If they do it right you could flick documents to colleagues arranged around a virtual table, finally making a paperless office, and pushing Macs into the office space.

If you tie that in with a virtual keyboard, iChat for those that can’t be there and speech recognition to take notes for you, that would make life easy at work, or for studying.

On top of that an e-book reader would again help in studying, making the iSlate an ideal PC for those studying coarses that are more arts based and have less emphasis on computing horsepower.

What would you like to see?

You may have heard all the fuss about this but you can look at pictures and video in Bing without going to the sites themselves, which makes Bing a proxy for porn.

I have to say though that blocking a search engine because you can find porn on it may be a bit harsh! Mind you it is Bing, so are you bothered?

I got the update for copy and paste really, but there is a lot of other stuff in there that makes it well worth the price.

Search is great, it is fast, suggests what you may be looking for and you can refine your search as you need. I can’t really work this out. How come on the Windows XP machine I use at work a search takes about an hour, but on the iPod it is instantaneous? Go figure!

iPod Touch owners also missed out in the 2.1 upgrade, as one of the main features, maps with street view, for some reason didn’t make the cut for the iPod. Well it’s in this time, and I have to say it works very well.

As for stability, so far everything is very stable with no crashes or any significant problems I can see.

Expect posts next week on analytics new features and more.

Most of the posts were from users saying that they thought the user should be engaged first, so I wrote a post from the perspective of the company.

“I notice that you are giving opinions from the user perspective only and thought I could give a company perspective on this.

A web application I created a couple of years ago (www.ausrackid.com) went through this thought process. Ausrack ID allows IT pros to configure 19″ racking systems in a visual way, save print out the results, and get quotes from the company I work for.

I chose having no sign up until the user decides they want to save, at which point you are asked for username and email address, if they want a quote for items they get asked for more details. This is quite a way through the process. I was advised to put in a signup process at the front end to allow us to collect information on the users which we could potential use for emailing info. I resisted this at the time, and still do today. However, for the first year, the site was getting significant traffic, and significant usage, but very few people were saving their design, or asking for a quote. As the site needs to fund itself, it was very difficult to justify it’s existence at this stage, and the whole project was almost pulled.

I think the moral of the story is that your user details have a value, and giving those to a website you use may be the only way they can stay afloat. Think of youtube, they can justify their existence by the data provided by the number of users. That is why Google bought them. At the smaller scale my advice would be if they ask for it, and you want to use the service, give them your details, it might just help them survive in a competitive world.”

The excuse from OneSteel is that it is there is a shortage in world supply. However reading the press, and their releases it seems like in Australia, they create the shortage by limiting shipping to their customers, this means that demand is always behind supply. Internationally it seems that they are trying to play the spot iron ore market in China to get better prices.

I’ve got to say that the chain goes like this: -

We buy steel – we increase our prices – our customers increase their prices – consumers pay more – inflation rises – risk of recession increases.

At the same time of coarse the bhp shareholders are raking it in from massively increased profits.

I’m not against capitalism, but you have to say that this is a really short term view from BHP. If they drive us into recession, they can forget house building, and many of the other industries they rely on for their bread and butter. I guess what I’m saying here is forget your short term profits and think of your market as a whole bhp. It’s up to you bhp, and many of the other corporates. Short terms gain and long term pain, or a more even market where you are more likely to still be here in 5 years time!