IGLD, IGLD …
Shares of company Internet Gold-Golden Lines (IGLD) grown in the past 9 days at 42%. An excellent result? Yes, but the company’s shares still have potential. In my view, the target of IGLD - $ 14.
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Industry Name Percent Change (1 year) What’s interesting? Summary: Bad news or very bad news? U.S. home prices fell 10.7 percent in January, and the S&P Case-Shiller Home Price Index of 20 cities saw the steepest decline in the index’s two-decade history. Worst-hit were Las Vegas and Miami, both reporting 19.3 % drops, as the regions are still paying the price for rampant speculation and overbuilding during the boom years. Those cities and 14 others, including Phoenix, San Diego, and Detroit, posted record lows. The trade group said sales rose 2.9 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.03 million units — the biggest increase in a year. But the median existing sales price in February fell to $195,900, the largest year-over-year drop on records that go back to 1999. To be or not to be? or To buy or not to buy? Bear Stearns was founded in 1923 and is headquartered in New York. 85 years. Friday (14 march) closing price of $30 and its year-ago level of $150. On Sunday J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. said it would buy Bear for $ 236 million ($ 2 for share). On Monday shares of Bear Stearns collapsed 84% to $4.81. Indeed, Joseph Lewis, one of Bear Stearns’ largest shareholders, told CNBC on Monday that J.P. Morgan’s offer was “derisory.” The currency-trading billionaire owns almost 10% of the brokerage firm, having built a stake since September when the shares were trading at more than $100. Today shares of Bear Stearns up to $ 5.91 With the introduction of only two new devices in Steve Job’s annual keynote at Macworld, the Apple TV and iPhone, I was a little disappointed when I realized that I probably won’t be able to use either products anytime soon. With speculations of the iPhone arriving in Canada no earlier than Q4 2007 and the lack of TV show or movie support in Canada’s iTunes store, I was pretty sure that I wasn’t going to be making any purchases from Apple anytime soon. That was until I read this. Well, I asked an Apple rep working the Macworld floor and he was very quick to assure me that any video content that iTunes can play can be played on the Apple TV, it’s not restricted only to content bought at the iTunes Store. That’s good news for anyone who prefers alternate sources for video content. – David Watanabe I didn’t use iTunes to organize my video library; I just leave them in my Movies folder. Heck, I didn’t even know you could (I’ve always thought it was restricted to purchased content from the iTunes store). As soon as I read that the Apple TV could play any video content that iTunes could play, I started importing video files that I’ve collected but I encountered a problem. It turns out that despite the Quicktime integration with iTunes, you could only import certain video file types such as MOV and MP4. You’re not allowed to import AVI files. After a little research, I found an easy and fast solution to the problem without any encoding steps required (but you do require QuickTime Pro). Here’s a quick break down of how to import AVI files onto iTunes: Voila, your AVI videos are now on iTunes and you can potentially play the file on Apple TV (assuming that the guy David asked was telling the truth). If you have troubles playing AVI or WMV files, download and install a codec pack (Quicktime component files). So if you were like me or my friend, Smaran where you thought the Apple TV was obsolete because you weren’t living in the US, you might want to reconsider. The only thing that’s holding me back now is the price. Update: Turns out I’m wrong with this one. This method of enabling XviD/DivX support requires access to the QuickTime components. There’s a good chance Apple won’t include the components required to play DivX and XviD files in the Apple TV. This gets me wondering again, what is the Apple TV good for in Canada or anywhere else that doesn’t have video support in the iTunes store? Update 2: I wanted to confirm this and so I called Apple Canada. They confirmed that only MPEG-4 and H.264 file formats will be recognized by the Apple TV. Well, I guess I’m back at square one - I won’t be buying any of Apple’s new products anytime soon. Update: Though I never really expected this article to get dugg, I’ve been enlightened by readers on some interesting points. First of all, the Official Microsoft Mac Blog addresses a lot of my issues in their blog entry describing why A/V support hasn’t yet been implemented. Though it does lessen my frustration, it is still not enough for me to switch back to MSN Messenger for Mac. wackybit also gives a nice tutorial on how to remove the annoying “Never give out your password…” message that appears on every chat window. MSN Messenger for Mac does in fact support groups. As far as I know, there are three common ways of using MSN on Mac OSX: MSN Messenger for Mac, Adium, and iChat via Jabber. I, like many Apple users, have been a long time die-hard fan of Adium for instant messaging. Microsoft recently released a new version of MSN Messenger for Mac and although the improvements are nice, there is still much that could be worked on. First of all, the new MSN Messenger for Mac 6.0 comes upgraded with a variety of new features such as chatting with Yahoo! Messenger contacts, integrating iTunes with MSN to display the song being played in your personal message, searching through your history logs with spotlight and of course being bundled in Universal Binary allowing for full speed with PowerPC and Intel-based Macs. However, these features are hardly anything to be impressed about. Being the software giant that Microsoft is, you can’t help but think that they’re teasing you for holding back on some key features that regular PC users get. For example, there is still no video or audio chat support, no support for offline messages, and still no support for user groups except “online” and “offline”. Another feature that MSN Messenger for Mac lacks is the ability to show a little bit of the message history directly in the chat window. There are even some tiny nuisances that just makes the app down right annoying. For instance, the caution message that goes along the lines of “Never give out your password…” appears on every new chat window and there is no clear indication of where to turn it off. Although I do appreciate the security advice, I’m well aware of what I should and shouldn’t share while I chat and would very much like to turn this feature off. Furthermore, there is a slight lag when you try close your chat window via Apple + W. If you close the window with the red x in the top left hand corner, the window will close instantly. If you use keyboard shortcuts on the other hand, there is about a second lag which again is not that big of a deal but a nuisance that should have been fixed prior to release. Above all, what I’m really confused about is why it’s taking Microsoft so long to enable video/audio support for MSN Messenger for Mac. I mean, Skype seems to be getting it with their beta software so why can’t Microsoft? Because they’re incapable of? I don’t think so. It’s simply clear that Mac users are just not a priority for Microsoft. Perhaps when Apple gets a stronger market share will they start thinking about implementing all the great features that MSN Messenger has for PC users onto the Mac version. After over a month of problems, it seems like Dreamhost seems to finally have fixed many, if not all of their problems. Synergos Design is going much faster than before and each page loads up decently. Speaking of which, I’ve been able to get some more work back into Synergos after a couple weeks of delay. The site is coming along well and I hope to launch it and market the company within the next week. It’s much more easier to work on a site that can load up decently as I’m the kind of guy that refreshes the site every five minutes to debug it. I think all Dreamhost has to do is work on their bandwidth speeds for FTPs and we should be back to normal. Let’s just hope something like that never happens again. Apple has failed to get back to me since my last contact with them. I even gave them a call back and the customer rep said that she failed to get a hold of My Mac Dealer and that she was waiting for a call back since she left them a message. It’s been over a week and I have a good feeling that they’ve either dropped my case or that service rep completely forgot about it. I do have to admit that I was expecting something similar to happen. I’m going to take the advice that tech from My Mac Dealer said and wait out a month or two before submitting my MBP for a logic board swap. Nevertheless, there are some good news! My girlfriend has purchased a brand new MacBook! I’m very excited for her and even a little jealous since she has the 2.0 GHz with 1GB of ram. Her specs are better than mine since Apple silently upgraded all the MBP several weeks ago and mine lingers behind as a 1.83 GHz. I recommended that she get the extra ram as I’m planning to do the same; 512 MB has become a standard for a while now and I wouldn’t be surprised if Leopard, the next Mac operating system, was a lot more resource demanding. She also got the student deal with a free iPod nano. I have made my first converter! |
