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It can even save the company money.

Imagine if Samsung had made a removable battery in these. Solve the battery issue and you don't need to recall an entire line of phones worldwide, just recall and ship new batteries.

It would also have given better optics: "see, it's not our phone but the battery produced by X that was defective"

FIND OUT WHAT PART OF GOVERNMENT IS CAUSING THE MONOPOLY IN YOUR AREA AND FIX IT.

Honestly? It's the part that will arrest me if I just go steal spools of fiber off of trucks, or if I enslave people to dig trenches for free.

Google Fiber was expected to spend $10 billion on installing fiber in the neighborhoods they were welcomed into with wide open arms and special government treatment (Kansas City cost over $1 billion alone). How many other companies have billions of dollars just lying around? Not only that, but we saw the local ISPs immediately cut costs and boost bandwidth in those regions to remain competitive. How many investors are going to hand you a billion dollars to compete in one city where the incumbent will immediately undercut you by leveraging their revenue from across the country to take a loss where you're trying to compete?

Sure, but why not do it as a single "News from WWDC" rather than posting, what is it now, six, seven, eight articles all on what seem like pretty minor announcements from Apple? Like these guys did, for example. The only thing in that whole pile of little tweaks and updates of any real significance was the HomePod, and even then it's just a catch-up to the Echo and Google Home.

Steve would have given them something to post about...

Oh, apparently, at least in the sound department, the HomePod is head and shoulders above everyone else. Hardly "just catch-up" when you fly past the others in the first stride...

Sure, but why not do it as a single "News from WWDC" rather than posting, what is it now, six, seven, eight articles all on what seem like pretty minor announcements from Apple? Like these guys did, for example. The only thing in that whole pile of little tweaks and updates of any real significance was the HomePod, and even then it's just a catch-up to the Echo and Google Home.

Steve would have given them something to post about...

Fines for companies found guilty of breaching EU antitrust rules can reach 10 percent of their global turnover

I hope I'm misreading something here (or the article author was..), but it sounds like Google could in theory be paying more in fines than they actually earned?

Doing some cross-checking it sounds like that $90b "turnover" is their pre-expense revenue. Their profit after expenses is more like $20b, from their own earnings report.

So a $9b fine is almost half of their entire global profits. In fact, according to this site, only around $8b of that profit was generated in the "EMEA" region (Europe, Middle East and Africa -- so that's still more than just the EU itself.)

When you're talking about having to pay out an entire year's profit, plus an additional billion dollars, plus however much cost for additional development needed to avoid future fines, you have to start wondering if its still worth operating in that region at all.

Space in datacenter is not the point. The connection points are transit points which NetFlix needs to pay Comcast for. Doesn't matter if the connection is 5 feet or 5 miles away, to connect to Comcast's network there is a fee.

Once Netflix agreed to this fee they had a deal worked out and the buffering issues went away.

Netflix and Comcast...

No company should be obligated to host any other company's servers or connections without appropriate remuneration for the amount of traffic they will be exchanging. That's what this is all about: one side doesn't want to pay for the speed of access they want to the other side.

The other side is that Comcast probably needed to do some major upgrades to their own network to handle this amount of traffic. Otherwise, without upgrading, but with letting Netflix have direct access to their networks, all other access would suffer. Netflix, rightfully so, didn't want all other network uses to suffer for one single provider with an extremely high-bandwidth use. With Netflix paying a high connection fee, Comcast can use those dollars to upgrade these internal bottlenecks.

...they were going to use something better - sapphire glass or something like that?

Here's an interesting article: https://www.recode.net/2016/7/28/12305062/apple-iphone-gorilla-glass-sapphire-screens

From the article:

But about nine months before GT Advanced was to deliver, the supplier ran into major difficulties in creating these sapphire screens â" or "surface covers," as they are called in the industry â" and the deal imploded.

...

While sapphire is a very hard material and very scratchproof, there is one major problem with it that makes it questionable for use as a smartphone screen: It is much more breakable than Corningâ(TM)s Gorilla Glass and even some soda lime glass that has special composites to make it tougher.

Even worse, if there is even the tiniest flaw in a sapphire screen, it becomes even more fragile when it comes to being dropped or accidentally hit by any solid surface or object.

Preface warning: your Subject asks the question "What's the point of 140 characters?" so I am answering that question directly. I'm intentionally avoiding the subject of why it hasn't been increased (although this may partially answer that question; the idea noted was scrapped).

The 140 limit isn't arbitrary. The goal was to a limit that was below the SMS text length limit, which is 160 characters (or 140 bytes, because GSM 03.38 encoding, which is what is used for SMS, uses 7-bit bytes). Anything above that is broken down into individual/separate text messages of 153 bytes or thereabouts (different carriers seem to do this differently). UCS-2, UTF-8, and UTF-16 are handled "uniquely" as well. You've probably seen some mobile phones "automatically" turn a long SMS that contains emojis into an MMS -- now you know why.

Twitter came into existence in roughly 2005 or 2006, and that the original goal of Twitter was to act as a "group messaging service" where you could send SMS messages to several peers/friends at once (group SMS/MMS send capability did not exist then). With that in mind, it's amusing to see what for and how it's used today (ex. people tell long stories on Twitter, consisting of 20+ replies. These people do not understand the difference between Twitter and a blog service; they are not even remotely the same).

But at least he asked manufacturers to include FM radio support in phones.
He even said pretty please!
That's how you know he's really a big supporter of consumer rights!

The arrogance on display by top-level executives is astounding. Mayer is going to voluntarily give up her bonus, what a sacrifice! Of course, she didn't intentionally screw up, so it's not her fault. The fact that any other employee who screwed up his/her area of responsibility would be (and was) sent packing? Doesn't matter, the elite are not to be held accountable.

What is it about bonuses, anyway? They are handed out to top-level execs like candy - even in the case of the worst business failures, the bonuses are never docked. Note that Ms. Mayer still received $35 million in 2015. For what, exactly? Presiding over the downfall?

The headline (and original report) seem open to misinterpretation.

50% of mobile game revenue comes from just 0.15% of users according to this 2014 report. http://www.recode.net/2014/2/2...

70% of mobile game revenue comes from just 10% of users according to this 2016 report. http://www.adweek.com/digital/...

So while I believe the article that the average amount spent per iPhone is $40/year (mean), it's probably equally true that the "average iPhone user" (median) spends less than $5/year. (That number is just a guess because I don't have the data.) Queue all the people who will reply to this story saying "I spent ZERO over the past year".

You are right that we have a long history of people crying wolf. As part of a course on the policy and ethical implications of AI, I am teaching the history of Luddite reactions from the printing press to the more recent robotic "revolution". Even recently with ATMs, there was a prediction of fewer branches and tellers which did not happen. So we're good right? Well...

Unfortunately, there is one thing that should stand out as being potentially different this time -- in previous instances of the Chicken Little scenarios, it was those who were worried about being displaced that were sounding the alarm, not those creating the technology. This time, it's the other way around. The vast majority of AI researchers, particularly in the private sector, are bullish on the elimination of most blue-collar and service jobs (even management and hedge fund investors are not safe) in the not too distant future. And if you have doubts, we have ample room to believe that the changes are not 50 years away:

• Manufacturing jobs are finally returning to North America...for robots
• Chinese factory replaces 90% of human workers with robots. Production rises by 250%, defects drop by 80%
• BBC News: Foxconn replaces '60,000 factory workers with robots'
• Attention all humans of Shanghai! Robo chefs will now whip you up a bowl of ramen in 90 seconds flat
• Japanese white-collar workers are already being replaced by artificial intelligence
• Mining 24 Hours a Day with Robots
• China Has Launched the Robocops You Have Been Waiting For
• Robots are already replacing fast-food workers Trump’s pick for labor chief, the CEO of Hardee's and Carl’s Jr., likes the idea.
• Inside Silicon Valley’s Robot Pizzeria
• Fmr. McDonald's USA CEO: $35K Robots Cheaper Than Hiring at $15 Per Hour
• Fast-food CEO says he's investing in machines because the government is making it difficult to afford employees

And other things to think about....

• Dallas Police Used Robot With Bomb to Kill Ambush Suspect
• Microsoft Foresees AR Tracking Your Keys, Milk, Entire Life
• White House: US Needs a Stronger Social Safety Net To Help Workers Displaced by Robots
• McKinsey's 2016 Analy

From the article:

"Google declined to provide a listing of the banned sites."

http://www.recode.net/2017/1/2...

Uber's own ad campaigns bend over backwards to emphasize that this is supposed to be a side gig to make some extra money.

Uber was just this week fined $20M by the FTC for doing the exact opposite of what you're saying, so pardon me if I don't believe anything you've just said. They were overstating median incomes by as much as $29,000/year, advertising unlimited mileage for leases that didn't actually have unlimited mileage, and advertising that their leases were lower-cost than their competitors (which wasn't true in the least). The FTC found that in some markets, only around 10% of the drivers were making as much as the "median" incomes that Uber was advertising.

So while I do generally agree that the world doesn't owe anyone anything, I'll add the caveat that companies are obligated to not make fraudulent claims, which is exactly what Uber is being fined for having done.

According to this http://www.recode.net/2016/3/24/11587234/two-years-later-facebooks-oculus-acquisition-has-changed-virtual Oculus had 75 employees when it was acquired. So, that $700 million to retain employees works out to a little under $10 million per employee for retention?!?!

I am really in the wrong industry...

What the hell does net neutrality have to do with the data limits on cellphone plans?

Moving away from unlimited and into more expensive and limited plans pushes people towards provider-sanctioned services for which the bandwidth does not count towards your monthly usage. This goes against network neutrality, even if the topic is bandwidth usage instead of transfer speed.

What the hell does Trump's winning the US Presidential election have to do with cellphone data plans?

Trump is an opponent of net neutrality.

Hell, if that four-and-a-half hours per day stat is accurate, $150/month for cable is still a good deal. I'm just trying to figure out how a person can spend that much time in front of a TV...

Is there some reason to not go this route? It seems a lot more obvious to me; no emulation needed. Continuum on Windows 10 Mobile on x86 solves most of these problems. I think Microsoft's last best chance for Windows Mobile to be anything other than a footnote is to support corporate desktops, and x86 phones that are also a corporate workers desktop seems like something they can manage in short order. At that point, good old-fashioned Microsoft inertia takes over and plenty of people start using their work platform as their personal device as well.

I don't see it conquering the world, but it's probably a profitable niche at least.

Since Intel gave up on mobile (and AMD never was on mobile and doesn't have the money to invest in this anyhow), going forward, why would anyone attempt to build an phone with x86 hardware? How could it possibly be a profitable niche?

You just have to face the facts, on mobile, it's ARM or nothing for the forseeable future...

http://www.recode.net/2015/9/2...

Have a read

This.

For a long time it has been a strategy of Corporate to "overspend", in terms of complexity. I think this is the most successful strategy against Free (look up "decommoditizing protocols" to get an idea of what I'm talking about).

One especially crass example: look at ODF's spec (aka OpenDocument) versus Microsoft's OOXML (I like to call it MOOXML :^) -- in spite of the second being utterly incomplete. You can only "compete" with that if you can afford the hordes of programmers Microsoft can afford... up to now.

Now times are a-changing. Perhaps those hordes of programmers are going to be replaced by hordes of Google TPUs (or by hordes of scavenged GPUs, for the poorer of us).

I know this may come as a shock, but your numbers appear to have little basis in reality. Instead, let's work with Apple's latest financial statements and draw our conclusions from there.

Focusing on page 3, here's what we can quickly glean using some simple arithmetic with their numbers from last quarter:
- They have a 38% margin after you deduct the cost of sales
- They have a 24% margin after you deduct operating expenses
- They have an 18.4% margin after you deduct taxes

According to page 28, operating expenses is where R&D, advertising, employee salaries, and other day-to-day costs fall, so it's safe to say that your claim regarding a "100% profit margin" has no factual basis, despite you being a random person on the Internet who has an opinion. Rather, depending on how we define "profit", we'd peg it at more like 18-24%.

As for why their margin isn't what you claimed, you probably grabbed your $200 number from this report that was widely circulated a few years ago, but it neglected to consider a number of costs beyond the bill of materials (BOM) and manufacturing. For instance, there's no mention of the cost to ship components to where they'll be assembled, the cost to package the final product, capital expenditures to customize or scale manufacturing, nor of the cost to ship the final product to its destination. These teardowns routinely come in FAR under the actual cost, and that trend has only been getting worse these last few years. It got so bad, in fact, that Tim Cook even took some time to address it last year.

Disclaimer: The numbers on page 3 (and here) represent their full product line, so I will readily admit that we can't take them as hard and fast numbers for iPhones specifically. That said, other statements I've read over the years have indicated that iPhone margins fall in line with their margins for their products as a whole, so we shouldn't expect them to be much different, if at all, given that iPhones account for 57% of their net sales, according to page 25.

You seem to think that TV channels have some sort of duty of care that their advertisements are legit.

I know next to nothing about UK law other than that European law tends to be somewhat more protective of consumers than U.S. law. And even in the U.S., there is evidence of such a "duty of care that their advertisements are legit": the FCC has fined US cable TV networks millions of dollars for showing trailers for the film Olympus Has Fallen that included Emergency Alert System signals.

Well said; Apple appears to be the only major company interested in privacy of their users, and dare I say, even fighting for their users' privacy. Each iteration of iOS hardens their system further from gov surveillance. Case in point.

Although iOS and iPhones are fairly well protected against gov surveillance, I'm not sure what Apple is doing against commercial spying apps and advertisers, particularly the most evil of all: Google.

I beg to differ - http://www.recode.net/2016/4/2...

You're cordially invited to start an ISP. Preferably where the likes of Comcast have a monopoly. Please do.

Google already did. To wonderful results...

Does this mean the NoSuchAgency have backdoors into all other systems? Of course if your secret keys reside on some server, then they're not really secret, just ask BlackBerry

The order from the judge was first. The All Writs act was second.

If you're going to understand what this argument is about it's important you understand what it is. Lines like this:
"making things the government can not access has been a long and healthy tradition and is a right for a reason"
prove you have an understanding gleaned from popular mechanics headlines, not one from actual critical thought given to the case specifics.

The facts:
Apple phones are encrypted by default. The encryption is not directly reversible by Apple, nor anyone without access to the encryption keys. Encryption is acheived through one way mathematical formulas. The only way to reverse good encryption is through brute force. Apple phones run a program on the device that operate a "kill switch" for access to the encrypted data after a series of failed attempts.

The dilemma:
The FBI, through the order of a federal judge, asked Apple to help them remove the kill switch so they could access the data in its native form. Apple refused, erroneously citing global privacy conerns.

The result:
The FBI has now simply given up on the idea of going through "the front door" and has mounted the data in another way they can brute force it outside of this "kill switch". Apple has continuosly manipulated the story pretending like they would have to compromise every iPhone in existence, or give the FBI the keys to the castle for this to be possible. The truth is, they could have easily cooperated with virtually no reprecussions. The FBI simply wanted the designer of the booby trapped front door to help them disable it. Instead, they opted to carve their own door into the side of the structure. The result is nearly the same.

Now that you should have a more informed understanding of the case you can hopefully look less foolish when you try to talk about it.

If you buy iPhones/iPads for employees and don't use an MDM (Mobile Device Manager), then you have lost control on the device, period. All of this insanity could be a if San Bernadino would have managed their employee devices.

This is a giant tempest in a teapot. The FBI was sloppy and locked the phone, even though they deny the screwup, judge for yourself.

ATTENTION: If you issue iPhones or Android to employees setup an MDM!

On the one hand, Apple tried to make a deal and keep the whole thing secret. So that makes it seem like Apple was willing to go along (for at least this one case) as long as it was kept quiet.

On the other hand, it doesn't really matter. If Apple is doing it as a publicity stunt, then it's doing it because the customers want it. Frankly that's better than a corporation trying to "do the right thing" that people don't want.

Re/code, Feb. 14, 2015: "The president has encouraged his two daughters, Sasha and Malia, to learn to code, although they apparently haven't taken to it the way he'd like. "I think they got started a little bit late," the president conceded. "Part of what you want to do is introduce this with the ABCs and the colors," he said. Particular attention needs to be paid to helping girls and other underrepresented groups in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields, including African-Americans and Latinos, the president continued."

Eric Jackson has been peeing on Yahoo for 7 years.

He advises people on How to be an activist investor, and it mostly comes down to making a lot of noise, even when you only own about 0.2% of the stock -- which is what his fund owns of Yahoo.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/ho...
http://recode.net/2014/08/12/a...
http://greenbackd.com/tag/dr-e...

His dream (now all but kaput, thanks to the financial crisis in China) was to have Alibaba flush with cash, spending it on acquiring Yahoo.

Continuing with that thought, and maybe I'm reading it wrong, but the following article seems to say that a large portion of players aren't impatient enough to part with that $1. But the ones who do, they'll keep feeding the machine, to the point where "whales" actually exist in mobile gaming just like with casinos. The result is that revenue is highly dependent on a very thin sliver of game players:

https://recode.net/2014/02/26/...

That's all Gamergate is about.

But here we are talking about SXSW and panels on harassment, and those are explicitly not about GG.

What I am trying to get across to you and others is that when gays, lesbians, women, minorities, and other members that the "marginalized" groups these panels purport to advocate for use tags like #notyourshield, we are not "astroturfing". Yes, believe it or not, plenty of us "marginalized" folks don't need the patronizing advocacy and self-serving media appearances of these people to make it through the day or have careers.

Here: http://recode.net/2015/10/06/g...

Yeah, nice DoubleSpeak, that.

"We don't collect the data..." vs. "We only collect the data when..."

Yeahrightsure. And you only get the option to "Opt In/Out" when you initially set-up the system.

Yeah, buddy. I feel SO much safer now...

Here: http://recode.net/2015/10/06/g...

Except Nintendo is practically the only game developer that does this. Search for "let's play" videos on youtube; there are TONS of them, from current generation games no less. If you upload a let's play for a nintendo game, they'll DMCA you and either demand you insert ads and they keep all of its revenue, or you have to remove it completely.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/a...

If you want Nintendo to share the ad revenue, you have to delete all of your videos of non-Nintendo games from youtube:

http://recode.net/2015/02/04/n...

(Disclaimer: I don't watch pewdiepie.)

That indeed is the elephant in the room:

* Nausea

There is a HUGE disconnect between with what your eyes are telling your brain and what your ears are. Your brain is getting mixed messages. We've been able to somewhat "get over" it in 2D monitors because of lack of immersion. I've been gaming since the early 80's and *never* get motion sickness. I do with VR. :-/ A certain percentage of the population gets sick on boats. That's not a great "strength" for VR.

I think it is way too early to write VR off. (I tend to as well but I also want to wait-and-see.) There are some fantastic *niche* markets.

Want to get over your fear of heights? Parachuting? Sky diving? Take a VR course! :-)

Apparently Tim Sweeney is betting the farm on VR

We'll probably see more hologram phone hacks like this in the meantime which is WAY more accessible.

Apple TV? That still a thing? And what ever Plex is. I guess the 13 people, that have an Apple TV will be happy for something new.

Yeah, more like 25 MILLION. And that was BEFORE the new model came out.

They'll probably call it CyberUL.

It appears these are smartphones for the developing world, do they have 4g yet? http://recode.net/2015/08/26/f...

In fact, from reading up on Pao - her "termination" was a pseudo-termination. If I'm reading what I see correctly, they "terminated" her from direct involvement with investments but offered her an "operational" position (as in, manager).

(If I'm reading http://recode.net/2015/03/12/l... - they basically pulled her from investing but offered her five months of pay to transition to being an executive at one of their portfolio companies, i.e. a company that they had a stake in).

All of the evidence (including her fuckups at Reddit) indicates she was marginally competent and KP tried to move her into a role where she wasn't over her head. She was overconfident in her capabilities and sued them.

Market share is not as important as "profit share". This is true for both device makers and App developers. Apple matters very much, with only 20% market share by unit but 89% by profit. On the app front, Apple paid out $10 billion to developers last year while Google paid out $7 billion.

So yes, they still are relevant.

The proper verdict would have been to destroy both the KP partners and Pao as they all horrible human beings.
...
The partner (?)...
...
given to a loser...
...
Indian sleazebag...
...
an utter whore and slut...
...
All I can say is, "Kill them with fire. All of them."

As for this part:

1. The partner (?) who did not want to invite the women in the company to a getaway with Al Gore because it would "kill the buzz." The buzz would be killed because the excluded party were women, not because they were unpleasant people.

http://recode.net/2015/02/25/a...

And about that Al Gore dinner, Chien said that only 10 people could fit in the former vice president's living room, and only three of them were affiliated with Kleiner Perkins. Pao herself had actually suggested some invitees who were male: The CEOs of Yelp and Dropbox.

Chien insisted he'd never said anything about women killing the buzz. "Absolutely not," he said. Pao's filing was "the first time I had ever heard of the phrase."

And about the all-guy ski trip? Chien said he'd actually invited fellow Kleiner colleague Mary Meeker, but she couldn't make it. And besides, she has her own house in the area, he said.

...
Could Path founder Dave Morin invite a female entrepreneur from a Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers portfolio company on the firm's 2012 ski trip to Colorado, organized by then senior partner Chi-Hua Chien?

He could not, Chien said. As he explained in an email at the time, "The issue is that we are staying in condos, and I was thinking that gents wouldn't mind sharing, but gals might. Why don't we punt on her and find 2 guys who are awesome. We can add 4-8 women next year."
There were no women on the 2012 ski trip, and there would be no ski trip the next year.

"Drivers shouldn't have to deal with aggressive, violent, or disrespectful riders. If a rider exhibits disrespectful, threatening, or unsafe behavior, they, too, may no longer be able to use the service."

Just you wait, Uber, until a year later it turns out, your drivers have blacklisted a "disproportionally" large share of some minority — sexual, racial, or religious. Let's see, if having Obama's top political adviser in employ will help you then...

Why should not a business-owner — whatever their business may be — be free to refuse to do business with anyone they find disagreeable, and for whatever reason?

It could be Sony itself. Sony has already admitted to doing Denial of Services Attacks against its enemies, whether those enemies are located in the United States, Europe, Russia, or anywhere else in the World.

Sony really doesn't care about collateral damage, nor national boundaries.

"powered by two 3, 1.4Ghz, quad-core NVIDIA Tegra processors"

Couldn't find those details in TFA, but from (the much more readable) article at: http://recode.net/2014/10/14/w...

seems to imply that should read:

"powered by two 1.4Ghz, quad-core NVIDIA Tegra processors"

An awful lot of those phones are going directly to resale. http://recode.net/2014/09/20/a...

Sorry, I may have spoken too soon there. Certain features of hangouts look like they still require plus, if you are not on an Apps (business) account. But they seem to have almost completely phased this out. In general they seem to have halted the major push for plus. I'd like to think they fired* the head of plus partly because of the failure of the push and the backlash of the real name, and youtube stuff...but I don't know why he "left" ( http://recode.net/2014/04/24/e... ). Anyways, here's what i could find on how to use hangouts:

https://productforums.google.c...
https://support.google.com/plu...
https://support.google.com/a/a...

Here's how to use it without plus:
https://support.google.com/han...

Looks like his next job is confirmed to be at Apple, although what position is undisclosed. http://recode.net/2014/08/31/v...