Quotulatiousness

August 13, 2013

Blacksoft or Microberry … will Microsoft scoop up Blackberry?

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:21

In Maclean’s, Peter Nowak wonders why Microsoft hasn’t already purchased Blackberry:

The logic is pretty solid. Android and Apple have run away with the smartphone market, with the Canadian company clutching at a distant and declining third-place slice. The latest numbers say the company has indeed lost that spot to Microsoft and its Windows Phone.

That’s not cause for any excitement — these are low, single-digit scraps we’re talking about. Android and Apple have about 80 and 13 per cent of the market, respectively. (As an aside, it’s funny how those numbers are starting to look like the historical division between Windows and Mac computers, huh?)

So what’s the fastest and easiest way for a company to make its anemic market share bigger? It doesn’t take a mathematician to figure out the answer: combine it with somebody else’s equally anemic share into something with a little more meat on its bones. Putting BlackBerry and Microsoft’s Windows phones together would amount to almost seven-per-cent share. That’s still small, but it’s almost within striking distance of Apple.

More importantly, Microsoft — through an acquisition — would eliminate its biggest obstacle. In some countries, especially Canada. BlackBerry still enjoys decent success as the de facto third brand that buyers gravitate to because they’re loyal and/or hate Android and Apple. By most accounts, Windows Phone sales are extra anemic to non-existent in these markets as a result.

August 9, 2013

The cult of Apple

Filed under: Business, Media, Religion, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:24

In Wired, Brett T. Robinson talks about the similarities of the “Apple cult” to religious beliefs:

Technology ads provide parables and proverbs for navigating the complexities of the new technological order. They instruct the consumer on how to live the “good life” in the technological age.

Like all advertising, Apple’s ads perform a vital educational function in consumer society. The advertisements are allegorical, rhetorical attempts to domesticate foreign and abstract concepts, making them accessible and attractive to everyday adherents.

In fact, they resemble medieval morality plays in their personification of good (Mac) and evil (PC). As such, the ads contain a moral — or, more explicitly, they propose a morality customized for the conditions of the age.

Media technology has acquired a moral status because it has become part of the natural order of things. Luddites, those who have sworn off new technologies, are the new heretics and illiterates. Technology is an absolute. There is no turning back or imagining a different social order. Challenge is acceptable as long as it remains within the confines of the technological order. Apple may challenge Microsoft. Samsung may challenge Apple. But the order must not be challenged.

The impact of digital culture, then, is epistemic; it insinuates a moral system based on its own internal logic.

[…]

In the Apple story, the brand cult began offline, with users meeting in real, physical locations to swap programs and ideas. Now, the Apple community is more diffuse, concentrated in online discussion groups and support forums. However, Apple product launches and conferences remain sacred pilgrimages where Apple fans can congregate, camp, and live together for days at a time to revel in the communal joy of witnessing the transcendent moment of the new product launch.

The reverence once reserved for holy relics and liturgy has reemerged in the technology subculture. The shared experience of living in a highly technological era provides a universal ground for a pluralistic society. There may be many different devices, but only one Internet.

Technology has become the new taken-for-granted order that requires our fidelity. Obedience to the new order is expressed in the communication rituals that take place every day in the use of computers, music players, and smartphones — devices that bind individuals together. From the farthest satellite to the nearest cellphone, the mystical body of electricity connects us all. Personal technology has become “the very atmosphere and medium” through which we mediate our daily lives.

May 21, 2013

Apple and the question of profit shifting

Filed under: Business, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:23

Tim Worstall explains why both Apple and the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations can both be correct on the question of profit shifting — because the term’s meaning isn’t consistent:

Apple divides itself, roughly speaking, into two segments. The Americas and everywhere else (not that unusual for a US company, actually). Apple’s point is that it makes profits in the US selling things to people in the US. All profits from doing this pay the full US corporate income tax minus the usual deductions and allowances that every company can take advantage of.

Apple also points out that it makes the majority of its profits selling things outside the US to people who are not Americans. The iPhones are made in China and sold in Europe, just as one example. These profits are made outside the US: and Apple does not bring them into the US. Thus such profits are not liable to US corporate taxation (it is more complex than this but that’s the gist of it).

However, the Senate doesn’t use that commonsense definition of the phrase:

The Subcommittee is agreeing that these are profits made in foreign countries. Profits made by buying something in China and selling it outside the US. These profits are then not repatriated to the US. This is then deemed to be profit shifting.

It’s worth noting what everyone does agree upon.

Apple makes large profits in the US. These pay full US corporate income tax.

Apple makes large profits outside the US. These are kept outside the US and do not pay US corporate income tax.

And so the question becomes, what is the definition of profit shifting? If we take Apple’s definition, that they do not move profits out of the US, then they’re not profit shifting. If we take the Subcommittee meaning then they are. For without the corporate structures that Apple has put in place then those foreign profits would be subject to the US corporate income tax (minus, of course, the foreign taxes already paid).

Update:

Update, the second: The Register‘s report on the Irish side of the “profit shifting” story:

Irish deputy PM: You want more tax from Apple? Your problem, not ours
Póg mo thóin, you crazy Yanks

May 4, 2013

This is why cash-rich Apple is borrowing money on the bond market

Filed under: Business, Economics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:20

In one word, taxes:

What a crazy world. Apple, a company with $145 billion of cash, is issuing some $17 billion of debt to buy back its own shares. Why doesn’t it just use its cash to do the same thing? First, because a lot of that cash is overseas, and bringing it back to America would incur a tax charge. Second, because interest rates are low and debt interest is tax-deductible, making this look a great arbitrage.

But think of it from the point of view of the hard-working American taxpayer. Apple’s money will still sit overseas and not be invested at home to create jobs. Apple’s tax bill will fall, as it offsets the interest payments against its profits. The buy-back will probably push up the share price in the short term, boosting the value of executive options; profits from those options will probably be taxed at the long-term capital gains tax rate of 15%, lower than the rate many workers pay. Organising a bond issue, rather than using a company’s own cash, incurs costs in the form of fees to bankers on Wall Street; the same bankers taxpayers helped support five years ago.

April 10, 2013

Despite government denials, the iPod duty is alive and well

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:13

Expect to pay more for your iPods and similar devices, says Mike Moffatt in the Globe and Mail:

Last week, I wrote that the federal government’s changes to tariffs in Budget 2013 would result in new import duties on models of MP3 players and three of four models of Apple iPods. The tariff changes involve changing the tariff status of 72 countries, so music devices manufactured in China, Indonesia and Malaysia will pay a 5 to 6 per cent tariff rather than their “preferential” rate of zero, starting in 2015.

The article caused quite a stir, and the government denied it was true. A spokeswoman for Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said the article was wrong. “Music devices like iPods are imported into Canada duty-free under a long-standing special tariff classification from 1987,” she wrote. That classification, which was unaltered by the recent budget, is known by its number: 9948.00.00. (We’ll call it 9948 for short.)

However, a close reading of the relevant document, Tariff Item 9948.00.00 (9948 for short), shows that to qualify for the special classification, the importer must meet strict criteria.

My position that importers cannot meet the requirements of 9948 rests on three straight-forward premises:

1. It appears that sellers of iPods and MP3s are required to collect “end use certificates” from the final consumer on each sale, and be able to present these to the CBSA if audited.

2. The 9948 requirement for “end use certificates” appears to be actively enforced by the CBSA.

3. Retailers cannot reasonably collect these certificates from consumers when they buy an iPod.

These three, put together, make retail sales of iPods and MP3 players ineligible for 9948 and therefore subject to an iPod tariff. What follows is my evidence.

The importer must maintain a database (what Moffatt calls “an iPod registry”) of personal information on the final purchasers of the devices, but there is no matching legal requirement on the consumer to provide this personal information (which would probably violate privacy laws in any other context).

The CBSA’s Memorandum D10-14-51 requires that consumers attest that they will use the iPod in a manner in which it is “physically connected” to a computer (though not necessarily permanently so, according to the memo) and will “enhance the function” of that computer. The consumers must attest that their devices will be “solely used for the purpose for which they were imported.”

If a consumer uses a device in a manner not covered by 9948 during the first four years of ownership, the importer is required to “make a correction to the declaration of tariff classification and pay any applicable duties and taxes.”

This rule is not trivial. CITT Appeal No. AP-2008-023 discusses the need for sellers claiming the tariff reduction (here Code 2101, the predecessor to 9948.00.00) to show that the end consumer is using the goods in the manner described on the certificate.

But there is no practical way an importer could possibly verify and ensure that that the retailer’s customers have not changed how they are using iPods and MP3 players.

January 30, 2013

“The only people [DRM] annoys are the ones who have [acquired] legal copies”

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:12

At Techdirt, Glyn Moody explains why the attempt to add DRM to the HTML5 standard is doomed to failure:

You would have thought by now that people would understand that DRM is not only a bad idea, but totally unnecessary: Apple dropped DRM from music downloads in 2009 and seems to be making ends meet. Despite these obvious truths, the stupidity that is DRM continues to spread. Here, for example, is a particularly stupid example of DRM stupidity, as revealed by Manu Sporny:

    A few days ago, a new proposal was put forward in the HTML Working Group (HTML WG) by Microsoft, Netflix, and Google to take DRM in HTML5 to the next stage of standardization at W3C.

After all, this is exactly what Web users have been crying out for: “just give us DRM for the Web, and our lives will be complete….”

[. . .]

That clearly implies that when people are not sharing their own content with family and friends, then they are indeed adversaries:

    This “user is not an adversary” text can be found in the first question about use cases. It insinuates that people that listen to radio and watch movies online are potential adversaries. As a business owner, I think that’s a terrible way to frame your customers.

    Thinking of the people that are using the technology that you’re specifying as “adversaries” is also largely wrong. 99.999% of people using DRM-based systems to view content are doing it legally. The folks that are pirating content are not sitting down and viewing the DRM stream, they have acquired a non-DRM stream from somewhere else, like Mega or The Pirate Bay, and are watching that.

This is the fundamental reason why DRM is doomed and should be discarded: the only people it annoys are the ones who have tried to support creators by acquiring legal copies. How stupid is that?

Pirates_vs_Paying_Customers_full

December 26, 2012

What we gain in accuracy we lose in romance

Filed under: History, Media, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:27

What am I talking about? Digital maps:

It’s not often that maps make headlines, but they’ve been doing so with some regularity lately. Last week, tens of millions of iPhone users found that they could suddenly leave their homes again without getting either lost or cross. This was because Google finally released an app containing its own (fairly brilliant) mapping system. Google Maps had been sorely missed for several months, ever since Apple booted it in favor of the company’s own inadequate alternative — a cartographic dud blamed for everything from deleting Shakespeare’s birthplace to stranding Australian travelers in a desolate national park 43 miles away from their actual destination. As one Twitter wag declared: “I wouldn’t trade my Apple Maps for all the tea in Cuba.”

There was one potential bright spot, though: Among the many mistakes found in Apple Maps was a rather elegant solution to the continuing dispute between Japan and China over the Senkaku islands. Japan controls them; China claims them. Apple Maps, when released, simply duplicated the islands, with two sets shown side-by-side — one for Japan, one for China. Win-win. (At least until the software update.) Call it diplomacy by digital dunderheadedness.

As some may recall, it was not so long ago that we got around by using maps that folded. Occasionally, if we wanted a truly global picture of our place in the world, we would pull shoulder-dislocating atlases from shelves. The world was bigger back then. Experience and cheaper travel have rendered it small, but nothing has shrunk the world more than digital mapping.

[. . .]

There is something disappointing about the austere potential perfection of the new maps. The satellites above us have seen all there is to see of the world; technically, they have mapped it all. But satellites know nothing of the beauty of hand-drawn maps, with their Spanish galleons and sea monsters, and they cannot comprehend wanderlust and the desire for discovery. Today we can locate the smallest hamlet in sub-Saharan Africa or the Yukon, but can we claim that we know them any better? Do the irregular and unpredictable fancies of the older maps more accurately reflect the strangeness of the world?

The uncertainty that was once an unavoidable part or our relationship with maps has been replaced by a false sense of Wi-Fi-enabled omnipotence. Digital maps are the enemies of wonder. They suppress our urge to experiment and (usually) steer us from error—but what could be more irrepressibly human than those very things?

Update: And the Apple Maps fiasco has them leading most of the tech world’s “Top 10” lists for mis-steps, fumbles, and self-inflicted wounds.

There really could be only one pick for the number-one spot on this list. The Apple Maps fiasco has done more to hurt the company’s image than anything else this year, leaving their reputation — and those of some of its supporters — in the dust.

At the start of the year Apple was riding high. The loss of cofounder Steve Jobs had been handled better than many in the industry had expected, and Tim Cook looked like a safe pair of hands to take the company forward. Apple was on its way to being the most valuable in the world in dollar terms, and was beating the competition like a red-headed stepchild.

[. . .]

When iOS 6 with Apple Maps launched, there was initially little fuss. Apple’s policy of only letting friendly reviewers get advanced access to kit held up well, and virtually none of Cupertino’s chosen few even mentioned the mapping function in their glowing reviews of the new operating system. But then users actually tried it out and the results were plain to see.

Apple’s Maps app simply didn’t work correctly. Sure, it could get you from point to point — just about — but the level of detail included was poor and mapping information was frequently wrong. The list of cock-ups grew day by day as people realized that the application just wasn’t fit in any meaningful way.

Even the Australian police warned against using it for fear of getting lost in the desert.

December 3, 2012

The feudal technopeasant internet

Filed under: History, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:20

Bruce Schneier on the less-than-appealing state of user security in today’s internet:

It’s a feudal world out there.

Some of us have pledged our allegiance to Google: We have Gmail accounts, we use Google Calendar and Google Docs, and we have Android phones. Others have pledged allegiance to Apple: We have Macintosh laptops, iPhones, and iPads; and we let iCloud automatically synchronize and back up everything. Still others of us let Microsoft do it all. Or we buy our music and e-books from Amazon, which keeps records of what we own and allows downloading to a Kindle, computer, or phone. Some of us have pretty much abandoned e-mail altogether … for Facebook.

These vendors are becoming our feudal lords, and we are becoming their vassals. We might refuse to pledge allegiance to all of them — or to a particular one we don’t like. Or we can spread our allegiance around. But either way, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to not pledge allegiance to at least one of them.

Feudalism provides security. Classical medieval feudalism depended on overlapping, complex, hierarchical relationships. There were oaths and obligations: a series of rights and privileges. A critical aspect of this system was protection: vassals would pledge their allegiance to a lord, and in return, that lord would protect them from harm.

Of course, I’m romanticizing here; European history was never this simple, and the description is based on stories of that time, but that’s the general model.

And it’s this model that’s starting to permeate computer security today.

November 30, 2012

Can we bury iTunes yet?

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:42

In Slate, Farhad Manjoo calls for the abolition of the worst carbuncle on Apple’s escutcheon:

iTunes 11 did not arrive on time. Apple originally promised to deliver the next version of its ubiquitous music-management program in October. Last month, though, the company announced that the release would slip to November, because the company needed “a little extra time to get it right.” This week the Wall Street Journal, citing “people who have seen it,” reported that the real cause was “engineering issues that required parts to be rebuilt.”

I suspect both those explanations are euphemisms for what’s really happening in Cupertino. I picture frazzled engineers growing increasingly alarmed as they discover that the iTunes codebase has been overrun by some kind of self-replicating virus that keeps adding random features and redesigns. The coders can’t figure out what’s going on — why iTunes, alone among Apple products, keeps growing more ungainly. At the head of the team is a grizzled old engineer who’s been at Apple forever. He’s surly and crude, always making vulgar jokes about iPads. But the company can’t afford to get rid of him — he’s the only one who understands how to operate the furnaces in the iTunes boiler room.

Then one morning the crew hears a strange clanging from iTunes’ starboard side. Scouts report that an ancient piston — something added for compatibility with the U2 iPod and then refashioned dozens of times — has been damaged while craftsmen removed the last remnants of a feature named Ping whose purpose has been lost to history. The old engineer dons his grease-covered overalls and heads down to check it out. Many anxious minutes pass. Then the crew is shaken by a huge blast. A minute later, they hear a lone, muffled wail. They send a medic, but it’s too late. The engineer has been battered by shrapnel from the iOS app management system, which is always on the fritz. His last words haunt the team forever: She can’t take much more of this. Too. Many. Features.

I use iTunes, but only because I need to back up my iPhone data … and nearly half the time, iTunes craps out on me and I have to go looking for fixes or work-arounds from Apple. Since I updated my iPhone to the most recent iOS version, I haven’t been able to sync with iTunes at all. Here’s hoping that the new version will fix that — and maybe, if we’re lucky, some other issues, too.

Update, 1 December: The update went well enough, but it still couldn’t contact the iTunes store or detect my iPhone. After a few minutes of looking through the Apple troubleshooting help pages, I reset the DNS cache and re-enabled iTunes to run in Administrator mode. That was enough to let it detect the iPhone and run a backup and re-synch.

November 22, 2012

The Apple ad that tells the whole truth

Filed under: Business, Humour, Media, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:55

The Commercial that Apple never wanted to show us, but today I’m going to show it to you 😀 I highly recommend to watch it 🙂 It’s short and sweet.

November 20, 2012

Microsoft’s essential problem

Filed under: Business — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:43

ESR explains why Microsoft has been languishing in the doldrums for the past several years:

This is why Microsoft looks so doomed and desperate. Yes, Steve Ballmer is a colossal fool who has never met a strategic decision he couldn’t bungle, but in an important way that is symptom rather than cause. Dysfunctional leaders arise from dysfunctional cultures; the problem behind Ballmer is that Microsoft’s culture is broken, and the problem behind that is that the monopolistic/authoritarian goals around which Microsoft’s culture was constructed are incompatible with any other kind of excellence.

A more poetic way to put this is Tolkien’s “Oft evil will shall evil mar.” Google’s “Don’t be evil” isn’t mere idealism or posturing, it’s an attempt to sustain the kind of culture in which excellence is possible. (Whether and how long this will be a successful attempt is a different question.)

Apple’s turn is next.

November 17, 2012

A new low in patents?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:35

Apple has patented the “page turn”:

If you want to know just how broken the patent system is, just look at patent D670,713, filed by Apple and approved this week by the United States Patent Office.

This design patent, titled, “Display screen or portion thereof with animated graphical user interface,” gives Apple the exclusive rights to the page turn in an e-reader application.

Yes, that’s right. Apple now owns the page turn. You know, as when you turn a page with your hand. An “interface” that has been around for hundreds of years in physical form. I swear I’ve seen similar animation in Disney or Warner Brothers cartoons.

(This is where readers are probably checking the URL of this article to make sure it’s The New York Times and not The Onion.)

November 4, 2012

Rethinking software patents

Filed under: Business, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Software patents are becoming a clear and present danger to innovation:

The basic problem being that there are so many patents, covering so many things, that the system is in danger of eating itself like Ourobouros.

    When Dan Ravicher of the Public Patent Foundation studied one large program (Linux, which is the kernel of the GNU/Linux operating system) in 2004, he found 283 U.S. patents that appeared to cover computing ideas implemented in the source code of that program. That same year, it was estimated that Linux was .25 percent of the whole GNU/Linux system. Multiplying 300 by 400 we get the order-of-magnitude estimate that the system as a whole was threatened by around 100,000 patents.

    If half of those patents were eliminated as “bad quality” — i.e., mistakes of the patent system — it would not really change things. Whether 100,000 patents or 50,000, it’s the same disaster. This is why it’s a mistake to limit our criticism of software patents to just “patent trolls” or ”bad quality” patents. In this sense Apple, which isn’t a “troll” by the usual definition, is the most dangerous patent aggressor today. I don’t know whether Apple’s patents are “good quality,” but the better the patent’s “quality,” the more dangerous its threat.

It’s near impossible to develop new software when there are so many such patents out there. Further, even if you tried to get clearance (or signed up to licenses and so on) to use them it would be near impossible.And we do need to recall what the purpose of a patent system is. No, it isn’t to provide and income to those who create inventions. That’s only the proximate aim: the ultimate aim is to maximise the amount of invention and innovation.

The economics of patents accepts that there is a tradeoff here. Yes, we’d like people who come up with useful new things to make money. Because that incentivises people to work on coming up with interesting new things to all our benefit. However, we also want people to be able to create derivative innovations and inventions. If our protection of the original inventors is too strong then we limit this. What we want is a system that hits the sweet spot, of encouraging the maximum amount of both, original and derivative. The problem of course being that to encourage one we weaken the incentives to do the other, either way around.

October 25, 2012

The Apple cult as a modern religion

Filed under: Business, Media, Religion, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:40

Do non-Apple fans sometimes think they’re talking to religious fanatics when they talk to Apple users? It’s a silly question, isn’t it? Of course they do, because Apple has become more and more a religious experience rather than a mere technology company:

[Kirsten Bell] wrote in the Christian Science Monitor that a stranger observing one of the launches could probably be forgiven for thinking they had stumbled into a religious revival meeting.

Bell now studies the culture of modern biomedical research, but is an expert on messianic religious movements in South Korea.

She said that an Apple product launch takes place in a building “littered with sacred symbols, especially the iconic Apple sign itself”.

Keynote speeches feature an Apple leader reawakened and renewing their faith in the core message and tenets of the brand/religion.

The tradition of not broadcasting launches in real time is akin to a religious event where it is forbidden to broadcast Sacred Ceremonies.

Instead scribes or its Tame Apple Press act like the writers of the gospels, “testifying to the wonders they behold” in a completely non objective way.

October 9, 2012

Politics and economics: election-style

Filed under: Economics, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:32

At the Hit and Run blog, Tim Cavanaugh bewails economic illiteracy:

It’s “very hard to fine-tune an economy” using any tools. That seemed to be a clear lesson of the twentieth century workers’ paradises, and it is implicit when politicians claim (usually following up with a “but”) that the free market is the least-bad system for creating wealth. Spending and taxes can, however, have very destructive effects, and the best way for government to further an enterprise is by the alacrity with which it gets out of its way. As the Clinton-era example shows, you can have a boom even if you just slightly reduce the rate of spending growth. That’s not fine-tuning, it’s slightly easing the heavy hand of the state. The Post’s rhetorical question leaves out such options as “Did they screw it up?” or “Did they do too much?”

You get to this level of fantasy not by knowing too little economics but by knowing too much, by being persuaded that the same math you use when you shop around for bargains or balance your checkbook does not apply at the level of the macroeconomy. Unfortunately, Keynesian logic is like Videodrome: Once exposed to it you can never get rid of it, no matter how much trouble it causes. Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman recently claimed that brisk sales of the iPhone 5 will spur economic growth, thus proving the broken-window theory of economics. In fact, it’s the opposite: People who buy the new phone think it will add value to their lives, not replace an equal amount of value that has been destroyed. As the Apple maps fiasco, the purple glare controversy, and this Jimmy Kimmel video suggest, they may be wrong about that. But that Krugman (who last year called for a hoax invasion by space aliens to spur spending) is down to such a transparently absurd argument suggests the time has never been riper to jettison both the new and old Keynesianism.

Just don’t look for either presidential candidate to do that. Right now the big question is whether Mitt Romney or Barack Obama will use his presidential job-creating powers to create more jobs. Mitt Romney is promising to create 12 million jobs, which strikes me as a strategic error. All Obama has to do is promise to create 13 million jobs and he’ll obviously be the better candidate, because that’s a lot more jobs.

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