Posts by El Limerino

Investors bullish on report HP will acquire McAfee

Rehashed Rumours R Us

Sheesh -- this used to be the rumor about HP buying Symantec. Now it's McAfee. Anything to generate options volume in a slow market... expect a new rumor next week. Maybe it'll be HP to buy Apple. Or EMC. Or Tommy's (Sandwich) Joynt in San Francisco.

Paris... because she always knows what she's bagging.

Mobile calls to get much cheaper - probably

Finally...

... a mobile phone issue where the US does it better. I just ported my phone number from AT&T to T-Mobile in 4 hours. Called T-Mobile with the number, AT&T account code and password. That's it.

Greenpeace fears clouds will turn earth brown

Losers

And of course, IT is responsible for less than 6% of all CO2 emissions -- so really zeroing in on a key problem with this, er... report. Almost seems like a desperate PR attempt to draft the iPad launch. Shurely some mistake?

If you want to fix global warming, work on convincing the public to eat fewer burgers. Agriculture is the single largest greenhouse gas emitter, by a very long way. Just has far less PR value.

F'in losers.

SpinVox consumer service croaks

Bugger

I really liked their service -- always worked well. I didn't care how they did it, only that it worked well and reliably. Didn't get the message, tho.

US comp-boffins claim fix for multicore 'concurrency bugs'

Er...

Always amazed at what profs think makes for a viable start-up company.

Carrier apathy depresses Google Phone outlook

Shocked and surprised

My my -- Google has been taught that marketing -- the thing that engineers think they know how to do, but in reality have no clue about -- might actually be important when it comes to a consumer device!

Welcome to the real world. Next up: having one business (say, advertising) constantly bankroll hugely cash-burning badly thought-out other parts of your business can't work forever.

Silicon Valley's biggest winners and losers in 2008

Ignorance is bliss

A classic case of using numbers without understanding what they mean.

HP "employment" didn't rise (it didn't hire lots of new people) -- it bought EDS, which means it just has more people now. No new employment created, and actually quite a lot of folks lost their jobs as a result.

Symantec didn't "lose" $6Bn -- it is in fact a cash machine, generating more than $1.2Bn in cash every quarter. The loss is entirely on paper, an effect of how the beancounters deal with goodwill (the difference between book value of an acquisition and what you actually pay for it).

Nevertheless, it does indicate that Symantec has overpaid for its acquisitions. Clearly, it did not wring out the anticipated value inherent in the price paid. Otherwise there would be no goodwill to write off. But, surely not as good a bullet point for a story in the Merc.

Paris, because she understands the importance of real money.