andrew j

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    • Fri Sep 26th 09:06 AM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      WaMu Buyout: JPM's Analysis Helps Treasury Projections
      for a souvenir. That's all they'd be good for...
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    • Tue Sep 2nd 15:39 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      On Being Rich
      Thank you, Mr. Salmon. Sometimes people need to be beat upside the head with perspective, and i hope this does it.

      OracleofOmaha, i have no sympathy for you. You have money -- plenty of it -- you're just spending it wrong. "extremely high housing costs" -- maybe you should ask yourself what is necessary, not what is frivolous. Your "few, if any, tangible economic benefits from the federal government" are probably discounting the single largest benefit you got: The good fortune of being born in the U.S.A. Your "tangible economic benefits" are so invisible you can't see them -- kind of like a fish not knowing what "water" is. I assure you, a child born in any nation in Africa would be happy to pay your taxes for a similar shot. Suck it up.

      "The essence of civilization consists not of the multiplication of wants, but in their deliberate and voluntary renunciation." -- Gandhi.

      Get civilized!
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    • Thu Aug 28th 14:41 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      What Election 2008 Will Do For Our Economy, and Your Tax Bill
      "But the money to pay for Obama’s ambitious agenda has to come from somewhere - $75 million in tax cuts"

      Hey dude, i don't know if you noticed this, but McCain's plan is for a decrease in payments from EVERY SINGLE income bracket. That's the money that's gotta come from "somewhere." I also notice you don't include the total cost of McCain's tax cuts. Hmm.

      That "status quo" approach to governance you mention -- is that the status quo of George W. Bush, the one that has ballooned government spending to the largest size EVER, and the federal deficit to $800Bn? Just curious. Republicans are NOT fiscally responsible, and haven't been in years.

      Might want to take those blinders off.
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    • Fri Aug 15th 14:07 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      The End Run Around the Operating System Is Under Way
      "i don't think that means what you think it means."

      If by "operating system," you mean Linux, Windows, or whatever you're calling the Mac OS built on Unix, then great. But if you actually mean is "the huge suite of usability tools and applications that get packaged with an OS.", then say that, instead.

      Let's check wikipedia: "An operating system ... is the software component of a computer system that is responsible for the management and coordination of activities and the sharing of the resources of the computer." The nice diagram showing an interaction chain goes from User <=> Application <=> OS <=> Hardware. As long as your applications need to use hardware, there will be OS's. Whether or not it will need to come with a media player, a movie maker, or even a solitaire program, is a different question entirely.

      Also, even if users get rid of their client side apps and move to server side things like GMail -- well, what the hell is going to manage the resources on the servers?

      But as long as there are resources to manage, there is an OS layer.
      Dell's laptop that lets you check your e-mail, calendar, etc, "without booting the OS!" actually means it is booting a very thin, but equally important operating system on top, one that probably sets up and manages a network connection, graphics resources, etc. (in fact, it's a very thin, embedded flavor of linux: blog.internetnews.com/... )

      "toss in virtualization" -- what is the virtualization running on top of, i'd like to know? pixie dust?

      So when you talk about the "future of the OS" -- you actually mean the future of the big, bundled bloatware that comes with them, right? Cuz that's a pretty different question.
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    • Tue Aug 12th 10:48 AM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Is Amazon’s Kindle Success Sustainable?
      as a Kindle owner, naturally i'm biased, but let me share some impressions:

      1) most people who ask me about it already know what it is, "is that a kindle?" So device recognition is fairly good.

      2) this is usually followed by some variant of "i need to see it in person before i'll know." This is due to a general lack of understanding of the display technology. When they realize its paper, not a screen, they invariably make up their mind -- this is doubled when people accost me outside and see it in the sunlight. While people could implicitly trust the iPod to make faithful reproductions of sound, people are (rightly) skeptical of the ability to reproduce text on paper -- which is the whole of the Kindle's sensory experience.

      Your two 'stumbling blocks' -- visibility and mobility -- don't really exist. Just because "you've never seen one" doesn't actually mean they aren't there. White earbuds (a stroke of genius, btw) were easy to spot. A kindle in its case is not.

      Likewise, my Kindle does fit in larger pockets without much difficulty, but mobility or not, it has quickly become such an indispensable item that it is always with me. Also, the leaked reports of the second generation Kindles suggest a slightly smaller version and a larger version are both in the works.

      Reports of people not reading anymore are greatly exaggerated.
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    • Tue Jul 29th 13:54 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Could Google Buy The New York Times?
      Wow, i love the assumption that the NYT is liberal, and the ensuing dripping contempt. Damn, got some on my shoe...

      The only thing more intellectually bankrupt would be the idea that it is somehow offset by Fox news, that two prejudiced news sources somehow balance each other and provide Truth.
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    • Fri Jul 18th 10:45 AM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Amazon: New Kindle To Tap $5.5 Billion Textbook Market?
      Wow, "the only reason to publish a large-screen version" ?

      PDF's are a fixed-layout format: the content is not easily separated from the presentation, (as opposed to html, for example). Having an 8.5"x11" version lets them support PDF's with much more fidelity. That's the big win. Electronic textbooks, probably distributed in PDFs, are definitely more possible, but bottom line is that this would make the device practically orders of magnitude more useful than it is.

      (and i'm a very happy kindle owner already! :)
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    • Tue Jul 15th 10:30 AM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      What We Can Do To Reverse the Oil Crisis
      It's amazing how much criticism he's getting for conclusions that are basically based on the numbers. I haven't heard one trash-talker actually refute any of his points -- the additional cost of oil IS diverting an incredible amount of american wealth to smoke. the nymex forward contracts ARE a giant joke.

      i've been reading phil for almost two years now: he hasn't gotten political except recently, when people have been losing their frickin minds.

      there may be more vituperative, pissant commenters here on SA than on the political blogs i read. I bet they all just lost money...
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