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Another vendor figures out the "bag of hurt" bedeviling Steve Jobs...
MSI to launch Atom-based all-in-one PCs in January 2009
Monica Chen, Taipei; Joseph Tsai, DIGITIMES [Thursday 20 November 2008]
Micro-Star International (MSI) has revealed that the company is planning to launch three Wind Neton all-in-one desktop PCs in January next year with a price ranging between US$399-799, according to Joseph Hsu, chairman of the company.
Two Wind Neton models – M16 with a 15.6-inch panel and M19 with an 18.5-inch panel – will adopt the Intel Atom 270 processor and 945GSE chipset, and will also features 1GB DDR2 memory, 160GB hard drive, a slim-type optical drive and either Windows XP or Linux. The M16 will be priced around US$399 while the M19 will be priced around US$499. MSI is also evaluating a plan to adopt dual-core Atom processors for the PCs.
The company's M22 will have a higher performance, as it will feature either an Intel dual-core or quad-core mobile CPU, GS45 chipset and a and a 21.5-inch panel. The device will also support H.264 and VC1 hardware decoding, an optional Blu-ray drive and touch screen control. The M22 will be priced between US$599-799 based on the specifications (not including the price of Blu-ray drives).
Interesting. That's a lot of product. On the AAPL board the netbook class is generally dismissed as "a toy" and "irrelevant".
I'm sure that will change should Apple ever ship one...
...not a CBOE standard transaction...
Right, it was an OTC job.
From a 10k...
Berkshire is also subject to equity price risk with respect to certain long duration equity index option contracts. Berkshire's maximum exposure with respect to such contracts was approximately $35 billion and $21 billion at December 31, 2007 and 2006, respectively. These contracts generally expire 15 to 20 years from inception and they may not be settled before their respective expiration dates.The contracts have been written on four major equity indexes including three that are based on foreign markets.
Note the bolded parts: there are without question multiple bets across multiple years involved here. They absolutely could all have crossed the same Goldman desk - for sure - but there were different exposures at different times and there are at least two sets of expiration dates.
Gotta say this strikes me as a strange position for the Oracle of the Financial Weapon of Mass Destruction to take. History is littered with the carcasses of put-sellers.
It was originally disclosed in their '07 annual report, so yeah, it's been going on for a while.
The now-infamous "put" sold by Berkshire was more than one position, as Berkshire started laying on the bet in 2005 and continued adding from then through 2008.
Buffet has taken quite a haircut in buying GS shares early...
Buffet [sic] didn't "buy shares" - he leant them money.
If there's one thing I've learned from Buffet it's that moving ahead of shareholders in the priority queue is a damn good idea, when possible.
OT: I guess no one here remembers Yellow Dog Democrats.
They never went away. Just changed their name to ABB.
Back to the markets, an updated historical chart...
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_pMscxxELHEg/SSRmPLU149I/AAAAAAAADy8/KGv9lbvuyEM/s1600/StockCrashesNov192008.jpg
...its almost a certainty that there will be some rescue plan of the big 3...
Today's automaker news...Viagra prescriptions are costing GM $17M a year.
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2006/04/gm_viagra.html
...forget the Pension Benefit Guarantee program...
IMO this is a huge part of the problem - things like the PBGC get set up and then nobody wants to pay the premiums necessary to keep them viable. If these "safety nets" are going to be established, they damn well need to be funded properly. And part of "funded properly" HAS to mean higher premies for higher risk companies.
Same situation with FDIC - so many of the people complaining about TARP have zero problem taking the FDIC subsidy to chase higher yields. That's neither right, nor sustainable.
Quite frankly the Big 3 and the UAW have always looked at negotations as a zero sum game rather than negotiating to win-win..
Not sure I can agree with this. Seems to me both GM management and UAW leadership figured out sometime ago that the best way to keep their beds feathered was to maintain the "too much unemployment" blackmail card.
At the end of the day, I view this is an aggregate failure of the US voter. Continuosly rewarding fiscal irresponsibility in the candidates they (re)elect, it allows the likes of GM and UAW to (eg) negotiate completely unrealistic pensions that both sides know full well will end up in the taxpayers lap.
Handing these guys a check doesn't strike me as likely to do anything about the underlying problems.
To be honest - that's not what annoys me - it's par for the course for politicians and what I expect.
What's really gonna annoy me is the tsunami of double-speak that's gonna emanate from the dissonantly cognitive True Believers (TM). It's gonna be the "no really, Shrub *is* a Conservative!" thing all over again, just in reverse.
Better your side of the border than mine! :)
totally OT:
So it's already back to "deficits don't matter", bailing out dead industries that can't compete but somehow have the coin to make political contributions, pushing Clinton retread aparachniks into key posts, Liebermann(!!!), three more years in Iraq...
When exactly does this great era of change begin?
Beautiful - just beautiful. Sign me up...
The only thing I found more perplexing than MSFT's original offer was YHOO's stupidity in not taking it. At this point I'd be shocked by any offer over $18. I'm in under $10, so it's all gravy...
YES! Almost certainly spells merger, the sooner the better.
I had a stinky bid on BIDU get hit today - apparently it wasn't stinky enough. Next time I'll hang some fermenting fish heads on it.
Holy crap - who here was pumping BIDU?
Looks like the netbooks will rule xmas..
Trying to figure out which surfin' box to get the munchkins - had kinda assumed it would end up being a low-end iMac - but these netbooks look good enough and (importantly!) cheap enough that I really won't mind so much when it suffers an inevitable 6-year-old "accident".
I know that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data"...
for some reason i found that quip really funny!
OT: Well that didn't take long...
CHICAGO (Reuters) – The United States government should not worry about deficits over the next two years while spending money to jumpstart the ailing economy, President-elect Barack Obama said in a television interview that aired on Sunday.
Obama, a Democrat who takes over from President George W. Bush, a Republican, on January 20, said consensus had emerged between economists in both major U.S. political parties that expensive measures were necessary to avoid a deep recession.
More of the same attitude that created this mess...
Those reports don't appear consistent with the state of 3G physical rollouts in China.
Pretty sure Cramer is confusing AMD with MDA.
:)
What's the magic bullet that sucker, uh, carrier #3 has that the other 2 didn't have?
An actual 3G network.
To put things in perspective, the Three Gorges project generates enough electricity to keep roughly 1 million cars moving ~55 mph. Accelerating them to that speed - or dealing with the other 90 million (or whatever) vehicles on the road is left as an exercise to the reader. :)
Would love to see an F150 with a 4.xL diesel in it. Terrific camping/towing vehicle for everything short of mega-trailers.
The world will always need a familiar low-cost "integrator", so I see the logic of including Dell. However I don't see why HP is on that list - strikes me that they stopped being a tech-led company quite some time ago and I can't see how the world would miss anything if they disappeared overnight.
SAP I guess belongs on that list - but my goodness do I ever hate their products & services. I pray one day that will catch up to them - but probably not in this cycle.
They better make another offer to YHOO right quick - I hear it can be had on the cheap now.
Their statement is nothing like your statement. EOM.
Good question.
http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2008/10/oregons_public_pension_fund_lo.html
Oregon's public pension system has been the fully funded envy of other states since 2003 legislative reforms and a bull market helped turn a projected $17billion system deficit into a substantial surplus.
No more.
As of Sept. 30, the value of the Oregon Public Employees Retirement Fund -- including a variable fund -- had fallen to $54billion. That's down 19percent from its October 2007 high of $66.8billion, and 16 percent from the beginning of this year.
That doesn't count this October's market mayhem: an additional 18percent decline so far in the Standard and Poor's 500 Index and even worse performance in international markets, where Oregon pensioners are big investors.
So why is the market up ?
I found a reason to start going long, and I'm a nobody. I asked last night for reasons to NOT buy Intel, and the only objections amounted to "don't know if it's the bottom". Well nobody ever knows if it's "the" bottom, so that's not an objection at all.
Presumably those with more money and smarts than I also found reasons. Maybe by tomorrow those reasons evaporate and we drop 2000 points on the Dow. Hell, I don't know, the market is (and has always been) a big casino, place your educated bets and move along.
Markets are supposed to go up and they're supposed to go down. Don't see anything here requiring a conspiratorial or "deep" explanation.
Cheers.
So far, so good. Now let's see if this is the rally that carries things up into January...
Chrylser was "merged" into Daimler. Daimler got their up-close look, wrote them off as having $0 value, and spun them back out.
Don't think it can be over-stated in just how bad shape these outfits are. Decades of collusion between management and union leadership to keep payrolls as bloated as possible, to keep "too big too fail" status as long as possible.
Keeping them alive makes a mockery of "free enterprise".
Whoever has the opposite end of the short-mortgages trade has a new "security" that acts a lot like a mortgage. So all the anti-short bets can get wrapped up into a new pool of mortgage-related "assets" that are easily priced because, well, they act a lot like mortgages. So now there's a secondary market that can be longed or shorted that aren't actually mortgages, but act as a multiplier on the notional size of the mortgage market.
Lather rinse repeat - tertiary market.
Lather rinse repeat - quadiary(?) market.
Yeah, twilight zone for sure.
Frankly speaking, other than the games they played with the electricty grid, none of this is all that different than what Enron was doing. Arthur Anderson was just a couple of years ahead of their time...
Took some INTC. Currently holding AAPL, SNDK, INTC, YHOO, all taken in last 2 days. Watching RIMM, BIDU, QQQQ, (more) AAPL and XLF, still 70% cash.
Delete, dupe. EOM.
...think like an American...
You mean like "Where's my bailout, dude?"
Sorry, couldn't resist. Anyway, I'm long INTC as of this morning for a longer-term hold.
Ok, I'm looking at this stock and this is what I see..
- Stock price lower now than at the '02 bottom
- more cash
- more tangible assets
- less meaningful competition
- more diversified products
- more product lines
- new high profile customers
- pays 4% dividend
Is there a reason NOT to buy this stock?!
Life is to short to waste on fundamentalists. EOM.
OK, need to make some assumptions/approximations.
Quarterly GAAP earnings from Gen1 iPhone -> 1/8 * 2M * $500
->$125M
Quarterly GAAP earnings from Gen2 iPhone -> 1/8 * 5M * $650
-> $400M
So GAAP earnings from iPhone sales should be somewhere around...
6 * $125M + 2 * $400M => $1.6B, ballpark
Leaving everything but Mac and iPod sales out...
iTunes sales: $1000
iPhone: $1600
Software: $500
Peripherals: $500
That's $3.6B. Assuming the guidance is 10% conservative, we're looking at $10.5B total revs (last Q1 was $9.6B, IIRC). So that leaves ~$7B in revs for iPod and Mac sales. Which would make the observer's numbers of $4.3B for Macs and $4B for iPods about 20% too high.
Assuming any decline is evenly split between Mac and iPod slowdowns (not sure that's warranted, but this is just meant to be illustrative), this comes to a miss of 600k in Mac sales (leaving ASP the same) and 5M in iPod sales.
If it turns out the guidance is not conservative, need to shed another $1B in revs, in which case you get a drop of approximately 1 million Macs and 10 million iPods.
This is really not my forte, if someone has factual corrections to make I'm more than happy to here them. There are obviously a myriad of ways product mix could change this - all I want to know is if this scenario is roughly consistent with what AAPL has said and previously announced.
Jealousy will be the end of you.