The electronic book is a wet dream for gadget makers and publishers alike. Since the dawn of the CD-ROM they have tried hard to give us the eBook as well as the eNewspaper.

Finally new technology like the Kindle seem to make that possible.

But I think the whole approach is wrong. You simply can’t simulate paper digitally – it’s physical attributes can’t be replicated on a screen.

You can only "advance" the concept and idea of reading and organizing a series of texts into a coherent bigger "story" (book) or collection of articles (newspaper).

We already have that new concept and you are using it right now: it’s called a browser.

People have disliked reading PDFs for years and prefer content in their browsers.

The only reason why they want shove eBooks and eNewspapers down our throats is that they want us to pay for it. We still connect to the concept of "books" and "newspapers" that we have to pay for it. Anything in a browser is supposed to be free.

Amazon wants us all to use a Kindle, so they can track and watch what we read. 

Those eReaders are all about buying content and digital rights management. And we already have seen that the Amazon Kindle as well as the iPhone (another big eBook plattform) have remote killswitches. If they want those companies can simply switch off access to any content you bought and downloaded for on YOUR own machine.

This is very easy to do with electronic gadgets with an internet – try to that with an old fashioned newspaper or book …

Like the "compact stereo system" – the new Übermonitors suck. Apart from notebooks – who should include everything for portability – all other gadgets should be "separate". So when one part breaks it doesn’t spoil all other "elements" and usually the built-in components are not top notch, so you want to replace them anyway – but you can’t. The speakers suck and the webcam/microphone are not as good as say a good Logitech one.

I am sure such workstations are used to answer complaints and send birthday letters. Right?

I am still waiting for an affordable Hello Kitty netbook – I would buy it instantly!

Normal hard drives are built like record player: you have spinning platters and an "arm" that reads and writes the data to the "records".

Computer drives only based on memory chips are nothing new – but bloody expensive. But sooner or later they will replace normal drives, since they are much faster, less less energy, have no moving parts and much more durable. Best of all: no more humming noise.

Especially for notebooks Sold State Drives are a blessing: batteries will last much longer and they will produce less heat.

At the moment these drives are EXPENSIVE. A 64 Gbyte SSD is usually around €700 to €1.000. But like all computer gizmos the prizes will come down.

Samsung has recently announced a 256 Gbyte SSD with a killer performance. The Nerds are drooling like mad – and so am I.

Back in the early days of desktop publishing these SyQuest cartridges were the best thing to send your data to clients or the printers. And they worked pretty well … most of the time (any one remember all the hassle to mount SyQuests when there was the wrong or a nasty SCSI driver on it?).

44 MBytes sound like a joke today and they were bloody expensive too. You can easily upload that amount of data today or burn a cheap CD. But all these technologies were not yet available at that time.

Digital Life certainly has improved.