taojones's Comments

Japan to the U.S.: 'We Don't Want to Exclude You, But...'

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 12:44:50 -0400

as professor Caroll Quigly rightly observed the mid east comprises of a tribal Patriarchal society Clinton understood this ( Quigley was his history professor) and bush SR. understood it (thats why he stopped short of bagdad ) george Jr who was either drunk or asleep in history class put our foot in this tar baby and now Obama is "unpredictable" as he try's to extricate us from this un manageable mess . to give a quick example of how tribal society's function look at the Palestinians. every time Arafat got 10 chiefs to agree the 11th chief bombed Israel and broke up the talks RATHER THAN SUCCED POWER TO A CENTRAL GOVERNMENT the graft flows up through the family' s and stops at the local chief there's no way these guys want democracy the only way to manage them is to be the baddest mother in the valley aka Saddam. you have a lot of cynical nerve to criticize Obama on this one. the best thing he could do is step out let them fight it out and deal with the winner.

Do Mac and Windows Users Read Blogs Differently?

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 14:20:29 -0400

windows user's are used to 4 or 5 weeks on the phone with tech support every time they try something new or even if they haven't done it in a while and windows disabled it "for their own good" I did notice all my windows using friends stand up at attention when they heard of any other OS than windows that they might use only to sit down again with a look of long suffering resignation when i explained centralized Applications to them.

Apple: Great Products = Great Investment?

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:44:56 -0400

rllh has taken a cheap shot at apples price. the forces driving down apples stock have nothing to do with the company and more to do with manipulations by institutional investors . the company has out preformed everybody and in 4 years or so has piled up cash from a meager 4 billion to over 44 billion and a lot is not even counted yet.
go invest in pepsi if you want to see cash coming in (and stock price dropping as soon as its paid ) if you want a dividend from apple. sell a few shares

Gold: Now Demonstrating Trust in Obama

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 09:19:15 -0500

exactly which governments are still on the gold standard?

On Feb 16 08:26 AM Maximus wrote:

> Atlasman,
>
> Don't worry, we are all out of our league and no one knows where
> this is all going.
>
> People who are buying gold are doing so because they think the Obama
> administration in conjunction with the Bernake-led Fed will "do what
> it takes" to keep the economy from collapsing (deflation with high
> unemployment and waves of bankruptcies).
>
> The only way out of this collapse, as the author alludes, is to reinflate
> the economy through the printing of money. With more money in circulation
> and fewer goods, inflation will go up. This is the theory that current
> gold buyers believe in.
>
> There is another theory that says that the government is not currently
> "doing what it takes." Paul Krugman just published an Op-Ed in the
> NY Times saying as much. He claims that we need fiscal stimuli in
> the trillions and not just billions.
>
> If the government doesn't in fact "do enough" (i.e. print money),
> then deflation will take hold and the economy will continue to grind
> to a halt. Gold would likely go down in that scenario and the cash
> would remain king.
>
> One other thing you should be aware of, there are also those who
> talk about manipulation in the gold market: that governments will
> begin shorting gold soon (March) in the hopes of causing a fall and
> later being able to repurchase at a cheaper price.
>
> This later scenario is also possible. Tread into the market carefully.
> If you buy now, make sure you have stop loss orders in place.

>
> If gold falls significantly in the next few months, I would then
> ramp up my purchases. I think the author is right, Obama and Bernake
> have no politically palatable choice other than to create inflation.

Gold: Now Demonstrating Trust in Obama

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 09:13:53 -0500

As a manufacturing jeweler i have seen these gold prices in the 70's an i saw what happens when everybody decides to dump. the fact is that you can't pay your grocery bill with a dwt of your gold stash. it is a fools paradise to hold a handful of shiny metal and think your any richer than the fools who thought their 200 thousand dollar house was worth a million.
The high prices of gold are ruining my industry and i caution you with the one axiom that has based my trade for 5000 years "gold ( or diamonds) are only worth what the next guy will pay for it !"
guys like this author are basically saying "we can play musical chairs forever the music will never stop" and the banks said "the price of real estate will never go down because they are not making any more land" Get serious! the reason i think the gold price went up in the first place was the arabs who were raping us on the oil price ( (a bid of 10 cents on a contract ups the delivery price 500% )needed a place to park the cash because they knew they would crash the economy . but that damage is done.the new deal starts now . they will be selling gold soon because there are real estate bargains to be had. watch out when the liquidation begins, does the name Bunker Hunt ring a bell?

Orwellian Finance: Is 1984 Happening in 2009?

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 14:05:27 -0500

one thing i will go along with when it comes to who gets the money

"some pigs are more equal than others"

george orwell

It's What Apple's Not Doing That Has Analysts Worried

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 13:56:59 -0500

It took apple decades to build the pricing structure. once broken they can never go back . this is why jobs piled so much cash up… to weather downturns like this. cutting prices means cutting corners and that has always been a disaster for apple. i point out in the early i-book soldering the ethernet port to the mother board with no supports , the weight of the chord was breaking the port free of the motherboard causing apple to replace a bunch of them. as long as value is greater than price apple will do just fine. let the "pc by the pound" pundits fight out the commodity wars Apple will stay above the fray. you don't see Tiffany having a fire sale now do you mr analyst!

Apple's Problems - Bad to the Core?

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 10:17:03 -0400

first news this morning of reception problems testing under strict lab conditions showed no flaw in the hardware www.gp.se/gp/jsp/Cross...

second i have an 850 dual g4 running leopard with out a crash EVER as well as a first generation mini there are a lot of idiot users who screw with the main libraries and have crash problems or have stupid things like pram batteries from the year one going bad and their clocks and dates are always different messing with directories. people do not know these need to be replaced every 5 years or so

dragging out the health issues at this point is just ignorant the only thing you left out of this laundry list was Gil Amelio allowed too many motherboard designs to be produced at once.

i wish you were bright enough to pull off a hatchet job like this

heres an idea (since you apparently have none of your own) for your next article

"Apple sells too many computers and phones in the back to school season, record profits will be difficult to top by christmas is this the beginning of the end for jobs?" or " piles of money at Apple causing dangerous stress on floors of company vaults"

Microsoft: Still Master of the Operating System Domain

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 08:53:20 -0400

to call microsoft an industry leader is an oxymoron. the main reason the OS was so crappy from the beginning was it was a copy of the mac os duct taped to dos. in being everything to everybody it ended up being nothing at all. Steve Balmer at the helm will make the company sweaty,hoarse and even more clueless. counting every beige box that comes with a disk a "sale" is really ludicrous and in a masterful public relations move cutting off the sale of XP ( extra problems) removes the consumer choice to pay extra at the store for a UPdowngrade to xp that many were doing .at his next testosterone fest Balmer will tout the increased adoption of vista as a triumph of its superiority over xp one more example of how out of touch a company can be o no i just got a virus update from mcaffe . . .wheres my credit card . . . my protection is expired what the heck is half ware anyway . . . I'm getting a mac dude!

Apple Surge Expected - RBC

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 14:23:14 -0400

steve jobs is going to have to buy bigger mattress to store all the cash in

Apple Can Disable iPhone Apps, but Should They?

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:10:32 -0400

its hard to write a crappy app for a mac because the system uses a resource fork and a data fork in each document or action the app performs. the app calls the system for instance "give me a window" and the toolbox throws up the window and the app developer can go and assign functions to the menus and what not but since the system produces all this stuff for the app its hard for the app to affect the system itself (its a one way relationship) thats why macs are so hard to hack and why apps all have the same look and feel. since there are 2 forks it is not possible to hide commands in information like you can in certain command line interfaces which shall not be mentioned lest we have a sweaty fat guy start yelling "developer" at me

Looking for a Cause for Thursday's Sell-off? Blame Greenspan

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 09:49:34 -0400

Greenspan had to deal with an administration that was hell bent on looting the treasury and lining their pockets for decades to come. I remember the blank stares from the senators when greenspan explained that the surplus that the clintons had left behind could not simply be returned to the bond holders(to reduce the national debt) because most were bearer bonds and with out offering incentives to offset the tax advantages we just did not know who(as a group) they are. thats why we all got that first 600 dollar check the government by law could not keep the money.He is a guy who see what is going on in a world of class "C" dunderheads but he should realize that pointing out that the emperor is naked will have consequences

Apple Math: Market Share over Margins

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 09:10:30 -0400

I'm buying all i can afford. the lower prices will mean (in simple math ) we can choose between owning 100% of one apple or 30% of the whole orchard. the fact that in these conditions there are lines for 3 weeks at the stores is PHENOMENAL

Three Apple Fears That Were Blown Out of Proportion

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 09:07:07 -0400

apple fan anybody Steve's age will have some health challenges but they ARE being managed i am sure he can get the absolute best care possible
and unfortunately the new phone is under the same accounting rules because apple is delivering upgrades for free over the life of the contract length and the law states that until the "whole value " is actually delivered the sale can not be considered "complete" but as was astutely pointed out apple will have use of the cash right away and save gobs on the taxes and the bottom line will grow and grow steadily over the next 5 years regardless of small setbacks in sales. Good news to investors like me if the bearish pundits don't panic the market as they have been doing. this routine unnerving of investors should be as illegal as crying fire in a crowded theater

Steve Jobs: Honesty Is the Best Policy

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 09:26:28 -0400

to all you folks just waiting to take offense at what was an accurate quote there is only one bad word in the entire language that should never be used and that word is NO! i think we're smart enough as a group to not have our lives or psyche ruined for life because someone else said a "bad" word in this case it was a quote and the reporter was right in including the correct expletive if Jobs had used the "c" word i would have known he was MUCH angrier. including the correct expletive allows me to judge the "freighting" of the sentence more subtly

Apple: Expecting Short-Term Weakness

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 09:15:08 -0400

perhaps we should not dignify Andy's idiocy with our attention.

Apple's MobileMe Mess

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 08:24:54 -0400

apple will get to the bottom of the problem and square it away quickly and trust that it will not be a band aid work around but a true fix. Mine is working fine. if any of you have had networking problems you would know fixes are a lot of educated guesses and trial and error propositions individual users can inadvertently mess things up (we had a stock boy search for an item that did not exist that put our company into an infinite loop that lasted 3 days) sometimes what you fix breaks something else there are a lot of reboots and reloads involved have a little patience here and remember if your a windows user searching the internet for some obscure .dll to get your scanner to work or calling tech support and having to rewrite code over the phone. sit back and the apple engineers will come out the other side with even better software (6 years in the making VISTA! yeah lets let Microsoft fix our phones!)

Apple: Expecting Short-Term Weakness

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 08:09:40 -0400

the choice of words from pundits always causes trouble if you don't see where the silver tongued devil is sending you if Colon Powell had called the baggy of baking soda and the crappy picture of a truck an "exhibit" instead of "evidence" we woild not be stuck in the briar patch right now. When a record quarter and lines of people at your outlets for weeks is "lacluster" i begin to think your keyboard must be a PC piece of junk and the b and l keys are sticking cause i see "Blockbuster" here

Apple: Economy Is Depressed

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:09:13 -0400

judging by the lines at the stores yes the depression will slow the growth rate from 800 percent to somewhere around 799. if we were in a "depression" and i was as broke as Russell Crowe in Cinderella man i could only afford one present for my kid this christmas guess where i would spend my wad. No worries about the apples mate!

AT&T Comments on Apple's 3G iPhone

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:22:54 -0400

hell at&t towed my car out of the lot while i used a bathroom next door (the at&t store was not open yet) the tow cost me 300 dollars and when i complained to corporate they said because i did not shop there THAT DAY i was not a customer! any corporation who could show up in small claims court with an argument like that (i won) cant reason worth a darn

Time to Stand Up for Steve Jobs

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 09:40:03 -0400

first of all a little credit goes to Xerox and the PARC team and the "Woz" who took Xerox's idea of the graphic user interface and the mouse and went with it (had it not been for them you would be looking at orange text with a blinking bar beneath one of the letters)Steve Jobs was the visionary that knew where these devices could go but it was the unsung apple engineers that smoothed out the nits and cricks and eventually made the beauty of OSX a reality .Microsoft's problem has always been they have no idea what we are likely to want to actually do with our computers. Like a pack of gum you don't need an instruction past "pull tab" to figure how it should work you pull the tab the cap pops off the gum is wrapped the paper falls away the powdered slice of gum is there you chew. Millions of people go through the same dance to get the peppermint reward with out instruction or manual that is the apple design esthetic in a green wrapper they care about what you want to do and set it up to do what you most likely want to do. steve guides that process by sending his people back again and again to refine the interface and constantly reevaluates what they have done not dump more features a'la Vista. if Steve were to leave tomorrow unless apple put a total dummy in there the design guidelines(go look at them in the tech library developer.apple.com/do...) already in place would continue to bring apple forward into the next great opportunity

Options Trader: Tuesday Outlook

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 13:16:00 -0400

not every one made irresponsible decisions who have lost their homes
I went blind in one eye and could no longer work as a jeweler my wife freaked out at our new situation and bailed on the family taking an 80 thousand dollar home equity line with her in cash i spent every dime i had trying to stay in the home so my son could finish school i was making it barely till my oil bills toped 1000 dollars for a tank fill up . i was forced to sell a step ahead of foreclosure i made those payments for 15 years there are many people who are wage earners who have been nailed into this position by the ass in the white house no one dare ask for a raise in this economy we could save a lot of gas by not driving tanks around in a desert. a helping hand from the government might have saved what's left of my family what was done is criminal and i hope bush Cheny and Powell rot in hell i take real offense at the knee jerk "screw em" attitude Im seeing here these homes were hope for a lot of people and they took a stab at belonging somewhere and had that taken away by a bunch of looters. Kudos to Phillip for telling it like it might be

Earnings Preview: Apple

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 16:51:48 -0400

if investors are supposed to be "forward looking" they must have their windows painted black the Lines are still long after a week and the biggest problem they have is making enough product.beating them down because of dumb old google or any other pc company is stupid they are in a class by themselves and should be judged that way . the noise about "smaller Margins" should be tempered by "HUGE VOLUME"

Apple's 3G iPhone: First Reviews Are So-So

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 08:43:12 -0400

first of all i like most others are almost always near a wi fi point of some kind and I assume the phone will use the wi fi when it can (as does the present one) there is a way to avoid massive web surfing bills from At&t (whom we hate!) and like all apple products they will get better in time because apple is always refining their ideas not just piling on "features" A'la Vista ( defined as a "far off never to be reached horizon") there is a form of hedonism that sees the lack of pleasure as pain so you end up always disappointed by reality. the rest of us are delighted that the i- phone experience just got faster and cheaper (plus I'm sure mr Pouge ran his phone constantly the rest of us actually do some work during the day and leave the thing in our pocket)

Apple's Leap from Mediocre to Marvelous

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 15:37:48 -0400

oh yeah, apple as macmatthews said is not Selling you a bag of shells and promises we leave that up to Vista. my original mac from 1992 still runs.(I own 6 )

Apple's Leap from Mediocre to Marvelous

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 15:34:07 -0400

Marketing and branding is all about creating tribes. when you buy a brand you join the tribe, you feel the cool when you see a fellow BMW driver or a nike wearer, Watches got ridiculously big so you could be sure your Michelle or Charioll would be noticed on your wrist. making the pod phones white was the marketing genus move instead of blending it into your hair it broadcast your tribal affiliation. Every time a pod owner sees white earphones he knows that person is having the same sort of great user experience and is warmed by the wisdom of their purchase. the next important thing in marketing Pride in ownership now get out of that pc tribe your obviously not proud to belong and come and play with the cool Kids. spring for 50 dollars and buy yourself a shuffle you will feel better for it.

'Best of Breed' Business Model a Chink in Apple’s Armor?

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 11:52:58 -0400

these commenters have it in a nutshell, you can put lipstick and nikes on that pig and it still is not going to fly because you will waste your precious time fighting viruses and looking foe dll's and installing drivers and dismissing messages like this "windows has determined that deleting this file may or may not affect programs that are installed on your drive or may be installed on your computer are you sure you want to delete this file" and of course the only button is "yes"

a dual boot would be the least of your problems

this kind of reminds me of a dog who gets fed half the time his master calls and beaten the other half. the dog comes when he calls but ears back cringing on his belly every windows user thinks the problem is he is too stupid to run the system right not that the system just does not run right

The Hidden Financial Impact of Apple's iPhone

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 08:54:50 -0400

another thing to think about is the income that having such a huge pile of cash brings in. Apple really does not need to buy any other companies. with outsourcing of its hardware manufacturing, aside from a fancy new headquarters i don't see that cash pile getting smaller any time soon. As my accountant used to say "The only thing better than sex is compound interest!"

Options Trader: Monday Outlook

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 10:59:59 -0400

says Philip Elmer-Dewitt at Fortune. Philip says that Jobs likely had the "Whipple" procedure, which often causes significant and permanent weight loss:

Along with the digestive problems, patients often lose 5% to 10% of their body weight after the procedure. Weight stabilizes within the first year or two for the vast majority of patients, says Dr. Dilip Parekh, chief of tumor and endocrine surgery at the University of Southern California, who has performed more than 100 Whipple procedures.

Apple's Balancing Act: 3G iPhone vs. Jobs' Health - Barron's

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 09:50:56 -0400