#English

I just installed a new 160GB 7200rpm 8MB cache WD harddisk, which I bought yesterday for just 105 euro. This new harddisk brings my total storage space to about 425GB (for the 5 ‘old’ disks keeping 265 GB I paid significantly more than 150 euro…).

I was just thinking about harddisk space vs. memory space. When I take a look at my history, this ratio has changed quite a lot:

Everybody receives it. In the last few weeks my university account was functioning I received about 100 emails per day. Less than 1 of them (on average) was ‘valid’ email, the rest was spam. OK, I admit: In the 5 years I’ve used that account I did nothing to prevent spam (back in ’98 the amount of spam was not that high), but still: it shouldn’t be the case that spam completely ruins a communication channel…

I don’t really get the point on the Google IPO. To my knowledge (but I’m just a Computer Scientist, not an economist, so shoot me), the tihng about an IPO is going public (hence the name) and getting money (but you loose your company (or at least a part of it)).

Why would you do that? When you need the money (to grow, to buy other companies, to pay your debt, whatever). The question thus is: does Google need the money? What can money buy them? They don’t really have to invest mega amounts of money for improving their product, it is already the best there is. Besides, they do make profit (at least, that’s what I read everywere), so I don’t really see the benefit.

Last week I bought a new subscription for my mobile phone. Apparently, even when you call very infrequent it is cheaper to get a subscription instead of using pre-paid cards. So I switched from my T-Mobile pre-paid card (calling costs .33 euro/minute) to a Telfort subscription (90 minutes/month for 3.28 euro).

To be able to still be available at my old phonenumber I thought it was a good idea to dig up my old phone and place my pre-paid card in it. While I was doing that (which miserably failed because I couldn’t find the charger anymore, and besides, I remembered afterwards that it was still KPN simlocked), I browsed the Internet a bit to find some info about the phone.

I just watched WinFS Overview – Significant New Storage Innovation for Longhorn on MSDN TV. I must say I’m very surprised by the very dramatic changes that are made. Apparently, things like files and directories will be replaced by ‘Items’, ‘Relationships’ and ‘Libraries’.

I’m not sure how people, who have been using ‘Files’ and ‘Directories’ for decades, can adept to these new things. Isn’t the change too radical? Most people (including me) aren’t even using the more high-end stuff from NTFS because they find it way too complicated. I’m not sure how MS is going to let people handle even more meta-data on files (euh, items :))…

I just read at http://www.webwereld.nl/nieuws/17064.phtml (Dutch) that Sun and IBM no longer negotiate (huh? Did I mis something?) with each other about developing an opensource IDE together.

But anyway. I don’t find this very strange. There are huge differences between Eclipse and SunONE. And the new opensource IDE would probably be built based on one of then (my guess: Eclipse), so the other party wouldn’t really ‘feel at home’.

Today during lunch at work we had the everlasting discussion about the price of Windows. I’ve bought Windows XP and I paid somewhat more than 200 euro for it. At first that price seems quite high (especially when you consider the price of the much used alternative: a free illegal copy), but when you think of it: I expect to use Windows XP for at least 4 years. So per year it costs me 50 euro. And that for the most used and most important piece of software on my PC. That’s quite cheap! In any case, it is much less than what I pay for my new hardware per year to keep my PC a bit up-to-date.

Well, my first post. What can I say? Why on earth should I have my own weblog? Maybe because it’s cool to have one? I don’t really know… What advantage has logging on this weblog over logging on the weblog of my flat? And, who will read this log?

More important questions: What should I log about? Should I blog in English, or in Dutch (or a combination of both)?

Many questions, few answers (hey, blogging looks like life :)). But the important thing is: I blog, therefore I am!