I have an old computer here that was running Windows 2000 very slowly. It’s a Hewlett Packard Pentium something or other with 256MB RAM and 10GB hard disk; it's a plonker. One of the girls had given up using it and I was getting ready to toss it in the rubbish (environmentally sound recycling of course...yeah).
But I am working on a Rugby Scoreboard project and I needed a computer with a parallel port built into it for programming the microcontroller (more on that in a later post). My laptop doesn’t have such old school stuff as a parallel port so I thought I'd keep this PC just for the scoreboard project, but how to make it go faster?
I had heard that Ubuntu has gotten pretty good and so I thought I'd give it another go.
I downloaded an ISO image of 8.04 straight from the website and burnt it to a 700MB CD on my Vista laptop with no problems. Stuck it in my HP boat anchor and booted. Within a few hours and having only answered a few questions (about ½ the questions you would answer to install XP) Ubuntu 8.04 was all installed and connected to the Internet and running very nicely.
Now I am very impressed with this release. Not only is it working fine on this old hardware that will not run Windows, but it behaves like Windows. Step aside all you Linux bigots, whether you like it or not the Windows system works reasonably well and everybody knows how to use Windows so why not replicate it? Well that's exactly what the blokes at Ubuntu have done. Right down to the drag and drop and right mouse operations. I am even writing this in the Open Office word processor which is very similar in features and user interface to Microsoft Word / Office 2007. To be sure I grabbed a few large Word and PowerPoint documents from my work laptop and checked that they all read fine and could be modified. The PowerPoint presentation was full of animations and graphics and they all presented exactly as on Windows and Office. It's not perfecf though, I couldn't get the spell checker to work in Open Office so this document was checked on my Vista machine before posting!
Everything is built in or free and easy to download. It comes with an iPod/Mp3 player jukebox program, torrent downloader, the equivalent of Office and of course FireFox.
Ubuntu have also taken a leaf from Microsoft's book and incorporated an automatic download and update system so any new security fixes are applied with the click of a mouse.
Not once have I had to read a manual anywhere. Everything just works and works well. One application that wasn't there was a standalone RSS reader but within minutes I had located one and downloaded it for free.
MP3 splitter, not problems, downloaded for free. AVI/MP4 ripper and converter, no problems and free of course. You usually have to pay for these on Windows.
All in all I reckon Ubuntu is as easy to use as Windows, as reliable and even simpler to install. With all the free built in applications and the ease with which you can add applications I would say there is no reason whatsoever that everyday users can't use Ubuntu instead of Windows and on the latest hardware it will probably scream.
Melinda and I went to see the new movie Body of Lies last night which stars Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio. It's a movie about the dark conspiracies behind US operations in the Middle East in the pursuit of an Osama bin Laden type figure.
Positives: Great location shoots and photography. DiCaprio and Crowe equally good performances.
Negatives: Marginally predictable American positive reinforcing slant "whatever it takes" is supposedly good.
A few people have asked me what my predictions are for the "financial crises" because I predicted the month and nature of the current “crisis” at the beginning of the year. I'm not one to write namby pamby if maybe could be stuff so here goes....
Firstly, my opinion is that this is engineered; it is a plan.The apparent chaos that you are reading in the news does not mean that this is not planned; it could just means the “news” is planned. What you read in the SMH and Telegraph are reactionary and basically “party line”, that is, it’s what they want you to think is going on.Who is “they”?To answer that you need to see who benefits (cui bono).
The plan is basically this:
·Consolidation of banking control worldwide
·Consolidation of assets into much fewer hands
·Raiding of the average Joe’s superannuation/pension/savings and any other tangible asset
·Further globalisation but this time it’s centralising financial control worldwide
Let’s get real now. The people that have the REAL money are well secured.The REAL money people saw this coming and prepared years ago.We, the middle class, through these so-called “bail outs” will be left carrying the can.Rich people don’t pay taxes; you and I are the ones paying the taxes whether they are income and expenditure taxes or the worst tax of all - inflation.
US Treasury Secretary, Henry "Hanky Panky" Paulson, did not wake up one morning and go "holy shit, the economy is stuffed and we best print 700 Bil and fix the problem!”Do you really believe that they suddenly had to rush through an Act in the US to resolve this; that the congress of the United States could only be given a week to approve the bill; that the UK had to invest US$124B in their banking sector overnight?Come on, the “authorities” in the respective countries knew what was going on and have prepared well in advance.I mean Fannie Mae ceased filing quarterly a year prior to its collapse!
This problem with derivatives (CDO’s, CDS’s, Interest Rate Swaps etc) was building since the abolition of Glass-Steagall in 1999 and then the deregulation of the market in 2001 by Bill Clinton.They knew as early as 2003 that things were amiss and that the risk transfer that these derivatives were creating was escalating to unmanageable proportions.
Consider the following logic:
If the authorities knew this was going to happen in advance of the crises (and they have admitted they did) then they would have had a plan to mitigate it well in advance of the crises hitting (also admitted).Therefore the “extremely urgent” passing of the Economic Stabilization Act 2008 was not really urgent at all otherwise they would have started the process earlier.The crisis was allowed to balloon in order to scare the masses and to deflate stock markets and to hand over yet more power to “authorities” and to create a sense of crisis under which oversight and restraint are given way to panic.We know that much of the USA Patriot Act was ready to go well in advance of 9/11, that’s well documented.So is this the same situation?
You should be angry but you won’t be because you will read the controlled lamestream media who will tell you that it was all because a few mugs in the US bought houses they could not afford and a few greedy unnamed Wall Street types (who will bizarrely never get prosecuted) capitalised on it.Seriously, if that was the case then we’d take about 300 bil and pay off the sub prime mortgages, take their houses and prosecute the nasty bankers and that would be the end of the problem.But that is not the case and not the end of the problem.The problem is the leveraging through derivatives and the subsequent multiplication of the leveraging that the fractional reserve banking system allows that has caused a small problem to be a very large problem.That leveraging was then used to buy real assets and then the debt risk was passed on through yet more derivatives. (Didn’t you ever wonder where all that cash came from that enabled the private equity takeovers in the last few years?)The people with the real money have ended up with the real assets and we have ended up - through these and the bail outs to come - with the [toilet] paper assets.
Here are my bold predictions:
·Dow will go down to 7000 points or lower.In the last Bear market 2000-2002 it lost 30% in three years.This time it has lost 30% in three months.
·Gold will go through the roof - I think a minimum of US$1500 – they have been working over time to suppress precious metal prices to support the fiat currencies but that has to come to an end soon especially given the flight of capital from other assets.Restricting physical supply is their latest half-arsed attempt
·The US Economy will go into a hyperinflationary depression (you can’t print money and expect there to be no consequences)
·Unemployment will rise to +13% in the US and 9% here within two years
·House prices will continue to decline everywhere because of unemployment
·Your super is stuffed because most people have managed funds and the managed funds are being pillaged during these crises.
·Rates, charges, taxes and levies will all increase significantly over the next few years because governments everywhere need to claw back money to pay for these bailouts or to replenish their reserves in the case of local governments whom were targeted by the criminal derivative traders.
Because of the US disaster, we in Australia will be impacted.The massive slow down in the US will reduce exports to Asia which will in turn harm Australia.Thank goodness our banking system here is sound.
House prices in Australia will decline another 15-20% before stabilising.This will lead to de-leveraging here so we can expect shares to decline for some time and foreclosures to further suppress house prices.
It’s all bad and the progressive decline will take two more years to hit the bottom or maybe longer then the buying opportunities will come :-)
Section 122 of The Economic Stabilization Act 2008 increases the public US debt to US$11,315B:
SEC. 122. INCREASE IN STATUTORY LIMIT ON THE PUBLIC DEBT.
Subsection (b) of section 3101 of title 31, United States Code, is amended by striking out the dollar limitation contained in such subsection and inserting `$11,315,000,000,000'.
Therefore public debt of the United States is about to hit 80% of GDP.That’s a veritable banana republic.If it wasn’t that the world’s reserve currency is the US dollar then they’d be down the tubes long ago.
Another interesting fact is the big one day changes in the DJIA in the early stages of the Great Depression and how those could be related to modern times:
The percentages were worse in the Great Depression:
Greatest DJIA Daily % Gains
of All-Time
Rank
Date
Close
Net Chg
% Chg
1
15/03/1933
62.10
+8.26
+15.34
2
6/10/1931
99.34
+12.86
+14.87
3
30/10/1929
258.47
+28.40
+12.34
4
21/09/1932
75.16
+7.67
+11.36
Greatest DJIA Daily % Losses
of All-Time
Rank
Date
Close
Net Chg
% Chg
1
19/10/1987
1,738.74
–508.00
–22.61
2
28/10/1929
260.64
–38.33
–12.82
3
29/10/1929
230.07
–30.57
–11.73
4
6/11/1929
232.13
–25.55
–9.92
But the instability was similar:
Greatest DJIA Daily Point Gains
of All-Time
Rank
Date
Close
Net Chg
% Chg
18
28/10/1997
7,498.32
+337.17
+4.71
11
8/09/1998
8,020.78
+380.53
+4.98
1
16/03/2000
10,630.60
+499.19
+4.93
17
5/12/2000
10,898.72
+338.62
+3.21
8
5/04/2001
9,918.05
+402.63
+4.23
9
18/04/2001
10,615.83
+399.10
+3.91
16
16/05/2001
11,215.92
+342.95
+3.15
14
24/09/2001
8,603.86
+368.05
+4.47
2
24/07/2002
8,191.29
+488.95
+6.35
4
29/07/2002
8,711.88
+447.49
+5.41
15
1/10/2002
7,938.79
+346.86
+4.57
12
15/10/2002
8,255.68
+378.28
+4.80
19
18/09/2007
13,739.39
+335.97
+2.51
6
11/03/2008
12,156.81
+416.66
+3.55
5
18/03/2008
12,392.66
+420.41
+3.51
10
1/04/2008
12,654.36
+391.47
+3.19
20
5/08/2008
11,615.77
+331.62
+2.94
7
18/09/2008
11,019.69
+410.03
+3.86
13
19/09/2008
11,388.44
+368.75
+3.35
3
30/09/2008
10,850.66
+485.21
+4.68
8/20 of the biggest all time gains have been in the last 14 months!
Greatest DJIA Daily Point Losses
of All-Time
Rank
Date
Close
Net Chg
% Chg
8
19/10/1987
1,738.74
–508.00
–22.61
5
27/10/1997
7,161.14
–554.26
–7.18
6
31/08/1998
7,539.06
–512.62
–6.37
18
7/03/2000
9,796.04
–374.47
–3.68
4
14/04/2000
10,305.78
–617.77
–5.66
17
12/10/2000
10,034.58
–379.21
–3.64
11
12/03/2001
10,208.25
–436.37
–4.10
2
17/09/2001
8,920.70
–684.81
–7.13
16
20/09/2001
8,376.21
–382.92
–4.37
14
19/07/2002
8,019.26
–390.23
–4.64
12
27/02/2007
12,216.24
–416.02
–3.29
15
9/08/2007
13,270.68
–387.18
–2.83
20
5/02/2008
12,265.13
–370.03
–2.93
13
6/06/2008
12,209.81
–394.64
–3.13
9
15/09/2008
10,917.51
–504.48
–4.42
10
17/09/2008
10,609.66
–449.36
–4.06
19
22/09/2008
11,015.69
–372.75
–3.27
1
29/09/2008
10,365.45
–777.68
–6.98
7
7/10/2008
9,447.11
–508.39
–5.11
3
9/10/2008
8,579.19
–678.91
–7.33
9/20 of the biggest all time losses have been in the last 14 months!
This is panic in black and white.My recommendation:Own hard assets (not shares) e.g., gold.Hard cash isn’t much good against inflation because central banks are acting in unison with interest rates which impacts exchange rates.It can be argued that moving into gold will contribute to the panic but remember: Nice guys finish last.
And one very last thing:I see from the latest news that “Helicopter” Ben Bernanke is going to head the oversight board for the bail out package.Talk about the Fox being in charge of the chicken coup.
Beware of the dead cat bounce today.It ain’t over til the fat lady sings. Adios amigos.
