Wednesday, April 20, 2011

A Death in the Family

The tide may be going out on the Desktop Computer, folks. They are bringing back the old Commodore 64. When people start longing for the nostalgia of a bygone era with slow computers, bad graphics and lousy sound, you have to make a pretty compelling case to get people to turn loose of $1500 or so for a new state-of-the-art appliance that is becoming less and less a part of everyone's life. And nobody, not even Apple, seems to be able to do that, now.

I blame the cell phone industry. Whoever it was that first included a little calculator in their cell phone sent us down this path and today we are awash in mobile alternatives to the big, clunky, desktop computer. If a cell phone can do more than just connect you to the pizza delivery guy, if you can do math on it, then why hand over a bag of cash for a desktop computer to do those things? So the value of a desktop computer is decremented by whatever value you assign to the little calculator app. Add in calendaring, Web browsing and Angry Birds, and why would anyone want a desktop computer? Why, indeed.

Flash ahead a few years and desktop computers haven't changed, much. Oh, they're faster. They're always faster. And they have a little more memory than the last one you bought, sure. But when you're at your word processor, trying to decide whether to use "Start" or "Initiate" you aren't taxing your processor. You could make that decision comfortably with an old '286 or a MacPlus. Screens are nicer, bigger and with richer colors, but the screen on my six year old iMac is big, with nice color, too. And it still boots up, every day.

I can browse the Web (to some extent), on my iPhone. I can browse the Web on my iPad, too. I can get my e-mail on either machine. I can do my banking with either one, too. In fact, as far as day-to-day activity goes, I can do everything I would ever want, except take a day off, with my mobile devices (The software vendor behind the accounting for vacation and sick leave here does not work with the best standards-compliant software.).

Today's Apple iPhone, iPad and their contemporaries from other manufacturers can be loaded up with a month's worth of music, video, books, magazines, movies, television programming and podcasts. You can get the weather, including radar imaging for your location, which of course the hardware already knows about, probably. Press a button and find the nearest shoe store, or coffee house. Check in with friends on Facebook. With content management systems like Drupal, you can even work on Web pages with severely clever features, using only a Web browser.

The value proposition is weakening on the desktop. I'll need one to run my income taxes, next year. It is nice to see photographs in big, wide-screen detail and I do enjoy an hour or two of Civilization now and again. But I could see the "Home computer" becoming little more than a wireless router in many homes, practically unseen. A Mac Mini, up in some closet, somewhere, constantly monitoring the temperature, turning off unused household lights, keeping track of how old the milk is in the fridge, and watching out for and snagging old episodes of TV shows to record for later viewing.

The guy that built that first wheel really started something. We can't get enough Wheels. The guy that built the first telegraph started something, too, but now even Western Union is just a money-transfer store. Fewer and fewer homes have land-line telephones these days—there's a machine that came and went in about a century and a half. Could it be that the desktop PCs time was only half a century or so?

We'll see.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Spring Cleaning

It's fashionable to engage in the restoration of our various environments at home, at work and even in our cars, this time of year. We are encouraged to clean this and shine that and throw those away. Massive benefits accrue to those who do, including the Finding Of Lost Stuff and the Efficiencies of Not Searching for Things. People report fewer headaches, reduced lethargy and even lottery winnings after this cleaning is done.

Nobody talks about our computers.

If you have had your computer for more than a month, it is probably full of junk. If you have visited more than a dozen Web sites or ever upgraded software, your computer is almost certainly a museum of abandoned files.

This is a good time to go through your computer and see what can be tossed. Every computer manufacturer includes stuff you never use and never will and many publishers do, too.

If you are running NumberCruncher v5 you can be reasonably certain throwing away updaters for NumberCruncher v3.2 and v4 won't hurt you or your computer. It's popular now to send e-mails with links to little stubs of software that then go and get the real item, and start things working. I tend to keep these e-mails, but throw away the little stubs, which are easy for me to find because I always download everything to my Desktop folder. If you're unsure, it is probably a better idea to leave a file where it is and lose the small amount of space it is claiming, than to delete the file and discover it really was necessary, somehow.

I have a Macintosh, and a lot of this stuff is just simpler and easier on a Mac than on other computers, but the general theory is the same. If you install, say, Office, and you know you won't ever be using some component of it, you can reclaim a lot of disk space and make finding things in the future much easier if you can uninstall it or delete it. I don't have much need for Microsoft Messenger, for example. I don't remember being asked about it during installation, but it landed in my Applications folder, briefly. I am pretty much an AIM guy, and rely less and less on that.

Those little stubs of programs? They often mount virtual disk resources used to update or upgrade software. Once you have updated everything, you can un-mount the disk and throw it away. There are any number of README.txt or LICENSE.txt files on a typical hard drive. Trust me. Nobody from Adobe is ever going to knock on your door and ask to see your computer. You can nuke those, too.

As a Web guy, I am constantly building low-feature pages to test this or that concept. If I'm building a page with complicated navigation, for instance, it can be frustrating and distracting to build the navigation in a "real" page with content and so on. I will very often create a new, blank page, save it as bogus.html or something like that, then start hammering away on the nav. When I get the navigation working, I just copy or clip it out of the "bogus" page and paste it into a real page. That leaves me with, over the course of a year, potentially dozens of Web pages named bogus.html, in all of the directories I work in. These take up time and space—and if you work in a Dreamweaver environment, they take up space at least twice, locally on your own computer and remotely, on the Web server.

I have also abandoned whole programs. You know, at one time I thought maybe I would take the time to sit down and learn DigitSlinger. But it turns out I'm more of a NumberCruncher guy, working in a definite NumberCruncher environment. The folks who report to me and the folks I report to are all NumberCruncher users. Why do I want to spend the time and effort to learn new commands and keyboard shortcuts and various Save As… methods to get meaningful reports that everyone can use? It's easier to just join the crowd and put those hours (and dollars) to better use.

So, throw open the actual windows, and take a long, deep breath of pollen, and let's clean up our computers, this week. But first: Remember to make a complete backup of everything, Just In Case.