Filed under: Earnings reports, Analyst upgrades and downgrades, Google (GOOG), Wal-Mart (WMT), Technical Analysis, Western Union (WU), Stocks to Buy

Do you know which company introduced the first consumer charge card? No? It also introduced the first successful stock ticker and was one of the original eleven stocks in the Dow Jones Average. Still no? What if I say that it completed the first transcontinental telegraph line across North America? Now you have it! Of course, the telegram is a memory.

Western Union Company (NYSE: WU) provides a range of money transfer and bill payment services worldwide. Its consumer-to-consumer operations involve multi-currency and real-time processing systems for walk-in, online, and telephone money transfers. Its consumer-to-business operations enable payments to utilities, auto finance companies, mortgage servicers, financial service providers, and governmental agencies. The firm also offers money order products and advance payment services. Western Union does business through a network of more than 320,000 locations, in over 200 countries and territories.

Investors were pleased last week, when the company reported Q3 EPS of 30 cents and revenues of $1.26 billion. The Street had been looking for 28 cents and $1.26 billion. D.A. Davidson subsequently upgraded the shares to “buy,” noting improved business in Mexico and optimism over newer relationships with Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT) and Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG). Management also guided FY07 EPS to $1.11-$1.13, versus consensus of $1.08. The share price popped on the news and then moved into a bullish “flag” consolidation pattern. Stocks frequently exit flags moving in the same direction they were traveling on entry. In this case, that would be to the upside.

Altogether, brokers recommend the issue with six “strong buys,” five “buys,” eleven “holds” and one “sell.” Analysts expect a 14% growth rate, through the next year. The WU P/E ratio (20.42), Price to Free Cash Flow ratio (14.60), Operating Margin (27.13%), Net Profit Margin (17.45%), Return on Assets (15.50%), Return on Investment (23.26%) and Net Income per Employee ($140.88k) compare favorably with industry, sector and S&P 500 averages. Institutions hold about 83% of the outstanding shares. The stock is one of those used to calculate the S&P 500 Index. Over the past 52 weeks, it has traded between $17.96 and $24.14. A stop-loss of $18.70 looks good here.

Larry Schutts is a contributing editor for Theflyonthewall.com and the Vice-President of Stockwinners.com.

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Filed under: News

A long-forgotten PS1-era “franchise” may be making a return to the PS3. Blasto has been spotted in the US Patents & Trademarks Office database. The filing comes from Sony Computer Entertainment America and was filed just six days ago, October 23rd. Interestingly, there appears to be some kind of online element to the game, as described by the listing: “OPERATING A REAL-TIME GAME FOR OTHERS OVER GLOBAL AND LOCAL AREA COMPUTER NETWORKS.”

What will this Blasto trademark lead to? A brand new online game? Or just a re-release of the PS1 classic? It’s hard to tell right now, but considering how poorly received the original game was, we’d much prefer a new game.

[Thanks, Joe!]

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Filed under: Action & Adventure, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, New Line, Remakes and Sequels

Fire up the flame war, because I’m about to admit to another crazy opinion: John Carpenter’s Escape from New York is boring. It’s a great concept — that of Manhattan being a maximum security prison in which a military prisoner must seek and rescue the President of the United States in order to receive a pardon. The movie is even relatively impressive considering its low budget, regardless of how dated it now looks. But it just doesn’t have enough going on to garner as much praise as it receives. Maybe if I’d seen it 25 years ago I would have the same fondness that its fans have, but I saw it this year and was seriously disappointed; and yes, I was extremely bored. Because of this crazy opinion, I actually wouldn’t mind seeing a well-done remake. Unfortunately, I don’t believe I will get to see such a thing considering the directors so far linked to the job. First there was Len Wiseman (I still haven’t seen Live Free or Die Hard, so I can’t judge him completely). Then there was the much worse news that Brett Ratner was taking the helm. Fortunately, we can count him out too, as Aint it Cool News has relayed an email claiming Ratner himself denied his involvement.

I’ll admit one other thing, that may save me from too many flames: Kurt Russell is the only Snake Plissken. No matter who New Line gets to direct the EFNY redo, the studio might as well save themselves some pain by changing the main character’s name. Technically there’s no reason to do this, but for those of us who associate Russell with Snake, it would be a wonderful, narratively insignificant change (I even have a suggestion for a “new” name: Ben Richards). Yeah, I know I just saw the movie for the first time within twelve months, but even without sitting through the thing, I spent the last 25 years with the image of Russell with the eyepatch in my head. That means he’s a part of the pop-cultural consciousness. Giving us a new Snake, at least by name, is like trying to re-introduce Mickey Mouse as a rat. Or Ronald McDonald as a bearded lady. Or Willy Wonka as Michael Jackson. Anyway, that is my invitation for scrutiny for the day, and I’m sticking by it. The Escape from New York remake, hopefully starring Gerard Butler as “some other dude with an eye patch,” is due in 2009.

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Long time no blog - very busy searching Switzerland these days but popping in first to say congrats to the 2nd edition team and second, for the sheer evil delight in submitting a late PHP implementation for Tim Bray’s fascinating Wide Finder Project.

Tim set a simple, but very much real-world challenge; write an app that determines the top 10 most popular blogs from his Apache access log. It should be fast and readable, with a subtext of illustrating how “language X” copes in terms of parallel processing and utilizing “wider” (many processor) systems.

Now technically, PHP has almost zero ability to execute stuff in parallel, other than pcntl_fork - (don’t try that on your live webserver - CLI only!), unless you’re counting ticks, which I hope you aren’t.

But we’re not going to let little details stop us! Because we’ve got curl_multi_exec() which allows us to talk to multiple URLs and process their responses in parallel. And just think how many requests Apache + mod_php is able to serve at the same time. Perfect for some map and reduce…

So first a mapper;

<?php
if ( isset($argv[1]) ) $_GET['f'] = $argv[1];

if ( !isset($_GET['f']) || !is_readable($_GET['f']) ) {
    header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
	die("Cant read file ".htmlspecialchars($_GET['f']));
}

$s = isset($_GET['s']) && ctype_digit($_GET['s']) ? $_GET['s'] : 0;
$e = isset($_GET['s']) && ctype_digit($_GET['e']) ? $_GET['e'] : filesize($_GET['f']);

$f = fopen($_GET['f'], 'r');
fseek($f, $s);

$counts = array();
while ( !feof($f) && ftell($f) < $e ) {
	$pattern = '#GET /ongoing/When/dddx/(dddd/dd/dd/[^ .]+) #';
	if ( preg_match($pattern, fgets($f), $m) ) {
		isset($counts[$m[1]]) ? $counts[$m[1]]++ : $counts[$m[1]] = 1;
	}

}
fclose($f);

$out = serialize($counts);
header("Content-Length: ".strlen($out));
echo $out;

You point it at a file it can reach via it’s filesystem plus give it a range of bytes ( a start and end ) to analyze. It returns a serialized hash, the keys being the blog entry titles and the values the number of occurences. A URL to call it might look like http://localhost/~harry/wf/wf_map.php?f=/tmp/o10k.ap&s=257664&e=524288 . Also for benchmarking it can be called from the command line to process a complete file in a single thread like $ php ./wf_map.php /tmp/o10k.ap.

Then we have the reducer, which actually invokes the mapper(s) using curl;

#!/usr/bin/php
<?php
function wf_reduce($urls) {

	$counts = array();

	$mh = curl_multi_init();

	foreach ( $urls as $url ) {
		$ch = curl_init($url);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
		curl_multi_add_handle($mh, $ch);
	}

	do {
		curl_multi_exec($mh,$running);
		while ( FALSE !==($msg = curl_multi_info_read($mh)) ) {

			if ( "200" != ( $status = curl_getinfo ( $msg['handle'], CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE ) ) ) {
				die("HTTP Status: $status!");
			}

			// Here we can "reduce" as soon as we get a response...
			foreach ( unserialize( curl_multi_getcontent ( $msg['handle'] )  ) as $page => $hits ) {
				isset($counts[$page]) ? $counts[$page] += $hits : $counts[$page] = $hits;
			}

		}
	} while ($running > 0);

	return $counts;

}

$mapurl = "http://localhost/~harry/wf/wf_map.php";
$file = "/tmp/o10k.ap";

if (!file_exists($file) ) {
	print "First run: downloading sample data!";
	file_put_contents($file, file_get_contents("http://www.tbray.org/tmp/o10k.ap"));
	die();
}

$partitions = isset($argv[1]) && ctype_digit($argv[1]) ? $argv[1] : 1;

$end = filesize($file);
$partition = floor($end / $partitions);

$s = 0;
$e = $partition;
$urls = array();

while ( $e <= $end ) {
	$urls[] = sprintf("%s?f=%s&s=%s&e=%s", $mapurl, urlencode($file), $s, $e);
	$s = $e;
	$e += $partition;
}

$counts = wf_reduce($urls);
arsort($counts, SORT_NUMERIC);

$top10 = array_slice($counts, 0, 10, TRUE);
print_r( array_reverse($top10) );

It is meant purely for command line execution, taking one argument which is the number of parallel “threads” which should run e.g. $ ./wf_reducer.php 10 which will fire off 10 HTTP requests in parallel to the mapper, requesting it parse a different “chunk” of the file each time. You’ll need to change the $mapurl.

Doubt this will win any awards for beauty and benchmarks with Tim’s sample file are not impressive - it’s faster to run single threaded - perhaps you’d start gaining with a much bigger file? My desire to find out is diminishing.

But anyway - PHP was also there. Wonder if Tim will now compile it on that T5120 ?

Update: Just discovered Russell Beattie got there first with a single threaded solution.

This article provided by sitepoint.com.

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Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Wing who? T-Mobile today has announced the long-rumored Shadow, a Windows Mobile 6 Standard device that looks not just better than its Wing stablemate, but arguably better than just about any comparably-equipped smartphone on the market today. Besides the “slick, slider design” and a juiced version of the standard Windows Mobile 6 UI, the Shadow features a rotating jog dial front and center, 2 megapixel camera, WiFi, and a new version of T-Mobile’s myFaves interface allowing users to call, email, text, or MMS the peeps in their “fave five.” Like what you see? If you do, good, because it turns out this is just the first in a whole line of upcoming Shadow-branded phones for the carrier — a line that’ll be focusing on multimedia connectivity and slanting the work / life balance a little more to the “life” side than some of HTC’s and T-Mobile’s other smart devices (ahem, Wing, we’re looking straight at you). Grab the Shadow starting this Wednesday in “sage” or “copper” for a surprisingly reasonable $149.99 on two-year contract.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

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Filed under: Audio/Video, Computers, Video Games, TV

Unless you have been living in a sound and fun-proof cave for the past couple of years, you are more than likely aware of ‘Guitar Hero’, the rock n’ roll simulator that has would-be musicians kicking ass on such guitar-heavy hits as Lynard Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” and Guns N’ Roses‘ “Welcome to the Jungle”.

And after a year of waiting, fans can finally get their hands on ‘Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock’, which was released over the weekend and the reviews thus far indicate the latest game in the series does not disappoint.

With online support, collapsible guitar peripherals and over 70 tracks from classic bands like the Rolling Stones and the Who alongside newer acts like the Killers and AFI, ‘Guitar Hero III’ is ever bit as entertaining as previous installments and them some.

Below are just a few review quotes from popular gaming media:

IGN.com
“The soundtrack is fantastic and the new online additions are going to take the ‘Guitar Hero’ community to the next level. It really is hard to argue with any facet of the gameplay.”

Yahoo! Games
‘Guitar Hero III’ won’t disappoint either diehard fans or people new to the series. This is the latest step in the stairway to heaven of home rocking.

Official Xbox Magazine
Ultimately, ‘GHIII’ succeeds as a polished technical workout for top-tier shredders, but the game’s magic was never really about pressing buttons anyway–it was about making the player feel like, well, a guitar hero.

If there are any complaints to be had they seem to mostly revolve around the fact that the game’s presentation has changed very little in three years and that has perhaps become a little easier to be good at the game.

And it remains to be seen how Guitar Hero III stands up to the upcoming ‘Rock Band,’ which is being developed by the creators of the original ‘Guitar Hero’ game and features a full rock band rather than just guitars, as well as some serious licensing deals that promise a vast collection of bands and tracks to choose from.

These nominal issues aside, we plan on spending the next month rocking extremely hard.

Related Links:

• Grateful Dead Comes to ‘Rock Band’ Video Game
  IPTV Coming to Xbox 360 with Fall Update
• After ‘Sopranos,’ Little Steven Tries Video Games
• ‘Guitar Hero III’ Announced
  

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Filed under: Gaming

Engadget’s favorite hardware hacker Benjamin Heckendorn is at it again, and his latest mutant mashup is the one-handed Access controller. The modular rig features five interchangeable pods — one each for the analog sticks, d-pad, main buttons, and shoulder buttons — that can be rearranged to make any control scheme one-hand-friendly. Ben says the Access is in pre-production with eDimensional, and will be hitting in PS2 / 3 versions first with a planned 360 version to follow — although it certainly looks like a brave 360 controller was involved in making that prototype. More photos await you at the read link.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

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How lazy can one get not to grind their own salt and pepper? Peugeot drivers, I guess. After all, this is the very same vehicle company that comes up with the Peugeot Elis Electric Saly & Pepper Mills which feature brushed stainless steel as well as acrylic construction, complete with lights and a one-handed operation. You get half a dozen pre-selections for pepper and half that amount for salt. They aren’t cheap though, retailing for $200 a set, but at least that price comes with an initial supply of salt or peppercorns to get you started.

Permalink | Comment | Uberbargain | Uberphones

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Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor have been in news for their new affair which has been started between them and it is also the reason for Shahid Kapoor’s break-up with long time girlfriend Kareena. Saif made an open statement that he and Kareena are going around and they are happy with each other. Recently […]

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Filed under: Rumors

It’s been over two years since we’ve heard anything about Eight Days and The Getaway 3. We just saw a video of them way back when the PS3 was trying to find its legs. It seems the website LusoPlay has stumbled upon some information about the games, however, and it may or may not be true we’ll see some information on both in the coming month.

Says a poorly translated LusoPlay: “We know that the month of November will be the month of all revelations, and even prepared a small event for these two games.” So if Sony has prepared a small event, we should be hearing something pretty soon, right? As far as we know, there’s nothing planned in November besides the Great Influx of Games (GIG for those with an acronym fetish). Still, we don’t know everything. We’ll file this under the big ol’ rumor section for now.

[via PS3Forums]

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