Well, looks like the British bank bailout didn't work the way they expected, so they are going to try again.
Wonder what this means as far as the bailout in the US is concerned? Might we have a second bailout coming this year if we feel the first didn't give the economy enough of a boost?
Ok, I honestly was not very enthusiastic for the whole government bailout program for a couple of reasons.
1. It would reward bad business practices by saving groups who made bad financial decisions.
2. I could see this leading to the 'bailing out' of other companies. If you did it for them, why won't you do it for us?
3. Would you really trust how the money was going to be used? I mean look at what they did with their own money, and you expect them to do better with my (the taxpayers) money?
4. It will end up costing a LOT more than the advertised 700 billion dollars.
Now on the other hand I heard how this would help us get out of an economic slump, re-invigorate the financial industry, and overall was just a good thing to do.
I have yet to see or hear about any major impact in the mortgage industry (the one I work in) although I'm not sure how long it would take to show up. I would've expected claims on default mortgages to drop, not increase dramatically after the bailout was doled out.
I have heard about several banks that have gotten bailout money, buying other banks. And these aren't small banks from what I've heard, they are banks that also received bailout money so basically the purchasing bank is double dipping.
I'm going to dig around and see if I can find any other hard information about the bailout money and where it's going and post what I find.
All I have to say is HOLY COW, I so want one of these!!!
This is both good and bad depending on what happens.
I like the concept of being able to take your dog exercising while you ride a bike, but I can also see chances for it to be done improperly. Especially when you consider how quite a few pet owners don't think about the safety of their dogs.
Maybe I'm wrong though, if they have this many customers and we haven't heard about problems, does that mean the people who are willing to buy this are responsible?
A cowboy named Bud was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture in Montana when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him.
The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, RayBan sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the cowboy, 'If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?'
Bud looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully-grazing herd and calmly answers, 'Sure, Why not?'
The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his Singular RAZR V3 cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.
The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany
Within seconds, he receives an e-mail on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC-connected Excel spreadsheet with email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response.
Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP Laser Jet printer and turns to the cowboy and says, 'You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves.'
'That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves,' says Bud.
He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.
Then Bud says to the young man, 'Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?'
The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, 'Okay, why not?'
'You're a Congressman for the U.S. Government', says Bud.
'Wow! That's correct,' says the yuppie, 'but how did you guess that?'
'No guessing required,' answered the cowboy. 'You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. You tried to show me how much smarter than me you are, and you don't know a thing about cows...this is a herd of sheep.
Now give me back my dog.
I had always thought that doing a loop in a helicopter was not possible due to the strain on the blades and the pitch needed for flipping over. I just wonder what kind of modifications this helicopter has had to be able to do the loops.
VERY cool video!!!!
Well, I finally got one of the new MacBooks, and I have to say after almost a week of using it I'm really enjoying it.
I was concerned at first about my plans of using this as my only computer. I had been oscilating between the MacBook and MacBook Pro and ended up selecting the $1599 Macbook for a few reasons.
1. The pro does have 2 video cards, but the management of them is clunky having to logout and back in to activate/deactivate them. The biggest thing is they do not support SLI which is a HUGE dissappointment and disadvantage to me.
2. The benchmarks for the MacBook compared to my current iMac were approximately 10-20% faster.
3. I already had a laptop with a glossy screen, so that didn't bother me. In fact I've come to prefer the glossy screen as it appears to be brighter and crisper. My work laptop also has a glossy screen.
I've been extremely pleased with it so far. I moved WoW over from my iMac and then brought them both up with the same character in the same area of the world. The iMac was running at 30 fps, while my MacBook was cranking out 60 fps!!!
I then set the graphics settings on 'high' on both, and the iMac dropped to 15-17 fps, while the MacBook was at 30-35 fps. I tried going to some major towns and still got about the same performance, so I'm really happy.
I've left it on high on my MacBook.
The one thing that's kind of frustrating is the new mini-display port, I'm going to the Apple store tonight to get the adapters, and my new 22" display.
The keyboard is definitely more 'solid' than the old one, not that I had any problems with the old one, but it's definitely got a 'cleaner' feel to it.
I'll update as I finish up migrating everything over to my new laptop, the biggest thing I need to figure out now is my storage strategy.
Here's the second article comparing these two virtualization products. It's pretty much what I expected, except for a performance difference. I honestly was expecting the open source one to perform better, especially considering it didn't have the GUI front end like VMWare fusion does.
I agree totally with his recommendation, that if Virtual Box suits your needs, use it, if you want a nice front end and a little easier tool to use on a desktop Fusion is worth it's price.
There was a new update released for the iPhone last week, but there really wasn't a huge attraction to install it for me. Just some minor upgrades and tweaks, although one of the changes I REALLY like a lot.
In the past I would sync my podcasts up with my iPhone, and when I would go to play them they would always show the most recent first. So if I wanted to listen to the podcasts in order of oldest to newest to keep the thread of the podcast I would have to manually start and stop it and slowly work my way up the list.
Now podcasts are sorted oldest first, so I can just start a series of podcasts, and they will progress one by one without me having to manually manage the playback. Since I listen to them on the way to work, this makes it much easier, in not having to stop at the end of each episode so I can kick of the next one correctly.
What can I say, my expectations are low :)
