A Virtual Insight – Richard Turner

PC or Mac? FireFox or IE? Both are common questions in the IT world, well I’m FireFox on a PC both in the office and at home. However i do own an Apple iPhone and Apple TV. I have yet to experience any problems with Apple TV, but here are some of my thoughts on the iPhone.

Apples are apparently better than PCs, what with windows updates, blue screens etc. that you get with Microsoft Windows, however what they don’t tell you is Apple are equally as bad they just take a different approach, instead of blue screens or error messages, you just get a “pretty” colour wheel whilst things are loading / restarting to try and distract you from the fact that it’s taking just as long to load than a PC would. Give me a Quad Core Xenon with Vista and i assure you it would be just as fast if not faster than a Mac.

When Apple released their iPhone 3G on 2.0 firmware, there was a huge amount of problems and very shortly after they announced 2.1 firmware which was meant to fix crashing of applications, general lag and other issues. However whilst running 2.1 you will not find applications crashing or lag because instead of locking up your iPhone they just close for no reason at all! This is really frustrating when you are trying to use an application on your IPhone, especially the ones Apple make you pay for! Either fix the problem or leave it broke, don’t claim to have fixed something that you clearly haven’t – you just changed how it handles the error!

On the day of release of the new Mac-Book Air, Apple announced numerous updates to fix known issues with software. Why release something that isn’t ready? If you want to make a claim to something at least have evidence to support it, this is just from what i know, I’m sure with a little digging i could find a lot more wrong with Apple’s methods and claims.

A friend recently had a similar experience with an Apple Time Capsule.

I often found myself spending long hours in the office 6 or 7 days a week, at home i cannot use my desktop for long periods of time since i don’t have space for another desk therefore it’s on the floor used for music and video plugged into my TV, so i decided to ditch my old IBM Thinkpad and spend a bit of cash on a brand new laptop so i can sit at the table or on the sofa and do bits from home and spend less time in the office, this also releaves the need to drive 12 miles to the office when something breaks.

• XPS M1530 CORE 2 DUO T8300 2.40GHz,800,3M
• Display 15.4″ WXGA+ Widescreen (1440×900) TFT with Truelife
• Fingerprint Reader Biometric with BLACK accent
• CCFL backcover black & 2.0mp camera
• Memory Dual Channel 4.0GB (2×2048) 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
• Hard Drive 320GB SATA (5400rpm)
• 8xDVD+/-RW Slim Slot-Load Drive
• Battery XPS Primary 6-cell 56WHr Li-Ion
• 256MB NVIDIA GeForce Go 8600M GT
• Dell Travel Remote control
• Intel® Next-Gen Wireless-N Mini-PCI Card, EUR
• European – Dell TrueMobile 355 internal
• Bluetooth Module
• Operating System : English Genuine Windows Vista SP1 Home Premium including Media

After installing FireFox, Zend Studio, Office, Filezilla and Putty i can now do research and work remotely with ease, i cannot find fault with this laptop – it was worth every penny.

Now i just need to buy an NAS for my home network so i can access those music and videos files on my “desktop” with the need for it to be on.

No matter what you do, whether you work part-time in a local convenience store, 9 to 5 in an office or 24:7 like a businessman, it is very important to stop for a moment, step back and take stock of what is going on around you. Always, always look at the big picture. Life is too short we all know that.

Are you doing what you thought you’d be doing when you were the age you are? Are you having enough time to yourself? Do you wish you earned more money? When you were growing up, most people had an idea of what they wanted to be, an astronaut, a football player or something along those lines. Where as when we are older we realise that not many people actually become this and are therefore we are forced to set new goals for ourselves, some people settle for something easy others strive to achieve.

If you didn’t have to work for a living and just did it by choice, what would you do? How many people would answer with their current job? 5%? 2%? I’d say more like less than 1%, that means there are millions and millions of people out there doing jobs they don’t enjoy or don’t have a passion for. If you lack passion for your work, you probably won’t get satisfaciton when you finish something or rewarded when you do a good job. Remember the average person works for 45 years of their life, it is important to enjoy it.

Mentality is an interesting thing too much confidence and you are likely to fail, to little and you will too. Getting the right balance of what you know and what you are capable of is crucial to success in anything; whether it’s taking an exam, meeting a project deadline or starting up a new business.

If you approach something with the attitude of “i dont know how to do this, it’s way over my head, im never going to get this done”, chances are you won’t. If you dont know how to do something, you find out how. Most things are possible and where there’s a will, there’s usually a way.

I first got into PHP programming this way, i knew very little about PHP and was asked to make an ecommerce site for a client. I didnt know how to do it, but i knew it was possible as many other programmers (more competant at the time in PHP than myself) had already done it. So i accepted the project, researched it thoroughly and came up with a solution that my client was more than happy with, i learnt a lot during this project it was a huge stepping stone in PHP programming that helped me get to where i am now, plus i got paid to do it!

With success comes the chance of failure, both are good, so long as you learn from failure and confirm with success.