WEB-LINK

Enlarge Julie Jacobson/AP

Mitt Romney waves to supporters as he arrives at a rally Friday in Las Vegas.

Julie Jacobson/AP

Mitt Romney waves to supporters as he arrives at a rally Friday in Las Vegas.

Mitt Romney’s Friday release of his 2011 tax return puts that issue back in the headlines just when it had slipped largely off many people’s radar screens.

Of course, it wasn’t exactly as though the other headlines the Republican presidential nominee has made of late were all that helpful to his presidential campaign. At this point, maybe his campaign has taken so many hits, the release of information showing he and his wife, Ann, paid a 14.1 percent effective rate in 2011 on $ 13.7 million of income and that their rate averaged 20.2 percent over a 20-year period can’t inflict much more harm.

There was something in Romney’s tax data on which both his allies and opponents could fixate. For instance, the Romneys donated more than $ 4 million to charity in 2011 but claimed only $ 2.25 million in donations.

That level of charity was lauded by supporters like Rep. Catherine McMorris Rogers, a member of the House leadership who, in a statement on the campaign’s website, said Romney’s donations “are to be admired.”

But drawing the attention of some critics was the explanation for why Romney didn’t claim all the charitable deductions he was entitled to under Internal Revenue Service rules.

Brad Malt, a lawyer who oversees Romney’s trust, said Romney’s effective tax rate would have come in lower if the former Massachusetts governor had claimed the entirety of his donations.

That would have been a problem because it would have conflicted with a statement Romney made earlier during the campaign that his effective tax rate had been at least 13 percent in each of the past 10 years.

So Romney paid more taxes than he had to. But that conflicted with another statement from earlier this year, when he said during a Republican primary debate: “I pay all the taxes legally required and not a dollar more.”

Enlarge AP

This handout image provided by the Romney campaign shows the front page of Mitt Romney’s 2011 tax return.

AP

This handout image provided by the Romney campaign shows the front page of Mitt Romney’s 2011 tax return.

At another point, he said during an ABC News interview that if he had paid more taxes than he owed, that would disqualify him from the presidency. His exact words: “I don’t pay more than are legally due and frankly if I had paid more than are legally due I don’t think I’d be qualified to become president.”

Despite that, he paid more taxes than he owed.

None of this bought him any respite from perhaps his biggest nemesis on his personal taxes — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Reid’s office issued a statement:

“The information released today reveals that Mitt Romney manipulated one of the only two years of tax returns he’s seen fit to show the American people — and then only to ‘conform’ with his public statements. That raises the question: what else in those returns has Romney manipulated? …

“It’s also galling to see the creative accounting Mitt Romney applied to his own tax returns only days after learning of his insulting comments that seniors, soldiers and hard-working parents don’t pay enough taxes.”

President Obama’s campaign piled on as well:

“Today’s release of Mitt Romney’s 2011 tax returns confirms what we already knew — that people like Mitt Romney pay a lower tax rate than many middle class families because of a set of complex loopholes and tax shelters only available to those at the top. Yet, Mitt Romney still wants to give multi-millionaires an additional $ 250,000 tax cut at the expense of middle class taxpayers who will see their taxes go up.”

It wasn’t just Democrats criticizing Romney on Friday after the release of his tax information. Alex Castellanos, a GOP strategist, was quoted by Politico.com’s Maggie Haberman thusly:

” ‘At first I thought this was an April Fool’s Joke,’ said Castellanos, who tweeted something to that effect at me earlier. ‘But it isn’t April. I can’t imagine that David Axelrod will now say, I’m glad Mitt put this issue behind him. This will drag Mitt’s taxes back into the debate. And there’s not many days left. I just can’t imagine why they would do this. There are 40 days left and you have now made more of them about Mitt’s taxes … you don’t serve a life sentence and then confess afterward. They’ve taken their beating on this (already). … I just don’t understand how a (being) “little pregnant” strategy (works).’ “

While some questioned the timing of the Romney tax dump, it wasn’t as though the Republican presidential nominee had much more time. Having filed with the IRS for an extension earlier this year, the Oct. 15 deadline was approaching. That’s one day before the second presidential debate. Putting the information out now could make it seem like old news by then.

U.S.

adminz

More Posts

It may be hard to believe now, but Crave’s Eric Mack suspects that we have seen the beginning of the end of Apple’s dominance.

I’m not sure even a little leather and beach time can save Apple.

(Credit: Eric Mack / CNET)

You wouldn’t know it from the sales numbers, the monstrous profits and the insidious hype, but the decline of iOS, the iPhone and perhaps even all of Apple 2.0 (the 21st century iteration) is now in progress.

This week’s Apple media event to introduce an iPhone 5 utterly devoid of any new innovations for the first time ever confirms to me something that I began to suspect at WWDC 2011 — the Cupertino juggernaut has reached its zenith and has since begun to coast back to earth (although very slowly, with the help of a parachute made of billions in cash). To put it more simply, Apple and the iPhone have jumped the shark.

If you aren’t familiar with the term, it’s derived from the fifth season premiere of Happy Days in which a be-leather jacketed Fonzie on water skis literally jumps over a shark. The Looney Tunes-esque moment marked a shift in the show that seemed to indicate the writers had run out of ideas and entered a period of creative decline.

In the case of Apple, I believe the shark-jumping moments came last year with the introduction of Siri and — to a lesser extent — iCloud. Both over-hyped features have failed to really catch fire in the revolutionary way we’ve come to expect from the company. In fact, Siri in particular flies in the face of the Jobsian mantra that “it just works.” Siri often gets it wrong and people talking to their iPhones hasn’t become the cultural meme it might have been.

Just as a water-skiing Henry Winkler wasn’t such a clear indication of the beginning of the end for Happy Days at the time, it’s taken some time for it to become clear that Apple has reached a similar point. But the iPhone 5 and rumored iPad Mini seem to confirm to me that Apple has shifted from creating and transforming markets to playing catch up in the spaces it once defined.

The iPhone 5 with its LTE and larger-screen upgrades is a clear response to the success of larger 4G Android phones, and a smaller iPad is recognition that Amazon’s Kindle (and perhaps Google’s Nexus 7) pose a threat.

I know how ridiculous this might sound. Apple is the most valuable company in history and as I write this it’s begun selling billions of dollars of iPhone 5s. But as my colleague Roger Cheng has been pointing out this week, the future of Apple suddenly seems a bit more uncertain.

Apple and the iPhone will be around for years to come, to be certain, but it seems that when Steve Jobs left the building, he took “one more thing” with him.

Look, Apple deserves credit. Tons of it, actually. The reason the iPhone 5 introduction didn’t wow many people is that Apple has basically perfected the smartphone, at least on the hardware side of things. All the iPhone 4S was lacking was LTE and little more physical heft. The only real improvement anyone has made on the iPad is to make a smaller and cheaper tablet, and that’s really more about reaching a different kind of customer than actually improving anything.

So Apple is the king. They’ve won on multiple fronts. But what’s next? This is Silicon Valley, where titans rise and fall faster than you can hop over a shark.

I’m certainly not counting Apple out. Maybe an Apple HDTV will prove me wrong in a few months, but I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that 2012 will come and go without a single game-changing announcement from the company.

Steve Jobs was a brilliant visionary. Tim Cook is a brilliant production guy, and man is that difference showing right now.

Happy Days continued on for five more seasons after Fonzie jumped the shark, often becoming a bizarre parody of itself centered around Winkler’s stardom. Scott Baio and Robin Williams were added to the cast in the second half of the show’s life to shake things up, but in the end it drifted into irrelevance and reruns.

I worry that Apple has already begun that drift, and I don’t foresee any new devices on the horizon with Baio or Williams-level gravitas to ensure Apple’s Happy Days continue.

Crave: gorgeous gadgets and other crushworthy stuff. – CNET

adminz

More Posts

Apple sold more iPhones, iPads and iPod touches during 2011 than it sold Mac computers over the past 28 years, according to new revelations from Apple analyst Horace Dediu of Asymco.

Apple during 2011 sold a total of 156 million devices running its iOS mobile operating system, Dediu wrote in an analysis Thursday. In contrast, Cupertino sold 122 million Mac OS X computers during its 28-year history.

Dediu on Thursday released a graph plotting each major computing product Apple has sold throughout its history (below). He was inspired to create the graph after reading statements Apple CEO Tim Cook made during an appearance at a Goldman Sachs investor conference earlier this week.

Cook admitted that even Apple was surprised by the staggering number of iPads it has sold to date — 55 million.

“This 55 is something no one would have guessed, including us,” Cook said during the speech. “To put it in context, it took us 22 years to sell 55 million Macs. It took us about 5 years to sell 22 million iPods, and it took us about 3 years to sell that many iPhones. And so, this thing is, as you said, it’s on a trajectory that’s off the charts.”

Dediu’s chart shows that Apple has, of course, sold more iPhones than any other product. Moreover, the iPhone looks poised to soon cross the milestone of 200 million units sold.

During the fourth quarter of 2011 alone, Apple shipped 37 million iPhones, a whopping 128 percent increase from the year before. Much of that growth was attributed to the launch of the iPhone 4S.

In total, Apple’s iOS mobile platform, which runs on iPhones, iPads and iPod touch devices, reached 316 million units sold at the end of 2011, Dediu said.

A Thursday report from iSuppli, meanwhile, found that sales of the iPhone 4S actually bit into sales of Apple’s iPad during the fourth quarter. But during that same Goldman Sachs conference, Cook said he doesn’t really care which product consumers are buying as long as they come from Apple.

[Image]

PCMag.com Cell Phones Product Guide

adminz

More Posts

The era of smartphones has officially arrived. More were shipped globally last year than client PCs for the first time ever, according to Canalys.

Vendors shipped 488 million smartphones in 2011 as compared with 415 million PCs, the market research firm said Friday in a report on country-level smartphone and PC shipment estimates for the year. The market shift was made all the more impressive by the fact that Canalys included tablets, no slouches in the growth department themselves, in its figures for PC shipments.

Smartphone shipments in 2011 grew by 62.7 percent compared with figures from the year before, while shipments of 159 million units in the fourth quarter of last year represented a 56.6 percent increase from the same period in 2010.

“Smartphone shipments overtaking those of client PCs should be seen as a significant milestone,” said Canalys analyst Chris Jones in a statement. “In the space of a few years, smartphones have grown from being a niche product segment at the high-end of the mobile phone market to becoming a truly mass-market proposition.”

Apple was the single leading smart phone vendor in 2011, enjoying record shipments of 37 million iPhones in the fourth quarter and just over 93 million for the full year. But Google’s Android operating system, used by multiple vendors in various handsets that together totaled 238 million smartphone shipments last year, owned the biggest chunk of the market with a 48.8 percent share.

Android phones grabbed better than half the smartphone market in the fourth quarter, when 81.9 million units running Google’s mobile operating system shipped for a 51.6 percent share of the market as measured by software platforms.

Apple’s share of the smartphone market in 2011 was 19.1 percent, equal to its market share as gauged by software platforms, since the iPhone maker is the sole user of its own iOS mobile operating system.

Symbian (80.1 million units shipped) was the third largest smartphone platform with 16.4 percent of the market, following by Research in Motion’s BlackBerry OS (51.4 million smartphones shipped, 10.5 percent of the market), bada (13.2 million units, 2.7 percent), Microsoft’s Windows Phone (6.8 million units, 1.4 percent), and all other smartphone operating systems (5.4 million units, 1.1 percent).

Client PC shipments also showed growth—to the tune of 14.8 percent from the previous year—but that was “padded” considerably by a whopping 274.2 percent increase in tablet shipments in 2011. Tablet makers (mainly Apple with its iPad) shipped 63.2 million units last year or 15 percent of all client PCs, according to Canalys.

For the full year, PC notebooks (209.6 million units shipped) and desktops (112.4 million units shipped) showed modest, single-digit growth from the year before. But netbooks felt the full brunt of the tablet explosion, with vendors shipping just 29.4 million netbooks in 2011, a 25.3 percent decrease from the year before.

Netbooks took an even bigger hit in the fourth quarter, to the tune of a 32.4 percent decrease in shipments as compared with the last quarter of 2010. Tablets, as they had the year before, really moved during the holiday quarter of 2011. Vendors shipped 26.5 million tablets in last year’s final quarter, a number that approached the 29.1 million desktop PCs shipped during the same period.

If new demand for tablets is putting a major squeeze on netbooks and perhaps even desktops, especially during major gift-giving periods, notebooks appear to be faring slightly better. Makers of notebooks shipped 57.9 million units during the holiday quarter, Canalys reported, an increase of 7.3 percent from the fourth quarter of 2010, and just a small dip in the 7.5 percent overall growth in notebook shipments for 2011 as a whole.

“In 2011 we saw a fall in demand for netbooks, and slowing demand for notebooks and desktops as a direct result of rising interest in pads,” Jones said. “But pads have had negligible impact on smartphone volumes and markets across the globe have seen persistent and substantial growth through 2011. “

PCMag.com Cell Phones Product Guide

adminz

More Posts

Cisco Connect Express app offers a hint of what to come in 2012: the ability to manage your network from a mobile device.

(Credit: Screenshot by Dong Ngo/CNET)

The wireless router is arguably the most important piece of computer equipment in your house since it connects the rest of your gadgets to one another and the Internet.

Now that we’re well into the new year, let’s look back at the top-five routers of 2011. These routers will stay relevant this year and maybe even beyond. They are a handful from among the many I reviewed last year that represent what consumers will find on the market.

The year 2011 was when true dual-band and the new 3-by-3 450Mbps ceiling speed became popular. The 450Mbps standard is practically the fastest that the existing 802.11n specification has to offer. All of the routers on this list are true dual-band and some of them also support the 3-by-3 standard. You’ll also find among them hints of features that are predicted to become popular in 2012.

Cisco Linksys E4200 v2
This is the latest wireless router from Cisco’s E-Series and it’s arguably the best router on the market, all things considered. Though it looks exactly the same as the previous version, the E4200 v2 is a completely different beast on the inside.

The router supports true dual-band with the 450Mbps speed available on both bands. It also comes with a much faster processor running at 1.2GHz, which offers excellent performance, especially for the built-in network storage feature. For the first time a router, when coupled with an external hard drive, is capable of offering storage throughput comparable with that of some dedicated NAS servers. The Linksys E4200 v2′s storage performance is about three or four times that of other routers with the same features.

On top of that, together with the E4200 v2, Cisco also released the first version of its Cisco Connect Express app that allows for managing the home network from a mobile device, such as an iPhone or iPad. Read the full review of the Cisco Linksys E4200 v2.

The original Cisco Linksys E4200
Despite the release of the second version, the original Linksys E4200 still makes a formidable router. It’s inferior to its successor only because it supports the 450Mbps speed only on the 5GHz band, and it has a slower processor. Nonetheless, it offers great performance as a router. It’s also significantly more affordable.

It’s worth noting that Cisco did very well this year with the new and refreshed E-Series, which also includes the E3200, E2500, E1500, and the E1200. The fact that the networking company has two devices on this top-five list means it must be doing something right. Read the full review of the Cisco Linksys E4200.

Netgear WNDR3800 (N600)
This is an accidentally top-notch router from Netgear. It’s supposed to be the third-tier model after the WNDR4500 N900 and the WNDR4000 N750, but it turned out to be the best router that Netgear had to offer this year. It provides great performance, true dual-band wireless, and Gigabit Ethernet. The router also has built-in support for a network storage feature via its USB port, which also offers personal cloud capability. Read the full review of the Netgear WNDR3800 (N600).

Note that the WNDR4500 and WNDR4000 also make great routers for those who care about the new 450Mbps speed and don’t mind the bulky size.

Asus RT-N56U
This is another true dual-band router that offers the traditional 300Mbps speed on both bands. This sleek and supercompact router actually offers very fast real-world throughput speeds, even faster than some routers that support the 450Mbps standard, in my testing. On top of that, it’s a fun router to use if you like tweaking. The router offers built-in support for network storage when coupled with an external hard drive. Read the full review of the Asus RT-N56U.

Trendnet TEW-692GR
The TEW-692GR is the first on the market to offer true dual-band with both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, and is able to handle the new and higher 450Mbps wireless speed. The router offers very good performance and is simple to use. It’s a pure wireless router since it doesn’t have an USB port for storage or print serving. When first released, the router had a very high price tag, which is now significantly lower, making the router a great buy. Read the full review of the Trendnet TEW-692GR.

Looking for specs and pricing? Compare these routers head-to-head.

Alltop RSS

adminz

More Posts

Let’s hear if for fox-force Five!

The directors of the Lifetime tearjerker, including—maybe you’ve heard of them—Jennifer Aniston, Demi Moore and Alicia Keys, are in the running for a Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Movies for Television and Miniseries for their work on the five-vignette drama about cancer patients and their families.

And they, along with codirectors Penelope Spheeris and Patty Jenkins, are the only women nominated in their category. (And all of the other TV categories in the DGA Awards field are mostly populated by men, as well.)

Well, Demi, turns out 2011 wasn’t all a bust!

MORE: Directors Guild Nominates Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, but Which Oscar Contenders Got Shut Out?

Needless to say, these are the first award nominations for Moore, Aniston and Keys in the directing department.

Jenkins, who wrote and directed the Oscar-winning Monster, is also nominated for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in a Dramatic Series for helming the pilot of The Killing.

She’ll compete against, once again, all men for their work on Homeland, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones and Friday Night Lights.

Aniston won’t be alone in the former TV star department, though: The Wonder Years‘ Fred Savage is nominated in the Comedy Series category for an episode of Modern Family he directed called “After the Fire.” He’ll be up against another Modern Family director, Michael Spiller, as well as fellows who captained episodes of 30 Rock and Curb Your Enthusiasm.

The guild announced its nominees in the film department yesterday. For the complete list of TV nominees for the 64th Annual DGA Awarads, go to www.dga.org/Awards.

GALLERY: 2012 Golden Globes’ Notable Nominees

E! Online (US) – Red Carpet Blog

adminz

More Posts

[unable to retrieve full-text content]

Red Carpet Fashion Awards

adminz

More Posts

Above: Celebrity Big Brother host Brian Dowling thinks the housemates are in for a rough ride

OK! Magazine :: Latest Celebrity News Feed

adminz

More Posts