The Size of a Screen

[sc:hardware-category ]Screen size has been on my mind lately, both mobile and stationary.

On the desktop side, by new 4K monitor is 28″ and seems small.  I know that sounds strange even when I say it, but the 16×9 display format makes it feel wide, but not large.  My previous monitor was a 24″ 16×10 display and it looks bigger than the Dell.

That’s a problem with perspective of course, the Dell is larger and all those extra pixels make a huge difference.

But this had started me thinking about my phone again.  My Nokia 925 has a 4.5″ display on it, but is 16×10, which for the longest time has felt just right.  But after using the Blu WinHD, which is 5″ at 16×9, the Nokia feels small.

Even a year ago, I would have said that a 5″ phone was too big, but once again my perspective has changed.  Yes, the 5″ phone still has all the same issue I thought it did a year ago (too large to put in a pocket, hard to carry, etc.) but now those issues don’t seem insurmountable any more.

I think this “change of perception after living with it” probably explains the ongoing trend towards larger and larger phones we’ve seen over the last few years.  It looks like that trend has finally slowed down and found its sweet spot but could it pick up again?

Could we see 7″ phones become popular in another year or two after enough people get used to 6″ phones?  Or is that a step too far?

In the end, what it comes down to is that familiar little voice in the back of my head is whispering again… a new phone wouldn’t be a bag thing right?  And come on, just a little bit bigger this time… 🙂

Fortunately I think I can hold out until we see some Windows 10 phones, I still very much like my 925, even if it is looking a little smaller than it once did.

Windows 10 for Phones

Windows 10 is well on it’s way to release and the technical preview for PC’s has been out for a while, but Microsoft released the preview for Phones only recently.

Unfortunately my Nokia 925 isn’t included in the initial batch of supported phones for the preview but I expect it will be soon enough.  By the sounds of it it’s a limitation on the size of the system partition and Microsoft is having to write a partition resizing tool before they can support more phones.

I have seen a few images floating around the net of some of the new UI and it looks good so far.

The thing I’m most interested in seeing is how well the universal apps work, especially Outlook.  While Mail on Windows and the Inbox on Windows Phone, they do leave quite a bit to be desired for more advanced functionality.

The push to unified applications across all form factors is really something that feels like the right thing to do, now the only question is can they catch up and convince everyone else?

I wouldn’t mind seeing an Intel based phone with WiDi and Bluetooth keyboard/mouse that would act as a full PC, running a full copy of Windows to see what it looks like, just for kicks 🙂

Welcome to JumbleCat’s new theme!

[sc:general-category ]Well after three and a half years I thought it was time to move to a new theme!

The old theme (Arjuna X) served me well but it was starting to look a little dated and hasn’t been updated in quite a while so after some looking around I found “Sparkling” which looks a lot more modern, though I have to say I didn’t really like the red highlight colour they choose so I’ve replaced it with some CSS work.

It will probably be a work in progress of the next little while so forgive any issues that come up and I’ll address them as soon as I can.

Hosting and Your House

[sc:general-category ]As some may be aware, every four years in Ontario we get new evaluations of the value of our home from the government.   This is then used to base our property taxes on.  I recently received mine and was reviewing it when I started to think about what options I had as I had been thinking of buying a new house.

While this was rattling around in my head I was also having a conversation with a colleague about where to host a WordPress installation.  These two things collided in a sudden flash of insight for a metaphor as follows:

Ownership

For the longest time the only option you had for where you placed your systems was in your own datacenter.  Sometimes this was the classic “under the desk” hosting, but in all cases, you owned and controlled your systems.

This is just like owning a house.  It’s yours to do with as you like (baring certain bylaws and home owner associations of course 😉

In many was I think we now undervalue this in IT.  Pretty much everyone’s dream is to own their own home some day and its pretty much the exact opposite these days in IT.

Co-habitation

Once the IT industry matured a little bit, it turned out there was money to be made in renting out extra space in a datacenter to others and this business model eventually morphed in to whole companies that just rented out the space and didn’t really have any significant footprint in their own datacenters.

This still makes sense in many cases as your business may not be close to a major internet truck and placing servers closer to users is always a good idea.

This is kind of like buying a condo.  You own your own servers but you pay monthly maintenance fees and are more limited in what you can do by the condo association.

Renting

Shared hosting really took off when virtualization became a big thing.  Before that you could still rent a server from a provider, but it was expensive and if you needed console access it was difficult.  Virtualization changed all that.  Vendors could load up big servers with lots of VM’s and give users direct access to pretty much the entire system.

This is like renting an apartment.  You don’t own anything and if you don’t pay your rent you get kicked out on the street!

Communal Living

The final push these days is beyond shared hosting and in to the cloud.  Don’t even rent servers, just consume services provided by others that you have no control over.  This is the ultimate extension of the move away from ownership in IT.

It’s like living at the YMCA, you don’t get any privacy or say in how things are run.  If you don’t like it, leave.

 

JumbleCat Site E-Mail Issue

[sc:general-category ]I have to apologize to anyone who has registered an account in the last few weeks, it looks like one of the WordPress updates wiped out the SMTP authentication settings for the site and passwords have not been going out through e-mail.

The issue should now be resolved, if you have registered recently and have not received your password e-mail, go through the lost password process to get a new one.

Once again, my apologies and thanks for joining as well!