Lightning in a Bottle

The website Engadget had an interesting observation last week - nine of the top ten best-selling laptops on Amazon.com are ultra-mobile PCs.  (This is true as of 9:12 a.m. on September 30, 2008.  Who knows what this link will show in the future?)  As a matter of fact, at the time of this posting, most of the top 25 computers are UMPCs of one form or another.

This further underscores why technology planning and the standards that grow out of them have to remain flexible.  This market niche didn’t exist twelve months ago, and even when the initial devices came to market and sold well, many technology observers openly derided them as under-powered and over-priced.   And yet, here we are eleven months after the Asus EEEPC came to market, and that brand has six of the top twelve best-selling laptops at Amazon.

Standards are important to making things work smoothly, but the concept of standards assumes a level of stability and predictablility.  That works for awhile in technology, but eventually there is a disruption and your standards need to be reconsidered.  I think the rise of the UMPCs is going to be one of those disruptions.

We had a small crisis on our hands one evening at our digital photography camp this summer. Two individuals both had their camera storage cards wiped out, with a significant number of unsaved images on each card.  (Strangely enough, they were sitting next to each other, even though the two events were completely unrelated - different cameras, different computers, different kinds of cards, different causes.)  When it became clear how completely gone the images were, I told the two I would spend some time researching the process of recovering files from cards during our dinner break, but not to get too hopeful.  The two participants were stoic and brave, but you could tell they were pretty upset about the loss of so many pictures they had taken on our trip to Mt. Rainier earlier that day.

In searching online, I pretty quickly came across several references to a Windows program called PC Inspector, which not only had good reviews but had the added benefit of being free.  It can recover some damaged files, but it’s main focus is files that were accidentally deleted.  As long as you haven’t taken a lot of new pictures with the card, they can be recovered.  (It will work for other forms of storage, too, such as hard drives and USB memory sticks.)

I downloaded it, fired it up and tried to access the missing files on one of the cards.  After what seemed like forever, a file appeared in the recovery window.  A few moments later, a second one.  It wasn’t fast, but over the course of a few hours it recovered all of the images on both of the cards - and there were hundreds.   The participants were thrilled, and I have a great new tool in my box o’ solutions.  It’s always fun to be able to fix someone’s disaster!