random musings...

First i titled “Are we dumber than our ancestors?” but i myself got offended by that, hence here is new title like Monsters Vs Aliens. The way we advancing our innovation and technology are slowed down comparatively our grand father days. But definitely we are advancing a lot in equality and humanity front, which was lacked a lot in olden days. The innovation is slowed down because we are too fear to take risks, afraid of failures, lot of scrutiny, lack of competition, settle with less and too much concern about privacy, human right violation, animal cruelty etc. The 20 th century is golden era of innovation and technology advancement mainly because of Great Britain ’s eager to expand their kingdom, German’s aggressiveness and finally cold war between U.S.A and U.S.S.R. At the end of cold war, we did rest our innovative mind and concentrated on peace and poverty abolishment. But we should not settle with a fake peace and show-off poverty abolishment stance. We nee...

As per my view, recession ends when oil price jumped to $45, we are not seeing price cooling off and second indication is gold price spiked above $900 and third indication is consistent home price/sales upward trend and forth indication is stock market keep on climbing north plus today’s important last hour bull ride. We are exactly at bottom and market positioned itself to stabilize and ready for right side of U within next couple of months. Now major worry is inflation and oil price, one of prediction is oil price would touch to $300 with in a year, that’s roughly $8.00 per gallon. This prediction should not happen but never know. It was a excellent job of President Obama and his team, President Obama said at yesterday’s 60 mins that “Now--there's a potential silver-- silver lining, which may be that things are so accelerated now, the modern economy is so intertwined and-- and wired, that things happen really fast-- for ill, but things may recover faster than they have in the pas...

As a Java developers, we don't care about Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) happening in market place, but today's IBM's acquisition talk of Sun Microsystems was really important. There are lot of questions about future of Java? it's open source status?? JCP process??? etc...etc...But as per my opinion, IBM did more than Sun did for Java, in fact IBM's developer's works has more document than Sun. IBM will not kill Java technology but questions regarding open source and JCP are unknowns for now. My opinion is, JCP should be continued and it was very transparent to all. The main question is, what will happen to SUN JVM? Since IBM has it's own JVM, what is the point of continuing with SUN JVM. The issue with JVM is, the working application will not work if we change JVMs. For example, the working application from JBoss will not work in WebSphere, because the former is Sun JVM implementation and later is IBM JVM implementation. The main issues are the way d...

All eyes are towards Wall Street, how it is going to trade tomorrow and coming days are crucial for these gloomy economic times. Today’s Fed Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke’s optimistic interview he was very positive than before, he reaffirmed the recession could end in 2009, which is good news and all investors are closely watching this development. Actually now part of new tactics from Obama administration is, top officials are coming out and spreading positive news around media, which is good and they have to do it. One more good news is, from OPEC that they are going to keep the output. The stability of oil price is really important during the pre-recovery period. Everybody thought OPEC going to cut production, but they exercised common sense at these tough times. There are two key events changes the fundamentals of recession, A) stability of retail sales B) blame game and pointing finger started. Why these are really important, retail sales is really important because people start s...

Definitely bulls are out there but hid to come out because of continuous sober news from recession hit market place. Yesterday’s a simple memo from top bank official made the bulls out of hidden places. The bull market extended to world markets and today also. So the million dollar question is, are we out of woods? In my opinion, no we are not yet. Still some companies want to cut cost during Q2 and Q3 of 2009 and housing market is not finding enough buyers to stabilize market and foreclosure not yet completely done. The top level, first line of investment professionals are out of woods for now, this is exactly happen when we are at bottom or close to bottom. First indication was, oil price didn’t touch psychological barrier of below $30 and bullish FOREX dollar value and gold price/U.S Treasury bond value up. These all are indication of bullish mood slowly returning to market. U.S employer’s cut almost 4.4 million jobs, if we use 20 jobs save 1 million calculation...

It took me two days to completely understand the essence of U2’s new album “No Line on the Horizon”. This is the U2’s ultimate album of their entire career. This album is higher than their most successful album “Achtung Baby”. The specialty of this album is a kind of mesmerism, excellent background music, high stretch Bono’s vocal and heartbreaking lyrics. Some songs (moment of Surrender, fez of born) are literally taking us to space, mood elevating. The anti-poverty band U2 and Bono’s central theme is no line on the horizon then why need line between countries. He is switching between east to west song sequence is brilliant to reveal his stance on peace, anti-war and anti-poverty. No line on the horizon First song of album, high stretch Bono’s vocal is a difference here. The started Eno’s magic with sound was made this song as a title song. Rock style is something different. Magnificent A typical U2 song. Probably hardcore U2 fans going to like this song much. Moment of Surrender  Wha...

Good way to start March madness. Now it is time to buy and read “ Even Buffet isn’t perfect ”, he is one of the reasons to sink DOW below 7000 mark. AIG is other reason for today’s melt down, they lost 60 billion dollars during Q4 2008 , which means they lost each day 652 million dollars (I did count on thanksgiving/xmas holidays and 92 day per Q4 calculation). This is really hurts, now AIG is 77% government organization, U.S tax payers has significant amount of stake on AIG. Actually Credit Default Swap is unregulated $60-40 trillion industry hence losses from AIG are not surprising and more to come. The U.S government should concentrate on AIG and Citigroup for now, they are the one required special attention. DOW now trades below 7000 which is 1997 level and S&P trades at 1996 level. The positive point of view is, we have once in a life time opportunity to buy stocks at 11 years backdated price. Imagine that we are in a time machine and that takes us to 1997 to buy as much as po...

Now we are all talking about when would U.S and world economy turns around, some predictions are end of 2009, some 2010 and so on. What would happen economy never rebounds? In other words what will happen if we are heading to prolong global wide recession for next 10 years. Here are some thoughts 1. Protectionism Obviously protectionism supporter’s voice grows stronger than ever. World Trade Organization may not have control over world’s trade. All nations lean towards protectionism and they choose their own way of doing business with greater consideration of local job creations and localized political gains. 2. Poverty Poverty rate grows at exponential rate in Africa and some parts of Asia , which leads civil wars and change of world map. The charity work will virtually stop. 3. Cultural Changes This prolong recession will help some cultural changes in some countries. To run family with normal means, all of the family members have to work. Man always wins bread concept wil...