Bob Browning's blog

As you get older (I’m 80) your brain slows down. This is a well-known fact. The defence against this is to keep it active and learn a new skill.  I tried a new language (Spanish), but it turns out that if you are really bad at languages in your youth you are God-awfully bad in later years. So, I turned to something I did have a talent for – coding. 

As we were stuck indoors anyway, courtesy of Covid, I thought I would update my knowledge of JavaScript, and something called Node. 

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Someone just asked me two important questions:

1. How much traffic should I get on my website
2. How many of them will buy something

Two good questions to ask when business planning.  A couple of resources that will help you with some numbers.

1. Statbrain (http://www.statbrain.com/) will give you an idea of traffic levels at competitors sites.   The most commonly used resource is Alexa but I think statbrain gives better numbers.  There are some more here.
2. The Fireclick index (http://index.fireclick.com/) will give you an idea of conversion rates by industry sector.  Another place to go is Coremetrics.

These are all guesstimates, so don’t expect consistency.

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The twittersphere is currently awash with Google Wave offers of invites and requests for invites.  Lots of people want to try it.

Amongst them was this tweet:  “Can someone please inform me on the signifigance of the Google Wave? What exactly is it?”

So your next task if you decide to accept it, is to explain Google wave as a tweet, max 140 characters.   Once I have done that I plan to summarise War and Peace as a tweet – probably easier.

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I find it absolutely amazing the way the human race is sleep-walking into a couple of related disasters. Our children are going to ask ‘what were they thinking of’.

Firstly we all know about the half-hearted attempts by our government to address climate change.  The other highly related issue is peak oil.

We have known for years that oil production in any system follows a bell-shaped production curve (the Hubbert curve – check out ‘peak oil’ in Wikipedia). This means that inevitably the world’s production will reach a peak and then slowly decline.  If you think abut it for 10 minutes that is pretty obvious.  If oil demand continues to rise then the inevitable result is a rapid rise in the oil price, shortages, and a major economic crisis.

When will this happen?  Expert opinion varies from ‘it is happening now’ to ‘after 2030’.  The UK Energy Research Council says around 2020.

This is after the next election, so the politicians obviously don’t need to bother with this.  There are much more urgent problems.

Someone needs to teach them the difference between ‘urgent’ and ‘important’.  Not taking action now has consequences.

The solution to the climate change issue and the peak oil issue is the same.  Renewable energy and nuclear.  It would be nice to say no nuclear, but we have ignored this issue for so long that a nuclear period is probably inevitable.  If the crisis is coming in ten years we need to give this serious attention and do something serious now.

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My mobile phone is too limited for any real work, my laptop is too big and only has a few hours battery life.  I need a smaller computing device that doesn’t weigh much or take much space, but which will do proper computing  jobs plus of course web surfing.

I still think the favourite is the netbook.  A possibility is the upcoming Apple tablet.  However Microsoft have come up with a third alternative that is really cool.  This is a tablet-like device, but with two screens, that folds.   They call it the Courier.  I really think two screens can work really well.

But no keyboard?

More details and a little video here: http://gizmodo.com/5365299/courier-first-details-of-microsofts-secret-tablet

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A smartphone is a mobile phone with some computer capabilities, such as web browsing and email.  A Netbook is a small notebook computer.  So a Smartbook is what?  Something between a Smartphone and a Netbook.?

You might think so.

Take device A.  This has 64 meg memory, a mobile phone operating system (windows CE or Android) a couple of gig of flash memory.  In other words the same spec as a smartphone but without the phone bit and with a screen and keyboard.

Device B.  A gig of main memory, maybe even a dual core processor, 160 gig disk, a full-blown multi-user operating system with a full set of office applications.

Obviously device A is a smartbook and device B a netbook.

Wrong. If device A has an intel processor and a Microsoft operating system and device B has an ARM processor and Unix.

It is madness, but the definition of a smartbook now is apparenrlty that it has an ARM processor because ARM processors are the ones you have in your mobile phone.

This is a triumph of marketing for Microsoft/Intel.

It has to stop.

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I have been receiving an Amazon Web Services newsletter but decided to un-subscribe.

Easy – you just hit the unsubscribe button and you are done: right?

Wrong.  Number one you have to sign in.  I had forgotten my password.  The password refresh function requires that you enter a code from a distorted image.  So distorted I had to have two goes.

I got the email, reset the password.  Then I was taken to the shopping page.

Back to the email, clicked on the link again, went to a page with my name, address and checkbox for this newsletter.  I unchecked the checkbox and submitted.

Error!  I have to enter a valid State.  Uh.  In the first place I hadn’t changed my address, and in the second place we don’t have states in the UK.

So I enter a state (XX) the postman with think they are blowing him kisses.

Done.

About five minutes for something that should have taken 5 seconds.  Not to mention my blood pressure.

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Nvidia just spoke on netbook operating systems for ARM based systems and they like … Windows CE.  They prefer it because it better suited to a netbook than ..Android.

Repeat after me 100 times.  A netbook is not a mobile phone.  A netbook is not a mobile phone. A netbook is not a mobile phone. A netbook is not a mobile phone.

Do these guys know nothing about computers and what they are used for.  Do they really think that the only use for these gadgets will only be used for browsing.  Because that is pretty much all these toy operating systems are capable of.

I dunno – I dispair. Maybe depressingly they are right.

Just because the first unix-based netbooks were a bit of a snafu it doesn’t mean that they should be written off.  Unix is the natural operating system for an ARM netbook.  No question.  If it goes the other way I will stick my head in a bucket.

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My guess is that Netbooks will eventually home in on a solid state drive and Unix as the ideal combination.  If you had such a device today with a reasonable processor how long would it take you to boot up and load firefox?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GKohxZHNg4&feature=player_embedded

22 seconds!

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David Pogue is writing a book.  Well actually he is not writing the book as such, he is compiling it from twitter posts.  It actually sounds quite feasible. 

Post a tweet and if included you get a copy of the book. 

http://davidpogue.com/bio_photos/twitter.html

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