bruceb news

With its announcement of the Kindle Fire tablet on Wednesday, Amazon did something worthy of Apple: it invented a niche that it is likely to control, not directly competitive with anything currently on the market.

You will see endless discussion about how the Kindle Fire compares to the iPad, or whether the Kindle Fire is an “iPad killer.” Don’t worry about that. It misses the point.

First, make sure you have the details in mind. Here’s one of the 7 billion articles today about the Kindle Fire and Amazon’s other announcements. If you want more background, Bloomberg’s article recaps Amazon’s history and describes how the new Kindles fit into Amazon’s business plan. […] continued

The request was deceptively simple:

Six very small offices want to share a single Internet connection. Each office wants to have a secure network for its own computers, not shared with the other offices. The offices want to share a single big Toshiba eStudio printer/scanner.

That shouldn’t be so hard, right?

It is remarkable how quickly networking becomes complicated. I don’t have any special instructions today, just a couple of anecdotes to help you understand why you might need help with your home or small office network.

Most people have simple needs: a single Internet connection for a single office; a router to let all the computers share the connection and connect to each other. […] continued

When you’re wrestling with your computer and wondering why everything has to be so complicated, maybe it will help to know that you’re not alone. It’s not any better behind the curtains where we pull the levers and pretend to be wizards. Here’s a random story about one of my frustrating moments this week.

One of the challenges of doing work with very small businesses is that there’s very little continuity. An IT person at a larger company will set up the same servers over and over, with shelves full of parts and a lot of time to learn the ins and outs of the equipment. […] continued

By the end of the year there will finally be a dozen or more reasonably-priced ultrathin, ultralight notebooks on the market, mostly priced under a thousand dollars.

Almost three years ago Apple introduced the MacBook Air, an ultrathin 13” notebook. Even with an example in front of them suitable for copying, PC manufacturers didn’t have any reasonably powered thin and light notebooks on the market until more than a year later, and even then there were only a few niche products – the Dell Adamo and one or two others. It wasn’t until Dell introduced the Vostro V13 that it was possible to get a satisfying ultrathin notebook that wouldn’t break the bank. […] continued

In April, with little fanfare, Microsoft released three new server products to manufacturing and to the hardware vendors: Small Business Server 2011 Essentials, Windows Home Server 2011, and Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials.

Small Business Server 2011 Essentials is so well-designed and fits its niche so perfectly that I expected that it would become the standard platform for many very small businesses, as ubiquitous as SBS 2003 was in its day. I excitedly previewed SBS 2011 Essentials back in November 2010, and I began using it in my own office earlier this summer. It’s great! Ever since the final product shipped in April I’ve been waiting to detail some of its best features – waiting until the inevitable burst of promotion from Microsoft, waiting until Dell and HP start selling it preinstalled on their servers, waiting until there was something concrete for you to look at and consider buying for your office. […] continued

The little device in the picture – about the size of a deck of playing cards, less than half as thick – is an Intel 160Gb solid state hard drive. It has given me a more significant speed boost for my computer than any other single device that I can recall – ever, in all my years of computing. It’s been a more noticeable improvement than years past when I have swapped a motherboard to get Intel’s latest and greatest processor, or added more memory to a system that needed it.

Solid state hard drives are starting to be sold preinstalled in new computers – still rare but likely to be much more visible in the next few months. […] continued

You jangle your keys in your pocket next to your Motorola phone and the screen isn’t scratched. You drop your iPhone and the glass doesn’t break. You jab with an icepick over and over at a Thinkpad X1 laptop and for goodness’ sake, I hope you stop to wonder what in the world is wrong with you – but the screen isn’t damaged.

Gorilla Glass is not secret. Corning has been taking out ads for months trying to get you to notice it. It’s one of the important components of the mobile device revolution, hiding in plain sight.

Gorilla Glass is used on smartphones from HTC and Motorola and Samsung, on notebook computers from Acer and Lenovo, on tablets from Dell and Asus – more than 300 million devices worldwide, according to Corning’s official list. […] continued

The little box in the picture to the left measures eight inches across and just over three inches tall. It’s quiet and inexpensive. In this difficult world of technology, the best I can tell you is that it might be just what you’re looking for.

The Dell Inspiron Zino HD is a compact little computer that is best used for a single purpose: to bring your photos, music, and videos to the big screen TV in your living room. There are more details about the Zino in this review.

The Zino runs Windows 7 and has sufficient processing and video power to decode most video formats. […] continued

Previously:
Whining About Wireless

I’ll tell you a story about my own experience. You won’t learn anything and there’s not a happy ending, but perhaps it will give you a little perspective on why I’m not urging you to ditch your wires and set up wireless everywhere.

I’ve had a wireless access point at the global headquarters of Bruceb Consulting for a long time. When my wife and I got our matching Vostro V13 laptops last year, we started to rely on wireless more than ever, so maybe we just began to notice a problem that had existed for a long time. […] continued

When you have a choice between running a cable and relying on a wireless connection, you simply must not consider them to be equal choices. The reliability of a wired connection seriously tilts the scales. I have told my clients for years that the equation is simple: people with wireless connections call me for help; people with wires don’t.

These two things are both true:

• Wireless Internet connections, whether 802.11 or cell carrier networks, are wonderful and useful and fantastic and science fictional.
• Wireless Internet connections can be an incredible pain in the butt.

Can you tell I’ve dealt with more than my fair share of wireless failures in the last few weeks? […] continued