Growth, jobs and more

We've seen the iPad. The best thing about it is that it will start a trend of cheap, affordable, useful tablet devices. Here is the tablet I am in the market for: Tablet format. It is a good idea, but hasn't been done right yet. It does not create a "laptop wall" at meetings. Draws less attention, makes you less pretentious than if you put a laptop on your restaurant table or open it up on a train. You can hold a tablet while doing a talk, discussion, lecture ... but not a laptop. A4 size exact, like all the paper I carry around. Reason: so that it does not draw attention if I put it with a stack of paper on the desk. 15 hours declared, 10 hours real battery life. I want to make one day trips to Brussels without a power supply. Would sacrifice color for longer battery life greyscale screen, usable in bright sunshine, 720p resolution minimum, 1080p optimum. Pixel density is everything if you want to read books or newspapers. I will watch movies and play games on a ...

We know it as a platform where: website or other on-line source (any web site or media store like iTunes), media (e.g. MP3), local software or client (e.g. Media Player) and device (PC, Mac, Phone, Flash Drive, Netbook ...) are not coupled with each other. Many competing companies are providing products or services for each of the components. This open model resulted in huge innovation over the last two decades, and spawned a lot of competition in creating the websites, media formats, software and the devices, driving the price down and quality up. All this possibly at the expense of the content providers who have huge problems protecting their content, because, to be universally playable, all parts of the system need to be well documented and interoperable, with any kind of security and copy protection clumsily pasted on top of it all. Apple Closing the Web? Kindle, Nook and much of the Apple Store stuff signal a possible end of this model. But with music and videos is it a lot like p...

From time to time I get unhappy with my twitter experience and join the install party, trying out new clients. So far I did not find a perfect one. This is what I want: handle multiple accounts allow me to define groups of people I follow allow the "join" and "filter" operations over streams of tweets (sounds complicated but it is in fact an enable of so many features. Think of filter like Gmail's labels and think of join like Google Reader's folder). example of a "join" would be to show a single stream of all friends' tweets across all my accounts examples of a "filter" operation would be to split a stream into groups, mentions, directs ... notifications should be based on configurable filters too show one stream (per account or not) of all directs, sents and mentions (it is a join). sort messages with new on top OR old on top (I like reading from old to new, top to bottom) display whole discussion thread at a click of a button...

One simply has to love some features of the aluminum unibody MacBooks. Like the magnetic lid "lock". Not only it keeps the lid closed, the magnet has no moving parts, so there is nothing that could break. The design is clean. The magnet is also radiating magnetic energy, bending properly the cosmic waves and preventing the carpal tunnel syndrome. And if you keep the MacBook on your lap, as a laptop, the magnet is well positioned to heel your body. But many users are reporting problems with the magnetic lid lock. Mac simply would not stay shut. If I put it vertically in my trusty Tumi bag, for example, it springs opens for about 5 millimeters. Like on the picture below: This is quite annoying, because you don't know what will happen in the bag. If it opens some more it would wake Mac up from sleep mode. It happened to me a few times, even if it was bumped closed again it stayed on, drained the battery, got hot, very hot ... Not very pleasant at all, because in the bag the ...

Awarding president Obama the Nobel Prize for peace shows how desperate the West is for leadership out of the economic, social and environmental crisis; for leadership in the times when it is worried about its decline. It demonstrates how clueless it is about matters of the future. Instead, the bubbly economy and the virtual media society could use a reminder that deeds, not words matter. The news about Obama’s Nobel was broken to me on Friday morning via Twitter. In deep mistrust I followed the link to a page which looked quite professional, and had a link to a video from a news conference; live from Oslo, it said. An elderly man in a small room with a couple of reporters. Could be a hoax. Well done. But not impossible, given the trick they tried to pull. Then the news started to come in from major agencies and news sites but I still could not believe it. With all due respect to the energy, passion and hope that president Obama brought into the global politics, where was the achievemen...

In the summer of 2008, when the fuel prices were at their highest, I published an  op-ed in the European Voice . I supported the idea that president Sarkozy had at the time, namely, to reduce the VAT and excise duties on petrol, to make it cheaper. The argument was that if the CO2 is indeed the enemy then it should have a price, and this price needs to be the same regardless if CO2 is emitted by a car, a powerplant or a production of a steak. In  January on this blog  I criticized the idea of NASA’s Jim Hanson to tax carbon at the port of entry. Not only it would create trade wars and will be seen as an excuse for protectionism, it will make the economies of countries with such tax less competitive to economies without the tax. Exactly the same is the problem with carbon caps and emission trading schemes. Carbon intensive industries are “leaked” to countries where such measures do not exist. Today I am reading about president  Sarkozy’s proposal for a carbon tax. ...

July 20 1969 is one of those dates that many of us remember. I was 7 then. We had a black and white TV with a cherry wood casing and yellowish buttons and dials. There was only one TV channel and most of the time it was airing not Slovenian but Yugoslav programs. However, TV Ljubljana was perhaps the only TV station from behind the iron curtain that had a live transmission of the moon landing. One of the commentators was an engineer, a colleague of my father, otherwise specializing in geology and earthquakes. Yes, it was a big step for mankind. Are we still making steps or do we prefer sitting in the pub? In June I visited the Smithsonian in Washington DC. Hollywood has this ability to show space travel, rockets, and shiny equipment as if they were out of this world. But in a museum you see the real stuff. A computer that has less capacity than the processor in my microwave. The knobs, the buttons, the wiring, the clothing and zippers, primitive even compered to my skiing outfit. It al...