Goldman Sachs has record profit this year?

If the news is to be believed, Goldman Sachs had a record profit this ‘year’ and will be paying out the largest bonuses ever. To quote the original article:

“…it seemed inconceivable that a firm owing the US government $10bn would be looking to break all-time records in 2009.”

I’m completely disgusted especially since I heard this on NPR right before they start talking about how businesses in general are reducing retirement benefits for their workers. Ironically, the reason for Goldman Sachs’ huge windfall is the poor economy. The government has to use financial institutions to move bailout money to companies, even though the same places help cause the original problem in the first place. And of course, now the Goldman Sachs paid their ‘TARP’ money back, they can set their bonus level and executive pay to whatever they want.

Something is fundementally wrong with the business model in the US. The power of these financial institutions are only getting bigger as the whole economy weakens.

Palm Pre ‘hard close shutoff’ fix…

One hardware issue seen with the new pre is that if you close the keyboard ‘firmly’ it seems to jiggle the battery enough that the disruption in power causes the pre to shutdown completely. One person’s fix was to put a piece of paper between the pre and the battery so its tighter. Another was to put folded electrical tape there.

Here’s a third idea. There is a tab in the pre when you open the back that you pull to get the battery out. If you fold that in half and replace the battery, you can still use the tab to remove the battery, and the folded tab is enough to ‘lodge’ the battery tighter in place so the shut-off doesn’t happen.

I have this idea…

I have this idea on what application I want to write for the Palm Pre. It’d be fine for the other smartphones too, but I have a pre, so that’s what I want to write for. But the damn Mojo (Palm Pre Developers Kit) is still unavailable for public consumption…

Just had to complain… open up Palm… we’re waiting…

Palm Pre calendar

For the last weekend, I couldn’t see my calendar on my pre, even though it was alerting me to my events. Finally figured out that the problem was I had too many calendars. My work Google calendar lists 20 calendars in total, and home has about 8… so the display was just over-whelmed. On the pre I just told it not to display most of the calendars in the ‘all calendar view’ and everything works fine now. Of course, then I removed calendars from my other accounts that I don’t care about anymore either.

Palm Pre… day one

So I stood in line for a palm pre… two actually. My current plan has the 1500 family with unlimited data plan already, and the phones my wife and I use contract was ready for new phones, so we were good to go for new phones.

Decided to go to Sprint store rather then risk BestBuy not having enough. Good choice as it turns out. 150 in stock at Sprint, and like 2 at BestBuy. With over 200 people that I know about showing up at the small store I went to, it must have been good for Sprint to see that volume move. (Though now I have to deal with the mail-in rebate, which is lame)

Palm pre itself is fairly easy to use. Comments made about the sharp edge when opening the pre is no joke, but easy to deal with. The OS is interesting and while learning the ins-and-outs of it, I think I now get the ‘palm’ and ’sprint’ business plan with them trying to recover.

First palm… this is a good phone, and I can see why some say its an attempt at going after the iPhone. But really what palm is doing is what Google should have done with their G-Phone… it integrates with websites easily. All my mail accounts (yahoo, google, corporate which is basically google for me) are available. All my contacts (not yahoo for some reason, but that’s fine with me) are there, faceboook integrates easily, etc. WiFi makes it fast at home and (likely) at work on Monday. Really, this is a better google-phone. They didn’t really try to one-up the iPhone by ofering what it has and more. (iPhone is just an extension of the Apple hardware suite. Google-phone is an extension of the Google/web suite) Which makes me think that Palm wants to be bought by Google. If anything, this phone proves it. (Yeah, its not android, but there is no reason the ’software/website’ integration that webOS makes easy couldn’t be done in Android. Though I can’t wait to see the Mojo API and start making my own webOS apps.)

Now Sprint. The service they give now is better, and starting with the palm pre gives people less reason to go to AT&T or T-Mobile… so this reduces the stream of people leaving. But what I noticed is that the plans are much cheaper on Sprint compared to AT&T and T-Mobile. I had a 20% discount on Sprint from working at Thomson. When I left, I was able to keep that discount, so I never left Sprint. Now with a CostCo membership, you can get a 23% discount. Anyone can get that. What the palm pre release on Sprint does is get Sprint’s name out there again… which will also make their discounts more known. Palm will be releasing on other providers by 2010, so Sprint’s discounts will make them more palatable now.

After a few more days, I’ll post about using the phone itself. Right now, webkit works like it does everywhere else. The fact that speed-dial is replaced by universal search will take some getting used to. (Or figuring out how to set speed-dial) Tweed (3rd party twitter app) is ‘okay’ on the phone, and the New York Times app is a good start. Of course, the task list I’ve already started using… and I await the day that it syncs to Google tasks. (Oh man, that would be awesome!)

More later…