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

New Report Suggest Government Support For Journalism

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)

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

Human Behavior With A Twist

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.

Norway to fill the void left by Chile’s collapsing salmon export

Norway’s salmon farmers stand ready to grab a huge chunk of the U.S. fish market left by Chile’s shrinking salmon export to the U.S., which will drop 40 percent in 2009, and another 70 percent in 2010. “Norwegian salmon could jump from five percent of the U.S. market to 25 percent,” says Børge Grønbeck, marketing manager at the Norwegian Seafood Export Council during a visit to New York.

Børge Grønbeck was in New York as part of the export council’s plans to reopen its U.S. office and start a campaign to boost Norway’s export of farmed Atlantic salmon to the U.S. “Chile holds 50-60 percent of the U.S. market, but there has been a serious decline since 2008 due to the ISA-virus (infectious salmon anemia),” he says, adding that Norway, which is the largest producer of farmed salmon in the world, wants to fill the gap left by Chile’s falling export. “We have the capacity and Norwegian salmon is well known,” he says.

Norway produces about 750,000 tons live weight of farmed salmon yearly out of a world production of about 1.5 million tons. The U.S. market for seafood is the third largest in the world, and 88 percent of the U.S. seafood consumption was imported in 2008.

Børge Grønbeck says that Chile’s regulation of its fish farms have been lax, allowing them to sit too close to each other, making the vulnerable to disease. Norway on the other hand, has had a strict regulatory framework, emphasizing sustainability, and spreading out its salmon farms to limit the use of antibiotics. A recent report in the New York Times said that in 2008 Chile used 350 times more antibiotics in its farmed salmon than Norway did in its farms. (718,000 pounds vs. 2,075 pounds)

For Norway, this is not just a one-time shot, but also potentially a long-term gain on its number one international competitor in the farmed salmon business. “It will take many years before Chile is back,“ Børge Grønbeck says.

Filling the void left by Chile is only one part of the new Norwegian strategy. “American eat too little seafood,” he says, adding that this presents both an educational and a PR-challenge. American’s eat relatively little seafood and salmon, which makes the growth potential the bigger. Americans eat on average 7.4 kg seafood per person and year, which is much less that in Europe and Norway (where the seafood consumption is three times the U.S. average.) Farmed salmon captures 15 percent of the seafood consumption in the U.S., which amounts to 280,000 ton. (It takes about 15 kg live weight salmon to produce 7.4 kg filleted salmon.)

The council hopes to teach both the distributors and retailers how to inform the consumer better and be more efficient in selling salmon. It is also important to educate the consumer about the health benefits of eating salmon, and overcome consumer fear of eating fish. “Many consumers simply don’t know how to prepare salmon, and think it is hard to cook it,” he says. “Once you show them, they often burst out that ‘I didn’t know it was that easy!’” When the council had a campaign in Norway to address this issue, it led to a big increase in sales during the grill season.

The Norwegian strategy will also push for easy to prepare meal solutions, better displays in supermarkets, and better branding of Norwegian salmon. In many supermarkets it can be hard to find out where the salmon comes from, and there is little advice for how to select and prepare your salmon.

It seems as Norway have a leg up on its competitors when it comes to farmed salmon, but there are environmentalist that criticize the entire industry of farmed seafood. “The growing global appetite for cheap farmed salmon is imperiling wild fish populations across the planet,” according to scientists quoted by the National Geographic magazine (February 12, 2008.) "Salmon farming seems to have a negative impact on wild salmon," Jennifer Ford, a lead researcher of Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, told the magazine. Her research was however put in doubt by Marine Harvest, the world’s largest salmon farming company. Other factors have contributed to the decline in wild salmon, according to the company.

Hans Sandberg

The Social Impact of the Great Recession

The recession will end, even this one. But it won't be back to the usual, it won't be back to the "happy days" of inflated real estate and easy profits on Wall Street. We're in the middle of a huge social shift, not unlike what happened in the 1960's. My guide to understand what's happening is Albert O. Hirschman.

When the IT- and telecom bubbles burst, there was a blip when people sat down and asked themselves what the meaning was with it all, but Osama bin Laden shook us out of all that, and George W. Bush took the opportunity to launch a couple of wars while lowering taxes on the rich, which got the economy started again, even though it was heading down the wrong way leading to the Great Recession of 2008.

But there was an underlying shift going on, a shift of the type Albert O. Hirschman discussed in his brilliant little book Shifting Involvements - Private Interest and Public Action (Princeton University Press, 1982, 2002)

The "me first" era had run its course and no Hummer or three-car garage could ease our existential pain, or address the large public issues that loomed ever larger at the horizon (war, poverty, health care for all, global warming, infrastructure...). The failure of private solutions lowered the alternative cost of public action, which we saw in the tremendous outburst of support and volunteering for the Obama campaign.

The shift from private to public emphasis helped prepare us for the challenges we are now facing, and it will be strengthened by the impact of the recession. This was illustrated well in Peter S. Goodman's story in the New York Times on August 28: Reluctance to Spend May Be Legacy of Recession

The Great Depression imbued American life with an enduring spirit of thrift. The current recession has perhaps proven wrenching enough to alter consumer tastes, putting value in vogue. 

“It’s simply less fun pulling up to the stoplight in a Hummer than it used to be,” said Robert Barbera, chief economist at the research and trading firm ITG. “It’s a change in norms.”
...
“Not only have people lost money, but they don’t expect as much appreciation in the money they have, and that should affect consumption,” said Andrew Tilton, an economist at Goldman Sachs. “This is a cultural shift going on. People will save more.”

Not only will they save more, they will take part in public life much more as their private options are limited when dealing with huge collective problems.

That's bad news for conservatives who live off fear and government-bashing.

Hans Sandberg