Headworx

Statistically, Americans do not travel . And this is why there is no rage about the geographical restrictions on electronic content services. The United States are bearing the critical market voting mass here and countries like the United Kingdom alone do not matter .  In the old days, after buying a CD record, I could put it in a portable player, circle the globe and the music would continue playing uninterrupted. But these were the old days. Now we have changed the conduit - from physical discs to wireless streaming and suddenly we learn the hard way about the legal restrictions. For a consumer, how is an ABBA song on a physical record different from the same song on a music streaming account? Yet there seems to be hell of a difference to the royalty collector (or the middlemen), such that they restrict where you can or cannot listen. Which probably is not a problem for those who do not change a zip code throughout their entire life. But once you start moving, you quickly hit a w...

Remote controllers for audio-video equipment have been one of the biggest failures of the industry. The failure comes from the fact they are designed by engineers (and UX is not involved) and in a purely engineering fashion they aim to expose every piece of (often not used or even not understood) functionality. On top of that, to do some very basic tasks, like playing a video, you need to operate two or three remotes - one for the display, one for the audio equipment and one of the video source device. It has been like that forever and even the introduction of the bi-directional digital AV interconnection standard (HDMI) has not solved this problem. HDMI has a great but little known feature called CEC , which is designed to solve the multiple remotes issue. And as I wrote before, it is little known and even less used / implemented. Even Apple, a company which is proud of its user experience - first designs, failed to recognize CEC until generation 4 of their Apple TV product (4 is the ...

It seems nuclear fusion has finally entered the investment horizon of private capital. Notably Sam Altman put $375M into Helion . This kind of reminds me of the very very early days of SpaceX, when space transportation was still the domain of states and governments, considered too risky and too capital - intensive for the private sector. But as the SpaceX story tells us, when the private sector moves in, we can expect rapid progress and innovation. The most known nuclear fusion project today is probably the ITER, started in 2007, with the budget reaching probably the order of $100B and still NOT being able to deliver overall positive energy balance . ITER clearly is a brute-force solution to the problem, somehow comparable to the Apollo space program. Throw any amount of money and energy in and don't care about the return, just reach the goal. This is not what any private capital wants. On the other hand there probably are hundreds of alternative methods to extract nuclear fusion e...

Children often think they become invisible when they close their eyes. Unfortunately this remains true for most adults dealing with much more serious problems. Take electric vehicles (EVs). The common wisdom is they are "green". And their owners consider themselves contributing to the greener planet and conscious of the global warming problem. This is so hypocritical.  Just because a car is electric does not mean it is clean or environmentally friendly. Where does this electricity come from? Well, most likely, from a dirty coal-burning, global-warming power plant . This is the reality today. Many people just don't want to see/hear it, closing their eyes while trying to believe electricity comes from a socket in a wall. And not from a fossil power plant. But the fact is fossil fuel production is set to soar over the next decade . And EVs are significantly contributing to that. The key problem here is not really if the car is electric or hybrid or combustion. The problem is...