In its new advertising folder for Thursday, April, 25th, Aldi sells one of those multimedia notebooks for 459.- €. To be sure, I would not want it even if it cost nothing. In the flyer, they say that “Medion® recommends Windows 8”, because it is so “nice, quick and fluid”. They also wrote: “Windows 8 with Windows® Experience Surface”. Well, there we have it again, the old Wintel connection between Microsoft® and Intel®. And then, they will again wonder why so many of these computers will remain unsold at Aldi.
On the back of the folder, I read that the 1,000 giga-bytes of hard drive now cost 69.99 Euros. A decade ago, such a thing was unimaginable. It seems that hardware still develops in record time.
Other than that, everything is in motion in the IT world. Microsoft tries to get to the top again. Apple does their own thing and Google will leave the HTML community. You can never really tell what Amazon is doing. IBM and HP seem to be reduced to the role of spectators, watching how the “big ones” are fighting each other. Dell starts a new approach and Japan’s Fujitsu is also still kicking around.
Yet, all of this will not really be important, because the future of IT technology will belong to the Asians anyway. For quite some time, companies with totally new names have been setting the pace technologically and conquering the markets.
From powerful CIO circles, I hear that Java is no longer fashionable – perhaps because of the purchase of Sun by Oracle. Other augurs tell me that c# (c sharp) probably is not the language of the future, either. I no longer know which way to turn and ask myself: what will be our programming language five years from now?
Pragmatists give a shrug of their shoulders and tell us that Phyton is a fashionable way of programming in the USA. That is something I really find hard to believe. People in Academica explain to me that, unfortunately, we neglected to further research and develop programming languages during the last two decades. Moreover, they relied on the Mozilla Foundation, but apparently, it is too weak.
These are the things I hear IT analysts say. To be sure, I have no idea how much technological competence they have, because I myself do no longer understand the current developments, either. Some way or other, IT became very complex and confusing – which went (and goes) along with such breath-taking speed that I was literally run over.
But I remember a time when Unix seemed to converge (X-OPEN). It was a good thing – even if, in the end, it did not work out. In those days, I liked programming with “c” and found it the best language of my programming life. To be sure, it was a language that suffered from a certain lack of clarity – but it was rather nice for development. And the results were efficient systems and solutions.
Since everything is so complex, I repress it. And I look forward to my small Nexus with Ubuntu. I might even get it as early as tomorrow. It cost me 250 Euros, value added tax included. This is probably also a lot too expensive, considering the additional devices – like my Airbook. It was registered on November, 23rd, 2010 – which means it is almost three years old already. It still runs like clockwork, but some way or other, I keep returning to the tablet. And then the mixture Ubuntu/Nexus might replace the Airbook in my creative everyday life …
Well, let’s wait and see …
RMD
(Translated by EG)
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