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Read More »How Fragile is Technology, 2006, by Tim Allix
Our recent trio of storms, while bringing us an abundance of fabulous powder snow here in Whistler, has not brought good cheer to many of our neighbors in Vancouver, or those on Vancouver Island. The arctic cold front descending south, combined with the low pressure system coming from the west, has produced hurricane force winds on the west coast. This has cost hundreds of millions of dollars in damages due to fallen trees, and consequently knocked out electric power to many regions, causing considerable financial hardship to retailers who are usually experiencing the busiest week of the year, as Christmas shoppers scurry to buy gifts at the last minute. Whistler has been lucky, though not exempt. Ordinarily, I submit this column via email; this week, I had to use something I rarely use any more – my fax machine. As we all know, there has been no internet in Whistler since Friday morning, and as of this writing (Sunday evening), there is still no internet service from either of the two local providers. The reason? The weather has taken out the fibre-optic line between Vancouver and Whistler, though there is precious little information about the severity of the situation. Rumor has it that it may be as many as ten days before service is resumed. Keeping this in perspective, it is certainly not life-threatening to be without internet for a few days, but for many businesses it is inconvenient and extremely costly. A few of my clients, who run accommodations businesses, depend on the internet for the majority of their bookings. Many of their customers use email as their sole method of communications; the booking companies, in order not to lose business, must resort to phoning or faxing every single customer in order to avoid losing their bookings, and to reassure customers that their unanswered emails were not being ignored. Others who have been hard-hit are all the retailers whose Interac and credit-card processing terminals have been converted from dial-up to high-speed internet authentication – these businesses are unable to process bank card transactions, and have had to return to the old imprint swipers for credit cards, for the duration of the failure. What a hassle! Walk around this town and you can’t help but notice the number of internet cafés and internet kiosks that are temporarily out of business as well. I own nine internet kiosks, and this is ordinarily one of the best times of year for usage, so I am somewhat less than happy myself. I decided to tackle the issue head-on and find a work-around. I thought, what about returning to dial-up? So I phoned Telus and asked for the local number. It didn’t work, as I had suspected it might not, because it probably uses the same fibre-optic line that was damaged. I phoned Telus again, asking for the toll...
Read More »Tech Predictions from 2007, by Tim Allix
This week I am going to attempt to predict some of the technology changes for the forthcoming year. Here goes: More competition for Microsoft. Even though this is the year of the much-vaunted Windows Vista operating system, and even though it looks to be quite an improvement, it really has nothing that Apple’s OS-X hasn’t offered for a few years now. Microsoft’s new Office 2007 looks to be very good and favorably reviewed, but competitors offer pretty good competing products for free. Linux will continue to improve and continue to steal market-share too. Battery Technology improvements. Not only will battery life continue to improve for consumer products such as iPods, cell phones, notebooks etc, but re-charging without wires is rumored for this year. YouTube will get huge. If you haven’t heard of this yet, you probably will in the year to come. If you have a unique home-made video, YouTube can make you famous. Even advertisers are getting in on the game, advertising products via YouTube, which costs nothing. If you missed Saddam’s hanging, you can watch it here. With video-cams built into everything from iPods to cell-phones, much of the content from these devices will turn up on YouTube. Cheap, plentiful Tera-Byte (1000 Gigabyte) sized hard-disks. Predictors of the past have said that the mechanical hard-disk will be replaced by flash memory in the future. While this eventually may be true, as flash memory is making giant strides, hard-disks don’t appear to be going away. They just get bigger and cheaper. Future Hard-disks will be hybrid combinations of mechanical technology and flash memory technology. Quad Core Processors in Computers. 2006 saw both Intel and AMD introduce Dual Core CPU’s into the mainstream market, and the success of these chips is unprecedented. Dual core means, essentially, 2 brains for the price of one. 2007 will see the death of single core CPU’s, and the birth of Quad Core (4 brain) CPU’s. Advantages, with modern Operating Systems, include true multitasking and better heat dissipation. Faster Internet. With more and more video content being delivered by internet, (see YouTube prediction above) what we call high-speed today will soon be regarded as quaint and slow; 2006 internet speeds will soon remind us of those good old dial-up days. Over-loaded Internet. With all this multimedia content coming at us via internet, and many crystal-ball gazers saying that cable TV will become obsolete, because TV programming will eventually be delivered via internet, the internet infrastructure will have to adjust to accommodate the increased data traffic. Chinese Cars in North America. American auto manufacturers have more to worry about as more there are more than 100 auto makers in China jostling to enter the North American market. Watch for cars made by Changfeng (Group) Co, Ltd. arriving in the US this year. More Chinese everything. Tire manufacturer Goodyear recently closed a plant in Valleyfield, Quebec as...
Read More »Linux Vs Microsoft, 2006, by Tim Allix
Linux vs. Microsoft – is this a legitimate contest? Will Microsoft remain a mighty empire forever? It’s not easy to predict the future of software development; nobody in the seventies could have predicted the rise and dominance of Microsoft Corporation and the emergence of Bill Gates as the world’s wealthiest man – not even Gates himself – but that’s a topic for another column. Microsoft has been successful because of its commitment to “software for the people”, and Gates’ fervent commitment to remain un-tied to a single hardware vendor (originally IBM wanted exclusive rights to MS-DOS). It has gone to great efforts to make software easy and friendly to use, but that required a vast infrastructure of programming and development staff, which costs a lot of money, and the price of Microsoft software is thus reflected. It is really no different from any other industry – money is spent on resources to produce a finished product, and the finished product’s price is set so that the company will be profitable. Microsoft has been very successful at this. What other brand of any household product can you think of that has been accepted by 90% of the world? For comparison, it would be like 90% of the world deciding they wanted to drive Chevrolets. If that were the case, GM would not be experiencing its current financial hardship. GM has a lot of competition, but until recently, Microsoft has had virtually none. It’s historically very unusual for a consumer product to exhibit such domination, and it is my contention that Microsoft will face some very serious competition in the decade ahead, and that competition will come from Apple Computers and Linux. How could Microsoft have predicted that its competition would arrive in the form of a product developed by a worldwide community of volunteers? Other challengers of Microsoft used the old business model – spend money on development, and then hope the world will buy it. Many have tried and failed. Canadian software company Corel is a good example of this, the company tried for many years to topple Microsoft’s Office suite dominance, but Corel has only ever achieved a minor market share, despite being priced at a fraction of the price of Microsoft Office. The fact that Linux is free and open source is what makes it so markedly different from any other type of software. The code is open for anybody (who has an internet connection) to hack, and consequently development is very rapid. With Linux, version releases come every few weeks or months, as opposed to years as with Microsoft. Anybody can test the new releases, so the world-wide Beta testing community is enormous. Bugs are reported, and fixed, quickly. This is a radical departure from traditional software development, and I believe we are perched at the dawn of this development model. As India...
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