Out With The Old, In With The New

As one decade wraps up, 2010 is sure to bring great advances in technology. Looking back over the past ten years, we as consumers have enjoyed advances which can only be praised, I for one can remember my first digital camera, sporting a futuristic 2.1 megapixels and costing a whopping 350 Pounds it was the most high tech piece of kit on the market, today camera's exist which have ten-folded that megapixel count, as well as a CCD which is a fraction of the size making the camera itself even smaller. The 35mm film has finally found its place in our history books, and it is certain that future generations will question why anyone would ever have want to feed silver halide coated film into a camera.

Another technology which has drastically changed over the past ten years is the trusty old television set. Gone are the days where your viewing pleasures were restricted to size, gone also are the days where you need to throw a party just to get enough friends over to congregate around the Television set that you want to move from one side of the room to another. Todays technology allows you to literally hang a TV using a wire on the wall as you would a picture and with normal retailers stocking TV's sizing up the high 65 inches and manufactures offering even larger servings, size is really not an issue anymore.

The past ten years have offered us technology beyond our wildest dreams, but now we must turn our attentions to the near future, what will be the norm in ten years time, as the ipod killed the walkman, will something come along and wipe us free from apples greatest invention, it seems only time will tell, but in the meantime whispers are spreading around the web, the gossip directs it's attention to Apple patents which seem to suggest Apple is planning on putting a Tablet on the market. Some critics of the netbook have been chanting the demise of the netbook and maybe it will be the Apple Tablet which delivers that sinking blow.

Over the past six months rumour's have seemed to be just that with Apple rejecting all stories that its working on a tablet, but as reported by the financial times a few days before christmas Apple has rented a stage in San Francisco in the last week of January 2010, We could have an Apple tablet as early as Easter. All we can do is wait, eventually time will unwind and all things that seem to be unknown will be shown the light of day.

What more can I say, just keep an eye out for those 3D television sets, the smarter editions of smart-phones, and if were lucky a new way of saving the planet. We must continue developing but we must also implement greener technologies. This is my advise not only for the end user providers but more so for the producers of energy itself.

A Random Rant, Or Was A Riot Around The Corner??

U.K. Faced ‘Bank Runs, Riots’ as RBS and HBOS Neared Collapse

Today Jon Menon and Andrew MacAskill wrote an article for Bloomburg.com which suggested that had the Government not stepped in to swallow the debt thus saving both RBS and Lloyds a year ago today, then Britain could have faced a massive backlash from the public with widespread riots leading to the streets of London looking more like the streets of Basra. Commenting on remarks made by David Livingstone suggesting that "Bank failures would have forced the government to cancel police leave and deploy troops as the breakdown of the financial payments system threatened the ability of utilities to provide essential services" the authors suggest that the actions taken by the British Government were not only necessary but mandatory for keeping peace.

Are we to be convinced?

The answer to this question can only come after many years, with hindsight we will see if the decision made were necessary or even required, for today we are too close to the event itself to look back and make a valued judgments. So I guess we will just have to leave this question with time, and time itself will give us a response when it sees fit.

Pretty on the outside, but isn't it whats inside that counts?

For many years now, the notebook market has slowly been growing, and now it is at that critical point where retailers see more notebooks flying off the shelves then they have desktops. This trend has led to a wide array of notebook sales from cheap and cheerful offerings to those targeting the who's who in society. Over the past decade Apples notebooks have always retained the premium status in the market but now Dell with its Adamo and HP's new offering the Envy both manufactures seem to be out to make Apples pot of honey smaller.

HP's Envy particularly looks very similar to the new unibody MacBook Pro, theres no need to double guess when asking what segment of the market HP is trying to aim its newest breed of sexy laptop to, but the one question that lingers is, will lineups such as the Envy or Dell's Adamo stop consumers who are looking for sleek, sexy notebook in their tracks. My simple answer is NO!

Apple offers more then just a selection of beautifully designed products, If we look at their simple no nonsense interfaces it is easy to see why they have won the market over, over and over again. OS 9 was their first incarnation which dragged the first few PC users who were looking for something different away. Since then and after the sale of millions upon millions of iPods we know that Apple is here to stay. Ask any iPod user and they may identify their desire to own an iPod merely as a fashion statement, but ask them why they sill have an iPod and they'll explain to you the true beauty of each reincarnation, this being the simplicity of the product, whether the user is 10 or closer to 80, an iPod can be for them.

OS X also follows suit, with the recently released Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) expressing the perfect "it's whats on the inside that counts" motto. Little has Snow Leopard changed on the face of it, but on the inside a large chuck of code has been rewritten and the biggest giveaway of this is the fact that an average user will regain about 3-5GB of hard disk space.

Getting back to the HP Envy, and the Dell Adamo, yes it is true that both these notebooks have brought sexy computing to the windows world and thus consumers no longer need to give up windows to have a notebook which is sleek and sexy on the outside but the fact remains Apples hold on its own market is still just as strong as it was before, this being with or without the Adamo or Envy.

Green Shoots and the Fruits of Summer

Any keen gardener will tell you that the combination of an extremely bitter winter and a progressively warmer spring, means that the UK is expecting to experience a phenomenal plum harvest.

But the main concern on many peoples minds does not relate to the UK's plum harvest but rather to the recession that seems to be gripping so many countries around the world.

Some signs suggest that green shoots are appearing, The Financial Times reported today that hedge funds have seen a surge in investments with over $142.5bn being allocated in their direction over the past three months. First and foremost what this suggest is that investors are actually believing that the major economies around the world are bottoming out and thus these individuals are predicting a change in fortunes. When the markets can go down no more, there's only one way left to go.

Some critiques may say that these investors are stuck in a dream world but better then expected results from the likes of Goldman Sachs have done well to lighten the mood, proliferating the whisper which suggest that a turnaround is coming.

A case of sibling rivalry? or does Apple now predict tough competition??

A new update available from Apple for its popular iTunes application has now done away with the hole which allowed non Apple devices to pretend to be iPods. Thus these devices can no longer use the program to sync music and other content. Apple suggested in June that it did not support non Apple media devices and that changes could be made in the the future to its software which would prevent such devices from syncing with iTunes.

The newly updated version of iTunes (8.2.1) does just that. Apple will obviously stress the fact that this is done with the best customer experience in mind, but skeptics such as myself see it as a direct response to the popularity of Palms new helping the Pre, currently selling in the USA on Sprint and due out in the UK exclusively on 02 in time for the holiday season the Pre is turning heads on both sides of the Atlantic. The Pre offers users the ability to seamlessly jump from application to application with the convenience of not having to close each application. The Pre allows for multiple application to be open at the same time, and apart from looking dashing the Pre is also equipped with a full slide out qwerty keyboard, as well as a multi-touch screen.

The Palm Pre does sound like a dashing offering, and Apple seem to know it, what other reason would there be for Apple to block of such a large selection of potential iTunes users.

From the looks of it, the battle stations are manned, and the war paint has been applied, will Apple continue to dominate? only time will tell.

How maths killed Lehman Brothers - The Beginning of the End

"On a sunny morning in 2001, a piece of investment plan landed on the desk of Dick Fuld, the then Chief Executive of Lehman Brothers. The document, compiled by a team of maths and physics PhDs, included a calculation to show how the bank will always end up with a profit if they invest on the real estate markets. Fuld was impressed. The next five years saw the bank borrowing billions of dollars to invest in the housing market. It worked. The housing market boom had turned Lehman Brothers from a modest firm into the world's fourth largest investment bank. "

Horatio Boedihardjo.

This is just a small snippet click here for the full article.

The Passing of a Legend

It was last night when I returned from an epic Dave Matthews Band concert that I opened my laptop to see the sad news that Michael Jackson had passed away. From early on, the press had suggested that the star had suffered a cardiac arrest and later Jackson was pronounced dead at UCLA Medical Center.

Jacksons impact on the world is clearly visible via proxies such as Google believing that it was under attack from a virus. "Millions of people who Googled the star's name were greeted with an error page rather than a list of results."

Sites such as Twitter saw a huge increase in traffic with the key search and posted topics being in regards to Michael Jackson. Other websites such as iTunes and Youtube have seen a huge increase in the number of downloads/views as this time of sadness grips the world with Michael Jackson fever.

But with the passing of this legend we also see the power of the internet. It is at times such as these that we realise how the internet has revolutionised our life's and has allowed for information to flow so freely.

This I see as my small testament to a legend who's music inspired for over four decades, and will no doubt continue to do for many years to come.