Mashed Articles

Back in the 1970s, cigarettes were everywhere. Even Tube trains suffocated you with the stink of tobacco. The memory came back to me while I was talking to Dave, a sales guy in the mobile phone section of HMV in Watford.

The conversation worked its way round to Windows 7. I’d been to the launch the week before, and it was still hot news. Dave wanted to know what I thought of it, and I said it was great, but I wasn’t completely happy with it. And that’s when he said, ‘Yeah, but Windows is everywhere. It’ll never go away.’ And that’s what reminded me of the ubiquitous fug of fags back in the day. Could any one of us then have imagined life without it?

I’d set off for that launch in a good mood. I’d been using Windows 7 on and off for months, and it looked as if Microsoft might finally have got something right. Not the price, perhaps (officially the full retail top-featured version costs about as much as an entry-level laptop), not the baffling array of different packages and certainly not the retention of legacy features from long defunct minicomputers, like the need to know that applications reside on the C: drive. But it’s smooth, does a good job and seems to fix most of the infelicities of Vista.

But something very wrong became clear at that launch. I don’t mean the way Griff Parry, BSkyB’s Director of Video-On-Demand, couldn’t get Windows 7 to connect to the internet to demonstrate his Windows Sky Player – even after three tries over a period of half an hour in a room stuffed to the gunnels with tech-savvy Microsoft staff. That was just a minor technical hitch. No, the problem with Microsoft is bigger than that. It’s a vision thing.

Microsoft’s UK MD, Ashley Highfield, talked a lot about listening to customers, and I see Windows 7 adverts everywhere taking much the same line. “Windows 7 was my idea,” says some actor, posing as a customer. But in listening to what people say, rather than exploring the real subtext, Microsoft has proved itself to be (forgive the mixed metaphor) catastrophically deaf to the big picture.

When customers ask for faster startup and fewer clicks, what they’re really saying is, ‘We’d like the operating system to go away’. Today we probably divide our screen time equally between a computer, a TV set and our mobile phone. My main computer happens to run Snow Leopard, my TV set is fed from networked multimedia boxes powered by Linux and my phone is a BlackBerry. Various flavours of Windows are in that mix somewhere (my second phone is Windows Mobile, and the back-end server for one multimedia box is Windows XP), and Windows may loom even larger in your own life. But who cares? We just want to be able to shift our stuff around between these various devices with the minimum hassle.

‘We know,’ says Microsoft. ‘That’s why we’ve devised the Three Screens and a Cloud strategy.’ Oh, really? ‘Oh, yes, really,’ says Ashley Highfield. And while the engineers are fiddling about backstage trying to get poor old Griff Parry’s Sky app working, Highfield explains how these three screens and a cloud – PC, TV, mobile and the internet – will all meld seamlessly together. Because as a necessary condition of that seamless melding, they’ll all be running various versions of Windows.

Suddenly I feel like I’m travelling back in time to the 1980s, when operating systems were important. It was a time that culminated in operating-system wars; a time when Microsoft took all by locking in its customers to a Windows environment from which they’d never escape.

Except that we did escape. Today, with our phones, multimedia boxes and games consoles, we’re certainly not stuck with Windows everywhere. And the way to join them all up isn’t by banishing this operating system democracy and turning it into a one-party state. Microsoft, are you listening to that?

Google is. Doubtless Google would quite like me to own an Android phone and run the Chrome operating system on my notebook. But it’s not saying, ‘Unless you do this, if you want to sync – you’re sunk’.

I’m no apologist for Google. Or for Apple. These are both big companies that, I strongly suspect, would very much like to own us the way Microsoft thought it owned us a decade ago. But these are also companies with a clue. Google apps run across multiple platforms, and Snow Leopard, Apple’s latest operating system, migrates elegantly to generic Intel hardware with a little help from the open-source community. Apple is showing no sign of discouraging this. It’s a plural world, and Apple gets that.

But Microsoft’s vision is three screens and a cloud – of old cigarette smoke. Unless it catches up, it may find itself edged out of the game in a way it simply can’t imagine.

Almost everything is run by computers today. They have become an integral part of our lives, handling everything from business to travel to entertainment and even most of our personal matters. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that it all started with just a handful of large and expensive mainframes, and the business of using those mainframes was called data processing. Collecting data and feeding it into those giant machines was a time-consuming procedure as the data was punched onto cards before it could be processed and analyzed.

Things have changed dramatically in computing over the past 50 years. Processing power is essentially free today, with the chips in notebook computers and even our smartphones infinitely quicker than those mainframes at the dawn of the information age. What hasn’t changed nearly as much is data entry. That largely remains an error-prone process that often requires manual labor and/or intervention. Think about all the ways we enter data and you quickly see that it’s the most critical point in the process, the point that consumes the most time and also the point where errors occur most likely.

A lot of the innovation in computerized systems today is not in building better and faster computers, but in perfecting data capture and data entry systems. There are scanners that read barcodes, systems that have radio frequency tags, machines that scan and convert forms, and numerous other ways to make the process of converting data into machine-readable form. All of this has made data entry faster, cheaper and more reliable, but it still remains perhaps the most critical bottleneck. Why?

Because a lot of data is generated by people, and people think and act differently from machines. When people fill out forms by hand, they may make errors, cross things out, and their handwriting may be nearly illegible. Even when they use an electronic form, they may use the wrong fields, or enter the data in a way that the computer cannot read. There are all sorts of efforts to automatically “clean” data, but even today, a lot of data must still be either entered by hand, or at least scanned and fixed by hand. And that can be enormously time consuming and therefore expensive.

There are other aspects of data entry that can burn up a lot of time. Data conversion is one of them. There are so many different data formats today that data conversion is a major issue. Even converting from one version of a format to another can totally throw the process and require extensive manual intervention. Something as seemingly simple as converting from one version of Microsoft Word to another can be hugely time-consuming, let alone conversions to and from formats such as XML, SGML, XLS or CSV. Add to that image conversion, data indexing, or data mining, and things can quickly go from time consuming to overwhelming.

This is where it pays to farm things out to an experienced professional data entry service. It’s also one of the areas where outsourcing makes most sense. Getting the raw data or data files to a reliable, inexpensive offshore data entry service for entry and cleaning, or even converting and processing in a number of ways, greatly reduces local costs. It also allows local staff to spend their time mot productively, by analyzing and using data to manage business and maximize productivity. It’s a win-win situation for all involved.

Chris Robertson is an author of Majon International, one of the worlds MOST popular internet marketing companies on the web. Learn more about Professional data entry.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com

Writen by Nick Smith

Tablet PCs are great. If you are a mobile person, and you have never considered getting a tablet PC in the past, now is as good a time as any to start checking them out – the technology is cutting-edge, the usability is superb, and prices are starting to drop.

There are two main types of tablet PCs: convertible and slate. Convertible tablets look a lot like normal laptops except the screen can be rotated all the way around and laid down flat across the keyboard. You then input information through the screen using a stylus. Slate tablet PCs include only the screen interface – though they are fully integratable with peripherals like keyboards and mouses, the computer itself does not have them. Both types are viable options, depending on your personal preferences and what you’ll be using it for.

As with any technology, tablet PCs have advantages and disadvantages. Thanks to the last few years of development and enhancement, the disadvantages are shrinking in number, and the perks are becoming more and more enticing.

Advantages of Tablet PCs

Far and away, the best thing about tablet PCs is their mobility. You can take and use them anywhere you go, the same way you would take notebook and pen. That means that when your boss bumps into you in the hallway and gives you a number of assignments, you can write them down. In meetings you don’t have to hide your face behind the monitor of your laptop because you can lay the tablet PC flat on the table. For students, this mobility is great – you can study your notes while you’re waiting in lines or even in the car.

Tablet PCs let you use digital ink to store handwritten notes, graphs, charts, and pictures. You don’t have to worry about taking your laptop and a notepad and pen to meetings or classes. Using the stylus, tablet PCs record your handwriting and drawings. They can convert your handwriting to text if you need to turn in an assignment typewritten.

All of the money you have been spending on pens, pencils, highlighters, notepads, papers, binders, folders, staples, and paperclips stays in your pocket. Because of the digital ink option on tablet PCs, much of the need for paper supplies and writing utensils is eliminated. You can keep all your notes on your computer.

Finally, one of the advantages of tablet PCs over regular laptops is that you don’t lose any functionality from your computer. Tablets operate on similar platforms and run many of the same programs. In fact, many programs integrate all of their normal functions with digital ink, so you can add notes to documents and even email your handwritten notes to someone.

Disadvantages of Tablet PCs

Despite my obvious zeal for tablet PCs, I recognize that there are still some disadvantages. First is the price. The prices for tablet PCs are coming down quite a bit from when they were first released, but on average, you can expect to spend more for a tablet PC than for its equivalent laptop. Depending on the bells and whistles you’re looking for, expect to pay anywhere from $1,000 on up.

The handwriting-to-text conversion does not always work the way you wish it would. Just like speech-to-text systems require a trained style of speech to work properly, tablet PCs recognize a trained penmanship easier than the way you may write naturally. A lot of the kinks in these conversion systems have been worked out – but don’t plan on handwriting your next novel expecting to be able to convert into a print-ready copy with no problems.

Finally, their smaller size is both an advantage and disadvantage. They are much more mobile than their laptop counterparts, but the viewing area is also smaller. Likewise, the keyboard also shrinks down to accommodate the smaller size, so if you feel like your fingers are already cramped on a laptop-sized keyboard, you’ll want to make sure you’re going to be able to use the tablet PCs before you buy one.

Nick Smith is a client account specialist with 10x Marketing – More Visitors. More Buyers. More Revenue. For organizational software that will help you take full advantage of tablet PCs, visit GoBinder.com.