Ramanisblog

Tag: Business

  • Technology changes ‘outstrip’ netbooks-BBC

    March of technology is truly astounding and at the same time bewildering.

    Rising prices and better alternatives may mean curtains for netbooks.
    The small portable computers were popular in 2009, but some industry watchers are convinced that their popularity is already waning.
    “The days of the netbook are over,” said Stuart Miles, founder and editor of technology blog Pocket Lint.
    As prices edge upwards, net-using habits change and other gadgets take on their functions, netbooks will become far less popular, he thinks.
    “Technology has advanced so much that it’s outmanoeuvred itself,” he said. “You wouldn’t go for something so basic anymore.”
    His prediction stems from his belief that the netbooks of 2009 are losing touch with what made them so appealing.
    Asus kicked off the netbook trend in 2007 when it launched the Eee PC 700 and 701. The 700 sported a 2GB solid state hard drive, 512MB of Ram, a 900 Hz Intel Celeron processor and a seven-inch screen.
    It was cheap, cheerful and a boon for those wanting to check e-mail and go online while out and about.
    But, said Mr Miles, the success of the small, portable notebook has been its undoing because it has spawned so many imitators.

    E-book readers are starting to do more than just handle text
    Many contemporary netbook models run Windows XP or Windows 7 which has forced the specifications, and price, upwards. Many, he said, now cost at least £350, a figure close to that for a more capable full-size laptop.
    What people are looking for now, he believes, is a machine that can keep up with the demands of contemporary web users – far more than the basic e-mail and web browsing that made the first models so appealing.
    “As soon as you want to do anything else you hit the same problem, it ceases to work,” he said. “It does not have the power.”
    Those changing habits of web users, he maintains, are too complex for those basic machines.
    “It’s the internet’s fault for making us much more multimedia savvy,” he said. Uploading and editing still or moving pictures and handling audio all require far more power than the basic netbook offers, he said.
    This could explain, he said, why many laptop makers are now turning out very thin and light machines that have power but not the shoulder-wrenching bulk.
    All change
    Ian Drew, spokesman for chip designer Arm, also believes netbooks are in for a shake-up. Consumers, he said, were chafing against the restrictions that using a netbook imposed on them.
    “We have failed the consumer because we have imposed constraints on them,” he said.
    Changing web habits and greater use of social media will mean consumers will be looking for gadgets that are tuned to specific purposes.

    The web is the king
    Christopher David, SonyEricsson
    “It will be a lot of different machines for a lot of different people,” he said. “This whole market will be exploding in the next couple of years.”
    Impetus for this change will come, he believes, from the phone world where many, many types of gadgets are already blooming.
    “It’s no surprise that your mobile has changed a lot in the last three years but your PC hasn’t,” he said.
    Arm hopes that many more netbook makers will be using one of its designs as a core processor and turn to Linux as the operating system.
    At the very least a crop of Arm-based netbooks might mean a big boost to battery life. Arm’s mobile pedigree means it is designed to be parsimonious with power.
    Dell already produces notebooks sporting Latitude ON technology that use both Arm and Intel chips so that they can boot into either Windows or Linux.
    Editing tools
    Battery life on Linux is in excess of 10 hours, for Windows rarely more than three.
    Machines sporting Arm chips are also likely to be thinner as they will not need the heat sinks demanded by processors used in desktops.
    Mr Drew said deals Arm has signed with Adobe will help ensure that future devices will be able to use the software maker’s familiar video, audio and image editing tools.
    What will also be worth watching, he said, is what happens when Google’s Chrome OS is launched.
    Many of the devices running that will be Arm-based as Chrome is broadly based on one of the Linux distributions. There are also unconfirmed rumours that either Windows 8 or 9 will run on Arm chips.

    People are becoming familiar with multi-touch thanks to touch screen phones
    Mr Drew also expects to see devices tailored to particular types of user.
    E-book readers were an example of this, he said, and were evolving into devices capable of doing more than just handle text. Many can play MP3s or let owners browse the web.
    Then there is the approaching wave of tablet computers.
    Apple is rumoured to be working on one. Dell and Microsoft have shown off their own ideas of what one will look like and there are bound to be many more from established tablet makers such as Archos.
    Mr Miles from Pocket Lint believes these are likely to take up the mantle from the netbook.
    “I don’t think people will expect it to do much more than you get from a netbook,” he said, adding that they were perfect for those who needed a device that let them get online quickly to satisfy their curiosity.
    They were more likely to succeed now more than ever, said Mr Miles, because of the greater experience people had with using such devices.
    “It’ll be helped by Apple which has educated people how to use multi-touch through the iPhone and iPod touch,” he said.
    Netbooks are also likely to come under pressure from smartphones as they get even smarter, said Christoper David, head of developers at SonyEricsson.
    Phone makers, he said, have to position themselves to be more open and able to support the web habits of users no matter what they were or what they wanted to do.
    “The web is the king,” he said. Handset makers must work with those open web standards to ensure that the software on the phones they make is flexible enough to cope.
    “Though,” he added, “that is only the starting point of the journey.”
    What will not change, he believes, is the importance of the phone as a vessel for data about its owner.
    “We’re going to see phones coming along where the form factor will be less and less relevant in terms of what we carry about with us,” he said.
    Future devices will grab the best resources nearby whether that is a flat screen, projector or thin film display.
    The ID credentials stored on what was our phone will handle all the logins and give access to all the sites and services we use.
    The netbook, and its limitations, will be well and truly left behind.
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8421491.stm

  • US agrees $6m pay cheques for Fannie and Freddie bosses

    Disgusting to say the least.
    The heads of US mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may each receive pay packages of up to $6m (£3.7m) for 2009, depending on company performance.
    The government has put $111bn of public money into the companies since taking them over and the awards go against moves to curb lavish pay packages.
    But the regulator which decided the pay levels said the awards were 40% lower than before the government bailout.
    The sums involved reflected the need to attract and retain talent, it argued.
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8430383.stm

  • The Next Wave From China

    As things stand China’s financial control over US govt.is high.When they enter private sector, the results will be not good for US.Look at the African countries where china has invested, leading to local unrest, following Chinese policy of hiring only Chinese.Also China shall use this as a lever in diplomacy.
    Story:

    Chinese manufacturers are looking overseas to acquire the means to move into broader markets.

    News that Ford Motor has agreed to terms with Zhejiang Geely for the Chinese carmaker to acquire its Volvo Cars division is the latest example of the next wave of Chinese foreign investment. Manufacturers–mostly privately owned, not state enterprises–are increasingly looking for brands and technology to use as the foundation of a new generation of innovative and branded Chinese products for both domestic and global markets.

    The first wave of Chinese foreign investment was led by the country’s huge state-owned enterprises, which aimed to secure critical natural resources such as oil and minerals and bought into basic industries that are capital intensive and need scale, such as steelmaking, shipbuilding, construction and telecom infrastructure.

    Chinese companies say that their motivation for foreign direct investment is market access or a pre-emptive securing of access against potential protectionist barriers. Computer maker Lenovo ( LNVGY.PK – news – people ) and white-goods manufacturer Haier have made inroads into the markets of the developed world following acquisitions, most notably Lenovo’s of IBM’s PC business. However, the fast-growing domestic market makes international expansion and the acquisition of foreign distribution networks relatively less important to many Chinese manufacturers than it would have been for companies from other developing economies at a similar stage of industrial development.

    Further evidence that the acquisition of strategic assets such as brand and technology, including product R&D, is driving the new wave of Chinese foreign direct investment is that firms are entering foreign markets through M&A rather than greenfield investment.

    In many cases, those acquisitions have been of failing firms, notably in the autos industry, where Detroit’s mistakes offer Chinese acquirers a rare and rich trinity of brands, technology and fire-sale prices. An additional plus: To the extent that these were firms in distress, any potential local political opposition tends to be more muted.

    Natural resources and basic industries acquisitions, particularly in Australia, have sparked protests about national economic security being at risk, with state-owned enterprises portrayed as the instruments of an overbearing Chinese government.

    Chinese manufacturers know how to squeeze value out of frugal engineering–the ability to produce low-cost versions of goods for mass markets–but they haven’t been able to add on the premium that can be charged for a top brand.

    Chinese brands have yet to make global impact. Lenovo and Haier are the best known outside the country, but neither is in the same league as the likes of IBM, Dell ( DELL – news – people ), HP and General Electric ( GE – news – people ). Nor have China’s automakers been able to establish outside China brands of the value of Volvo, GM’s Hummer, whose acquisition by Sichuan Tengzhong is awaiting Beijing’s sign-off, or MG Rover, the last domestically owned mass-production car manufacturer in the U.K., which wound up in 2005 in the hands of Nanjing Automobile Group, now merged with Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp.

    Acquisition is not the only route to technology and brands. China’s automakers have long pursued the so-called “‘linkage, leverage, and learning” model of development, by conducting joint ventures with foreign manufacturers seeking access to the Chinese market, SAIC with GM (now jointly heading for the Indian market, too) and FAW with Toyota ( TM – news – people ), for example.

    Baotou Bei Ben Heavy-Duty Truck, China’s sixth-largest heavy truck maker, announced a joint venture earlier this month with South Korea’s Hyundai that will let it revamp its model line based on Hyundai’s existing vehicles by 2014, far faster than it could do alone, and eventually give it access to the U.S. market through Hyundai’s distribution network there.

    A similar joint venture approach is being taken in IT, where Chinese software firms have focused on their domestic market by working with foreign multinationals and expanded internationally little further than regional markets in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea.

    Beijing has designated 20 industries in which it intends Chinese companies to become world-class, and it is driving consolidation and vertical integration in many of them. That makes its bureaucrats wary of private company ventures abroad (witness the dallying over Hummer) and subjects potential acquisitions to bureaucratic infighting between ministries championing “their” state-owned companies.

    That may hold back the innovation that the foreign direct investment strategy is meant to promote. It may also hinder the creation of conglomerates that often drive horizontal integration necessary for developing economies to develop multinationals. South Korea’s chaebols, for example, started by replicating in overseas markets the innovations developed for their domestic market while simultaneously acquiring related technology and expertise internationally to grow as multi-product and multi-industry companies. China’s five-year plans aren’t so flexible.

    India, in contrast does have conglomerates, such as the Tata Group. For all Chinese firms’ success in capital-intensive industries, they have been outpaced by Indian companies in skill-intensive sectors such as pharmaceuticals, information technology and business processing. There is no Chinese Wipro ( WIT – news – people ) or Infosys. Not yet, at least. Nor has China developed substantial food and beverage or retailing companies, two industries still dominated by Western giants such as Nestle ( NSRGY.PK – news – people ) and Wal-Mart ( WMT – news – people ).

    It is easiest for any developing country’s firms to grow and internationalize in areas that lack head-to-head competition from U.S. and European firms. China’s carmakers are in the vanguard of those Chinese companies now showing a readiness to acquire the wherewithal to move out of the niches and into broader markets.

  • Climategate: the corruption of Wikipedia

    Revolting, to say the least.Could not have taken place without Wiki’s knowledge9?).
    By James Delingpole Politics Last updated: December 22nd, 2009
    241 Comments Comment on this article
    If you want to know the truth about Climategate, definitely don’t use Wikipedia. “Climatic Research Unit e-mail controversy”, is its preferred, mealy-mouthed euphemism to describe the greatest scientific scandal of the modern age. Not that you’d ever guess it was a scandal from the accompanying article. It reads more like a damage-limitation press release put out by concerned friends and sympathisers of the lying, cheating, data-rigging scientists
    Which funnily enough, is pretty much what it is. Even Wikipedia’s own moderators acknowledge that the entry has been hijacked, as this commentary by an “uninvolved editor” makes clear.
    Unfortunately, this naked bias and corruption has infected the supposedly neutral Wikipedia’s entire coverage of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory. And much of this, as Lawrence Solomon reports in the National Post, is the work of one man, a Cambridge-based scientist and Green Party activist named William Connolley.
    Connolley took control of all things climate in the most used information source the world has ever known – Wikipedia. Starting in February 2003, just when opposition to the claims of the band members were beginning to gel, Connolley set to work on the Wikipedia site. He rewrote Wikipedia’s articles on global warming, on the greenhouse effect, on the instrumental temperature record, on the urban heat island, on climate models, on global cooling. On Feb. 14, he began to erase the Little Ice Age; on Aug.11, the Medieval Warm Period. In October, he turned his attention to the hockey stick graph. He rewrote articles on the politics of global warming and on the scientists who were skeptical of the band. Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer, two of the world’s most distinguished climate scientists, were among his early targets, followed by others that the band especially hated, such as Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, authorities on the Medieval Warm Period.
    All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it — more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred — over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolley’s global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedia’s blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.
    Connolley has supposedly been defrocked as a Wikipedia administrator. Or so Wikipedia claimed in its feeble, there’s-really-not-much-we-can-do response to anxious questions from one of Watts Up With That’s readers.
    In September 2009, the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee revoked Mr. Connolley’s administrator status after finding that he misused his administrative privileges while involved in a dispute unrelated to climate warming.
    If this is true, it doesn’t seem to have made much difference to his creative input on the Wikipedia’s entries. Here he is – unless its just someone with an identical name – busily sticking his oar in to entries on the Medieval Warm Period (again) and the deeply compromised, soon-to-be-leaving (let’s hope) IPCC head Dr Rajendra Pachauri. And here he is again just three days ago, removing a mention of Climategate from Michael Mann’s entry. And here is an example of one of his Wikipedia chums – name of Stephan Schulz – helping to cover up for him by ensuring that no mention of that embarrassing Lawrence Solomon article appears on Connolley’s Wikipedia entry. And here he is deleting criticism of himself.
    Connolley, it should also be noted, was one of the founder members of Real Climate – the friends-of-Michael-Mann propaganda outfit (aka “The Hockey Team”) which, in the guise of disinterested science, pumps out climate-fear-promoting hysteria on AGW and tries to discredit anyone who disagrees with the ManBearPig “consensus”.
    Here he is, for example, being bigged up in a 2006 email from Michael Mann:
    >> I’ve attached the piece in word format. Hyperlinks are still there,
    >> but not clickable in word format. I’ve already given it a good
    >> go-over w/ Gavin, Stefan, and William Connelley (our internal “peer
    >> review” process at RC), so I think its in pretty good shape. Let me
    >> know if any comments…
    >>
    and here are some of his associates:
    From: Phil Jones
    To: William M Connolley ,Caspar Ammann
    Subject: Figure 7.1c from the 1990 IPCC Report
    Date: Fri, 05 Jan 2007 13:38:40 +0000
    Cc: Tom Crowley ,”Michael E. Mann” , “raymond s. bradley” , Stefan Rahmstorf , Eric Steig ,gschmidt@giss.nasa.gov, rasmus.benestad@physics.org,garidel@marine.rutgers.edu, David Archer , “Raymond P.” ,k.briffa@uea.ac.uk, t.osborn@uea.ac.uk, “Mitchell, John FB \(Chief Scientist\)” , “Jenkins, Geoff” , “Warrilow, David \(GA\)” , Tom Wigley ,mafb5@sussex.ac.uk, “Folland, Chris”
    Get that? The guy who has been writing Wikipedia’s entry on Climategate (plus 5,000 others relating to “Climate Change”) is the bosom buddy of the Climategate scientists.
    Nope, this isn’t a problem that is going to go away. Wikipedia may well be beyond redemption – as this useful resource site for Wiki-inaccuracies would seem to suggest. Like so many hippyish notions, Jimmy Wales’s idea of a free encyclopedia for everyone was a noble intention which has been cruelly and horribly abused by some very ugly people.
    Do you want to know just how ugly? I’ve been saving the worst till last. Here it is: William Connelley’s Wikipedia photograph.
    http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100020515/climategate-the-corruption-of-wikipedia/

  • Billionaires Castle.- Video

    http://video.forbes.com/fvn/rich-list-09/american-billionaire-castle?partner=popvideo