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This article deals with the difficulty to find a well-balanced computer (notebook) system with adequate performance (read: moderate games and multimedia application performance should be decent) for a reasonable (read: below EUR1,500 or USD1,700) price.

Mobility has its price(s)
In this category, all notebooks (even the bulky ones with 14" displays and bigger) have pathetic graphics chips. Power consumption? Yeah, right. My old IBM Thinkpad has a horrible NeoMagic whatever graphics chip and an almost dead battery. I certainly do not want to replace this with a graphics controller who has the same n00b performance.

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See who does my job when I'm away from my desk....

Today, Yahoo! celebrates it's tenth anniversary. What is it with this number and company that prompts me to write an entry into my blog about it? Well, first off, I started using the Internet at roughly the same time that Yahoo started out. Since 1996, I use their e-mail service and it has not let me down. It was one of the first web-based e-mail services and became my favorite over the years. I wrote e-mails with Yahoo mail from all kinds of different places in Germany, Canada, the U.S., the Netherlands, practically everywhere I went.

Join in on their birthday website at Yahoo Netrospective for some online nostalgia and good vibes for the times still to come!

By the way, though this is not related to the above article in any way, this is a classic shockwave flash file I recently re-discovered on the web: All your base are belong to us!

Everyone: have a nice evening, folks!

Ok, this morning, I felt inspired to write about a trend that seems to head into the totally wrong direction: How the music industry copes with copyrights and cares for its dear customers. Woohee, how did I step into this topic? Well, for starters, I bought myself yesterday a CD single with "Galvanize" from the Chemical Brothers. It was offered for a fair price of EUR 2.50 downtown. Not a bad deal. Except for the fact that it has a copyright protection scheme that annoys eveyone to no end: "Copy Controlled". Thanks for this brilliant innovation. Now I can only listen to the CD in horrible sound quality from a cheesy player application included on the CD. Did I already mention that it takes ages to load via autostart?

Dear music industry executives: Crippling your products is not the way to encourage legal music use. It's like I buy a newspaper but can only read it while I'm at home. Or, even better, a computer program that only works between midnight and 2:00am whenever there is full moon. How brilliantly inconvenient! Listen, we live in the 21st century and what you offer is a pathetic reaction to the digitalization trend. Other industries try to promote the spread of their services digitally while you guys only try to restrict it. As a business graduate in college, I do realize that music is your asset. You want to guard it against freeriders, which is fine by itself. Other industries face the same issue and have found workable solutions most of the times.
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After my last, rather short entry, I thought it is about time again to do some real writing. Or at least get started with it. See, over the past weeks here in the Netherlands again, I re-evaluated my environment a bit again. The conclusion is a surprisingly good one: I like it here. But I don't want to devote this article to personal observation of living circumstances, rather to a specific subset of trends here. It is the pervasiveness of sound and music, especially two genres: Dance/Techno and Urban. Compared with Germany and the U.S., Dance is not a niche market here. The scene is alive and you have plenty of choice between formidable events all-year long. Same goes for the Urban scene, it is evolving and inspired by influences from other genres. So, what gives this impression?
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