While the vast majority of Americans enjoy a holiday, and the rest of the free world slows down for the weekend, I hope you’ll pause to remember the sacrifice the US armed forces have made and continue to make every day.

To those who have served and those who serve today, the Thirdpipe and Tightwad Technica team applaud you. Most importantly, we honor our best and brightest who paid the ultimate price so we can be free to enjoy a day of leisure.

The iPad has been a decent success for Apple. No bones about that. But the more I think about tablets and eReaders (they are nearly the same thing you know, technologically) the more I come to the conclusion that such devices as they are currently designed really won’t cut it. The Apple AIR would be a better technology choice for many for example.

So what’s wrong with a tablet? Let me count the ways –

• If its an eReader like device, no color for one. A limited screen size. That’s two things the iPad got right.
• Limited functionality. All the current crop of devices are purposely crippled to not support many public document stds. Bad move I believe.
• Limited input capabilities. The iPad is not even a good note taker in its current form. Same can be said for most of the other designs out there. The current hand gesture techology is just too clumsy.
• Limited input capabilities II. Many of the designs just lack input like say USB in some cases. Or ability to accept a std keyboard. That’s a problem if you are in the authorship business in some form or another.
• Weight. I know we are only at generation 1.5 of this device type. But to be really serious all of them need to go on a diet and shed about 50% of their weight.

The more I think about it, the tablet is a technological dead end in many ways. The test? What if I told you that there was a device that could act like a tablet sometimes, but ’snap’ a keyboard to it and it then functioned like a laptop; weighed less than 2 lbs and would work all day on a single charge. Would that cool your desire for a tablet? I know it would me and there lies the problem. The tablet nearly qualifies for gadget status, not a serious business tool. Sadly, I do not know that such a laptablet exists. Wish it did.

That big fruit phone masquerading as a utility computing device is sold out. That’s great for Mr. Jobs and Apple’s shareholders. The happy lemmings will pay more for all media they consume via this device via a walled garden app and media store. Got to admire the chutzpah! PT Barnum would be proud of Mr. Jobs doing a job on the those who have more money than common sense!

The real breakthrough will be a $100 to $200 device that will work with any content from any source. It will come in different shapes and sizes for a variety of makers. It won’t have fanboys or make a fashion statement. It will, however, be as common as dirt and embraced by the unwashed masses, including this Tightwad.

The Tightwads hope that you have a safe and peaceful Christmas filled with new gadgets.Thanks for another great year!

We wish all of our readers the best of Thanksgivings. We hope that you enjoy the day with loved ones, food and football. We also hope you’ll remember all that you have thankful for.

We are grateful to you for making our efforts worthwhile. In a year that has been so tough that many blogs have faded away, we’re still here and will continue to be here as long as we can pay the server bill.

We wish you the well and hope you’ll keep reading!

Acording the Gartner, yes. But the devil’s in the details and Gartner is very motivated to cast the best possible light on  the current political agenda. The forecast shows growth from this year which is the worst in history. When you are crawling back from the brink of extinction, it’s not so difficult to show growth from the lowest point. Looking back in comparison three or four years ago still makes for a pretty bleak year ahead, just not as bleak as 2009. What that means for the Tightwad tech worker is the necessity of adhering to strict tightwad ways are a means to survival. It also means that there will continue to be some great tech bargains in the marketplace. So, if you can afford that next upgrade, go ahead and spend. You might help save a fellow tightwad’s job.

(Link)

Apollo 11 was not a Tightwad undertaking. In fact, Americans bet the nations wealth on it. The bet paid off big through the development of new materials and technologies that have among the things made high power personal computing and the internet possible.  Excitement over space exploration focused young, creative minds on the sciences insuring that the next generation would be capable of even greater things.

It’s sad that American space tech has faltered so in the last four decades. For that we can thank career bureaucrats who wrestled control of the space agency away from technologists while they forbade private space missions.  The results are the impending loss of our only manned space launch platform, with no firm delivery date for its replacement. The goal of human  footprints on Mars by the year 2000 is all but forgotten.

As a new generation takes the control of America, it’s important for it to learn to value the legacy left by its grandfathers. We may have changed direction, but we’ve wandered even deeper into the wilderness with that new change.

Gosh I don’t want to sound like we are picking on Malone. He’s a good writer and has his ears to the ground on what happens in Happy Valley of Silicon. But his latest missive is almost like he has been reading this blog. Case in point –

It hasn’t quite turned out that way. . .

The first surprise to many Valleyites is how innately anti-entrepreneurial the new Administration has turned out to be. Candidate Obama looked like a high tech executive - smart, hip, a gadget freak - and he certainly talked pro-entrepreneur. But the reality of the last six months has been very different. One might have predicted that he would use the best tool in his economic arsenal - new company creation and the millions of new jobs those firms in turn create - to fight this recession. But President Obama has instead appeared to be almost exclusively interested in Big Business as the key to economy recovery.

By comparison, almost every move the new Administration has made regarding entrepreneurship seems to be targeting at destroying it in this country. It has left Sarbanes-Oxley intact, added ever-greater burdens on small business owners, called for increasing capital gains taxes, and is now preparing to pile on cap-and-trade, double taxation on offshore earnings, and a host of other new costs. Even Obamacare seems likely to land unfairly on small companies.

Entrepreneurship has been the single most important contributor to the economic health of this country for at least a century now - and if you were going to systematically destroy that vitality, you couldn’t come up with a better strategy than the one Washington has put in place over the last six months. Indeed, you can make the case that the sole contribution the Obama administration has made to entrepreneurship in America to date is to force all of those millions of unemployed people to desperately set up their own businesses in order to survive.

We have been saying since November that an Obama Administration will not be a fan of Silicon Valley. The reason is simple. If Obama’s vision is a Federal Corporaracy of the Euro model then having a vibrant free wheeling free enterprise model making big bucks is the anthesis to that vision. It would have to be torn down. That appears to be Obama’s aim.

Malone’s piece should be on every CEO’s desk in the Valley. You can read the whole thing here.

The New Zealand government has decided to not continue a long standing option to continue with Microsoft products. NZ has traditionally utilized an agency approach to purchase. That is a procurement group cuts the best deal they can acquire representing the potential buys by all other agencies that use Microsoft product. Those buying agencies then purchase the products at the discounted price. Only not this time –

Christie said the government had had no option but to back out from a deal this time because it was offered the same recommended, retail price as any other customer, despite the volume of licences it would buy.

He said replacements would now have to be sought and it would be a long, hard haul as the Government had got used to the Microsoft applications.

“Essentially, Microsoft software is like a virus; once it’s in your system it’s very difficult to get rid of it,” Christie said.

David Lane, director of egressive, a company dealing in open source, said: “I’m excited about the possibility that free/open source solutions are no longer excluded from government procurement… That and the increasing grassroots understanding of FOSS within business and government is causing a subtle but profound shift in the mindset throughout NZ. Microsoft is now seen as the frivolously expensive ‘closed’ choice, which it is.

“Now it’s just up to the FOSS vendors in NZ to seize the opportunity and rise to the challenge of filling the gaps as they form. Rest assured that we will!”

He said it would not be long before the NZ Ministry of Education tie-in with Microsoft received similar scrutiny. “The latest agreement is being negotiated now, with results announced in a month - that agreement reportedly covers twice as many licenses as the G2009 agreement would have had.”

So it appears that the NZ deal fell apart because Microsoft is feeling downward volume pressures due to the economy. That and the fact that there are viable alternatives from Apple and FOSS.

Is Microsoft dead in NZ? No. Agencies are still free to buy product they just won’t get a discounted deal for it. Which is a problem for Redmond. As governmental agencies around the globe feel the effects of reduced revenues they won’t be able to afford yesterday’s rates for IT product. They will be looking for a deal. And what’s a better deal than free?

Linky.

Because the eBay phenomenon has substantially reduced total costs by eliminating middlemen, brick-and-mortar stores, high-priced dealers, and other marginal expenses, the local eBayers and craftsmen can make more money cranking out cheap fakes than they can by spending days or weeks digging around looking for the real thing. It is true that many former and potential looters lack the skills to make their own artifacts. But the value of their illicit digging decreases every time someone buys a “genuine” Moche pot for $35, plus shipping and handling. In other words, because the low-end antiquities market has been flooded with fakes that people buy for a fraction of what a genuine object would cost, the value of the real artifacts has gone down as well, making old-fashioned looting less lucrative. The value of real antiquities is also impacted by the increased risk that the object for sale is a fake. The likelihood of reselling an authentic artifact for more money is diminished each year as more fakes are produced.

This from an antiquities guru. So eBay is ’saving’ the antiquities world one cheap piece of junk at a time. Who would have thunk it? What this really confirms is the old economics adage that — bad money chases out good money.

The real problem ahead? When in 2025 every household has a device the size of a microwave and can reproduce antiquities of a perfect match to the real thing at the molecular level then what? Is it real or a fake. And how do you detect it?

In the mean time I headed over to my parents attic to see if I can find that 1950’s set of metal spun dinner ware my parents have as an antique.

Linky.