Notes from the Cape

Hi all

Just a quick note to let you know that I am now using a new elist provider. Mailchimp should be a lot more stable and reliable. However, you emails may now look a little different.

I hope it all work!

Craig

Yesterday, I watched a technology presentation by Chris Anderson on TED.COM, recorded in 2004. He said that in 2008 (ie: now) you would be able to store 1 million songs on a hard drive costing about $400. Now, assuming that a MP3 is about 4meg big, you will need 4 million meg to store 1 million songs, or approx 4 Terabytes.

So I took this to the test. Currently, you can buy a 1 TB hard drive from BestBuy for $150, so a 4 TB drive will be about $600, so not too far off. In fact, it will probably be spot on by the end of the year. Hey, wait a year and you will probably be able to store 2 million songs.

Locally, a 750gig drive from Chaos is about R1600, which equates to approx R8500 for 4 TB of storage.

But what is really scary is that you can store over 1 million songs on your home computer for less than R10000, which is less than 10c per song! Now just pause and think about that. We can freely share music (mostly illegally) at no cost, and store it at an igsignificant cost. So, how is that going to affect the music industry?

Food for thought…

By the way, if the average song is about 5 minutes long, your new collection of 1 million songs will take about 9 1/2 years to play in its entirety!

There is a great post on Seth Godin's website about how to get effective tech support. I love one of his comments "If you own a computer, back it up. If you don't, all bad things are your fault."

I am getting really sick of either lugging my laptop around with me whenever I travel, or trying to read my emails on my phone – which is just a pain!

So, I decided to look on the net and see what solution I could find – and boy did I find a fantastic solution. This is an ASUS EEEPC (easy to learn, easy to work, easy to play). It is a laptop that weighs just 800grams (that is a box of matches on the keyboard)!

This little machine packs quite a punch – although it only has 512meg ram, and a 2gig (solid state) hard drive, it has three USB ports, as well as a SD slot, so with an external memory stick or external drive, you have pretty much unlimited disk space (there is also a network and Wi-Fi port). It also has a video out port, which I will test later to see how well PowerPoint works on it.

It comes pre-build running Linux (which fly’s – even though there is not much RAM), and some great applications, including Open Office, Skype and the Firefox web browser. If you click on the image below, you can see Open Office busy loading. Of course, you can install pretty much whatever Linux app you care to. For travelling it is fantastic. If you want to , you can also put Windows XP onto it, but I don’t think that I am going to bother.

I took it to Durban on Friday, and it was fantastic. I caught up with email in the lounge, and I wrote a report on the flight home.

The best part is that you can buy it from Incredible Connection for less that R3000!