Don’t cry for Colbert. Bush is gone, but the GOP POL (Party of Limbaugh) is still hysterically funny. They’re the highlight of Guantanamo Baywatch - The Final Season, gnashing teeth and rending garments at the thought of Killer Khalid busting out of an American Supermax.
To quote Colbert … “If they had mutant powers, we’d know it by now”.
Ahh, remember the days that Intel and Microsoft were friends? The Wintel days?
Those days are over.
NetBooks: Intel Shows Off Moblin, Their Own Netbook-Optimized Linux OS
... We're hearing more and more about specific netbook-optimized operating systems, and Intel is joining in the game with an alpha release of Moblin, their netbook Linux OS optimized for Atom.
Moblin is based largely on Fedora, and it's still a work in progress, but its main goal is to optimize performance for Atom and Core 2 processors running on smaller machines. The alpha Intel just released alread has an innovative network connection manager and fast optimized boot times, and it's confirmed to work well with Dell's Mini 9, the Acer Aspire One, and the Eee PC 901 (although right now wi-fi on the Eee is iffy).
... Right now Moblin is using the Xfce desktop, which is pretty bread and butter. Later in the development they'll switch to a more gussied up UI based on Clutter, which Intel owns...
In related news Dell was briefly selling a refurbished Netbook Inspiron Mini today for $177, Samsung has clobbered the price of RAM modules, and India is promising a $20 Netbook, and Gizmodo has a Netbook thread with feed that gives you all this stuff in one place.
I guess I was being about right when I predicted Netbook-induced mayhem for 2009. Maybe Mattel needs to accelerate production of the Barbie B-Smart Netbook in time for Christmas 2010.
Update: Oh, and this one too. Intel Android netbooks.
Cameras Too Expensive For Christmas This Year: Canon's Profits Down 91% (CAJ)I'll bet Nikon's profits didn't fall by 81%.
Japanese high-tech giant Canon Inc. warned Wednesday the economic crisis would drive down profits by two-thirds in 2009...... Canon logged a net profit of 11.62 billion yen (130 million dollars) in the fourth quarter of 2008, well short of the previous year's 127.85 billion. Operating profit fell 81 percent to 35.83 billion yen...
... "The rapid deterioration in the economic environment since the autumn has triggered a global slump in individual consumption. This has caused damage to the digital camera market beyond our expectation," [Canon managing director Masahiro Osawa] told reporters...
I thought it was a silly gift even by toy standards, but Emily knew better. It's on the wane, but two months isn't bad for something that's almost pure junk.
Almost junk, because there's a surprising amount of educational software stuck into the tiny black and white display of the "laptop", and the touch pad and mouse really do, sort of, work.
It cost $70, batteries not included.
So what's next for Mattel? Well, it's not hard to imagine some interesting possibilities. By 2011 the cost of manufacturing a battery-free Chromestellation Netbook should fall beneath $100.
Mattel could sell the Barbie B-Smart Netbook for $125 in 2011. There'd be no margin on the sale, but there would be a big margin from bonded online community services, marketing to susceptible minds, and DRMd Chromestellation products.
Big time disruption is on the way.
Microsoft is in big trouble -- unless they decide to go for the jugular.
Hang on.
Vanguard − Vanguard's Treasury money market funds are closed to new accounts as yields tumbleand by email the legal notice (emphases mine)Vanguard has closed Vanguard Admiral Treasury Money Market Fund and Vanguard Treasury Money Market Fund to new accounts effective 4 p.m., Eastern time, on Monday, January 26, 2009. The decision was made to protect the interests of current fund shareholders in an environment in which yields on short-term Treasury securities have reached historic lows.
Current shareholders of the two funds who invest directly through Vanguard may continue to invest up to an additional $50,000 per day, per fund account. ..
... Although a money market fund seeks to preserve the value of your investment at $1 per share, it is possible to lose money by investing in such a fund.Were you aware that the Guarantee program doesn't apply to investments made after 9/19/08 and that it may expire in a few months? I confess, I wasn't aware.
Notwithstanding the preceding statements, the funds are participating in the U.S. Treasury's Temporary Guarantee Program for Money Market Funds. The Program generally does not guarantee any new investments in the funds made after September 19, 2008, and is scheduled to expire on April 30, 2009..
It's time to bankrupt and break-up the finance companies.
David Krasne - Money for Nothing - NYTimes.com
... Merrill Lynch is not the only irresponsible institution out there. Despite a year of record losses, despite all the taxpayer money being injected into our financial institutions, bonuses for 2008 were, in some cases, down less than 50 percent from those the previous year...
Let's look for the companies that cut out their bonuses. They can be funded to do the taking over.
Merrill Lynch can pound sand.
Update 1/28/09: Occasionally Maureen Dowd is right.
As expected, opposition to aggressive action on the economy is building. One meme is "1982 was worse"; the implication is that since we survived 1982 without aggressive government action that we don't need to do anything differently this time.
This drives Krugman batty, since he repeatedly points out that you can't make interest rates subzero. Still, the 1982ers keep singing the "la-la" song.
Today, writing for Britannica, Jon Talton goes into more detail on how 2008 is not 1982 (emphases mine) ...
Today's Recession Is Different From Those of the 1980s - Jon Talton - Britannica Blog
... Yet having lived through the 1980-82 recession(s) as an adult, it’s also important that we understand how today’s economic disruption is different and dangerous. It’s not all in our heads, as some critics of the media might have it..
1. China was barely a blip on the world economy in 1982. .. China and America are locked in an unsustainable and reckless “debt-for-stuff” relationship. Were it to deflate suddenly, it could make the popping of the housing bubble look small by comparison. In addition, China has become the world’s factory .. Now unrest is growing and could prove destabilizing.
2. Peak oil. The United States was only a few years past its peak in oil production in 1982, and world production remained ahead of demand... World peak is happening or near and the nations of this petroleum-addicted world are far from making the necessary adjustments to make the transition to a future of much more expensive energy. This is another recipe not only for economic disruption but also for geopolitical conflict.
3. Global warming. In 1982, it was a rarefied theory. Now it’s a clear and present danger... It will impose huge economic and social costs in the decades ahead. Also, more than 2 billion people have been added to the world population since 1982, severely stressing the planet’s carrying capacity.
4. The housing bubble. The housing crash of 1982 was part of a broad, cyclical downturn, made worse by the 1979 oil shock and the Federal Reserve’s war on inflation. Today’s housing crash is the result of a speculative bubble the size of which has few precedents. It will take years for this sector to come back and, for a variety of factors, the old suburban sprawl model is dying or dead. So it’s pointless to hope for a return to the 2005 go-go era. The housing crash this time has made Americans poorer, decapitated several major job sectors and helped bring on…
5. The banking crisis. Nearly every recession has an accompanying banking crisis. It could be contained in 1982 for several reasons, especially better regulation and smaller banks. ..Today’s banking system is a highly concentrated creature whose innards have metabolized far beyond traditional banking...
7. Human capital. Americans have seen their earnings stagnate for years — their only consolation the housing bubble which has now exploded. Their 401(k) nest eggs have lost as much as half their pre-crash value. Income inequality is at a high not seen since the eve of the Depression, stifling, among other things, economic mobility. Perhaps a million or more illegal immigrants are consigned to the shadow economy, kept out of mainstream advancement and creating a costly underclass. In 1982, the middle class was still strong, with relatively secure jobs, benefits and pensions. The health insurance system still worked. It was a very different country, whatever the temporary pain. In addition, today the skill gap has grown substantially. A tech-savvy “creative class,” as Richard Florida calls it, will create value in the future. Yet millions are left out, without the ladder up once provided by skilled, union, blue-collar jobs...
He missed a few key items and his monetary policy explanation skirted the fundamental zero-problem, but it's a good list.
The 80s were bad, but we know how to fix that class of problem. We don't know how to fix this problem.
The problem with a need for aggressive action is that there's a lot of political appeal to sitting calmly while the "chickens" run about squawking. Sometimes that's (only in retrospect) the right thing to do -- I was very concerned about SARS, but it (somewhat mysteriously) went away. My SARS experience made me a bit more cautious about the 2004 Avian Influenza report.
Sometimes it doesn't work. A lot of people were complacent about pre-WW II Japan, or the economic situation of 1929, or strength of the Maginot line, or the expansionary power of early euro-americans, or, for that matter, CO2 levels.
This time we don't need to fear "fear itself". We need to fear complacency.
The NYT has done a great job of tracking the collapse of the personal computer industries business model, a topic I most recently discusses this morning.
Today Stone and Vance are drilling down on the impact of the $200 price point. It's not the best article in the recent series since they mix the true disruption ($100 netbooks) with various business-oriented cloud outsourcing measures. They also fail to mention Chrome, a rather big omission.
Still, worth a scan to see where the memes are going ...
$200 Laptops Break a Business Model - Stone and Vance- NYTimes.com
... Microsoft’s valuable Windows franchise appears vulnerable after two decades of dominance. Revenue for the company’s Windows operating system fell for the first time in history in the last quarter of 2008. The popularity of Linux, a free operating system installed on many netbooks instead of Windows, forced Microsoft to lower the prices on its operating system to compete...
... Many consumers appear ready to abandon the costly desktop computer altogether. Analysts expect PC sales to fall in 2009 for just the second time in the last two decades, with desktops falling even faster than they did in 2007 or 2008.
The only bright spot in the PC industry is netbooks. Analysts at the Gartner research company said shipments rose to 4.4 million devices in the third quarter of 2008, from 500,000 units in the first quarter of last year. Analysts say sales could double this year despite a deep worldwide recession.
Two lumbering giants, Hewlett-Packard and Dell, missed the first wave of these tiny, stripped-down machines, allowing Acer of Taiwan to grab market share. Acer pushed Apple out of the No. 3 spot behind H.P. and Dell as sales soared 55 percent. Dell and H.P. are making the devices now...
... “Companies like Intel, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments that make chips for these devices are hiring Linux talent as quick as they can,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. “They know the future is netbooks and mobile Internet devices...
Gordon's Notes: Squeezed 2009: Netbooks, Android and MicrosoftThe King could go gently into the night, but he's not acting that way.
... what's a Netbook running Chrome and Linux but a calculator in drag? It's fundamentally complete. It's built entirely of plastic, silicon (sand) and a tiny amount of rare metals. All the technology development costs have been fully realized, and there's no vendor with true monopoly control. IP attacks won't work if China and India decide not to cooperate...
... The squeeze has been coming, but in 2009 it's going to be obvious. The price of the personal computer has been doing a Wile E. Coyote -- running on air for 27 years.
This year, gravity is going to kick in. Within another two years we'll see very crappy netbook equivalents being sold for under $75. Maybe they'll be today's netbook, maybe they'll be an iTouch with external display and bluetooth keyboard, maybe they'll be subsidized Chromestellation machines -- but it's going to happen.
This isn't all bad for Intel. The computing must be done. They can sell cheap chips to the netbooks and the phones, and lots of chips to the Cloud...
... but then there's Microsoft and Dell.
For them, this is very bad...
Palm Pre: The Definitive FAQWhoa! Smackdown Pre.
... The entire contents of your phone are searchable. Whether it's contacts, old conversations, appointments, media file, etc., you can easily find what you need on your phone with all the results provided in a single screen...
Original iPod nano owners benefit from scratch settlement - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)It was a pain to enter the serial number at the settlement website, I found it easier to read on the internal 'about' screen than on the back of the phone. Between re-entering the serial number and re-entering the Captcha [2] it took me five tries.
... Thanks to a now-settled class action lawsuit, nano owners who experienced the scratchies can apply for a refund of $15 (if the iPod shipped with a slip case, as later ones did) or $25 (for no-case shipments)."
Palm Pre: Palm Chats with Facebookers, Explains Pre's Lack of MicroSDMy iPhone doesn't have a removable memory card, and I don't miss it. So I'm not griefing Palm for that call. I'm just taking the opportunity to call for balance, especially at Apple.... Crowley is currently holding an open chat on Facebook to answer any questions people might have, although it's heavily selective. Among the questions Crowley won't answer: how intrusive is the multi-platform personal information program Synergy going to be? What about the lack of desktop synchronization, or cloud storage? But he does take a crack at a question on MicroSD expandability.
‘Design' was the highest goal on the Palm Pre project. The phone has to look and function great in the hand and up against the face on a call. The decision to include or not include expandable storage is an easy one when design is the highest priority. The physical size of the device would have been compromised if we added another physical component to Pre. Just a millimeter can seriously impact the curvature of the design in a way that minimizes the design intent...
Obama Urgent on Warming, Public Cool - Dot Earth Blog - NYTimes.comThe only reason global warming outranks head lice is that the public wasn't asked to compare the two.
The latest in an annual series of polls from the Pew Research Center on people’s top priorities for their elected leaders shows that America and President Obama are completely out of sync on human-caused global warming...
According to the survey of 1,503 adults, global warming, on its own, ranks last out of 20 surveyed issues. Here’s the list from top to bottom, with the economy listed as a top priority by 85 percent of those polled and global warming 30 percent: the economy, jobs, terrorism, Social Security, education, energy, Medicare, health care, deficit reduction, health insurance, helping the poor, crime, moral decline, military, tax cuts, environment, immigration, lobbyists, trade policy, global warming...
The White House - President Obama delivers Your Weekly Address... Our economy could fall $1 trillion short of its full capacity, which translates into more than $12,000 in lost income for a family of four...
... I have proposed an American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan to immediately jumpstart job creation as well as long-term economic growth...
.. It’s a plan that will save or create three to four million jobs over the next few years, and one that recognizes both the paradox and the promise of this moment - the fact that there are millions of Americans trying to find work even as, all around the country, there’s so much work to be done. That’s why this is not just a short-term program to boost employment..
... To accelerate the creation of a clean energy economy, we will double our capacity to generate alternative sources of energy like wind, solar, and biofuels over the next three years. We’ll begin to build a new electricity grid ... weatherizing 2.5 million homes.
To lower health care cost, cut medical errors, and improve care, we’ll computerize the nation’s health record in five years, saving billions of dollars in health care costs and countless lives. And we’ll protect health insurance for more than 8 million Americans who are in danger of losing their coverage during this economic downturn.
To ensure our children can compete and succeed in this new economy, we’ll renovate and modernize 10,000 schools ... We’ll invest more in Pell Grants to make college affordable for seven million more students, provide a $2,500 college tax credit to four million students...
Finally, we will rebuild and retrofit America to meet the demands of the 21st century. That means repairing and modernizing thousands of miles of America’s roadways and providing new mass transit options for millions of Americans. It means protecting America by securing 90 major ports and creating a better communications network for local law enforcement and public safety officials in the event of an emergency. And it means expanding broadband access to millions of Americans, so business can compete on a level-playing field, wherever they’re located.
... Instead of politicians doling out money behind a veil of secrecy, decisions about where we invest will be made public, and informed by independent experts whenever possible. We’ll launch an unprecedented effort to root out waste, inefficiency, and unnecessary spending in our government, and every American will be able to see how and where we spend taxpayer dollars by going to a new website called recovery.gov...
I'll subscribe to the iTunes podcast. Recovery.gov isn't up yet, there's just a notice that it will be online after passage of the recovery act.
Since I make my living working on clinical computing software, I will abstain from comment on the economic and clinical merits of investing in the EHR. The rest of it sounds good to me.
The broadband investment is critical. Cheap broadband combined with the the $150 Netbook will be revolutionary.
