"Success is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well."
The Canadian government wants a stealth snowmobile
Topic: Current Events
11:03 pm EDT, Aug 27, 2011
Why Canada needs a stealth snowmobile is a question best not asked. The solicitation laments that current snowmobile engines are too loud for “missions where covertness may be required,” but doesn’t bother to list any.
The Toronto Globe and Mail was all over this Canadian angle, quoting approvingly from the New York Times that “American policy makers might learn a thing or two from Canada’s patient, hysteria-free pruning.”
“But it isn’t just spending cuts that dug Canada out of debt trouble,” added the Globe, Canada’s newspaper of record. “Tax reform, including the contentious introduction of the goods and services tax in 1991, provided Ottawa with a surge of revenue, without hitting up wage earners and businesses.”
"We believe Apple is looking to merge iOS (iPhones/iPads) with OS X (Macs) into a single platform for apps and cloud services starting in 2012-13," Jefferies writes. "Our preliminary view is that Apple can use a 32-bit ARM architecture to address the vast majority of the OS X ecosystem's needs in 2012-13 except for high-end professional devices. When 64-bit ARM is available in 2016, we believe Apple will have a single OS and hardware architecture."
While the iPad 2 uses the Apple A5 chip with a dual-core ARM processor, Jefferies speculates that "Apple is ready to start sampling the A6 quad-core app processor and will be the first such multi-device platform capable of PC-like strength."
Jefferies predicts the iPad 3 will launch with the A6 chip in Q1 2012, while an A6-powered iPhone will launch next summer. The MacBook Air will get the A6 in the second half of 2012 or in 2013, but the higher-powered MacBook Pro laptops and Mac desktops will stick with 64-bit Intel chips until 2016, the analyst firm says. 64-bit chips allow greater use of memory and are useful for "computationally-intensive programs like Adobe's Creative Suite."
While the U.S. remains mired in debt and slogs through a subpar economic recovery, Canada is moving ahead steadily. Its unemployment rate peaked at a little over 8.5% and is now 7.4%, and there were no bank bailouts. Real GDP growth is expected to be roughly 3% this year. ..
Canada's government, for example, has grown smaller over the last 15 years. Total government spending as a share of the economy peaked at a little over 53% in 1993. Through a combination of spending cuts in the 1990s and spending restraint during the 2000s, it declined to a little under 40% of GDP by 2008. (It's currently about 44% due to the recession.)
Reductions in government spending allowed for balanced budgets and the retiring of debt. Federal debt as a share of the Canadian economy was almost halved from nearly 80% to a little over 40% over the same period. --
Unsteady Forklift Smashes $1 Million Worth of Wine, and a Nation Mourns
Topic: Current Events
9:44 pm EDT, Jul 23, 2011
This is one spill that's won't be rubbed out easily. That's because this was no bottom-shelf wine. 462 cases of Australian wine, each bottle valued at $185 Australian dollars (about $200), fell 20 feet off a forklift as it was being loaded onto a ship Thursday.
Only one case of the 2010 Mollydooker Velvet Glove shiraz survived the drop, with the other 461 – a total of 5,532 bottles of the primo vino – smashing onto the Adelaide wharf. The loss totals more than AUD$1 million for Australian winemaker Sparky Marquis.
“It was like a murder scene. There was red everywhere," Marquis said.
Video: Climb onboard for Rhys Millen's 2011 Pikes Peak run
Topic: Movies
5:03 pm EDT, Jun 29, 2011
Rhys Millen put in a heroic effort at the 2011 Pikes Peak International Hill Climb. The brakes on his Hyundai-powered RMR PM580 decided to give up before he did, which makes his 10:09.242 that much more amazing. Are you curious what it would be like to drive that beast up the Colorado mountain? You're in luck, because Rhys and his team slapped a few cameras on the car.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- QE2 is just about done. But the Federal Reserve will still be buying massive amounts of long-term Treasuries. In fact, the Fed's purchases over the next year will likely be at least $300 billion. That's half the size of QE2 -- even if QE3 never takes place.
Think of it as QE2.5.
While the Fed's efforts to pump about $600 billion of new cash into the economy over the last eight months comes to an end this week, the program, known as quantitative easing or QE2 for short, was not the only way the central bank was an active buyer of Treasuries.
Video: Camaro leaves the premises in hairy Grand-Am crash at Road America
Topic: Cars and Trucks
4:05 pm EDT, Jun 26, 2011
During the weekend's Grand-Am Rolex Sports Car race at Road America, Günter Shaldach radioed his crew to report what he called "a brake issue." Shortly after that, as Shaldach's CoolTV Chevrolet Camaro was hurtling toward turn one behind Joe Foster's Florida.com Mazda RX-8, he locked up at full tilt, and plowed into the Mazda. Then it got really ugly. Shaldach continued straight through the gravel trap and tire barriers, then flew over the course fence into the outside world.
Fellow team driver Oliver Gavin later said Shaldach had pushed the brake pedal and it went to the floor, then everything simply locked up. The airborne red blur in the pic above is Shaldach's leaping Camaro, the trail of dust on the right is the Mazda. Thankfully, Shaldach got out of the car and walked back up to the track on his own.
On May 25, U.S. businessman Charles Hubbs made the short trek to Hong Kong from his office just outside Guangzhou, a city in Guangdong province in southeastern China that is known for good reason as the manufacturing workshop of the world. For the 64-year-old native of Louisiana, it was a trip that may have marked the beginning of the end of his successful 22-year run as a China-based exporter of medical supplies.
Hubbs was going to listen to a pitch from the American ambassador in Cambodia, Carol Rodley, and the president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Phnom Penh. Their aim was simple: to get foreign investors, particularly those already with operations in China, to consider setting up shop in Cambodia. Hubbs was all ears. To hear him tell it, the price of labor is on the brink of making his firm, Guangzhou Fortunique, which supplies some of the U.S.'s biggest health care companies, uncompetitive. "We've seen our wage costs in China go up nearly 50% in the last two years alone," he says. "It's harder to keep workers on now, and it's more expensive to attract new ones. It's gotten to the point where I'm actively looking for alternatives. I think I'll be out of here entirely in a couple of years."
