological requirement to fully exploit the convergence of telephony with computers and remove the last barriers to human communication and interaction".]
]
February , 2009
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February 25th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
No way!
I am not doing computing or browse the internet on an iPod or an iPhone!
No way! It is too small and not powerful enought.
hello!
No way!
February 25th, 2009 at 6:49 pm
I can’t (easily) run Linux on most portable devices — which means that all the programs I enjoy (kmail, VI, iceweasel, amarok), and all the daemons that do background work for me (citadel for e-mail, g15daemon, gizmod, cron), and most of my gadgetry — g15 keyboard, Griffin PowerMate, Streamzap remote (and other remotes, actually. I like buttons.), scanner, decent camera, etc. — just simply wouldn’t be available.
Worse: screen real estate. What’s an iphone? A couple hundred pixels squared, maybe 2mp if we’re lucky. It’s not so much the size of the screen (although it helps to have a larger screen), but the limited number of pixels. I have two monitors, setup with twinview, and when I’m browsing the web, I almost always have my web browsers maximized on at least one screen (sometimes both). Web pages are big, screen-wise, and they can’t be shrunk without redesigning almost the entire site — which would then remove any benefits of having a larger screen.
Another nail in the coffin is processing power (already mentioned): there is no way an iphone can compete with my laptop in terms of processing power. I am a programmer, and I tend to need to run a compiler quite frequently. Even small- to medium-sized programs take significant processing power to compile. Did I mention interpreted programs? How about Java applets? Flash?! (ok, skip flash. But for an average web user, flash is important). These things just can’t run in that limited of an environment.
How about repairs? If my computer’s monitor breaks, I go down to the local computer shop, and buy a new monitor. If my video card breaks I buy a new one, pop it in, and problem solved. Even on my laptop, most components can be replaced if I get hold of them – which, if you know the right words to say, is not all that hard, really. And I don’t need to hire an expert to do this. What happens if an iphone breaks? You send it back to Apple. If you’re lucky, they send your phone back with your data intact and you’re good to go. You still lost a week or two waiting for the repair, and possibly lost your data in the process (if it were a laptop, you could grab the data off of the hard drive before you sent it away, at least).
DATA! That’s another thing. iphones don’t have enough space. I mean, they’re OK, but I have 800gb of storage space on my desktop, 200gb on my laptop, and that exceeds all iphones I have seen. Saving data? Well, sure. But I carry with me — on my laptop — maxima (for my calculus class), which requires an entire common lisp implementation to run, I carry my entire music collection, I carry several videos, mostly of lectures that I need to watch, several e-books, saved copies of web pages that I would like to browse when I’m not near wifi and I’m not stationary enough to use Clearwire (a local wireless ISP). Basically, I need storage space, and lots of it, to do my daily activities.
How about typing? It’s hell to type on tiny devices. You can succumb to blackberry thumb if you use one of the thumb keyboards (it’s a form of tendonitis in your thumbs, similar to carpal tunnel syndrome). You have major accuracy problems if you try to use palm’s handwriting recognition. Severe speed penalty for on-screen keyboards. Privacy concerns for voice recognition (as if these devices were powerful enough for that!), or you have to buy very expensive and delicate keyboards to attach to these things — a (failed) attempt to compensate for a clear problem spot. I’m finicky about my keyboards. I type at about 75-80wpm on my desktop, 50-60wpm on my laptop (posture makes a difference), and that is almost fast enough to let my thoughts flow onto the keyboard. I couldn’t stand it if I had to spend 45 minutes typing out an e-mail!
I also have privacy concerns. I use open source because I don’t trust companies who won’t tell me what their software does to write software that I can trust. malicious software, microsoft and apple’s DRM, and so forth are exactly why I don’t use proprietary programs. I don’t know if the iPhone will phone home every time I listen to a song — it’s possible that it does, and the MAFIAA could get wind of it. I like to encrypt my e-mail, at least between me and the server. Does the iPhone do that? I don’t know, but I have my doubts.
Yeah, there is no way toys could replace my laptop. For work, or for play.
February 25th, 2009 at 9:45 pm
What I frequently need is a semi-portable computer with enough HD space and CPU power to run most of my work applications– and admittedly a few emulated games– and *NOT* to connect to the internet or check email. Let’s see a camera phone do that!
February 26th, 2009 at 12:19 am
What it seems the 3 posts ahead of me are missing, is that hes not living without computing power
to him, I’m planning to move to an “almost”
hes simply not carry the heavy weight (relatively) laptop while on the fly. Hes still connected,
but not in a traditional way. More power
Blackberry in the next month or so just to START having some connectivity, and no im not a tech
generation type!
stw