keeping simple

Category: business

  • Samsung’s trial brief in the Apple patent lawsuit

    http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/1257891/Samsung_unredacted_trial_brief.pdf Contrary to the image it has cultivated in the popular press, Apple has admitted in internal documents that  its strength is not  in developing  new technologies  first, but in  successfully commercializing them.    When Apple was developing its campaign to promote the first iPhone, it considered – and rejected – advertisements that touted alleged Apple ?firsts? with…

  • Free software and newspapers

    Folks who decry the idea of subscriber fees argue that paywalls won’t work, and that those who advocate for them, don’t understand the Internet. The opposite is true. These folks don’t understand the first thing about actual journalism. It costs money to cover a metro region, or a nation, or the world comprehensively, to place…

  • Murdoch strikes against copyrights

    The witnesses allege a software company NDS, owned by News Corp, cracked the smart card codes of rival company ONdigital. ONdigital, owned by the ITV companies Granada and Carlton, eventually went under amid a welter of counterfeiting by pirates, leaving the immensely lucrative pay-TV field clear for Sky. The allegations, if proved, cast further doubt…

  • Manufacturing and devices

    The answer is obvious but few people stop for a second to wonder about this. After all, it is not like Apple has control over all aluminum in the world. Apple were just the first to see the potential of such bodies and began to increase their orders. In just a few years Apple became…

  • Richard Stallman speaks

    A supply of tea with milk and sugar would be nice. If it is tea I really like, I like it without milk and sugar. With milk and sugar, any kind of tea is fine. I always bring tea bags with me, so if we use my tea bags, I will certainly like that tea…

  • Sinking in too many layers

    Facebook engineers and analysts tap the company’s Hadoop clusters via a SQL-like query language known as Hive. [..] Separate from its Hadoop work, Facebook built Cassandra, a distributed database also based on a piece of Google’s backend. Google uses a proprietary distributed database known as BigTable that runs atop the Google File System (GFS) system,…

  • Computer architecture, power, and PHP

    The Tile-Gx chips have 64-bit processing on their cores, and include floating point math instructions that allow a floating point operating to be done in five cycles instead of hundreds of cycles when done in software. This is, believe it or not, important for PHP support, Ihab Bishara, director of cloud computing applications at Tilera,…

  • VCs bailing on signed term sheets

    Via Trevor Loy (not a bailer) this story We’ve heard three stories in which lead investors bailed on rounds after term sheets were signed.   The first upset came last week from a WeWork Labs company. The startup’s lead investor pulled out of a $500,000 round. Another entrepreneur raised between $3 and $4 million and thought he was…

  • American corporate management

    ASUSTeK started out making the simple circuit boards within a Dell computer. Then ASUSTeK came to Dell with an interesting value proposition: ‘We’ve been doing a good job making these little boards. Why don’t you let us make the motherboard for you? Circuit manufacturing isn’t your core competence anyway and we could do it for…

  • Apple’s Patents possibly covering android

    Apple’s initial legal victory over rival HTC in a patent infringement suit could pave the way for Apple to collect high royalties from devices running Google Android, according to one analysis. Mike Abramsky with RBC Capital Markets believes that Apple has the upper hand over HTC, which is a smaller handset maker with a limited…