Re: Definition of "technology"
I suspect they count things like buying a fleet of 60 Airbus A320s, not something they will be doing on an ongoing basis I wouldn't have thought.
2645 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Sep 2007
Samsung's argument was that this kind of thing had existed on Surface (the original MS version) like devices before Apple's claim. There was plenty of speed and responsiveness on those devices, but they chose to implement scrolling like standard Windows (and AFAIK, all desktop operating systems), by coming to a hard stop at the limit of scrolling. Windows Mobile did the same thing. It wasn't an obvious idea because, although there was plenty of hardware and opportunity with which to come up with the idea, no-one thought of it.
Once Apple demonstrated the idea to the world, THEN it became obvious (and its more than a couple of lines of code BTW), and there in lies the problem. Many ideas from the past look obvious in hindsight, but taking the conceptual leap to them isn't.
Google meanwhile have worked out a perfectly good alternative that doesn't infringe the patent, so there is no reason that Samsung had to fall foul of this. They walked into it chin first.
Start with some news and then throw in a couple of unrelated "facts" (one of them is unprovable and almost certainly untrue - the iPad mini is still hard to get hold of, so it's unlikely to be selling badly, plus no quarter end results have yet included it).
Why Apple's stock fell is likewise hard to determine. It's quite possible that its being engineered by some trading firm or other in an attempt to pick it up cheap before the quarter ends financials, but then the Leach couldn't possibly accept that.
You missed out some facts
1) Your friend is charging you a fee to borrow his car
2) He understands that you may sell it, BUT at the end of the month you will return it or an exactly equivalent model.
So at the end of the month he gets cash and a car. If you've guessed right and can buy a replacement for less than you sold it for minus the fee he's charging then you make a profit. If you get it wrong then you make a loss.
Where things go wrong are NAKED shorts - you promise to sell shares up front, knowing that you don't have them and haven't borrowed them. You can only get away with this because trades take several days to complete a trade.
High Frequency Trading systems are owned by TRADERS. They try to look for movements in market prices and buy early, gaining a small but noticeable profit from selling seconds later.
The job of a broker is to get the best price for their client. Probing the market with small trades helps them determine that price, and owning a few shared in consequence isn't considered a position. It's also unlikely that their costs for the trade will be as high as you think (they tend to be exchange members). That it may also confuse HFT systems is a bonus.
Share Brokers are middle men. They are not supposed to buy or sell shares on their own behalf, only on instruction from a client. They make a profit by charging a fee for each transaction. The risks that they run are that their purchase or sale will fail to complete (the counter party they are dealing with has some sort of problem) or that their client can't pay. There are areas within a brokerage company that keep track of these risks.
Share Traders are people that acquire a position in a share or shares. They hope to make a profit in the difference between buy and sell price. They may use brokers or, if they're big enough, go direct to the exchange. They hold a lot more risk. They stand to make more money if they get it right, but can lose a lot if they get it wrong. If they are part of a bank or other financial institution then they will also have a risk department keeping an eye on them.
What we had here was a Share Broker trying to act as a Share Trader without authorisation. Even if it had worked out there was risk that the brokerage company would find its self in trouble with the financial regulator for exceeding its licence, so I doubt they would have been all smiles if they'd found his profit either. The guy seems to have been an all-round idiot.
For there to be a bubble the shares would have to be trading at a huge multiple of earnings per share. Anything between 10 and 20 times earnings per share is normal, and Apple were smack in the middle of that range. If you want to see a bubble then look at Amazon or Facebook.
What caused the shares to drop was not meeting the markets estimate for earnings that quarter. They exceeded Apple's guidance, but the Analysts were betting that they would be higher so the price went down. Mad, but that's the way the market works.
They tend also to contain a lot of business logic. It's that which keeps companies locked in, not the effort to copy the data across to a different database engine.
Oracle has never been aimed at small business. It really needs dedicated DBAs to manage and tune it, but when you do that it scales up to levels that the open source crowd simply wouldn't believe.
Those two facts together produce a lot of inertia. Oracle aren't going to wake up tomorrow, or even in a couple of years time, and discover their user base has been decimated.
I think I see the source of your confusion. The problem is that HTML5 doesn't mandate a given video CODEC, and indeed Google Chrome (one of the most popular web browsers) only supports WEBM. The iPhone 5 website had some hacked together code to, I believe, bypass this incompatibility issue.
Personally I think Google are far too late to the table with WEBM (devices with h.264 hardware encode and decode capabilities are ubiquitous, and the cost of adding support is low), but until this sort of standards based argument get sorted out I guess we're likely to see more of this type of hack.
You honestly think that the delay is perceptible? Even Adobe shifted to that method of playback in later Android builds. Just face the fact that you don't understand the complexities of video playback (including the fact that Adobe's original approach required them to map the video from YUV to RGB colour space before they could apply their overlays) and give in.
Tosh. Video on the iPhone always has been h.264 offloaded to the GPU to decode. Adobe wanted to use software decoding and compositing (to add the adverts and overlays) before copying completed frames to VRAM. It's no wonder that Flash video ran like a dog on mobile devices.
Apple's problem with Adobe was that, although they nominally supported OS X, they put so little effort in to it they might as well not have bothered. Apple provided the Carbon framework as a compatibility layer to allow developers of OS 8 & 9 apps to port to OS X. Adobe were still using it when Apple announced that 64 bit OS X wouldn't support it, and it wasn't until the second Adobe release following that they finally had a Cocoa version of their code.
Don't forget that, although Apple had a nominally small market share at the time, a huge proportion of Adobe's Photoshop/Creative Suit sales were for the Mac versions, so it wasn't like there was no demand or money to be made. Adobe development was just hugely lazy and couldn't be bothered.
Apple didn't want to be in that kind of situation with the iPhone, waiting for Adobe to catch up with their APIs when they felt like it. More importantly Flash just wasn't designed with the idea of being driven from a touch screen. Apple's challenge to Adobe was "show us a version that runs well on a mobile phone", and Adobe never really succeeded (to the point that even they gave in and cancelled the mobile version).
EXACTLY why would using the older JS engine, when embedded in an app, be a problem for HTML5? When you're in Safari, where you're SUPPOSED to be running HTML5 code, you get the latest, all singing, all dancing engine but that breaks normal sandbox security rules so you can't embed it in your own code. Writing a native app and then adding HTML5 is kind of against the point isn't it?
Patents are about implementations, not the basic idea of doing something. Inductive coupling dates back to the days of Tesla and is well out of patent. Apple are claiming a particular method of wireless charging to power a set of peripheral devices like keyboards and mice at ranges up to 1 yard. This doesn't block anyone else from using wireless charging, just from using it for the same reason.
Is that they got into the data centre by being powerful enough (not anywhere near as powerful mind you) and cheaper than RISC/Mini systems. This reduced demand for said systems made them more expensive again (lower volume plus same fixed development costs).
The same is starting to happen to Intel with ARM. ARM CPUs are becoming fast enough for a lot of desktop work. They are MUCH cheaper than Intel's offerings (even ATOM chips are more expensive by the time you work out the cost of all the support components).
The size of the blank makes a difference to yields, but not much on the scale of an LCD screen and the maturity of the process offsets this. Manufacturers will have known all the variables before they quoted for the job. The haters may hate this, but I'll say it again, the iPad mini screen isn't a complicated or advanced part. LCD panels are cut from sheets more than a meter long each side.
The screens for the iPad 3/4 and iPhone 5 are much more complex and newer processes. I can understand them having process issues, but these?
It doesn't have the integrated digitiser electronics of the iPhone and is basically just a larger sized blank cut from the same process that they made the iPhone 3GS from. I'd take this report with a large pinch of salt (don't forget that Digitimes get the occasional fact right, but mostly spout rubbish).
iOS benchmarks pretty well against competing mobile browsers. There's no evidence that Apple have in any way slowed it down (with the exception of browser windows embedded in apps, that get a slower JavaScript engine), but rather that the limit is the ARM hardware that it runs on.
There's a trade off to be made. More pixels need more GPU power to drive, more bytes to store images etc. Since LCD screens aren't just black or white like a laser printer they tend to look better at lower resolutions, so my bet is that 300 DPI is the practical limit.
The A15 is more power efficient than the A9? Think again. The A15 was designed as a desktop device and its actually quite power hungry. So much so that ARM have designed the A7 to pair with it and disable the A15 during light duty work. Hit the Nexus 10 with heavy workloads and its battery life falls to about 4 hours.
That's pretty much EXACTLY what he did. He tried doors at random, and if they opened he collected the data behind the door. If you're using a public system that asks you for a user ID then you can't complain that guessing an ID isn't hacking if the system doesn't then demand a matching password. It's not difficult hacking, but the degree of difficulty doesn't distinguish between legal and illegal.
Now if he'd proved the exploit and told AT&T about it then (without publishing the results) that's fair game. Embarrassing them in public after they fixed the hole is fine too. He crossed the line by publishing the data he'd extracted.
Go away and learn about P/E ratios, and try not to be such a prat. Shares in blue chip companies trade at a price that is normally between 10 and 20 times their earnings. Below 10 the stock is considered undervalued, above 20 and its over valued. When the market as a whole is doing badly the average multiple goes down, and vice versa when the market goes up. Apple's current ratio is 12.7, slightly on the low side but kind of where you'd expect it to be. Amazon is currently trading at a P/E of 3341 (madness, I'd be looking nervous if I owned any), Intel at 8.5, Microsoft at 26.7.
Companies can sustain a high PE only if the market thinks they are going to grow well. Low PEs are an indication that the market thinks they have little chance of growth. As long as a company keeps growing and increasing profits then shareholders are generally happy. When profits start to shrink they become more fractious and if the company loses money then there can be all sorts of boardroom fights. The important point here is that the board has to have made a lot of shareholders unhappy (normally by losing them money) before sitting members can be seriously challenged, and the bigger the company the harder that is.
You realise that Apple's share price isn't a bubble, that it's actually in line with earnings (unlike Amazon or Facebook for example)? Investors can't FORCE Apple to do anything with its cash pile, partly because lots of it are outside of the US and would be subjected to a large lump of tax if they tried to repatriate it, and partly because its a board decision and they'd first need to stack the board with their own nominees. Unless there's a dramatic drop in profits then that just isn't going to happen.
You're confusing market share with market numbers. Provided the NUMBERS are high enough to support a developer community then they will continue to develop for the platform. iOS numbers have been increasing continually, there is a huge market for software on it, and plenty of people willing to purchase (which is the most important factor).
So Google's data is just one order of magnitude short of disastrous?
You seem to have failed to comprehend my post. No one has perfect mapping data (the world changes, and its a big place). Apple's data is not yet as good as Google's, but that's not to say that it's completely hopeless.