One of the common panelists is John C Dvorak – and I generally like what he writes, he makes sense, and often is right – admittedly I relate to his cynical undertones.

However, recently he wrote an article on what would make the perfect tablet. I’m not too sure I agree.

My main reason is it all depends on what you want the tablet to do, or achieve.

John’s ‘list’ follows:

1. The machine should be about the thickness and size of a standard clipboard. It’s a size we are used to and a device this size would fit wherever a clipboard fits.
2. It should weigh about a pound. The weight of today’s Kindle e-book reader should be the same weight.

Agreed. The device does have to be relatively thinner than a notebook, and perhaps not as bulky. But until they find a better power source to batteries, I think this will remain a slight pipe dream. The truth is most notebooks are quite light – even with the battery inserted.

3. It should have a digital ink or MEMS display-technology screen. There are many versions of this so-called digital ink technology and there must be one that would be ideal for this application. This low-power technology does not have to be powered up to display. The image is permanent until it is powered up and erased. Most e-book readers will use this sort of technology since it has a high contrast ratio, thus increasing readability.

This one makes sense. You want a technology that is vivid and crisp enough to replicate print on paper, whilst ensuring longevity in battery life.

4. Multitouch screen. I do not think I have to explain why this is necessary. I’m sure Apple will feature this for sure.

I’m not entirely sure how this would be useful – maybe for that gimmicky ‘zoom in / zoom out’ trick with four fingers. Though, you don’t realistically need ‘multi-touch’.

Perhaps in some primary school applications, or medical fields it could be useful – but you can’t enforce this as a ‘standard’. So, back to my key argument: Depends on the application for which the tablet is being designed.

5. Massive I/O. As a PC user I like my machines to have a lot of I/O and connectivity options. This means Wi-Fi, WiMAX as well as all sorts of USB connectivity. If the machine is to be thin it may have to be done with a dongle, although I can see the device having a lip on one side with room for connectors. I hate losing dongles.

This one is a big wrong in my books. Excessive I/O may seem ‘cool’ and ‘handy’ – but how many people realistically need to have firewire, usb, audio in/out, external video, etc. on a device that has limited applications?
It makes designing a case complex, and makes designing the board even more complex- along with the additional cost factor for components to make the I/O work.

An alternative would be to have a narrow connector at one side of the device which ‘docks’ into a docking station. This docking station would allow for:
Charging, Connectivity (USB, FireWire, E-Sata,etc), External Video (HDMI, VGA / DVI), Gigabit LAN.
Though, that said, you might be able to get away with a mini-HDMI connector on the unit itself for presentations, or even an SDHC slot for storage of files.
Besides, with the way things are going, we may end up having a wireless ‘charging station’.

The unit itself could have Wireless Networking (N-Standard should be more than enough for most people), as well as BlueTooth connectivity.

6. Built-in GPS so the whole thing can be used as a car navigation system.

Interesting thought: but maybe not. A 12 or 15 inch display is hard to mount adequately for using as a guidance system. Stick to the 3 or 5 inch navigators.

7. Built-in Apple TV and full screen video-processing capability. It could be used as a small hi-def television in the kitchen, perhaps.

That’s just silly. At some point we’re forgetting the purpose of tablets.

A tablet, I see, should be used much the same way as the ‘Data-Pads’ in Star Trek. Replacing pen & paper with a digital, more re-usable form.

Modern tablet computers are wasted on gimmicky solutions. Let’s start thinking of real useful applications where these devices can be used – such as hospital’s to replace patients charts, where the records are being stored on a local server, rather than fragile paper.

And at this point in time, there’s a lot of speculation around the ‘hype’ of Windows 7′s ability to perform on older hardware.
Vista suffered from the ‘lets throw more hardware at it‘ syndrome – where you don’t ensure enough backward compatibility, and tried to bring about too much change in one hit.
Funnily enough, many users expect their computer of 5 years to be able to handle the next operating system – not being fully aware of the changes in technology. Which is fair enough – to a point; It’d be nice if users actually read the ‘minimum’ and ‘recommended’ requirements for the program they’re trying to install, and to then follow that thinking, investigate what they have, and then learn a bit along the way.

A lot of people don’t always want to upgrade their system. It’s a comfort thing. They know where their files are. They know how things look, and feel, and where to find elements of the system (control panel, programs, games, etc). Others are willing to throw away a computer that’s two years old (and was top of the line when they bought it) simply because it’s running slow.
What they might find is that they have some virus’s or malware – or just too many programs running, causing the slow down. More RAM and a clean up would help it – but they don’t care. Like many organisations, they just throw money at the problem, and that should fix it.
Right? Wrong.

So, we’re hoping people are going to start appreciating what they have, and maybe take maintainance measures to draw out the life of their computers – Perhaps this is also part of the reason why windows 7 is ‘said’ to be able to work on a:

• 1 Ghz 32-Bit or 64-Bit Processor or higher
• 1 GB of system memory or more
• 16 GB of available disk space
• DVD-R/W Drive

Apart from the ’16 GB’ of disk space, that’s pretty much a standard PC. That’d almost work on my old 900 Mhz Duron – which is 9 years old!
If you have a 40 GB Drive – which many systems come with as a basic setup, especially in corporations- Then that might be starting to get too close. With half your drive spent on the Operating System, you’d be possibly dealing with a bit of a slow system. Possibly.

There are some people (Farseeker, of this site, and more notably – John C Dvorak) who think that the current state of Windows 7 (The beta of which runs quite happily on my EEE 701) is only a facade: That whilst it runs nicely, and efficiently now, the final product will be bogged down with ‘crap-ware’.
And, as John Dvorak happily notes – he feels that the success of Microsoft – indeed, the entire Windows line – is based on whether Windows 7 works – and works well.

I agree – in part – with this opinion. Vista was a bad move by Microsoft. Even they’ve admitted to that. However, whether people like it or not – They still hold the market in most corporate environments. But part of the key to Windows 7 is how it will be priced -  especially given the current ‘economic crisis’.
Windows XP, whilst great for its time – is buggy. More and more security holes / flaws are being discovered, and I don’t think that patching the Swiss-cheese like architecture that is XP is going to work forever.

The real ‘key’ to Microsoft’s success with Windows 7 is two fold.
1. Pricing. They need to price it in such a way that it wont be hideously expensive, but still represent a value for money. Both in terms of features and security. Corporations aren’t going to spend $400 per machine to upgrade. Especially in an environment consisting of 500+ desktops and laptops.
And the average Joey Bloggs isn’t going to upgrade his nicely working year old Vista machine – especially if he’s just layed out a pretty sum for it.

2. Upgrade path. At the time of writing, every indication has said that there’s no way of ‘upgrading’ from Windows XP. The architecture is just too different. However, you *could* go from XP – Vista. Hmm.
Win7 is based on Vista – but I wonder how much of the ‘base system’ they actually changed that you can’t go from XP – Win7.

Or is this another ‘push’ to customers to do a clean install? Those of us in the industry know the benefits and ‘psychology’ of a clean install. Things are fresh, and you don’t bring your old garbage to the new house. Microsoft tried the ‘push’ strategy with Vista by forcing people to upgrade their hardware. That went down like the Titanic.

It’ll be interesting to see how much the economy of current times will affect the release and adoption of Windows 7.

We’ve had the credit bubble go *pop*,  the subsequent mass hysteria of everyone pulling money out of investments so fast (thanks to the wonder of technology: High speed Internet and Internet banking) causing entire countries to become bankrupt, and generally society starting to panic and think “Is this the next Great Depression?”.
That question, I’m not in a position to answer – nor is it the purpose of this post. Rather, considering where consumerism has taken technology.

So, there was this lovely scene. Everyone was working for someone, making some money – and then you had these people in the financial sector willing to give out credit to the workers – it didn’t matter how much you earned, you could get a line of credit from as little as $2000, to as much as $20,000. Whether you could repay it or not they wouldn’t care.
Some people don’t really think about that. They just thought: “You beauty, quick money – I can get all those cool things I want” – but don’t really need.

That well suddenly dried up – and the horse drinking from it: no one’s seen him since.
The last 10 years has seen some dramatic growth and change in technology: I point it squarely at the consumer market.

Advertisers are always trying to get the everyday person (consumer) to feel that they need something to fill their otherwise boring life. That new 52 inch Plasma. That 10.2 surround sound system.The latest Mac Book pro. Anything they think will help them get on with everyday life in a more ‘interesting’ fashion.

The huge profits that this generated for the companies allowed them to push Research and Development, to make things better, & to find new technologies. Along the way, the additional hype of a growing energy crisis and shortfalls in resources has prompted certain companies to rethink what resources they are using. Never a bad thing – provided they could come up with a reason why they’re wasting it all on products that in 8 years are going to sit in a rubbish dump.

It’s always a ‘short lived’ focus.

People used to go out every 6 – 12 months and get the newest, greatest digital camera.  People will now stick to the one they’ve got. The number of mega pixels is irrelevant these days. They all do a fantastic job of capturing an image. That’s all it has to do.
People are no longer throwing out computers that are a year or two old because they’re “getting slower”. They’re putting more memory in it, running maintenance procedures, and trying to make it last a little bit longer. One has to wonder how long they’ll really last – but it’s reasonable to expect at least a 5 – 8 year life span.

I’d like to think hope that we’re going back to a different mindset. Sure, the ‘throw away’ society will remain to a degree, but maybe people will hold off on throwing away technology that still works for a little while longer.

The last month has led me consider how I got into this predicament, that is, one of programming for MATLAB.  You see, MATLAB is the foundation stone of all computer-based maths.  IT is the yard-stick against which all other pieces of software are measured against.  Why?  Because.

Here are the key reasons I’ve been told for using MATLAB:

• It can do EVERYTHING (almost)
• It has years of expertise behind it
• It is expensive, therefore it is high quality
• Everyone else recommends it…

The problem is… my experiences don’t reflect any of the apparent positives that have been dictated.  To give some background, I am currently doing some image processing of video feeds in an exercise in computer vision.  So far I have had the following issues:

• Video under linux can only be loaded if the video is stored as a non-interleaved AVI file.  Finding a program that can do this seems to be about as likely as finding a hen with dracula-fangs
• Object-orientation can be done in two different ways.  Only one method is properly documented by MATLAB.  Neither way work as one might expect.
• MATLAB provides extraordinarily clumsy controls for GUI and redrawing operations
• Image processing of various kinds has some strange undocumented limitations.  For example, I load a 2D image, the instant I attempt to change perspective (camdolly etc.), the image vanishes…
• Image crop can only crop a straight rectangle…

Each of these has wasted more than a day of work to figure out and program around.  So where is the advantage here for using to MATLAB?  I have explained these shortcomings to others who I work with, and all I ever hear back is the popular refrain “but the program is really good… what’s your problem?”.  So, in spite of all these shortcomings and issues, when I say MATLAB sucks, people just don’t believe me.

The first major question to consider is: how did MATLAB come to be in such an untouchable position?

As ever, I dont like to present problems without having theories to back them up. My theory is it took the following 4 steps:

Step 1: write a program

Simple stuff of course.  They wrote a mathematics program that could work in matricies.  It was written as an educational tool by a lecturer.  Nothing wrong at this point.

Step 2: sell the program to another university

So, this is the first and only software of its time.  Of course other Uni’s have the same desires and needs, so they adopt it wholesale, as it is a lot better than nothing… right?  Now we are starting to get on shaky ground, as this program likely hasn’t really been very “cleaned up”.

Step 3: get adopted by a company

This happened in 1984, with the forming of a company called The MathWorks.  Now there is a commercial reason to sell it… and generally the commercial entity will want a bigger market etc.  Also, the commercial entity will want to sell asap, and probably won’t bother rewriting or reworking the existing system.  After all, additional functionality expands the market-base, not improving of existing technology.  So, we get a different style of programming tacked onto an already questionable code base.

Step 4: get many students hooked on it so it gets dragged out into the industry

If the students are raised on only one program, then of course, that is what they will want when they graduate.  A great business model, I would highly recommend this track if you can get in!  Now the software is suddenly being used everywhere.  It is quite prolific, and is an almost entirely self-supporting illusion.  All you really need is enough people coming in to equal the number of people leaving your software.  At uni, this happens very naturally, so there is no hassle.  Industries will use software students are familiar with (or students will ask for software they are familiar with), our recent graduates won’t really investigate the other alternatives that hard, assuming that the university had already done this research (they didnt either)… suddenly we have a mythical reputation that springs into action.  All sides assume that MATLAB is the best of breed… why?  Because umm… everyone else is using it…

The problem is, that no where along the way has anyone actually sat down to decide the program they are building.  MATLAB has grown organically for many many decades now and my… goodness… does it show.  It has many different styles of documentation, mutliple functions to achieve almost identical ends, inconsistent coding syntax and many undocumented “features”.  And yet, this has no effect on the perceived value.

MATLAB is already big.  Why is it big? Because it grew when no-one else was there to compete.  So people argue “but <prestigious uni name here> uses it, certainly its good enough for us!”… of course that Uni uses, they use it because everybody else does!

Is MATLAB the best peice of software?  Probably, it is very expensive… and everyone knows you pay for quality.

Why is MATLAB so expensive?  Because it has taken decades of development, therefore it must be good… you know, it’s passed the test of time and all.

The reaction people are having to my critisisms is quite basic: they are buying the advertising material.  It is the same reaction you would get if you rocked up in a Ferrarri, and started telling everybody how bad the performance was.  People would nod and smile knowingly, and think in the back of their head “but its a Ferrarri… I’ll be he’s just using it wrong”.

Well, I’m not using it wrong.  For the area of image research I’m doing, contrary to popular belief, MATLAB quite simply sucks.  If there is one thing I can ask people reading this, it is: Please please please DO YOU OWN RESEARCH before you force those working below you to use a particular technology or software suite.  If you haven’t checked that the software can do the hardest thing you will need to do (or even all the simple things such as maybe loading a compressed avi file), then you haven’t done your research properly and could be crippling your project for life.

So next time someone says you should use <Big Technology Company Name Here>’s brand spanking new product, smile at them, pat them on the head, find yourself a trial copy and check it out for yourself before you commit to using it.  Don’t be fooled by the myths of reputation.

Now, apart from the general ‘hype’ around anything that’s meant to be able to ‘kill’ or be a ‘better’ alternative to Microsoft’s latest operating system, the idea that this particular version/distribution of Linux has the ability to put Vista to death is just absurd.

I had the oppertunity to use Vista for a time – partly as a feasibility study for my work, and partly out of my own self-interest to see what progressions / changes Microsoft had made to it’s OS.
My own personal criticism’s were that it required too much memory and drive space, and was quite a ‘bloated’ operating system in general. Now, of course, this is in light of the ‘average’ technology that is still kicking around for 90% of the populace. From that perspective, to call Ubuntu 8.04 “The Vista Killer”, would maybe be accurate. But even I, a linux user, find it a bit far fetched.

Windows is still the primary operating system being suppored by a large percentage of products – with Apple’s ‘Mac OS’ coming in second place. Adobe is a good example of industry software that is only supported on those two major operating systems.
Linux does have it’s open source ‘alternatives’, (and admittedly I’ve not spent much time in using or even trying any large number of these) but even I don’t believe that all of these are in a position yet to be used widely by industry. Don’t get me wrong, I have every faith that there will one day be open source software that is usable by various industries – but this isn’t the reality we live in. Not yet.

Sometimes I just wish that consumer-orientated publications could be a little more ‘balanced’ in their approach – and marketing. Considering the criticism’s I found with Vista, Windows 2000 could be percieved a “Vista-Killer”. So could the latest Mac OS. So could Dos.

It all comes down to what part of Vista (in this case) that you’re not liking, and want a ‘better’ alternative to.
I suppose, ultimately, it’s all subjective.