That is undoubtedly a - perhaps important - factor driving psychology at present, but in all seriousness this is due to a widespread inability to understand the abstract subtleties of the modern money creation process, even in the financial community, I’m sorry to say.

The way you tend to think of it is like this: somebody gives you £1,000=Wohooo, you’re rich, time to spend, spend, spend.

But this is not how the wildly extravagant sums for central bank money printing frequently bandied about in the media work. Instead they are products of double entry accounting. The correct analogy is that you go to the bank and borrow £1,000. You now have plenty of cash but also a corresponding debt; your net wealth is unchanged and if you are suddenly feeling flush it is because you are a financial dunce, that the bank should never have lent money to in the first place.

In fact all money in the modern world comes into existence as debt, which is the basic if misunderstood fact underlying much of the more hysterical goldbug rhetoric in widespread circulation.

I go to the bank and borrow £1,000. The cash is - to put it in sensationalist terms - created out of thin air by the Bank of England. The double entry is as follows:

Me: + Cash, -debt to HSBC
HSBC: +Outstanding Loan to me, -debt to BoE for cash advance
BoE: +Loan to HSBC, -IOU in the till/increase in bank notes in circulation (a Central Bank liability).

At this stage the plusses and minuses all cancel each other out and no wealth whatsoever has been created. That only occurs if I am able to somehow generate a positive return with the cash from the loan and/or I repay the loan with interest, in which case that is wealth created for the bank and its shareholders.

However, if I default on the loan, the cash I received that was created by double entry is lost in the real world because HSBC’s liability to the BoE is not cancelled. To be clear, the lending bank is putting its capital on the line to guarantee the money created out of thin air, that then correspondingly vanishes from the real world in the event of default.

Unfortunately, pursuant to the most recent financial crisis it emerged that banks en masse had lent vast amounts of money to large numbers of financial morons, exposing themselves as individually and institutionally incompetent in the process. As a consequence banks’ capital has been largely wiped out, even in those jurisdictions where accounting regulations have been altered to keep up appearances,

The policy response so far has been to go into full blown ostrich mode, and flood the system with more debt in the hope that the market will somehow save us through a mechanism as yet to be divined.

However, for those here that believe ‘long term’ stock market investment is the business, it is worth noting that on an inflation adjusted basis the notional FTSE (/UK) All Stocks Index didn’t regain its 1820s peak until 1999 and we all know what happened after that

Rest assured that what is driving the price of gold higher is speculators (read investment institutions) in the fine global financial markets, flush with cash that Central Banks are lavishing on the aforementioned captains of finance, in an almost certainly vain attempt to fight powerful deflationary forces.

However, you have in fact manifested the modest impact this is having on the real economy by indirectly speculating that something inflationary is afoot. Alas while inflation expectations are important in the short and medium term, in the long term as Keynes astutely observed we’re all dead.

Somewhat related:




Source

Funnily enought there were some comments out from the Leader just a few days ago; he said Intel didn't rate USB 3 so he wasn't a fan either.

You touch on a point I think is worth expanding upon here:

One of the computer related topics that crops up all the time is effective data backup. I am a big believer in a multi-tiered approach but given one of the few certainties in life is that hard disks will fail at some point, I believe Raid arrays should be a requisite part of this; they are highly effective and relatively cheap and simple to set up if planned in advance.

In practice that planning merely requires buying a computer cased in something that has plenty of physical space for hard disks (a minimum of 4, preferably 5+ for added flexibility) and a motherboard with onboard Raid and plenty of SATA ports to connect your hard disks to. Even the latter is not strictly necessary since you can buy cheap and cheerful raid cards that won’t deliver top notch performance but will give you a string of SATA ports.

Certainly most off the shelf Dells, PC World specials, etc will fail to meet this requirement. But so will all iMacs. Mac Pros start get into territory where you can rig something half decent together but they certainly also cost a pretty penny, and I have a feeling you are tied in on the hardware side.

And Apple aficionados will hopefully note that whilst on this subject I have diplomatically refrained from delving into the Time Capsule debacle.

OT Chris – I always thought you were an html programmer

Surely the Supremes and the Four Tops.

Rock on.

For a bit of fun there is also an OS X skin for Ubuntu:





Article and instructions

I find it interesting that amid all the techno talk in this thread so little has actually been said about what you want to do with these laptops.

Personally the answer is a lot. I want to do spreadsheets, run databases, certain windows applications, remote desktop sessions, web browsing, mail & messaging, photo stuff, maybe Illustrator, etc, and much of it at the same time.

For these reasons I have recently freshly installed Ubuntu Linux on my Dell Precision (workstation replacement) monster laptop. Not only is this now generally light years faster than under Windows XP, but Linux has what is for me an invaluable feature that allows for multiple concurrent desktops that can be switched with a mouse click or a hot key sequence. I find this a massive productivity advantage getting close to replicating my dual monitor desktop environment.

But the speed increase is also very, very impressive with Linux. For example I dug out an old Toshiba Tecra laptop a few months ago I think I paid around £3,500 for in 2001; Pentium III, 512mb ram, and a very nice screen. It was probably designed for Windows 98, was a little slow with Windows 2000 and unusable with XP, but is now happily running Ubuntu 10.10, and is fast and responsive and again a joy to use with the excellent screen.

If you are about to scrap your existing laptops you have nothing whatsoever to lose by trying Ubuntu to see if you like it, either just by booting from the CD or installing it on the hard disk. On the other hand if you simply like to buy shiny new gadgets, knock yourself out.

Try this: http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/Download.php

The controls initially look somewhat daunting but this is simply because it is highly flexible and powerful, for example allowing you to rename based on EXIF data. Well worth spending a little time trying to get to grips with.

Hard to say without more info but if it is a usb device there are a few obvious thing you might try:

First disconnect the usb cable and restart the pc. Then plug in the NAS usb lead and switch it on. Does the system detect it now?

If not try to uninstall all software associated with the NAS drive. Google for the “Revo Uninstaller” (free version) and use that. Then restart the PC and access “device manager” for example just by typing it into help; look for any and all references to the NAS under drives, storage controllers, USB controllers, etc and uninstall. Restart the computer and reinstall the original software or if possible the latest version from the manufacturers site as per the installation instructions.

Good luck!