Cadence

The blog of Jurie van Dyk

Latest posts

Warren Buffet – Are the Glory Days Over?

Buffet or BS?

Warren Buffet is often called the “Oracle of Omaha.” When he speaks, the world listens. When he buys, markets move. I have tremendous respect for Warren Buffet. He’s obviously a very smart man and a great investor, but could it be that his time has past?

His company, Berkshire Hathaway (BSH), didn’t do well in the stock market during the crisis. BSH crashed along with the rest of the stock market. It’s my opinion that a professional investor’s portfolio should do well in an up-trending market and even better in a down-trending market—but that’s just my opinion and philosophy.

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Using Technology to open new Worlds in Sci-fi & Real Life

BREAKTHROUGH AWARDS 2011

AEROSPACE » AUTOMOTIVE » COMMUNICATIONS » CONSUMER TECH » ENERGY EXPLORATION » MATERIALs SCIENCE » medicine » ROBOTICS
Logan Ward, Logan Ward

Innovator

JAMES CAMERON

Brilliant idea

USING TECHNOLOGY TO OPEN NEW WORLDS IN SCI-FI AND REAL LIFE

THE VISIONARY

James Cameron with one of the 3D camera rigs he created to film Avatar. The director plans to take a version of the rig on a dive to Challenger Deep—36,000 feet below the surface of the ocean—in a piloted submersible he also helped to engineer.

WHEN MOST PEOPLE THINK OF JAMES CAMERON,

They first think of his movies: Aliens, Titanic, Avatar, The Terminator. Then they might reflect on how his films have pushed major technological advances in the entertainment industry, from the state-of-the-art visual effects that created the water tentacle in The Abyss to the high-tech SimulCam system used to film Avatar. But for Cameron, Hollywood is just the beginning. His innovations are also expanding human knowledge by exploring new frontiers. “Exploring is, in many ways, my first love,” the director says. He has led an expedition to probe the wreck of the German battleship Bismarck and helped design 3D cameras for NASA’s next Mars rover. “We let Jim shoot pictures with our cameras in Mars orbit,” says Michael Ravine, advanced projects manager at Malin Space Science Systems. “When I brought him the 12-foot-long prints, he halted a meeting and came out to sweep the floor so we had a big enough area to unroll them. He was asking questions about collapsed lava tubes while all these movie folks stood around, wondering what was going on.” Cameron isn’t a scientist—”I think of myself more as a science groupie,” he says—but there’s no telling how many have been inspired by his work. POPULAR MECHANICS correspondent Anne Thompson spoke with Cameron about his plans to dive to Challenger Deep, the real obstacle to colonizing Mars and how humanity should grapple with its greatest challenge.

How to Back-up Your Facebook Data

How to Back Up Your Facebook Data

For many, Facebook pages contain lots of valuable information and media files. Here’s how to back up all of it.

By Jill Duffy

Facebook users get shaken up every few weeks with some kind of threat, whether it’s regarding privacy issues from within the social network itself, or outside sources—like the now-rescinded threat from the hacker group Anonymous to destroy Facebook entirely on November 5. If your photos, friends’ contact information, and other important data are wrapped up in your Facebook account and nowhere else, it’s not a bad idea to download a copy of all of it (and back up your other data, too) for safe keeping.

The site does permit users to download a Zip file of all their Facebook data, including wall photos, profile pictures, and messages, but I doubt many users have gone through the process, so few know how it actually works—what happens, how long it takes, and what steps are required.

The company makes it sound easy enough, but in typical Facebook fashion, it’s a lot trickier than you’d think. It took me about 80 minutes, start to finish, although most of that time (an hour) was spent waiting for an e-mail for verification. The verification test surprisingly took me two attempts before I passed. It’s not a foolproof test by any means, though, as you’ll see in this step-by-step walkthrough of the process.

On the one hand, it seems like Facebook made a good-faith effort at security. It makes sense that it should be tough to download all your data from the site that hosts more user-uploaded personal information than perhaps any other. On the other hand, the verification process is very odd, and it wouldn’t be hard for someone who’s not you to pass it if he or she did a little poking around online.

Before you try to back up your Facebook photos, message history, and information, make sure you know what you’re getting into, and set aside enough time to do it.

1. Find the Link. Go to Account (upper right). Select Account Settings. Find and click the little link at the bottom that reads “Download a copy of your Facebook data” (why doesn’t it appear in bold like the other important items on the page?). Click Start My Archive.

2. Wait (and Wait) for an E-mail. Wait for an e-mail letting you know the archive has been created. For me, this step took about an hour (although the Facebook account I used to test didn’t have very much in it, so it could take longer for others). Next, you have to verify your identity through a multi-step process. Part 1 makes sense to me, but the second part seemed strange.

3. Verify, Part 1. Click the link in the email that you received. It will take you to a Facebook page, where you have to reenter your password. Then the process really gets going…

4. Verify, Part 2. Before you can download your file, Facebook requires that you verify that you are who you say you are by identifying five of your friends tagged in photos, which is a lot harder than it sounds if you have friends who tag pictures of dogs, babies, cartoons, as themselves, or if they’re wearing a snorkel mask.

For each chance, two photos appear, and you have to figure out who is tagged in them (it’s the same person in both images) from a multiple-choice list. Take a look at the image above to see what I mean. Even if I knew that person, I don’t know that I could correctly identify her from those photos. You get two opportunities to skip a set of images if you can’t identify the person from a multiple choice list.

5. What Happens if You Fail? The fail screen basically says, “Sorry, no dice. Try again some other time or contact support.” I went back to my e-mail, clicked the link again, and was able to take another stab at identifying people immediately. The second time, I passed, so I then downloaded a Zip file with all of my data.

What’s Actually Included?

But what kind of information do you actually get?

My package was split into two main folders: HTML and Photos. The photos folder contained more subfolders: Profile Pictures and Wall Photos. The HTML folder contained ten files: eight HTML files, one CSS file, and one tiny gif of a lock icon.

Making Sense of the Files

The HTML files only contain your information—not the whole Facebook look and feel—so if you’re unfamiliar with HTML, be prepared for them to look kind of flat and uninteresting. The CSS file applies some styling to the page, like fonts, but not much, as you can see from the image. You can see in my “messages” HTML file (top) all the messages I’ve sent and received through both direct messaging and instant messaging (Chat). On the bottom you can see all my wall posts and all my friends’ comments. Notice how every entry has the date and time record included, too. The photos that download with your files appear to be the original size that you uploaded.

It takes effort, but once you’re finished, it’s comforting to know that all the information you’ve posted or received is at hand.

 

Farewell Steve Jobs 1955-2011

Steve Jobs 1955 – 2011

 

It is a very sad day, not only has Apple lost a visionary creative genius, but the world has lost and amazing human being.

 

Personally Steve Jobs’s life has been an inspiration, and his memory will live on forever.

 

Quoted as “the greatest inventor since Thomas Edison” only time will really teach us the impact that Steve Jobs has really made.

 

Thanks you Steve for making a dent in the universe.

 

The Steve Jobs we know.

by Walt Mossberg:

That Steve Jobs was a genius, a giant influence on multiple industries and billions of lives, has been written many times since he retired as Apple’s CEO in August. He was a historical figure on the scale of a Thomas Edison or a Henry Ford, and set the mold for many other corporate leaders in many other industries.

He did what a CEO should: Hired and inspired great people; managed for the long term, not the quarter or the short-term stock price; made big bets and took big risks. He insisted on the highest product quality and on building things to delight and empower actual users, not intermediaries like corporate IT directors or wireless carriers. And he could sell. Man, he could sell.

As he liked to say, he lived at the intersection of technology and liberal arts.

But there was a more personal side of Steve Jobs, of course, and I was fortunate enough to see a bit of it, because I spent hours in conversation with him, over the 14 years he ran Apple. Since I am a product reviewer, and not a news reporter charged with covering the company’s business, he felt a bit more comfortable talking to me about things he might not have said to most other journalists.

Even in his death, I won’t violate the privacy of those conversations. But here are a few stories that illustrate the man as I knew him.

The Phone Calls

I never knew Steve when he was first at Apple. I wasn’t covering technology then. And I only met him once, briefly, between his stints at the company. But, within days of his return, in 1997, he began calling my house, on Sunday nights, for four or five straight weekends. As a veteran reporter, I understood that part of this was an attempt to flatter me, to get me on the side of a teetering company whose products I had once recommended, but had, more recently, advised readers to avoid.

Yet there was more to the calls than that. They turned into marathon, 90-minute, wide-ranging, off-the-record discussions that revealed to me the stunning breadth of the man. One minute he’d be talking about sweeping ideas for the digital revolution. The next about why Apple’s current products were awful, and how a color, or angle, or curve, or icon was embarrassing.

After the second such call, my wife became annoyed at the intrusion he was making in our weekend. I didn’t.

Later, he’d sometimes call to complain about some reviews, or parts of reviews — though, in truth, I felt very comfortable recommending most of his products for the average, non-techie consumers at whom I aim my columns. (That may have been because they were his target, too.) I knew he would be complaining because he’d start every call by saying “Hi, Walt. I’m not calling to complain about today’s column, but I have some comments, if that’s okay.” I usually disagreed with his comments, but that was okay, too.

The Product Unveilings

Sometimes, not always, he’d invite me in to see certain big products before he unveiled them to the world. He may have done the same with other journalists. We’d meet in a giant boardroom, with just a few of his aides present, and he’d insist — even in private — on covering the new gadgets with cloths and then uncovering them like the showman he was, a gleam in his eye and passion in his voice. We’d then often sit down for a long, long discussion of the present, the future, and general industry gossip.

I still remember the day he showed me the first iPod. I was amazed that a computer company would branch off into music players, but he explained, without giving any specifics away, that he saw Apple as a digital products company, not a computer company. It was the same with the iPhone, the iTunes music store, and later the iPad, which he asked me to his home to see, because he was too ill at the time to go to the office.

The Slides

To my knowledge, the only tech conference Steve Jobs regularly appeared at, the only event he didn’t somehow control, was our D: All Things Digital conference, where he appeared repeatedly for unrehearsed, onstage interviews. We had one rule that really bothered him: We never allowed slides, which were his main presentation tool.

One year, about an hour before his appearance, I was informed that he was backstage preparing dozens of slides, even though I had reminded him a week earlier of the no-slides policy. I asked two of his top aides to tell him he couldn’t use the slides, but they each said they couldn’t do it, that I had to. So, I went backstage and told him the slides were out. Famously prickly, he could have stormed out, refused to go on. And he did try to argue with me. But, when I insisted, he just said “Okay.” And he went on stage without them, and was, as usual, the audience’s favorite speaker.

Ice Water in Hell

For our fifth D conference, both Steve and his longtime rival, the brilliant Bill Gates, surprisingly agreed to a joint appearance, their first extended onstage joint interview ever. But it almost got derailed.

Earlier in the day, before Gates arrived, I did a solo onstage interview with Jobs, and asked him what it was like to be a major Windows developer, since Apple’s iTunes program was by then installed on hundreds of millions of Windows PCs.

He quipped: “It’s like giving a glass of ice water to someone in Hell.” When Gates later arrived and heard about the comment, he was, naturally, enraged, because my partner Kara Swisher and I had assured both men that we hoped to keep the joint session on a high plane.

In a pre-interview meeting, Gates said to Jobs: “So I guess I’m the representative from Hell.” Jobs merely handed Gates a cold bottle of water he was carrying. The tension was broken, and the interview was a triumph, with both men acting like statesmen. When it was over, the audience rose in a standing ovation, some of them in tears.

The Optimist

I have no way of knowing how Steve talked to his team during Apple’s darkest days in 1997 and 1998, when the company was on the brink and he was forced to turn to archrival Microsoft for a rescue. He certainly had a nasty, mercurial side to him, and I expect that, then and later, it emerged inside the company and in dealings with partners and vendors, who tell believable stories about how hard he was to deal with.

But I can honestly say that, in my many conversations with him, the dominant tone he struck was optimism and certainty, both for Apple and for the digital revolution as a whole. Even when he was telling me about his struggles to get the music industry to let him sell digital songs, or griping about competitors, at least in my presence, his tone was always marked by patience and a long-term view. This may have been for my benefit, knowing that I was a journalist, but it was striking nonetheless.

At times in our conversations, when I would criticize the decisions of record labels or phone carriers, he’d surprise me by forcefully disagreeing, explaining how the world looked from their point of view, how hard their jobs were in a time of digital disruption, and how they would come around.

This quality was on display when Apple opened its first retail store. It happened to be in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, near my home. He conducted a press tour for journalists, as proud of the store as a father is of his first child. I commented that, surely, there’d only be a few stores, and asked what Apple knew about retailing.

He looked at me like I was crazy, said there’d be many, many stores, and that the company had spent a year tweaking the layout of the stores, using a mockup at a secret location. I teased him by asking if he, personally, despite his hard duties as CEO, had approved tiny details like the translucency of the glass and the color of the wood.

He said he had, of course.

The Walk

After his liver transplant, while he was recuperating at home in Palo Alto, California, Steve invited me over to catch up on industry events that had transpired during his illness. It turned into a three-hour visit, punctuated by a walk to a nearby park that he insisted we take, despite my nervousness about his frail condition.

He explained that he walked each day, and that each day he set a farther goal for himself, and that, today, the neighborhood park was his goal. As we were walking and talking, he suddenly stopped, not looking well. I begged him to return to the house, noting that I didn’t know CPR and could visualize the headline: “Helpless Reporter Lets Steve Jobs Die on the Sidewalk.”

But he laughed, and refused, and, after a pause, kept heading for the park. We sat on a bench there, talking about life, our families, and our respective illnesses (I had had a heart attack some years earlier). He lectured me about staying healthy. And then we walked back.

Steve Jobs didn’t die that day, to my everlasting relief. But now he really is gone, much too young, and it is the world’s loss.

 

 

 

This Is News?

A short summery of what is wrong with the world.

Warning: Normally I try and keep my blog posts positive, informing and lets hope educational, but every now and then a man needs to rant a little.

 

I’m not one for reading or watching a lot of news. Not that I’m an ignorant person, everything but, I’ve just learned not to spend so much time consuming: well nothingness. If it does not influence my life directly, or I don’t have any influence over it, why spend the time consuming it. I would rather go surfing or walk my dog.

 

Lunch time I was more bored than usual and thought I would have a look on the website News24. You know, catch up on what’s happening in the world.

 

The following seems to be very important news because it is on the homepage:

 

Ashton Kutcher has unfollowed his wife, Demi Moore, on social networking site Twitter.

US website RadarOnline reported on Friday that Ashton had unfollowed Demi – who uses the twitter handle @mrskutcher – and that she too unfollowed him after following each other on the site for years. Demi however changed her mind and started following Ashton again shortly after.

At the time of writing, Ashton Kutcher was still not following Demi Moore on Twitter.

 

Fuck me people. ”This is news?” That’s just time that I’m never getting back.
No wonder the world is going to shit.

Necessary Endings

Necessary Endings

I learned something very interesting this week.  Roses in the wild never grow to its fullest potential and for that reason need to be systematically pruned.

The gardener constantly keeps a close eye on the rose bush, selecting careful the buds with the most potential and cuts away the rest.  Only by this intentional systematic removal of lesser buds and branches can the rose bush reach its fullest potential.

Business seems to imitate life. If you’ve watched Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares, you will notice that the first thing Gordon does when saving an unsuccessful restaurant is to eliminate items from the menu.  More options are seldom the answer to success.  He will only choose dishes that the chef excels at and build a small menu around that.  Most often the small, but excellent menu not only performs much better with the customers, but is also much easier to sustain.

Similarly in the biggest corporate turnaround the world has ever seen, Steve Jobs (at his return to Apple) reduced their product line – up to only 4 products. “We are going to spend all our effort and resources on only these 4 products, but these products will be the best in the world.”

As of this writing, Apple is the second most profitable company in the world, narrowly trailing Exxon Mobile, an oil company.  I think that Apple would become the most profitable company in the world before the end of 2012.

Both Ramsey and Jobs realizes the key to success. In order to achieve great success we need to eliminate, rather then accumulate. Bruce Lee famously said: “The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity.”

There has always been a wrongful notion in business that great success comes from a great idea. The truth is, ideas are cheap and plentiful, and most often it is not the lack of ideas that leads to mediocrity, but too many ideas being acted upon. Chasing after too many ideas will more than often turn out in many “half arsed products”. Resources squandered chasing after good results but never achieving greatness.

The first step to becoming great is not a to-do-list, but a not-to-do list, most often you need to prune away branches in your business to make way for the few to flourish. In business as in life, we need to prune away the good enough, to make way for the great.

From Empowerment To Entitlement: The Corruption Of The Self-Help Movement

 

I follow Larry’s work and particularly enjoyed this blog post by him.  The biggest problem we face today is not monetary, it is entitlement.

From Empowerment To Entitlement: The Corruption Of The Self-Help Movement

by Larry Winget

I doubt there is anyone who can make an intelligent argument against the fact that we have become the society with the biggest sense of entitlement in the history of our world. I have written much about the problems of entitlement in each of my bestselling books and have talked about it for years in blogs and social media and on various television shows. We are the entitlement generation. In fact, the bulk of all government spending is for a series of programs called Entitlement Programs.

People actually believe they are owed a living while doing nothing on their own to make sure they are employed or have any savings or that their bills are paid. That’s why we have 5th generation welfare recipients. Folks believe they are owed retirement income, even though they spent every dime they had their entire working lives with little or no thought about what would happen when they were finally put out to pasture or if their company went out of business. People think they are owed unending unemployment benefits, when they did nothing to put away any money for a rainy day, or do any planning, or even make much of an effort to become re-employed. And the evidence shows that many didn’t even put out the work they were being paid to do to stay employed in the first place.  Most of the 99 Weekers never bother to even look for a job until the last few weeks before their unemployment runs out.  Many believe they are owed complete healthcare regardless of the fact that they destroyed their own health by smoking or overeating, usually both. You fall in a fountain because you weren’t paying attention and that’s a perfect reason to sue the mall where the fountain sits. Or spill coffee in your lap in the car and it’s the restaurants fault, not your own clumsy fault. Or have a facebook relationship and when one breaks it off, sue them for a broken heart. Or sue the bartender because you drank too much and had a car accident. Some folks wear the latest fashions and have big screen televisions, drive a new car and eat every meal at a restaurant and yet have never bothered to save a dime and then blame others that they are broke.  Bottom line: People believe they are entitled to compensation for consequences they brought on themselves due to their irresponsible lifestyle and stupid choices.

How did this happen? How did we reach this point? My parent’s generation didn’t think this way. Yet they raised the baby boomers, who created this mess. And now the baby boomers have raised a generation with an even bigger sense of entitlement. I just finished reading the New York Times Bestseller “World War Z” by Max Brooks. I ran across this great line: “You can blame the politicians, the businessmen, the generals, the “machine,” but really, if you’re looking to blame someone, blame me. I’m the American system, I’m the machine. That’s the price of living in a democracy; we all gotta take the rap. Nice to be able to say, “Hey, don’t look at me, it’s not my fault.” Well, it is. It is my fault, and the fault of everyone of my generation.”

I couldn’t agree more. It’s everyone’s own fault. I could sum up all that I teach, speak and write about in one sentence: Life is your own damn fault.

But again the question is: What happened to the baby boomers to move them from being self-sufficient like their parents to becoming so self-indulgent? Answer: The self-help movement.  Before the baby boomers, there wasn’t a self-help movement, there was only the “help yourself” movement.  It was the baby boomers that created and went like lemmings into the ocean to the Positive Thinking rallies. We created bestsellers of Norman Vincent Peale’s books, “If You Can Think It, You Can Do It” and “The Power Of Positive Thinking. and Napoleon Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich.” And we took a pots and pans salesman named Zig Ziglar and turned him into the king of motivational speakers. Then we created an entire industry of “motivational speakers” like Tony Robbins, Jim Rohn, Earl Nightingale and yes, even ME! Some added a religious element and we ended up with Robert Schuller and now, Joel Osteen. Then we pushed the whole concept even farther and ended up with stupid books like The Secret and The Law of Attraction and folks started following abominations with a messiah-complex like James Ray. (Say what you like about what I do for a living, but no one ever died as a result of attending one of my seminars. And I won’t make you walk on fire or sit in a sweat lodge. I’ll just ask you to look in an imaginary mirror and take responsibility for the life you have created.  If you die from doing that, your reflection must be pretty bad!)

So is the self-help industry a bad thing? And what about Zig and Tony and Norman Vincent Peale and Earl Nightingale and the thousands of other motivation speakers yelling positive platitudes from stages all over the world – are they bad?  No. I like much of what the motivational guys do. Not all of it for sure, but much of it.  So let’s make it clear, I am NOT blaming the messenger. And I am not blaming the message. The message itself isn’t bad at all, but we have bastardized the message and ended up producing the exact opposite result of the original intent. The original intent was to get people to realize that they had the power, all within themselves, to change their results. It was meant to give them the confidence to go out and work and use their talents to create success, happiness and prosperity.  It was a message meant to empower people to becoming all that they had the potential of becoming.  That message of empowerment is important and necessary and powerful. However, that message has sadly, been twisted and corrupted and in many cases, lost. We turned empowerment into entitlement.

Zig Ziglar said “You can be whatever you want to be, do whatever you want to do and have whatever you want to have as long as your believe in yourself.” That statement was meant to empower people to have confidence in themselves and to believe in their abilities to work and achieve their goals and aspirations. And we messed it up. It might have been our laziness that messed it up, or our ever-declining work ethic, or our sliding scale of morality, or the gray area of integrity that runs rampant among workers, corporations, Wall Street and government. Add to that our greed and unhealthy desire for more and more and MORE. Maybe it’s our demand for more sensationalism via our insatiable need to be entertained. Or our fascination with the shallow, inane and ridiculous.  But whatever happened, it corrupted the entire self-help movement. Somehow the self-help movement shifted from SELF, which was Zig’s (and the others) original message, to HELP.

What’s the solution? Stop thinking about HELP and turn back to your SELF.  Stop blaming others. Stop looking to others to save you. Don’t be a follower of the ideas of any sole individual, group, party or movement. Read, study, think and WORK. Rely on your brain and your brawn to create the life you want.

Again, one more time; my message: Life if your own damn fault. Your thoughts, your words and your actions created it. Your thoughts, your words and your actions can change it. Take responsibility for both the mess you have created and the success you have created. Don’t blame others. Don’t look to anyone else to come to the rescue. You do it. Not, you CAN do it. But just, YOU DO IT. Now. Today. Not Tomorrow.

(This post was originally published for Larry Wingets column at www.DebtKid.com)

 

There Is @#$% In The Drinking Water!



Should you be drinking tap water?

I’ve gotten used to people rolling there eyes and shaking there heads, thinking that I am the biggest snob, for refusing to drink tap water.

It is not difficult to understand why most people would not think twice about drinking tap water, after all, grand-dad drank tap water all his life and he lived to be 110. “ And if you don’t believe that there is nothing wrong with South African tap water, ‘Google it ’ ”.

Our government has gone out of there way to publish documents stating that according to their standards, tap water is perfectly safe, or rather not unsafe to drink – I think I just spotted the problem. According to their standards.

Where I can fully agree that our tap water is perfectly clean when it comes to germs and bacteria, those are not the only things harmful to our human bodies. Those things are the fast killers, I’m more worried about the slow killers in the water.

Not too long ago the same debate raged in Grahamstown.

Although a panel of Rhodes University professors and a packed gallery containing some equally learned experts did not see eye to eye on claims that the water was tainted by heavy metal toxins, they all agreed, more tests needed to be done.

The decision to debate the quality of the town’s water comes hot on the heels of a Dispatch report earlier on allegedly dangerous levels of toxic heavy metals, coming from a tap at a local ostrich export abattoir.

Unacceptable levels of aluminium, mercury, cadmium, arsenic and coliforms were allegedly detected regularly in the water by a South African Bureau of Standards accredited laboratory, conducting tests for the Integrated Meat Processors of the Eastern Cape (Impec)

Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 10 March 2010

I first became aware of this issue when a water specialist did a heavy metals test at a clients house that I was invited to. The results of the test prompted me to get my own reverse osmosis water purification home system.

The real clincher came 6 months later when it was time to clean and replace the filters. I was interested to see the state of the filters after it has been filtering only drinking water for 6 months. Well, let me show you the pictures.

Now, I’m no doctor or marine biologist, but you don’t have to be able to split atoms to know that that amount of rusting heavy metals is not good for you. Because the filters only filtered drinking water, it is safe to assume that everything you see captured in the filter and the water in the bucket would have gone through my kidneys and liver. My body would have had to fight those toxins to try and minimize the impact it would have on my body. Imagine how much of your imune system is taken up fighting things that we unknowingly put in our bodies. It is no wonder that the cancer rate among younger people have become so abnormally high. How many years do you think your kidneys can put up with that kind of abuse?

I struggled for a day to get the rust stains off my hands, and have not drank tap water since.

If you climb into a bath of water and you can smell the chemicals used to clean the water, or run a tap and you can see that the water is discoloured, what makes us think that it is good enough to nourish your body?

In closing, and probably the ultimate jinx a person could bring onto themselves (I did think it important enough to mention though) I have not drank tap water for 5 years, I also have not had flu or have needed any antibiotix for the last 5 years, where before it was a once a year accurance, at least. Are these related? I would like to think so, but who knows.

The fact remains, we are ultimatly responsible for our own health, so think careful about the things that you expose your body to.


Apple goes to the mattresses

Apple Goes To The Mattresses

by Jason Snell, Macworld.com Jun 9, 2011 12:15 am

Something about Apple’s presentation at its 2011 Worldwide Developer Conference in June reminded me of mob movies. No, I’m not likening Steve Jobs to the Godfather. But Apple’s keynote presentation addressed so many longstanding Apple weaknesses and took the company in so many ambitious new directions, that I was reminded of the relentlessness of movie tough guys.

Old business

In Martin Scorcese’s “GoodFellas,” there’s a scene that shows every member of a criminal job being found dead after the boss in charge decides they’re all liabilities that need to be liquidated, all while “Layla” plays on the soundtrack. (If you’re in a “Godfather” frame of mind, recall the bloodbath ordered by Michael Corleone during his godson’s baptism.) It’s a massive clearing out of old business, and we got a lot of that in this keynote. Except with very little blood.

 

Apple’s Scott Forstall kicked off its announcement of iOS 5, the new version of the software that runs iPhones and iPads, with the humble explanation that he only had time to detail ten new iOS features. But that list addressed almost every major sore spot we’ve found in the iOS in the past few years. Forstall whacked notifications, cut the tether that tied iOS devices to computers, and sent the outmoded SMS text-messaging system to sleep with the fishes.

Sitting next to me during the event was Macworld Senior Associate Editor Dan Moren, with whom I collaborate on our live coverage of Apple events. Dan turned to me during the iOS presentation and said, “Wow, they’re really knocking them down today.”

The iOS has been with us since the day the first iPhone shipped in 2007, and in the intervening years Apple has been furiously adding new features. With iOS 5 there’s still a lot that’s new, but it feels like the first time that Apple has doubled back to fix features that made sense back in 2007 but are clearly antiquated today.

The current system of push notifications (individual pop-up alerts and a stack on the home screen that’s dismissed when you unlock it) is a mess, but it’s been completely overhauled in iOS 5 with the introduction of Notification Center. Safari on the iPad now supports tabbed browsing. There’s finally a built-in to-do list, courtesy of the Reminders app. The Camera app finally lets you press a hardware button to take a picture. The list of fixes and re-thinks is remarkably long.

Head in the cloud

And I haven’t mentioned the biggest re-think of all: the latest reboot of Apple’s online service, iCloud. MobileMe wasn’t a bad product, though it always had a hard time competing with other web services that offered most of its functionality for free. But for Apple to settle all family business, it had to die.

When you set up an Android phone or one running HP’s WebOS, getting up and running is incredibly easy: enter in your user name and password. Your e-mail, contacts, and calendars are automatically configured, and if you’re replacing an old phone, all your old data is automatically restored. The iPhone and iPad experience was much more complicated, because Apple couldn’t count on MobileMe being there for every iPhone and iPad user—only the ones who paid $99 for the privilege.

With iCloud being free, everything changes. Not only will this allow Apple to stop asking you to plug in your iPhone to a Mac before you use it, but it makes set-up vastly simpler. You can put in your Apple ID and automatically gain access to your address book, browser bookmarks, e-mail, calendars, and the rest. It boots one of iOS’s longstanding weaknesses right out the door.

More importantly, deeply integrating iCloud into OS X and iOS means that it’s now part of the hardware/software synthesis that is at the core of Apple’s ability to build great products. I’m not sure Apple has ever understood what it means to be an online-services company, selling various online features off on the side of Apple’s core business. But iCloud isn’t going to be some ancillary part of Apple: it’s going to be everywhere, part of the experience of every iPhone, iPad, and Mac user.

Given Apple’s shaky history with online services (eWorld, iTools, .Mac, MobileMe), this might be cause for some serious concern. But I think iCloud will end up being a big success, specifically because it’s now front and center, rather than off to the side. There’s nowhere for it to hide; iCloud will be just as much a part of Apple’s products as the operating systems and the physical hardware. The iCloud experience will be subject to the same brutal scrutiny as all the other aspects of Apple’s product-creation process.

There might be some bumps along the way, but I believe Apple will get this right. In fact, Apple must get this right.

New business

We shouldn’t forget the Mac. Though a lot of people argue that most of Apple’s energy is devoted to the iOS these days, the fact is that the Mac continues to vastly outpace the rest of the PC market in terms of growth. And with OS X Lion—due in July—Apple is showing that it’s still innovating on the Mac.

There are the usual hundreds of new features in this latest OS X update. But there’s a quality to the changes that seems different from recent OS X updates. A lot of them are inspired by iOS, but with added complexity that require a dedicated computer, rather than a simpler device such as an iPad or iPhone.

There will be a lot of hand-wringing about the changes to the scrollbars and scrolling behaviors, the emphasis on multi-touch shortcuts, and the redesigned Mission Control system that replaces Exposé and Spaces and adds a few new spins of its own. There will be the usual hue and cry from people who will declare the UI changes a betrayal of the Mac and a sign that the apocalypse is upon us and only iPads and iPhones will survive it. Some criticism will probably be deserved, and presumably some of Apple’s radical gambits will have to be fixed or scaled back… while others shockingly succeed with little fight. Of course, it’s hard to tell which is which until regular people start using Lion.

But let’s set all those Lion interface changes aside for the moment. To me, the most intriguing new features in Lion are Auto-Save, Resume, and Versions.

All three of these features stem from Apple’s engineers asking if some common ways we use our computers actually make sense. (Spoiler alert: they don’t.)

Why keep hitting command-S to save your document? In Lion, the Save command vanishes—every document is always being saved. When you quit an app or try to shut down your Mac, why do you have to decide whether to save or not save every document you have open? In Lion, apps just shut down—and when they resume, all your files are still open just the way you left them.

Versions, like Time Machine, is an attempt by Apple to take geeky technology that’s been around for ages and bring it to regular computer users. In fact, you can think of Versions as a sort of Time Machine for your files: As your apps auto-save, they’re also keeping track of what’s been changed since the last time they auto-saved. If you regret that you deleted something yesterday, you can just roll back to yesterday, grab that something, and pull it forward. It’s an ambitious feature that will change the way most Mac users work, and I’m really excited about it.

This is the path Apple has chosen: It’s getting rid of its old liabilities and striking out in bold new business directions. Although Apple tends to settle old scores without shedding as much blood, it’s still an aggressive approach that even the Godfather would have understood.

[Jason Snell is Macworld's Editorial Director.]

 

 

 

Back To Paying In Gold & Silver

Back to gold and silver

by Robert Kiyosaki

Bad News For The Fed and IRS

This month, Utah became the first state in the country to legalize gold and silver coins as currency.

So what does this mean to you, me, the Fed, IRS, and the world? To understand the significance of Utah’s actions, you need to understand the definition of the word “currency.”

As strange as it may seem, governments determine what they think money is. For most of us, money or currency is the paper in our wallets. It only has value because governments have the power to declare paper to be money.

In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt made owning gold illegal. The president declared that money now was paper. The key to this scheme working, is the government only accepts its own “paper” as money. You cannot pay your taxes with gold or silver…only official government paper.

To make sure we only used “paper” the government imposed a very high capital gains tax of 28% on gold and silver. That means, if you bought gold or silver for let’s say $10 and it increased in value by $10, the government would tax you $2.80 for your gains, even if you held the gold or silver for several years.

A 28% tax is nearly 100% higher than long-term capital gains tax of 15% in the US. For example, if I bought a stock for $10, held it for a year, and sold it for $20, my tax would be $1.50 on my gains.

The reason Utah’s actions are significant is because Utah is taking on the Federal Reserve Bank, IRS, and Washington, D.C.

The Utah state government is bypassing the Fed and the Treasury by accepting gold and silver as money, for example, allowing taxpayers to pay their taxes in gold and silver.

Let me explain further. Let’s say I bought gold in the year 2000 for $300 an ounce. In 2011, with gold at $1500 an ounce, if gold is now treated as money instead of being treated as an investment, I do not have to pay that 28% capital gains tax to the US Treasury.

In this example, of $300 per ounce to $1500 per ounce, a gain of $1200, I do not need to pay 28% of $1200, or $336 per ounce, in taxes to the US Treasury. On 1000 ounces, using the same buy and sell numbers, that is a savings of $336,000 in taxes, or $336,000 staying in my pocket for me to use. Thank you Utah. Tom Wheelwright adds that the change by Utah does not mean that gold will now be treated as money by the Federal government. It should mean that Utah will not tax it when used as money. It will be years before the courts decide whether this change means a change in how gold and silver are taxed.

Not only does this challenge the Fed, IRS, and the US government, it makes gold and silver more valuable. Using gold and silver as money, rather than a taxable investment like stocks, bonds, and real estate, makes gold and silver more desirable, at least in Utah.

One reason there is such a high tax, 28% on gold and silver is simply because the Fed and the tax department do not want us to hold gold and silver. By holding gold and silver, we pull their phony dollars out circulation and mock their corrupt system of counterfeit money.

Utah is truly a story of David taking on Goliath. Minnesota followed Utah later this month, taking a step closer to make gold and silver legal money. North Carolina, Idaho, and at least nine other states have similar bills being drafted. A Republican lawmaker has introduced a bill in Congress to explore the option for the entire US.

If the 28% tax on gold and silver is repealed, you may see a massive rush to own more gold and silver. Repealing the 28% tax is like a 28% increase in value. More importantly, it means 28% more money for those who have been following COR.

In many ways, history is only repeating itself. After all, gold and silver, especially silver, has been real money for thousands of years.

Thank you for supporting COR.

Robert Kiyosaki

PS: I thank the people and state of Utah for taking the first step to dismantle the conspiracy of the rich. This is big.