nokia makes a comeback?

there is always endless hype around the iPhone and apple’s various offerings and samsung has the hottest mobile of the moment. but nokia should never be counted out. nokia’s stock price is up more than 100% since october 2012 when it hovered around the 2 dollar range. the bbc reports that nokia sold more than 14 M handsets. It sold 4.4 million of its new lumia smartphone as well as 2.2 million symbian smartphones and 9.3 million of its inexpensive asha smartphones.

h.265 in 2013

video is the leading driver of data traffic on mobile networks. this number clocks in at 50% and sometimes hits 70%. 2013 will be a game changer for the entertainment and mobile industries. and perhaps will alleviate some of the ongoing headaches of ISPs.

with the introduction of the mpeg dash specification and the h.265 codec. mpeg dash should solve a lot of headaches for compressing video for various data rates so that companies such as netflix, which has been known to encode 100s of files to accomodate the various connection speeds of their customers, can compress 1 for multiple bitrates. h.265 will halve video files sizes of h.264 video. the h.265 codec uses hevc (high efficiencey video coding) that is more efficient than avc and provides a space saving of 50% with higher resolutions.

Samsung Galaxy SIII LTE a hit in Germany

the lte version of the samsung galaxy s3 was released late november 2012 in germany. since then carriers have had a hard time keeping the new phone in stock. we took stock of this (no pun intended) over the holiday shopping season, visiting various electronic shops such as saturn while also cruising by free standing carrier shops for vodafone, debitel and t-mobile. we were only able to find the phone at a t-mobile phone. the lte version of the s3 comes with 2 gb of RAM (an increase by 500MB from the version released over the summer). both versions have the 16GB and 32GB internal speicherplatz (as it is called in deutschland). samsung has announced that a 64GB version is coming soon.

samsung galaxy s 3 lte

whose to blame for the connecticut murders

the white house is blaming the nra. the nra –that’s the national rifle association for those clueless ones, is blaming hollywood and computer gaming companies. then there are various people who are most likely affiliated with the nra (charleton heston would be proud) who think ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people.’ then there’s this thing in the u.s. called the constitution and the second amendment. so are all these conversations merely media chatter. because as every american knows, this section of the constitution is not getting deleted. the only action that the u.s. government can take on the second amendment is to curve it.

the bigger question might be, why did lanza’s parent have multiple guns in their home? why weren’t they locked up? should his mother be blamed for her own death? isn’t that like blaming the victim? we at a blog about whatever are anti-gun on a personal basis. but we sometimes wax philosophical about the whole thing. if someone is truely nuts he (or she) would grab a knife and off a lot of folks, like what kids do in the uk. if the government controls all the guns whose to say something like what is happening in syria could happen in the u.s. are the loose gun laws in the united states and canada the reason that neither country has been conquered by a dictator? is violent american culture to blame?

democrats don’t need to do anything for the u.s. black community

the black community in the u.s. has unemployment rates not seen since the depression era. but this did not stop african americans from voting for barack obama and democrats in staggering numbers. in places like philly some wards reported obama winning 99% of the vote. so now that the DNC and the GOP know that the black community’s vote is 100% in the bag for the dems what’s the point in even making promises even if they weren’t planning on keeping them anyway?

cnn in the bag for the obama administration

cnn in the bag for the obama administration

the obama amdinistration supressed an attack by iran. according to cnn (aka the clinton news network), last week “Two Iranian Su-25 fighter jets fired on an unarmed U.S. Air Force Predator drone in the Persian Gulf last week.” unfortunately cnn and the other networks also supressed this news.

cnn poll

cnn poll

mitt romney, whose had an uphill battle since he declared his second run for the presidency. people are suspicious of his connections to the mormon church, as many americans think it’s a cult. romney, as a moderate republican with questionable conservative credentials, the GOP had a hard time embracing him during the primaries. but this time around he was able to make it through the primaries without having to spend much of his own fortune. in 2008 he spent somewhere around 50M–but don’t quote us on that figure. we can only confirm that it was a lot.

the first presidential bate of the 2012 handily goes to mitt romney, according to a snap poll take by cnn (aka the clinton news channel), 60% of americans said mitt romney won.

tom hardy the next movie star

is tom hardy the next movie star. while his turn as bane in ‘the dark knight rises’ was better in the trailer than in the actual film. he did have his moments. but unfortunately the filmmakers sold the character out in the last 30 minutes in the film.

while the film ‘lawless’ will be a wash for hardy, it’s clear that
mad max’ will attract a lot of attention. perhaps ‘this means war’ was an indication of what hardy has to offer. a lot of promise but perhaps not the chops to sustain an entire film.

tom hardy as bane in the dark knight rises

i feel lucky

just started reading the book i feel lucky which chronicles life at google from 1999 – 2005ish. yeah this book came out last year. but since it’s packed with stuff on marissa mayer–new ceo of the trainwreck that is yahoo, we thought it might be worth a read. why? because the book was published in 2011 so it’s probably a bit more honest about who marissa mayer really is and could provide insight into her leadership capabilities and sort out whether or not being the ex-girlfriend of larry page helped or hindered her ascent at google.

at the moment we are on page 104. and can see that marissa mayer analyzes stuff from multiple angles and tries to anticipate what angles others might proffer. while larry page and sergey (whose last name i can never remember) are able to make snap decisions based on gut instincts. and say things like ‘that sucks’ or ‘i think you need to go back to the drawing board.’ or something along those lines. so our question is does mayer suffer from the female gene which john kerry also has? you know, the one whereby one has to overthink stuff and asks for loads of input out of fear of making the wrong decision?

john mccain during 2008 presidential election

john mccain talks about the media and politicans and how he made the mistake of being too accessible to the u.s. media.