When $6 Million a Year Isn’t Enough

By Robert Frank

Nothing shines a light on the personal finances of the wealthy quite like divorce. Consider the acrimonious de-merger of billionaire value-fund manager Charles Brandes and Linda Brandes.
The couple divorced in 2005, after she accused him of keeping a “lady in waiting” and he accused her of losing interest in him. According to a detailed account of the divorce by Peter Rowe in the The San Diego Union-Tribune, the couple lived extra-large both before and after their split.
Consider:
* The couple owned six homes–including a $4 million home in Rancho Santa Fe and a penthouse in Manhattan–and had two more under construction. The total value of the homes was more than $40 million.
* At one home, Ms. Brandes began a landscape renovation that cost $1,365,130, not including tile work.
* Mr. Brandes owned 10 Ferraris (valued at more than $4.4 million) and an “extremely long driveway” to race sports cars, dirt bikes and ATVs.
* She had gambling bills of as much as $30,000 a month.
* Mr. Brandes paid Elton John somewhere from $1 million to $1.5 million to perform at his wedding when he remarried in 2006. He paid Christina Aguilera $1 million to perform at a Halloween party.

http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2011/01/25/when-6-million-a-year-isnt-enough/

What If Your BlackBerry Ran Android

Whoa, whoa, whoa. This latest BlackBerry rumor comes courtesy of BGR.com and it sounds so crazy that it just… might… work.
In the interest of not overly nerding up the story, the basic gist is that the upcoming BlackBerry PlayBook tablet—which we learned about back in September of last year—runs a new (for BlackBerry) operating system called QNX. Moving forward, BlackBerry phones will eventually run the same QNX operating system, too.
In the interest of making QNX backwards-compatible with applications built for current-generation and older BlackBerry phones, the new operating system will contain what's known as a "virtual machine." It's basically software capable of running older applications as though they're running on different hardware—in this case, older BlackBerry handsets.
Well apparently one of the virtual machines, or VMs, that BlackBerry's considering building into its QNX operating system is known as Dalvik. And wouldn't you know it, Dalvik is the same virtual machine used by the Android operating system. According to BGR.com:

"Here is the big news: we have been told RIM is very much considering the Dalvik virtual machine, and we ultimately expect the company to chose Dalvik. If that sounds familiar to you, it's because it's the same VM that the Android OS uses, and it would allow RIM's PlayBook and other QNX devices to run just about any application built for the Android platform.

There are various approaches to this situation — one where RIM uses the open source Dalvik VM and does not involve Google, and another (incredible) scenario where RIM and Google might reach an agreement (basically 'certify' the device/platform) that would provide official support to Android apps on RIM's QNX-based OS, and would feature the Android Market, Google's Gmail, Maps, and other apps."

This sounds too simple and too good to be true, but imagine the implications.

Read more: http://techland.time.com/2011/01/26/what-if-your-blackberry-ran-android-apps-it-might-happen/#ixzz1CDDjMsmA

The Fall of Wintel and the Rise of Armdroid

by James Allworth  |
Many people are complaining that this year's Consumer Electronics Show was a bore, but blogger Horace Dediu has a much more interesting spin on it.

This year's show, Dediu argues, marks the end of the PC-era: it's finally being disrupted. The basic concept of disruption is that a low-end offering (in this case, tablets) emerges to displace existing solution (PCs). The reason this takes place is that the current solution has improved to such an extent that it provides more performance than a majority of users able to usefully employ.

This means that the iPad and its many clones were not really the main story of the show. The main story — which almost nobody covered — was that this year's CES marks the beginning of the end for Microsoft and Intel.
This transition has been a long time coming in the PC industry. Ironically enough, both of these two big players have seen the writing on the wall for almost a decade. But as is so often the case, incumbents find it immensely hard to disrupt themselves.

 http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/01/the_fall_of_wintel_and_the_ris.html