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Basically, this isn't an implementation bug, or even a design flaw... it's an architectural flaw, present in all modern CPUs.

Except those from AMD.

This is incredibly huge. To a first approximation, all computers are broken.

All computers made by Intel, anyway. They have always been shitty at branch prediction. That's why the P4 sucked so hard; it had a long pipeline and their branch predictor wasn't up to snuff, and branch prediction happened fairly early in the pipeline so you had to throw away many cycles when it mispredicted. Intel addressed this inadequacy by playing fast and loose with OoO to get a performance improvement, and now there's a vulnerability. This is just more typical incompetence from Intel, but this time it's really going to screw them because it has a significant performance impact. FDIV couldn't kill them because the performance impact of mitigation was minimal. But this is fundamentally different; people chose Intel CPUs because it reduced the number of nodes they would need compared to AMD. Now they're going to have to buy more nodes, erasing that advantage. Actually having to spend more money because of Intel's screwup will make them think twice about any more homogeneous, intel-based networks of computers.

It's about the available profit in the mobile market. And yes, you're both correct that it's not 95%, it's 93% in Feb 2015, 92% in July 2015, 91% in Feb 2016, 94% in Nov 2016.

I apologize for the rounding error.

Replying to myself.

I just read another article that says

Imagine a few years from now traveling from New York to Paris with your spiffy iPhone 9. You get off the plane, go into the iPhone’s settings, and in a few steps, you sign up with a plan from any one of a number of carriers for a bundle of voice minutes and data.

http://www.barrons.com/article...

So probably I don;t know jack about the pro's and con's of eSIMs.

Additionally, he conveniently leaves out his value from his company:
http://www.barrons.com/article...

horses used to supply horsepower. in the near future, man used to supply manpower. http://www.barrons.com/article...

MS invested in Comcast years ago and then they sold their stake - years ago.

Ahh, another no-name two-bit "analytics" firm! It's really hard to pry numbers out of anybody but Apple regarding the number of phones that are in the hands of actual consumers. Google likes to pussyfoot around with "activations" and Samsung will tell you how many they loaded into shipping crates

Ironically for you Apple also publish "shipped" figures and they do so because they are confident they can sell their products, and I agree with them. Here is them defending their massive sales drop in iPads "Regarding iPad, Oppenheimer said the year-over-year drop in iPad numbers from 17 million to 14.6 million units was in part the tough comparison with last year’s debut f the third-generation model, with no such revamp this past spring, and also the reduction in channel inventory last quarter of 700,000 units versus a year-earlier build of 1.2 million units." http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2013/07/23/apple-fyq2-call-the-iphone-beat-defending-ipad-margins-and-the-rest/

The bottom line is Apple is not competing effectively for market share, because of its weak...but incredibly profitable product line.

What's a 'barron'?

It appears to be a business magazine. Not sure what it has to do with the taxation of virtual profit...

No. Companies are allowed to keep reasonable financial reserves, but the billions that Apple and other companies keep are anything but reasonable reserves, and are unprecedented. This was worked out decades ago, but they stopped enforcing it.

Amen to this. Apple is currently engaged in the largest stock buy-back in history, $60 billion so far.

In essence, with its immense cash reserves, which instead of tangibly building the business in some way, or increasing the compensation of its foreign workforce, or making its product more affordable, it is benefiting those holding tons of stock options (the execs), who will only pay low, low capital gains taxes on the wealth being transferred to them risk free.

Apple has been progressively building its business for over a decade. They don't do massive acquisitions because they understand that the company's culture remaining undiluted is the key to its success.

Since Apple has been using Foxconn for assembly, Foxconn has increased line worker pay considerably, sometimes at Apple's specific request.

Apple's products are by definition very affordable by dint of their massive sales. If people are buying their devices numbering in the hundreds of millions, they're by definition affordable in a general sense. Apple isn't a charity. They aren't bound to give away shit at a level that you, in particular, deem adequate.

Stock options are not a risk free compensation. That you think so is laughable. They also can't cash out on those options immediately or they'll have to pay the full US income tax rate on them. They're used to make sure that executives have a vested interest in the fortunes of the company they work for in the longer term.

No. Companies are allowed to keep reasonable financial reserves, but the billions that Apple and other companies keep are anything but reasonable reserves, and are unprecedented. This was worked out decades ago, but they stopped enforcing it.

Amen to this. Apple is currently engaged in the largest stock buy-back in history, $60 billion so far.

In essence, with its immense cash reserves, which instead of tangibly building the business in some way, or increasing the compensation of its foreign workforce, or making its product more affordable, it is benefiting those holding tons of stock options (the execs), who will only pay low, low capital gains taxes on the wealth being transferred to them risk free.

Chine has been buying up hard assets.

I want you to stop tracking me with like buttons on third party sites.
I want you to stop building a profile on me without my consent.
I also want a golden toilet seat... I might as well wish for something obtainable.

What do I want?

I want to live just long enough to be there when the board cuts Zuckerberg off and puts his head on a pike as a warning to the next ten generations of venture capitalists that some IPOs come at too high a price. I would look up into his unemployed eyes and wave like this. ( /waves ) Can you and your associates arrange that for me, Mr. Morgan Stanley?

From the Ars link:

If you use Siri 2-3 times per day at an average of 63KB per instance, you might expect to use 126KB to 189KB per day, or 3.7 to 5.5MB per month. For 4-6 times a day, that might come out to 252KB to 378KB per day, or 7.4 to 11MB per month. If you use it 10-15 times per day, you might end up using 630KB to 945KB per day, or 18.5 to 27.7MB per month.

Yeah, Siri is not really a bandwidth hog at all. 63KB is about the same amount of data needed to get you one image on one web page. Browse something as innocuous as a few news articles? Congrats, you've used more data than Siri will during an average day.

Sprint has come out and said that the average iPhone owner burns through 50% less bandwidth than the average 3G / 4G user on another platform.

Sprint's CEO was cited elsewhere saying that Android apps tend to be "more chatty" with the network, and the iPhone does a better job of offloading data to WiFi whenever possible. And the App store does its part too. If you try to download a large app over the cell network, it will throw up a little alert window and ask you to try to download it over WiFi instead. (Before you complain, that's a mandate from the carriers, Apple has been trying to raise the limit)

What apple proved is that people would be happy with what was basically an oversized phone, rather than a scaled down laptop, which was really the only revolutionary bit of the idea

Except that, according to Jobs, the iPad was actually developed first, before the iPhone. So, perhaps, the iPhone is more of a scaled-down iPad than the reverse. And if you've ever used both, you would likely agree that that is a fair assessment.

And you may have forgotten, so I also have just one thing to point out regarding Jobs' claims that Android became popular by becoming a nearly direct clone, (UI and form-factor-wise at the very least), of iOS devices...

And if the German Courts were fooled by a bit of chrome, shame on them.

Their niche is the same size as Barron's - who remembers Barron's?

I subscribed to them for years. Before instant access to financial data became available online, it was a great source of info...and they're still not bad: http://online.barrons.com/

Instead it CUT it's deployment spending over the past few years

[citation needed]

That would explain a lot but I looked it up and there appears to be no indication that's the culprit (not sure what is). Here's a link or two or three that says AT&T has increased its wireless capital spending. I found one article claiming what you say in the headline but if you read the article the jist is that the reduction in capital spending was due to a slowdown in their U-verse home fiber buildout.

Just look at google news. Bank's stock market analysts have the numbers now. here is one that describes sales as "light." It is not surprising because all the reviews appear to say the product is not done (you will have to google for those yourself).

Well then, it's doubly ironic that even in the present "half way shipped" state, it still gives iPad a good run for its money.

http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2011/03/02/motorola-detwiler-sees-xoom-struggling/

"

No, it isn't banned. We the state don't ban anything. You just won't be doing business in this town.

I much rather have state censorship. The state can be voted out. Amazon can not.

So, you are free to publish a book that upsets the powers that be, you just won't be finding a publisher or bookstore to sell it. But freedom is ensured as long as you don't try to exercise it.

This guy would also defend "No jews allowed" or "Whites only" on private businesses. The dream he chases? I want none of it.

The debate should be over whether or not the books really promoted what they were banned over. Then you can decide if Amazon was removing books for sale that were morally offensive and described illegal acts, or just rash to judge. This has NOTHING to do with "no jews allowed" (it's no illegal to be Jewish" or "whites only" (it's not illegal to be black). This has to do with rape, which is illegal, and incest, which is illegal. So you can describe the portrayal of it as legal but offensive, but portraying an illegal act in a book is not the same as against breaking the law yourself through discrimination. Also, Amazon has a monopoly... of Kindle users. Just like Apple has a monopoly... of iPad users. Kindle book store = Apple app store. Monopoly of the industry is quite a bit different. The most aggressive projects are 8 million Kindles sold this year . Sony claims to have sold a couple of million eReaders, which use ePub and support content from non-Sony stores, including Kobo (can't find a link now). B&N is making 18,000 NookColor tablets a day, and if they keep that pace for just 6 months that's over 3 million shipped. Then there are Kobo readers, people using non-Kindle apps on their iPads and iPods, folks using apps other than Kindle on their Android, discount no-name eReaders sold at KMart and other fine establishments, and before you know it, you realize that anyone in this comment thread suggesting a monopoly, really is way off base. WalMart doesn't sell music with explicit lyrics. Is it censorship? Sure. Nothing inherently ILLEGAL about it, nor do they possess any more of a monopoly in Music than Amazon does in eBooks.

Did anyone ever try to buy things from Sun?

No other company I ever worked with made it so hard. Unless you were a megacustomer, it was actually fairly difficult to actually buy anything from them.

In contrast, buying RedHat on the small scale is click, click, done.

Here's a summary of Ellison's rant on why Sun died, notice the complaints are mostly about sales and engineering decisions, open source had very little to do with it:

http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2010/05/13/oracles-ellison-sun-execs-were-astonishingly-bad-managers/

One shouldn't forget that these high speed tradings are not in the interest of investors, companies being traded or other market participants with a real-world interest. They serve only the high-speed/high-volume speculative traders, specifically algorithmic or automated traders.

Even Wall Street is slowly waking up to the problem:
http://online.barrons.com/article/SB50001424052970203952604575552190237324972.html?mod=BOL_twm_mw

This was a bomb about a week ago when it was published, the guy making those statements is a Wall Street billionaire, not a hippie communist.

No surprise, Transocean finds fault with the report, as does Halliburton.

No surprise, Transocean finds fault with the report, as does Halliburton.

This is a rumor from TechCrunch. Maybe there's something to it, maybe not. All the other news items reporting this seem to be quoting the one TechCrunch source. Another news item said "A Source Close to Cisco" said there was nothing to the rumor.

http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2010/08/31/cisco-has-not-had-talks-about-acquiring-skype-source-says/

Odd that all the articles cite TechCrunch as the source of the rumor yet this guy from Barrons, says it's untrue.

I sent a query to the Yankee Group shortly after seeing that CNN article. The results are unbelievable: There have been various prior studies that found quite different numbers.

Even if you ignored prior studies, it is a basic human tendency to justify what you've purchased, making excuses for one's decision even against overwhelming evidence. Even if Android phones were shocking their users, I would still expect at least 2/3rds of users to claim that they love it.

And of course Android has been getting pretty damn decent. The majority of phones are running 2.1 now, and while 6 months ago you were a second class citizen with an Android phone, nowadays most major apps are doing parallel releases given the growth of the Android ecosystem. If Android made it through the ugly months, with mediocre hardware, quirky OS', and no software support, I find it hard to believe it would do so poorly now.

So my query to Yankee was whether that sentence in the CNN article was correct, and also what their methodology is. They didn't respond. Does *anyone* know what their methodology was?

I can say right now that the 20% thing, if quoted accurately, guarantees that their survey is completely tainted and is utterly worthless. Maybe they posted a voluntary survey at mac.com or something.

But nonetheless, every Mac/Apple/iPhone site and fanatic is posting the results to assure themselves that they're richer, prettier, more intelligent, etc.

Underdog? Not exactly, anymore. They're competing in different markets, but Microsoft and Apple are now the 2nd and 3rd, or vice versa depending on how you measure it, largest corporations in the world by market cap.

On the other points, I agree.

Sun: Oracle Bid For Software Assets; Who Was Party B?

Not sure that anyone's mentioned being afraid of TV tracking (after all, the data's been randomized! ;-), but concern/caution seems appropriate. For instance, reality shows and similar LCD programming: first off, your TiVo stats (and have a thousand friends join you) will do little to dent network affections for such genres -- they're cheaper to produce than so-called "scripted" shows, so Survivor is always going to have a leg up in the excutive suites.

Where your viewing data will have an effect, however, is in determining which shows attract viewers that stay on the couch to watch the ads. Slashdot ran another story on TiVo data collection way back in '03; the linked BW article mentions one impact of this more-granular data -- it's possible to separate total viewership (aka old-style Nielson numbers of rating and share) from "advert stickiness", the number of viewers who watch the ads. Way back in '03 this was exemplified by comparing The Practice (lawerly drama, pre-Shatner bogosity) to The Weakest Link (cheesy semi-schadenfreude game show): Practice had an 8.9% TiVo rating, but those viewers watched only 30% of the ads. OTOH, Link had only a 0.9% rating, but its viewers stuck around for 78% of the ads. These stats open up a whole new field for the network quants: how to make a show good enough to draw an above-threshold rating/share, but crappy enough to draw the kinds of folks with nothing better to do than sit through the ads.

Now add in Google's Nov. 2009 deal to buy viewer stats from TiVo for use by Google TV Ads, and set your phasers to Irony....will producers begin formulating AVO (advertisement-viewing optimization) strategies similar to SEO shenanigans on the web?

Your last time was not short enough ago to count anymore. Please read this article as to quote its subscriber rate will be flat for the first time since mid 2007 :) http://online.barrons.com/article/SB125998006760077993.html I love my sprint plan and phone.

In the very near past, newspapers were making profit margins of 30%, today they are still making margins of 10%. The problem isn't that they are unprofitable (they are more profitable than health insurance companies - 6%), it is that they over extended themselves when times were good. http://online.barrons.com/article_email/SB125633654783004637-lMyQjAxMDI5NTI2NDMyMzQ2Wj.html?page=sp Yes, they will have to update their business model to reflect the realities of the digital world, but most of their woes are related to making less of a profit than they had expected. There is a big difference between making less of a profit and not making any profit.

What's an icon?

Really! I shouldn't speak too tech to the users...

Example icons: Michael Jordan, Babe Ruth, even The Namesake Carl.

They're the "number 2 software company," but they didn't have anything like the JDK or a real OS to call their own.

Oracle did have an OS, RedHat. There was talk a few years back that Oracle would kill or acquire RedHat after they released their own version of RedHat.

Falcon

Citation please?

First google result I found said that net revenue had increase 101% in the last year, although YT profits represent only 1-1.5% of googles total ad revenue.

http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2009/04/03/given-youtube-losses-should-google-buy-twitter/

... to the tune of 470M per annum according to Credit Suisse analyst Spencer Wang, maybe we should pile on instead of boycotting them. :)

Coincidentally, Barrons.com announced free real-time quotes today too http://online.barrons.com/article/SB121237840349237093.html

Riccitiello paid off some friends and himself with his acquisition. Bioware and Pandemic aren't worth $840 million, since their total accumulated revenue since inception has barely been higher. Riccitiello made gobs of cash, his buddies made gobs of cash, and Bioware and Pandemic will be gutted for the sake of efficiency. There's nothing else here. If anything, this will only be the milestone where EA will have started to go downhill. Goodbye Bioware. I hope the founders made enough money to start from scratch again.

Indeed Apple does get $.29 (not $.30) in *gross revenues* less the *fees* they pay the labels. That leaves a *gross* profit $.29 which is used to pay for advertising, infrastructure bandwidth, maintenance, taxes, etc. The highest estimates are that Apple might make as much as $.10 *net* profit per song. However, if anyone can squeeze extra money out of it through automation, streamlining, smart accounting, and tricky synergistic strategies and planning, it's Apple.

So by now, with their hard won experience and increased competition, I imagine Apple is in position to undercut the rest and still make it worth their while by a penny or two. Here's an article that contains the widely reported breakdown:

http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2007/04/23/apple-turns-out-itunes-makes-money-pacific-crest-says-subscription-service-seems-inevitable/

Would anyone miss them if they pulled out of iTunes? I don't think so. Apple/iTunes is only the largest supplier of downloads as they have a LOT of iPods out there. People only buy a couple of tunes each a year, but multiply that by the number of iPods out there and you are talking big numbers. People buying a dozen tunes each year is not a bright future for the music industry. It's better than every other download company but still not brilliant. Twenty songs =1 or 2 albums.

As you say they get paid for doing nothing. I wouldn't be suprised if the record companies got together and formed their own music sales website. Just as NBC is supposed to be doing. That way they still have to do nothing but get the full 99c for it. iTunes was successful as it was first but as it has no control over the content the record companies have them over a barrel.

The Appeals Court issued a temporary stay pending a hearing of the appeal - anywhere from a few weeks to several months.

http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2007/04/0 6/vonage-appeals-court-grants-temporary-stay-on-or der-barring-signing-up-new-users/

Hence, you can still sign up

The Consumerist has reported that the free 18 months is false (original story)

In addition to what the other s have had to say re: what you're so outraged about. "Willful disregard of a law is potentially an impeachable offense. It is at least as impeachable as having a sexual escapade under the Oval Office desk and lying about it later." From the Barron's editorial. This is about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It's about what makes America...America. And frankly, America deserves better.

Barrons had an interesting piece on Intel this week, entitled "Intel NOT Inside."

In that article as well, Intel claimed that it was targeting the internet economy. The implied reasoning was that the profit ratio is about the same on the $500 chips as the $100 Celeron, so they're about five times as lucrative. The article estimates that one server-class machine is needed for every ten consumer machines on the Internet.

If consumer hardware is getting cheaper while server hardware is staying steady or even advancing in cost, we can see where the safe money's going to be for Intel.

Given the above, and the article's further declaration that Intel has already made/is trying to make further inroads into the embedded controller market where switches, hubs, etc are concerned, we can determine that Internet Economy is obscure jargon for the Internet server and networking hardware market.

--

My question for Intel is whether it's prudent to explicitly remove emphasis from lower end systems (if that's what they truly intend). By Intel's admission, the $100 chips still make the same percentage profit. Wouldn't it make more sense to get on the ball and start pushing Microsoft and game developers to make use of SMP in consumer products, and to then push its low-end SMP-capable processors?

Imagine the benefit to Intel (and us) if they let companies continue to make these sub-$1000-PCs, but if each had 3 spaces free for candy-colored $200 cartridge with another processor and a bit of RAM inside. Average consumers can finally buy that PC that lasts them 5 years, and Intel still gets (eventually) the full price of a server-class chip when people finally upgrade. (And I'll wager quite a few will if they can do it in sub $200 increments!)