Thursday, October 22, 2009

Windows 7 Is Here, And Guess What, It Seems To Live Up To Its Promise

Microsoft officially launched Windows 7 at a party held at Skylight Studios just around the corner from Manhattans' meatpacking district. Windows 7, the multiplatform, multitouch and relatively slim operating system offers hope for us stuck with XP, and an escape route for those of us who where unfortunate enough to upgrade to or buy a system with Windows Vista pre-installed.

Steve Ballmer was his usual self, jolly, engaging and straight-talking. The demo worked without glitches and the focus was totally on user experience. Not a word about gigabytes and gigahertz. It looks like the PC finally has caught up with and maybe even surpassed the Mac, displaying the look and feel of an iPhone. Steve Ballmer said that Windows 7 finally has reached the goal Bill Gates put forward many years ago, to put Windows everywhere. It aims to be the new digital home entertainment center, running everything from audiosystems and wireless picture frames to TV's, Internet TV's and allowing you to connect to your home network while traveling.

I'm not a big fan of Microsoft, but neither am I one of those who allways have to find faults in everything they do. Vista was a disaster that set them back tremendously, opening the field for Apple and Google, but with Windows 7 they have a strong foundation to build on.

We have two Vista systems in the family, one 32-bit XP and one 64-bit XP in our family, plus a bunch of other systems mostly gathering dust. Microsoft Sweden sent me a copy of the 64-bits Windows 7 last week, and even though the install on our 64-bit XP system was anything but painless as it refused to recognize the 32-bit networking card, webcam and mouse driver. The installation program suggested that we find help online, but that was hard without access to the network and router, so my 18-year old son Erik had to download "homemade" drivers on another system and copy them over via an USB stick. However, he eventually got his system up and running, and now loves it. It's fast, looks damn good, and runs everything but the sticky notes, the webcam and the mouse, which works so and so.... "Now I understand why Logitech's webcam was on sale... and they are not going to provide me with 64-bit drivers as they rather sell new webcams," he tells me.

Well, well, that's nothing compared to my futile attempts to install OS/2 many years ago. I swapped out every possible part and driver. I still never installed! And that may have been my good luck as IBM eventually would throw in the towel on their "Windows killer"...

As I write this, Alex, my 15-year old son, comes by my office and reports that his upgrade from 64-bits Vista to 64-btis Windows 7 went smooth. No problem at all. "It seems pretty good so far," is his first comment.

Hans Sandberg

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

New Report Suggest Government Support For Journalism

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Russia Looks to China for Power Lessons

"Like an envious underachiever, Vladimir V. Putin’s party, United Russia, is increasingly examining how it can emulate the Chinese Communist Party, especially its skill in shepherding China through the financial crisis relatively unbowed," Clifford J. Levy wrote in New York Times about a meeting between Russian top leaders and leaders of China's Communist Party. (Russia’s Leaders See China as Template for Ruling, October 19, 2009.)

Twenty years ago, during Mikhail Gorbachev's state visit in May 1989, it looked like China's leadership was in need of political help as it struggled to contain growing waves of protest from students and workers dreaming of democratic political reforms. Thousands of students occupied Tiananmen Square on May 13, just before the arrival of the Soviet Communist Party leader, creating a major loss of face for Deng Xiaoping and the Chinese party leadership. We know how this drama ended, but the paradox is that while China entered a long period of relative political stability and unprecedented economic growth, the Soviet Union collapsed, leading to radical economic and political reforms followed by a chaos and lawlessness that ultimately brought Vladimir Putin, a former KBG-chief, to power. He managed to centralize the power, using Russian nationalism, the country's vast oil- and natural gas resources in an era of rising prices, this in combination with his personal charisma and Russia's military strength.

Today, however, Russia is hurt by the global financial crisis, and its fundamental economic weakness became obvious once the oil prices came down. China, in contrast, used its centralized political power and financial strength to push through a huge stimulus package, which turned the economy around, helping the world economy pull out of the Great Recession.

“The accomplishments of China’s Communist Party in developing its government deserve the highest marks,” Aleksandr D. Zhukov, a deputy prime minister and senior Putin aide, declared at the meeting with Chinese officials on Oct. 9 in the border city of Suifenhe, China, northwest of Vladivostok. “The practical experience they have should be intensely studied.” (Quoted in New York Times.)

The recent meeting between top leaders from Russia and China was only one in a series of such meetings, and China's President Hu Jintao has been invited to attend United Russia's convention in November and more meetings are planned. Russia's ruling party is even planning to open an office in Beijing according to the Times.

"Whatever the motivation, Russia in recent years has started moving toward the Chinese model politically and economically," Levy writes.

China is not the only country the Russians are studying: "...Mr. Putin’s political aides have long studied how to move the political system to the kind that took root for many decades in countries like Japan and Mexico, with a de facto one-party government under a democratic guise, political analysts said. The Russians tend to gloss over the fact that in many of those countries, long-serving ruling parties have fallen."

This is an interesting fact since one political system that China's leadership studied in the 1980's was Singapore, a country that had a "de facto one-party government under a democratic guise." China's authoritarian political system, which essentially is a dictatorship where the party elite controls all key levers in the society, is very attractive to the Russian leadership: “We are interested in the experience of the party and government structures in China, where cooperation exists between the ruling party and the judicial, legislative and executive authorities,” Vladimir E. Matkhanov, a deputy in Russia’s Parliament, said at the Suifenhe meeting, according to a transcript quoted by the Times.

It will be interesting to see if the current political exchanges between Russia and China will lead to a closer political, and maybe even military cooperation, something that could change the balance of power between China, Russia and the United States.

Yet another challenge for Team Obama.

Hans Sandberg

If you understand Swedish you may want to read this blog posts on my Swedish blog, Sandbergs hörna.
Ryssland, USA och Kina - Intervju med W. Joseph Stroupe, del I. (2007)
Ryssland, USA och Kina - Intervju med W. Joseph Stroupe, del II. (2007)
Putin släpper inte greppet, men vad är det han vill (December 2007)

Friday, October 16, 2009

Sweden's Internet Knocked Out By A Missing Dot

Sustainability just got a new meaning. Read on here!

The Old Economics Is Dead - Long Live Socio-Economics!

The impact of the economic crisis on the mainstream economic theory is still to be felt. Alan Greenspan's mea culpa was instructive, but just a blip. What we do need is a radical overhaul of the economic theory, which for the past 50 years has been seduced into obscurity by elegant mathematics.

The Great Recession was the ultimate wake-up call, but there is a strange silence coming out from the economics departments near and far. Paul Krugman did adress the issue at length in the New York Times Magazine, and George Akerlof and Robert Schiller has fired a substantial volley, but considering the degree of complicity from the discipline, one could ask for a lot more in terms of self-critique from our dismal scientists.

Maybe the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics can be of help here. At least, it point the discipline in the right direction. New York Times' Louis Uchitelle quotes Schiller in a blog:

“This award is part of the merging of the social sciences,” said Robert Shiller, a Yale University economist. “Economics has been too isolated and too stuck on the view that markets are efficient and self-regulating. It has derailed our thinking.”
Hans Sandberg

Thursday, October 8, 2009

Thursday, October 1, 2009

Re: Polanski, or would Hitler have been excused if he had been a better painter?

I don't believe in "L'art pour l'art," art for the sake of art. It may be timeless, but it is art for mankind, "L'art pour l'homme."

A lot of great art have come from people who turned out not to be that great human beings. We still listen to their music, admire their paintings, photos or films, but that doesn't mean that we need to forgive them their crimes or immoral behaviour. Does that mean that the artist is above the law, that the genius can do whatever he or she wants?

Roman Polanski is a great filmmaker, but also a man devoid of moral.
Here is what he did.