Month: December 2005

Apple Could Become More Valuable than Microsoft

Um, right… But thanks anyway, Murdza.

Excerpt from this article:

Cody Willard is the manager of a hedge fund and the author of the Telecom Connection, an investment newsletter. He is also a headliner on TheStreet.com, writes for Razor Magazine, VON Magazine and the Financial Times, is a frequent featured guest on CNBC and has been quoted in many publications, including the New York Post and the Hollywood Reporter.

Willard writes for TheStreet.com, “with Apple having blown by Oracle in market cap already, I wonder how much longer before it catches Cisco. Then Intel. Then Microsoft? Let me go ahead and be the one to throw it out there first: I wouldn’t be shocked to see Apple more valuable than Microsoft sometime in 2007. What a mind-blowing thing to think to ponder.”

“Apple’s market cap has gone from $6 billion to $60 billion in the past two and a half years. Can it keep running? If the company delivers the growth it looks like it will: heck yes it can keep running. I’m sticking with it, although I have trimmed the exposure in the past few weeks, as I’ve noted on the site.”

Some stats according to MacDaily News:

Apple’s market value is currently $59,888,758,930, thanks to recent profit-taking. Dell’s, for one example we’re keeping a very close eye on in relation to Apple for obvious reasons, is currently $78,182,273,298. Microsoft’s current market value stands at $287,850,410,220.

Underdogs can always dream of being the top dog.

Memory Upgrade

Finally got those 2 sticks of 512MB RAM I ordered from Small Dog Electronics in Vermont. I have had my PowerBook for over three years and it’s worked flawlessly (can’t say that about a 3-year-old PC running Windows). But ever since the upgrade to Mac OSX Tiger, it’s been a bit sluggish running a few “big” apps simultaneously.

Having more memory is a beautiful thing.

“I” want a memory upgrade.

Google Earthing

Finally got a hold of a beta version of Google Earth for Mac and found where I currently live… It doesn’t seem like much because the stupid tree (big one too) cast a shadow over the one-story house…

Google Earth image of my home

WICKED!

And this is my grandma’s home in Taipei up on the Mt. Yang-ming…
Google Earth image of my grandma's home

This was our last [tiny, dinky] apartment in NYC (where Jason and Alicia were among the few who have visited and actually spent the night at!)
Google Earth image of my grandma's home

One important lesson I learned out of using Google Earth was, it’s fricking tough to find places through the bird’s eye view. It was relatively easy to find places in the U.S. since everything is nicely correlated to addresses. But looking for my grandma’s house in Taiwan was very hard, even though I knew how to get there from various points ON THE GROUND. Literally flying around trying to locate the exact location from a different perspective totally screwed up my orientation. I ended up having to use longitude and latitude coordinates I found from another site to locate her relatively big house.

I have a new found respect for birds, pilots and Superman.

Death Penalty and Social Justice

I ranted on Jason’s blog about Tookie’s execution. I thought I might as well get into it while it’s still fresh on my mind…

Personally I think death penalty is an inefficient system of getting rid of people that the society is tired of dealing with. First of all, it takes years of waiting in line just to be executed because the death row is so backed up that a criminal would basically need take a number and wait. But partially it’s also because most people file for appeals to either get their sentences reduced, thrown out of court or just to buy more time. It’s not unusual to sit on the death row for 20 or even 30 years before someone on the death row is executed. And this is what I have trouble with: With all the time and resources spent on locking those prisoners up in maximum security prisons, why not spend that exact same amount to help them become better people? It’s alarming to see that prison constructions are being more aggressively funded than higher education these days… Not to mention that United States has the highest prison population in the world. Even more interestingly, some people have come up with the brilliant idea to make profit off of the prison system (more prisoners a private prison can lock up, more money the company gets from the government). What the hell? It’s turned into an industry of its own!!

A better solution to reduce crime and prison population is education. Invest on educating in early childhood education (many educators believe this is when personalities are developed); invest on educating the parents to take better care of the kids so that they don’t mistreat the kids and turn them into social f*uck ups; invest in facilitating individuals who are casted as “social misfits” and help them fit in!!

Again, NPR aired a fascinating insight on the topic with Sister Helen Prejean (author of “Dead Man Walking ) and Lawrence C. Marshall, an activist against the death penalty.

United State is a very Christian country. I mean, virtually all of its presidents are Christians of some kind. It’s so Christian that when President Kennedy, a Catholic (the Original Christians, I call them) was elected president, it was a big deal (WTF?!). The country is so Christian that the word God appears everywhere (or so it seems)… It’s in the Pledge of Allegiance (ver. 1.1, where the words “under GOD” were added in 1954), in currency (In God We Trust. God forbid that money is fake.), when one swears into court (put your hand on the Bible… blah blah… so will help you God. What if a Muslim wants to be sworn in on a Koran? Would they let him do it?), and when George W. Bush was elected twice into the White House under the pretense that he’s a reformed born-again Christian (what bull… more on him later).

For a Jesus and God loving nation, it sure as hell acts like one (the “hell” part). Would Jesus himself pull the electric switch?

The Bush family… ah~ what a lovely household:

Jeb and George W. Bush, among many others, have also expedited the appeals process, to execute as many prisoners in as short a period of time as possible, which increases the likelihood of error. As Governor of Texas, George W. Bush was the most active executioner in the nation, killing on average one prisoner every other week (The Nation, January 8-15, 2001).

Source: The Nation

I highly recommend listening to this broadcast hosted by KQED.

Calm Thyself to Sleep, Baby

We just witnessed an amazing achievement with Bryan today — he put himself to nap all on his own! Typically, Bryan’s sleeping routine requires someone to hold and cradle him with soothing classical music in the background (Jason, Alicia and Michelle can testify what they witnessed). And that’s been the regiment for the past two months or so. But today at around 2PM, the usual time for his afternoon nap, Grace started iTunes with some classical music as she prepared for a late lunch for both of us. Then Bryan started by playing with his hands and cooed. Slowly, the cooing disappeared, and he fell asleep!!

This is good stuff. Soon he’ll feed himself too! 🙂

Getting Ready for Tax Season

As the year draws to a close, I am also getting ready to get all my receipts in order for the year-end write offs. I spent the weekend entering everything my one-man company has for the past year into QuickBooks Pro 2006. I was relieved to have found a Mac version. Now I feel much better about myself having completed the company finances. Despite the fact that I started the weekend not knowing anything about QuickBooks and virtually nothing about accounting (let alone corporate accounting), I’d say I did okay with the help of QuickBooks Community. An accounting class is definitely in order though… I don’t want to waste time trying to figure out how to book a stupid PayPal sales refund using appropriate accounting practices AND learning QuickBooks at the same time.

Up next, personal finances with Quicken for Mac.

I do have to rant about QuickBooks for a brief moment though… The shipped-as-is version sucked big time. It’d crash for no reason in about every 10th thing I did… I’d be happily reconciling credit card charges, and POOF!!, the damn thing crashes… And I’d have to set up the whole environment again (that is if previously entered data was even saved). Thank god Intuit has an update file I can download to fix most of the crashes. But that’s modern commercial software sales for you… Get it out of the market with bugs first to get market share — fix the bugs with patches and updates later. Microsoft, more or less, perfected that method with Windows and its Office suites. Apple has been accused of similar charges when it first released Mac OSX… It had no DVD driver!!

Bloggers the Tech World’s New Elite?

A “Slashdotter” commented:

“Wall Street Journal tech columnist Lee Gomes says that the top tech blogs ‘aren’t part of some proletarian information revolution, but instead have become the tech world’s new elite (WiredAtom Editor’s note: Here’s a PDF version in case WSJ decides to make the article unavailable). Reporters for the big mainstream newspapers and magazines, long accustomed to fawning treatment at corporate events, now show up and find that the best seats often go to the A-list bloggers. And living at the front of the velvet rope line means the big bloggers are frequently pitched and wooed. In fact, with the influence peddling universe in this state of flux, it’s not uncommon for mainstream reporters, including the occasional technology columnist, to lobby bloggers to include links to their print articles.'”

Suckas!

via [Slashdot]