Sr. Pessimist

Micro-Hoo!™: Desktop vs. Internet

I predict an increase in sales of small arms, nationwide. I would say that small arms manufacturers provide a justifiably stable investment with a steady, profitable return in light of the said merger considerations. What are consumers going to buy with the money anyway? Food? Nah. What it takes to get by takes on a whole new meaning when M$ acquires Yahoo.

Oh wait, I forgot. Microsoft is littered with GNU GPL source code, while Yahoo could never get their damn Panama operation going (meaning they can't target ads right). So they are nothing but two oversize and yet tame beasts of capital intrepidity. Don't be afraid of the big guys. There are but 7 programmers in this entire country, and apparently neither Microsoft nor Yahoo has ever employed a single one of them. Just because it's a big dinosaur doesn't mean it's a T-Rex, double the trouble. Here it's just two big fat useless brontosaurs mating with each other behind the biggest prehistoric bush they could possibly find after an 18 month long courtship. Their worst weapon is their tails, and they've been persisting by tail jobs for just too long now for there to be any remaining ominous threat, a-over there.

Google’s Eric Schmidt Won’t Talk About The iPhone At Apple Board Meetings

What if he was doing something under an e-shroud of secrecy?

Obama is Apple, Hillary is Dell

I'm Konrad Zeus. I am Collosus.

Market Up on Bad News About the Economy

Lets me know what the capitalists believe about the last strength of the economy.

iPhone Price Drop Is A Bad Sign

I actually agreed with the article as I read it. I went through and read the comments, as well. The point about the slowing American consumer has already been made in several articles I've read over the weeks. The consumers have spent a lot of home equity to buy their stuff. They don't own houses. They live in houses the banks mostly own. My problem with the PS3 was it was too expensive. $600 for a video game system. They dropped it by $150 and still can't get sales. It's too close to the cost of monthly rent or mortgage. Same with iPhone. 4GB is skimpy, so 8 is necessary. And $600 is too expensive for a phone with a good interface. I got a LG VX9400 for $150, and free for a one year renewal. It has 320x240 and can play videos. It may not have a touch screen but it has a sideways-sliding widescreen. I'm not crazy about it but all it cost me was a one year renewal, and it is ready for high speed cell phone transmission, too.

The iPhone can only do something like 250kbps in practice. Decent 320x240 video with h264 and aac exceeds that, even at a mere 15 fps. Like with other cell phones and iPods, videos have to be pre-downloaded and transfered on to the internal storage for watching later on. So why pay $600? The audience is crazy about it, but how hard is it to get something somewhat competitive? 1/4 of the cost?

Rent is a lot to pay for a phone, and the consumer is losing buying power.

Bank of America Starts Apple Coverage With Buy Rating

What irks me is the royalties for use of 2.5G and 3G. Patents (US-style) really destroy the ability of an economy to pursue tech.

Cowen Advises: Place Your Mobile Internet Bets On Google, Not Apple

All this, founded with the presumption that money should have anything to do with it. Currency is stupid. It's simply a way of casting a society into two groups of people- those who are born into printing out the currency and make the rules, and those who are born into answering to the rules and the currency. So we develop all this science in economics, but it's all based on numbers, money, percentages. It's ill-founded. Shortly, although currency will not immediately become obsolete, the encryption of that currency will be. My belief is that authenticity is possible, but encryption is not. No secrets. You are who you are. So the above remarks are all an attempt at making a gauge out of the economy, but the truth is that so much will change so shortly, with the government not being so conveniently equipped to cover up its favoritism and corruption, that value will be more in the ability of the laborer than what the next thing from one of the big guys is going to be.

Years ago, when I came up with good ideas, I used to wonder why my older ideas weren't working in business. I tried to analyze my ideas and compare them to financially successful ones. It was very hard to figure out because things that were absolutely worthless were considered financial successes, compared to my well-engineered ideas. As soon as I started to negatively critique others besides myself, I learned to have a certain level of disrespect for their characteristics. Then it became possible to me that American business was more corrupt and stupid than I ever would have guessed, just being a consumer. So then I started making generalizations, with the reservation that there are exceptions to a rule. One rule I found myself tending to is that there must be an element of corruption, collusion, and unfairness to every successful business idea. Idiots with nothing to speak of were somehow making it big, so there had to have been an explanation, such as "daddy got it for them" or "they had sex with the right person." As soon as that clicked, I decided that I had to trust my gut, because it was my gut suspicion that was more correct than my own eyes. One way or another, nobody ever gets a chance unless they decide for themselves that the rules don't apply, and they are just going to make up their own rules.

So, in the above, I'd say that Steve Jobs had sex with Bill Gates, or the financial equivalent thereof, and was given his chance to develop neat toys for people. Jobs is probably the best CEO around. He has an intimate knowledge of the mindset of the customer base. He is a marketing wiz, so let's all hail Steve Jobs. Now when he was up there with Bill Gates in his little talks where he charged people to come and see them sit on the stage and jabber, and they said "We've been married now for 10 years and nobody even knew about it," do you think they were kidding? $150 million stock purchase back there? Who bought who again?

Lots of people can do this stuff. The creeps that print out currency just don't let them.

Why I'm Not Dismissing AppleTV

I think the h.264 standard is the best available, and Apple has that going on in their Quicktime, but I don't know if Internet transmission rates are capable of sending video even at that level. The lines are going to be really congested and the huge pictures like this will be compromised. HD is going to be a hard trick to pull. The codecs are necessary to make it borderline, but there still will be compromises. People may wait for 10 minutes for a movie to buffer sufficiently over broadband to their hard drive so they can enjoy a more-or-less problem-free VOD digital movie, as it is. Using MPEG-2/AC3, HD movies take around 20 GB, as we see with HD-DVD's and Blu-Ray's initial capacities. 20 GB can take a long time to download. h.264 reduces it to easily half that, but we're still talking about bandwidth problems. It's not there yet for HD. The market conditions don't make it a financially viable endeavor for immediate profitability. That's not to say that video over the internet won't be on your home big screen. Just not with the exact current conditions. Full throughput for HD with surround is around 13 megabits per second, I think. Something impossible like that, using current standards. Just something impossible to forget about. It's safe to say it won't happen that way.

So Steve Jobs made no mistake. He hit the market quite right, in my opinion. There will be a new version of Apple TV anyway.

How Steve Jobs Lost Over $4 Billion

There's really no reason for a billionaire to have his sleeves rolled up unless he doesn't do it for the money.

How Steve Jobs Lost Over $4 Billion

Jobs is different from other CEOs. He is Apple. Apple is nothing without him innovating the valuables for them to churn out. He can just dump a billion here or there and it doesn't matter to him. He doesn't watch money in the same way that others do. He can always make more. He already knows how. He probably doesn't care about a billion here or four billion there. That's why he keeps cranking away at his profession. It's really not about the money. If it was, he would have retired at his first hundred million and vanished.

Apple Corners 5% of U.S. PC Market

Computing is up for a pretty big metamorphosis. Processors and memory are smaller and more powerful. Software is free where it used to exceed the price of all else on the computer. Cell phones will be more powerful next year than desktops were this year. More people will be on the Internet with wireless CLDC 1.1 devices than will be on with desktops sitting on desk tops. Storage is changing from a single discrete disk to a distributed array for cost-cutting. The best applications are available on the Internet, not the box at your retail store. Bandwidth can be handled by the lines but not the backbone, and we're approaching the requirement for a new structure altogether for the global network. Money is not made from the consumer, but from the corporation. This here about Dell is probably as short-lived as anything in tech. Apple is showing the success of things closer to a sexy little 3G cell phone.

Goldman: Apple's Leopard Delay the Right Move

Better to delay than to disappoint.

Is Apple Beginning Its Long Delayed Descent?

Every time stock profits blast through the roof on a corp it turns out to be fraud. Two-trick ponies have something in similar. I disbelieve in the Google search-advertising service from the customer's benefit. I disbelieve in Microsoft's server-desktop for the same reason. I disbelieve in player-music because Hollywood is dead, lots of talent can make good songs, and mp3 files cost zip to make if you just know the free open-source tool to make them. You have your choice among many, in fact. So what's so hard about walking down Venice Beach, buying a CD and taking a name and phone number from everybody offering CDs, direct them to your website where they can make money directly off of mp3 sales, and just charge a small little service fee for every download? In fact, things are more flexible than that. Apple-Hollywood is competing with script kiddies in the world of bits and bytes. Watch them just get eaten alive. For every so-called two-trick pony on the Internet, there's a decent quick way to make an open-source equivalent for free. Slow corps have just no chance in the virtual world. It's this easy: mobile phones-amateur talent. Mobile phones just about all do mp3 files. Amateur talent makes songs sheerly from their heart. For every whore who made it to Hollywood, there are 1 million competitively-merited non-prostitutes that make great songs without selling their bodies for profit, a tradition that seems to have been around since the early 1920's in Hollywood (just look at how some of those drugged-dead actresses got their film roles with certain producers).