Headworx

Day after day I work leading a small company towards success. 95% of my decisions are based on so called business perspective. This means most cost effective delivery of products and services that give our customers the quickest return on investments. The business grows delivering in turn the shareholders the best return on their investments. Economy rulez. But deep in my heart I am a romantic engineer dreaming of brave and innovative products that will give us, users, the new experience, not only the cheapest product and service. How often I would like to ask " where is my personal jetpack? " to quote Walt Mossberg... There were a number of achievements in the past, killed later on the road, because they were not profitable. Yes, we have even been to the moon... 40 years ago. Today such project would be laughed at... Tomorrow I am leaving to the USA, taking a Lufthansa cross - Atlantic flight. Yes, we do not have supersonic Concorde's anymore. And we even do not have in ...

The Samsung SGH-i600 is an unusual gadget. In a sense that it has been so long in service ( since April 2007 ). Of course I have been trying to find some replacement or upgrade for it... but I could not find anything worth attention. The only recommended upgrade was the shift from Windows Mobile 5 to Windows Mobile 6 , while all potential competition was either lacking a good qwerty keyboard or 3G/HSDPA (iPhone 1.0) or was too bulky (Nokia N95) or did not have a simple push email interface (Blackberry) based on Microsoft Exchange we use for business emails. I even tried to use the Samsung as a portable music player, but unfortunately Windows Media is too complicated. My entire music collection is based on playlists I compose myself. CD albums, since the introduction of the optical disc technology in early 1980s, contain a lot of crap music. The reason is they can store 70-80 minutes of music. This is twice as much as it used to be in the ear of vinyl LP records. And it is virtually im...

Last week I spent two days with student teams competing in the Imagine Cup competition. This was my third edition of Imagine Cup I participated as a judge . As always it was so very refreshing to meet the unconfined creativity of the competing teams. But having said that I missed something of a breakthrough. Something blowing the mind, something spectacular in concept. That is why I keep on remembering the inPUT team from the 2007 Imagine Cup . They had something Steve Jobs would love to incorporate in the next release of MacOS. Or something Vista should have built-in to answer the question of what it brings to the end user. The application has been called onespace. The description on the team's web page does not exactly tell the essence. onespace is a powerful system designed for easier Communication, Collaboration and Creative Problem Solving. It enables people independently on their location and nation to cooperate as if they were sitting next to each other. onespace gives yo...

Some time ago I posted a short collection of security - related news, picturing rather sad story about how we treat security and how we progress with the effort to make computing and Internet a safer place. Bruce Schneier had this very good article on being secure versus feeling secure . What strikes me is how often people just feel secure, losing common sense that would help them be secure... You probably know that, but BlueRay discs with their superior BD+ copy protection scheme were cracked a while ago. http://forum.slysoft.com/showthread.php?t=14786 Diebold, a company behind the electronic voting machines and notorious with "feeling secure" lost another case: the key allowing a physical access to every machine has been made based on photos they have on their web site... That is almost like Darwin award nominee! http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4066#more-4066 There is a theory linking the random number generators in Windows to NSA having a secret backdoor... Sounds like X-Files...