<p>Well BCEagle91, it is your link. Do you have any comments?</p>
<p>It reminds of of the word “trappings”. The trappings of middle-class or suburban living or the trappings of the wealthy lifestyle where you feel pressured to have certain things that cost a lot of money to acquire or maintain. I’ve tried to get rid of things that cost a lot of money to maintain so I don’t have to worry about outgoing cash streams. I’d rather have the incoming cash streams.</p>
<p>I’m seeing more discussions of the Fed tapering later this summer. I don’t see any evidence that they will do this and there are headwinds with the labor market. But I should probably do a little reading to see what people are chatting about.</p>
<p>Just looking at tablets: the iPad Mini is 0.68 pounds vs 0.75 for the Nexus 7. The rumors are that Apple will shave 25 - 33 percent off the weight of the iPad. If they can do the same thing with the iPad Mini, they will have quite the winner. Actually I think that the iPad Mini’s weight is probably the best there is; any improvement would be nice. The Nexus 7 is supposed to go Hi-Def this summer; the iPad Mini is supposed to go Retina this year but it might be a fall release. At any rate, both tablets are great devices - I’d rather have the Mini because it has much better apps but the Nexus 7 definitely wins on price.</p>
<p>Posted May 21.
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<p>I am amazed at notrichenough’s ability of premonition.</p>
<p>re: post #7772 & #7773
[HP</a> Envy Rove 20 - Desktops - CNET Reviews](<a href=“CNET: Product reviews, advice, how-tos and the latest news”>CNET: Product reviews, advice, how-tos and the latest news)</p>
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<p>Cool. So they expect people to carry around a 20 pound device to watch TV in an easy-chair or in bed.</p>
<p>BTW, in my weekend reading I find that the technical folks say weakness short-term and that the rally is intact long-term. No fuss, no muss. The fundamental players say doom and gloom in the short and intermediate term. The latter is getting much more attention in the media as boring doesn’t sell advertising.</p>
<p>David Kneupper’s site (the charts yesterday) have one or two sell signals along with a ton of other signals that aren’t indicating problems. Yet. If things continue down, then more technical sell signals will appear. So I’m in wait-and-see mode for now.</p>
<p>Went through the monthly bills today. I received a notice from my landline phone company that they are increasing prices on various services by $2. I have the $5.97 service which costs $16/month. Our phone service is not very good (sometimes a lot of noise on the line) but I want to keep the number. I would like to figure out a way to keep the number - ideally I’d like to make my home number on my iPhone. I don’t know why the landline companies keep doing this - they’re just pushing people to drop their lines. We already all have mobile service.</p>
<p>AT&T is adding a $0.69 fee to all customers with wireless service. They’re supposed to offer you an exit from your contract if they do this with no early termination fee. It would be interesting to test this out or see if there would be a class-action suit against the fee. I may consider dropping my bandwidth level from 5 GB to 1 GB. I got 5 because it’s required for the hotspot service but I find that I actually don’t use it very often. In general, I use about 300 MB of data per month so 5 is a waste.</p>
<p>I suppose I could just buy their stock too.</p>
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I promise to only use my powers for good. :D</p>
<p>I’m about 40% in cash right now. Be afraid… ;)</p>
<p>Dropped the data plan from 5 GB to 3 GB for a $20 savings. They don’t have a 1 GB plan. Just 300 MB and 3 GB. I could live with 300 MB but I’d have to be a little more careful. I think that 3 GB will work for now. Next thing on my list - call the landline company and ask them if they can lower my rate from $16 to $10. If not, move the number to my iPhone and lower it to $0. Then we use the iPads as landlines.</p>
<p>BCEagle, you could see about porting the number to Google Voice. I have some friends that do this with their prepaid phones. Google Voice auto-redirects any calls from their “permanent” number to their current carrier’s assigned number. Google voice also transcribes all of their voicemails and will text the contents. I think there’s a few other neat benefits. I’m planning on doing something similar when I get out of my current contract with Verizon.</p>
<p>I have Google Voice accounts already. I spoke to a co-worker about porting landlines and he’s heard that a lot of people have lost their phone numbers in the process. It goes poof and there’s nobody at Google to try to get it resolved.</p>
<p>The path would have to be landline -> mobile phone -> Google Voice. The danger in using a free service is that you lose your phone number. I can just use my home number on my phone and tell people to call another Google Voice number if they want to reach someone.</p>
<p>I think that the markets would like Summers. I don’t think that they’d like Geithner and hopefully President Obama knows about the national ambivalence about Geithner. I don’t know much about the rest on the short and medium lists. I personally don’t know why Bernanke should be replaced unless he wants to leave. I don’t think that his successor is going to be much different. It seems that Fed Reserve heads don’t really have a ton of options as to policy given the structural problems that we have in our economy.</p>
<p>“Such certainty is puzzling: there is no evidence President Barack Obama sees Ms Yellen as a shoo-in. Nor does his likely shortlist – which includes two former Treasury secretaries, Larry Summers and Tim Geithner; and a former vice-chairman of the Fed, Donald Kohn – suggest Ms Yellen as the inescapable choice. Each is an impressive name, as are possible outsiders such as Stanley Fischer, governor of the Bank of Israel (who holds dual nationality). Mr Obama has a deep bench from which to choose.”</p>
<p>[Larry</a> Summers has an edge in the race to head the Federal Reserve - FT.com](<a href=“Subscribe to read | Financial Times”>Subscribe to read | Financial Times)</p>
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<p>Summer is a complete jackass who is not liked by many people. He is abrasive and the one thing you have to do is work well with other big egos at the fed. I think Summers would be a disaster. I think Geithner would be a good choice. Despite constant criticism it turns out he has done a pretty good job at Treasury.</p>
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<p>I didn’t say that people would like him; rather the markets.</p>
<p>Samsung talks about their 14 nm FinFets that should tapeout in 2014Q1. It’s a strange beast with 14 nm structures but no node shrink. It appears that they can’t do the shrink thing. BTW, this is Samsung, IBM and AMD. Intel is supposed to ramp 14 nm production in 2014 (which means that they ship in 2014). Samsung is doing tapeout in 2014 - I don’t know when they will actually be making chips. The stuff that seems easy for Intel is very hard for everyone else.</p>
<p>“In the end you will get a chip that looks like it was built on a 20nm process, is sized like it was built on a 20nm process, but has the dynamic range and power consumption of a 14nm chip. You can also order wafers built on the process much sooner than you could a full 14nm process, and reuse much of what you did to build the 20nm variants of your chips. Cost will obviously go up, it always does, but to what degree is still an open question, one unlikely to be publicly answered by any of the players in the near future.”</p>
<p>[Samsung</a> talks about their 14nm FinFET process | SemiAccurate](<a href=“http://semiaccurate.com/2013/05/28/samsung-talks-about-their-14nm-finfet-process/]Samsung”>Samsung talks about their 14nm FinFET process - SemiAccurate)</p>
<p>CS said San Fran housing up 22 percent. dstarke can sell his house in May and go to Dallas where housing prices are down 2%. dstarke ridin horses and ropin cattle? Why not.</p>
<p>I found out that my mother has a government phone. She apparently lost her own phone a while ago (and cancelled service) and got one of the low-income phones. I guess her income is low enough to qualify even though she’s a millionaire.</p>
<p>“If you meet certain low-income requirements, you can receive a free basic cell phone with a free calling plan of 250 minutes per month. You may also be eligible to receive a $10 per month broadband Internet connection and a low-cost desktop or laptop computer for your family.”</p>
<p>[Free</a> government cell phone ? USATODAY.com](<a href=“http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/kimkomando/story/2012-06-01/low-income-lifeline-plan/55315532/1]Free”>http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/kimkomando/story/2012-06-01/low-income-lifeline-plan/55315532/1)</p>
<p>That’s better than the plans that my wife, son and daughter have. Their plans cost them $8.33/month and give them about 35 minutes/month.</p>
<p>I had a look at the phone and it’s actually nice for a feature phone. I don’t know whether or not it had a camera. I assume that you could take the SIM card from it and place it in a better camera for Smartphone capability over WiFi.</p>
<p>[Millions</a> Improperly Claimed U.S. Phone Subsidies - WSJ.com](<a href=“http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323511804578296001368122888.html#articleTabs%3Darticle]Millions”>http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323511804578296001368122888.html#articleTabs%3Darticle)</p>
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HP rove 20 is about 12 pounds based on the CNET article. CNETs Dan Ackerman created a new category for the mega tablets and called it tabletop PCS. [Tabletop</a> PCs: The first wave | Reviews - Desktops - CNET Reviews](<a href=“http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-3118_7-57584869-74/tabletop-pcs-the-first-wave/]Tabletop”>CNET: Product reviews, advice, how-tos and the latest news)</p>
<p>If the mega tablet is a hit then the tabletop PCs may be a permanent accessory in the family room on top of the game table or coffee table. You can throw out all the board games cluttering up the room. The family instead plays with various apps like Chutes and Ladder, Scrabble, Clue, etc. With the Lenovo Horizon 27, you can play monopoly, poker or a game of air hockey.</p>
<p>BC, to explain a little bit on that Samsung article. For this particular process (companies do have many different processes and lines to manufacture their chips), they are doing front end (FEOL) with new 14 nm equipments and the back end (BEOL) with their old 20 nm process. To clarify, the front end is the lower level layers that form the active devices and silicon gates where the switches and logic circuits reside. The BEOL or back end are the interconnect where the wires are patterned and deposited to connect all those devices created by the front end.</p>
<p>So basically this is a hybrid process where the actual devices got smaller (shrink) but the metal interconnect above it do not. It saves time to market and money to develop this particular technology because they can reuse the same manufacturing equipments and know-how for part of the process. You get the power and speed advantages of finfet at 14nm but probably will not be able to do a very dense and very high end chip that requires more interconnect routing capability. Later on in time, they probably will have a new 14 nm BEOL that will go along with the 14 nm FEOL.</p>
<p>On a different topic, you can port to google voice number from a line by porting to t-mobile. You can get t-mobile sim kit for next to nothing and port any land line to the prepaid t-mobile service and quickly turn around and port the t-mobile number to google voice. I have done this several times without any problem, you just need to know your 4 digit pin of your land line account. Also I use obihai box to host my google voice number on their voip service. Basically, with this method, I have free landline through my internet service similar to many other voip services but totally free (after initial cost of the obihai box).</p>
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<p>I just went through the eligibility program for lifeline support and you have to make under $15K to qualify (if you’re the only person in the household). I would think that my mother’s social security and pension income would easily exceed that but I should check. Their income calculation does not include investment income and she has significant amounts of that. Perhaps they assume that people with low salary/social security/pension income don’t have investment income.</p>
<p>I will check with my sisters on this to see if she’s really eligible. She said that she filled out a form and had to put income information on it but I don’t know if she understood all of the things that she put into the form.</p>