Mobile PC - Features - The Birth of the Notebook

Mobile PC's feature- The Birth of the Notebook provides us oldies with a nice reminder of all the things we did and saw in the past twenty years.

I might as well 'fess up that I thought that laptops were unnecessary and that there was no real reason why anyone would want a colour LCD. Whoops. On the other hand, hey, monochrome is more than sufficient for text processing!

And now time for fear

Let me start by saying that apologies are in order: I intend to keep the focus of this blog is tech but every now and again I come across other info worth sharing. The Economist’s Buttonwood column offers a disturbing insight into the current state of the dollar. One of the scarier things is:

“... the foreigners—mainly Asians plus a few outliers, including Russia and Brazil—have obliged, permitting America to scoop up 75% of the world's surplus savings. Together, Asian central banks have accumulated about $2.5 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves, up almost a quarter in little more than a year, most of it in dollars; Japan and China alone have reserves of nearly $1.5 trillion between them.”

The American point of view is that this is a BAD thing because they will be paying interest on these loans to a bunch of foreigners. On top of that those same foreigners are buying equity and property in the U.S.A. so that the foreigners will suck out rents from American enterprise. We foreigners should worry because in the past 5 years the US Dollar has slid down by close to 60%. Basically that means that if you had given an American € 100 in dollars at the dollar’s high point and he paid you back today, you’d be looking at getting € 40 worth of dollars back (excluding interest of course).

Now if we take that calculation and let it loose on the numbers from the Economist, this means that the United States could have destroyed 45% of the world’s surplus savings: 60% of the 75% of the world’s surplus savings. And every day that the dollar slides, the more non-American savers are being ripped off. I don’t know about the rest of the world but I really don’t enjoy saving to finance American consumption.

PSP v. iPod - the battle begins

PSP Video 9 - PSPcasting documents how you can convert video for sharing onto PSPs. It looks like Sony may have found the comeback device with the PSP. It's high on cool and the geeks out there are already starting to work their stuff on it. Steve Jobs should start worrying any time now.

Perspective anyone?

Okay, the New York Times warned that the article was contrarian but they didn't warn it was ridiculous.

The article is basically an argument against restrictions on resale of confidential information (ie. against privacy). The argument put forward is that people can be tracked and traced for good reasons as well as bad: the article tells the story of a woman reunited with her estranged daughter, because a private investigator could dig through credit and other reports to find her.

I can't bring myself to critique the story - it's too nonsensical. I can only repond with a questions: of the people 'reunited' with others in this way, how many were glad about it? Ie. how many were reunited with estranged children and how many with abusive spouses and general stalkers?

Computers are bad *sigh*

The Guardian is reporting that students with computers at home show poorer performance in literacy, science and math.

Microsoft to pay for its sins

The Register is reporting that should Microsoft Corp. continue to fail to comply with the remedies imposed upon it by the European Court of Justice it could find itself having to pay a $5 million a day fine.

$5 million a day sounds like a lot but when you remembebr that Microsoft's cash and cash equivalent stash was reported to be around $40 billion (we're not talking market capitalisation here, rather what they have lying around on their bankaccounts), they can hold out for 8000 days. That comes out to just short of 22 years...