Not about speed anymore

Living with high-tech is not about speed anymore, as it used to be a few years ago. There are several other aspects that are more important than sheer processing power or even Internet speed for that matter, however vital this last trait may be.

We can go back to the old cars-computers analogy that was very popular in the 1980s and that remains surprisingly valid today. Long gone are the days where speed was the main factor that would let you choose a car. Not only any model can take you well above the speed limits that are into force in most countries and on most roads, but also drivers now look for comfort, convenience, security, features, environment protection and energy saving.

The same change in living style, the same new approach now applies to computers, smartphones and anything in between. 

Even size doesn’t matter much. Whereas some still like or perhaps really need to have 22 or 24-inch monitors on their desk, the vast majority is content with laptop or tablet screens, not to mention the smaller smarpthones. Data storage size is also a problem that belongs to the past. Whether it is on your local machine or somewhere in the cloud, storage is abundant everywhere; and inexpensive. A one-terabyte hard disk is a mere JD70 in Amman and most cloud services give you 15 gigabytes for free, or up to one terabyte for a nominal fee.

In a general manner, convenience and security are what we are mainly looking for today. They have significantly improved over the last five years or so. Unfortunately, things are far from being perfect, despite the undeniable progress.

I have yet to see the perfect e-mail software. From Outlook to Gmail and a few others, they all have weaknesses alongside their strong points. If only they could unite, join forces and put in common all their good features, discarding the not-so-good ones. What a wonderful product it would make!

If you consult your e-mail from various devices and locations you know about the synchronisation headache that is associated with the process. Messages are duplicated, or downloaded again, or they disappear without asking for your permission. Is your mail box set for IMAP or POP3? Do you leave a copy of the messages on the server? If yes for how many days? How good is your anti-spam filter? Etc…

Spam e-mail and various Internet threats are as invading and annoying as ever. In my trade as an IT specialist in Amman, not a month goes by without seeing someone severely hit by a virus of some sort. Recently I saw ransomware cause serious, irreversible damage to a friend’s data.

He admitted he had been careless and had opened and launched an e-mail attachment that was sent to his mailbox by an unknown sender. The ransomware virus encrypted all his files in a way that he couldn’t access or open them anymore. The virus then showed him a text that asked him to go to a specific site, to pay some money online so as to be able to get a code and then decrypt the files. Naturally he didn’t pay the ransom but lost his files nevertheless — for good. He was only able to retrieve a small number of them, form a backup copy set he has done one month before the attack.

Convenience sometimes comes at a price. We all know what a smartphone represents in terms of information, organisation and communication. The object has become virtually priceless in all what it lets us do. This being said, seeing it destroyed, damaged, or worse, stolen, is reason for disaster and nervous breakdown, and it happens every day.

So yes, definitely, it is not speed that we are after, but convenience and security. But we’re not really there yet.