As it stands now the union won’t start the strike until it gets final approval from the union’s executive board and the president of the union sets an actual date for the strike. AT&T stands by that it maintains a good relationship with the unions for its workers. In fact more of AT&T’s workers are unionized than any other carrier in the US, they shrug the vote off as basically just part of the negotiations progress. From the look of things the union won’t be happy with some promotional pens as a bonus for their workers, as their contracts expired and they wouldn’t be going through the entire big negotiations if it wasn’t for something big. The scary part is that they say their ready for all possibilities including the possibility that the 20,000 workers could go on strike. Personally I think poking the big corporate giants with a stick in this hard economic time isn’t the best idea, I mean even if your contract is expiring this week, most people are fighting to keep a job not bitching about the deal they got or the contract their stuck with.

But that’s just my 2 cents, I mean really I find the concept of 20,000 people getting their contracts all negotiated for together is odd, i mean aren’t we in a performance based world, shouldn’t each of those 20,000 people be evaluated on their own merits?

Source: RCRWireless

They also apparently are working with Sharp to spin their DVD business into a new company together that would basically shed several thousand employees over the next year or so and close down the Shizuoka plant which would be added to the US and European plant closings we’ve heard are happening. I mean this economic downturn is really pruning the companies that were wasting cash on things or just braking even before it started to turn bad. Though personally I still don’t know what Pioneer will be doing I mean will they be making tv stands and mp3 players? Or are they going to cut all the fat down until their only making cameras or silicon chips or something how far will they keep cutting back. I mean it’s not small things their cutting, LaserDisc is dead, their TV manufacturing is dead, and their DVD business is on 1 leg?

Source: Engadget

I cam remember a year ago when Computer Memory Prices were damn near the same price as a full upgrade of CPU and Motherboard, but now 4gb seems like it’s priced that I really don’t see a reason that every computer shouldn’t have 4gb, even if they don’t need it. More memory can never hurt and at the current prices in the market it’s definitly awesome. MemoryDeals has a good bit but the fact is stores all over the Internet have great memory prices, it’s just a good time for those that waited to upgrade to go out and start upgrading, and memory seems like a prime place to start. If your really smart you’ll take advantage of the fact that Intel’s Quad Core Q6600 is so darn cheap especially considering its one of the fastest chips out their :) I mean they can be found on the Internet for 199$-230$ if you look hard enough,

If you tally it up ~190$ memory, 230$ q6600 CPU, 100$ motherboard, you’ve got a kick a$$ PC upgrade for 500$ or less.

The drop in pricing and wide availability will be due to Samsung hitting 3 million OLED panels produced in 2009 and a whopping 6 million panels in 2010. FINALLY MASS PRODUCTION! This all comes as very good news considering a lot of techies have actually probably considered blowing their bank on the $2,500 Sony XEL-1 that’s only 11″. But with mass production and wide availability this means that Samsung should be able to push that price way down, and in turn force Sony to lower its prices and start releasing larger panels.

The race to wide availability of OLED’s at 42″ is on, and in turn the race to replace both Plasma and LED as our TV’s of choice especially remembering those blistering fast refresh rates, and 1,000,000 to 1 contrast ratios that put every other monitor in the world to shame. Only time will really tell what kind of “affordable” Samsung is referring to, are they referring to slightly more than a used cisco router from eBay, or are they referring to the 6-10,000$ that is “affordable” to bill gates and other people that use cash as toilet paper. Considering the production levels their planning, I’m betting somewhere in the middle, definitly more than current LCD pricing which has plummeted of late. So I’d say that 31″ will go for around 2500$, surprisingly the same price the 11″ Sony went for this past year or two. Wow talk about some pissed off Sony customers. I wonder who will be the first to send in a letter to Sony “hey bi*tch where’s my other 20 inches”

Source: DigiTimes

I’m planning to utilize a Small Business Merchant Account from onlinecheck.com to take care of the credit card people since I just find that having to go through the entire PayPal fiasco to end up using a credit card is a bit of a run around. I’m also planning to build it around PayPal and the other traditional online methods like MoneyBookers but the point is to give options. The script I’m planning should be capable of scaling from selling e-books to a fully managed Web Hosting Ecommerce Merchant Account for managing a website’s entire sales repertoire

The only question that remains is how best to implement the payment options. I’m considering locking them to a set of prescreened and fully implemented processors that I know work. But the alternative possibility is for me to make it extensible and able to add alternative sites for Online Credit Card Processing in case the need should arrive that a site isn’t quite cutting it I just need to swap out a plugin instead of a full new version. But I suppose it comes down to if I’m keeping it inhouse for my own sites or giving it away/selling it to developers.

As always I’m open to suggestions from fellow techies and developers :)