So Apple got a billion or two from Samsung in court and Apple just effectively paid half that back due to Samsung jacking up component prices to Apple. Sweet justice.
Category: Apple
If Microsoft really plans to get into the mobile space(and Win8 is all about tablets) this is not the way to do it. $600 bucks for a tablet isn’t going to fly when Andriod and Ipads are already established with superior featuresets already.
For a while there it seemed that Microsoft was going to do something spectacular which was going to give Android and Apple a real kicking and establish itself as a leader in the tablet market.
The rumour had been that Vole was going to release a subsidised Windows RT tablet for about $300 which was practically a giveaway. While this would anger hardware makers, it would establish Microsoft’s new operating system and lead to the company becoming a leader in the mobile market.
Unfortunately the rumour was based on the assumption that Microsoft would use common sense and its piles of money to make itself relevant again.
According to Extreme Tech, the rumour mongers had forgotten that Microsoft is a huge elephant of a corporation ruled by competing factions and overseen by Steve Ballmer. So far it has yet to come up with anything that is responsive or innovative to push itself into the mobile market.
Now, a leak has confirmed that Microsoft’s inability to come up with a decent business plan to deal with mobile is about to snatch another defeat from the jaws of victory.
A leaked slide from Asus says that its Vivo Tab RT, due to be released alongside Windows RT at the end of October, will start at $600.
This is more expensive than the iPad 3, and a full $200 more than the iPad 2 or Galaxy Tab 2 10.1. So to be competitive it should have some insane hardware specs – right?
Er, no. The Vivo Tab RT has a low-res 10.1-inch 1366×768 IPS display, quad-core Tegra 3 SoC, 2GB of RAM, NFC, 8-megapixel camera… and that’s about it.
Basically it is the Android Transformer which can be plugged into a keyboard/battery dock for an extra $200 and a docking station only costs $150.
Microsoft is assuming that people will buy the tablet because it has Windows RT on it. This attitude is rather arrogant because it forgets that people are doing rather nicely thank-you-very-much with their Android machines and do not really need Windows.
Vole is basically charging what it always does with its licences, and has no plans to relax the “Windows Tax” to push itself into the mobile market.
via Microsoft prepares to stuff up tablet plans – Asus leak shows Vole’s own goal | TechEye.
So Iphone is stil behind the competition in many ways. Plus you get locked into doing it Apple’s way or no way. No thanks. pricing is ok abut I can get my nexus for $99 and an s3 for less than 200 both with features not found in ithingies. Apple is no longer innovating..they are following Samsung and HTC. No wonder they are becoming more like Microsoft and trying to sue their competition instead of innovating. Iphon5 + refreshed Iphone4..etc etc etc. When Apple comes out with something new i’ll see about it again.
iPhone 5 Brings Size and Speed – Ina Fried – Mobile – AllThingsD.
This is what i thought. A jury in Silicon Valley with bias towards Apple(seeing Jobs as nearly a deity) has now been seen by their own words as stepping outside the bounds of not only their instructions but also of their own “expertise”. this jury verdict would be tossed on those grounds alone. Samsung…if their lawyers rate their bar certifications) should also be able to get this tossed on the ignoring of prior art. this verdict was bogus from the beginning in many(but not all areas) and it looks like it was done only to keep Apple’s ‘reality distortion field” intact.
One of the jurors, Manuel Ilagan, said it only took a day to decide that Samsung had wronged Apple. But it could not decide about the prior art issues, which was a corner stone of Samsung’s defence. The jury decided that these “prior art” issues were getting in the way of letting Apple win.
This was where Hogan stepped in and solved the problem with his experience of patents. Before he did so the jury was having trouble believing that there wasn’t something out there before Apple. However Hogan’s answer was to ignore prior art and focus on the patent and whether Samsung had broken it.
As Hogan said to Bloomberg when he got into the case he started looking at the patents as if they were his and how he could defend them. This is not normally the way you try a court case. If that were the case a jury would be asked to imagine they are the victim and you have to come up with a way to lock your accused up.
Ilagan said that it meant that the jury could go faster as all this prior art nonsense was bogging the jury down. The jury’s inhouse experts did not have to decide if Apple invented the rounded rectangle, it just had to work out if Samsung had made a rounded rectangle.
Reuters quoted Hogan as saying that the jury wanted to send a message to Samsung which was not just a slap on the wrist.
“We wanted to make sure it was sufficiently high to be painful, but not unreasonable.”
He claimed that the jurors could decide on these matters because a few had engineering and legal experience, which helped with the complex problems in play.
Now the main problem with his quote was it means that the jury was wilfully ignoring the jury instructions. It was written there that damages are not supposed to punish, merely to compensate for losses. It seems that the jury did not read them because a few of them considered themselves experts.
via Comment: Apple versus Samsung verdict was a complete mess – Jury ignored prior-art | TechEye.
Since Mountain Lion isn’t going to work on my macbook I’m going to go a different route. No dual booting here..going to run Ubuntu Linux on it..:)
Apple is even more controlling than Microsoft. Once you step into the Iworld you can’t get your stuff out without major gyrations. In this environment Apple can do whatever it wants whenever it wants. What’s funny is people are making a ton of noise but I bet it’s only noise…they’ll continue to buy the Istuff even though it costs them inflated prices. Once folks take their noise and put action behind it(like not buying Istuff) Apple will either change it’s ways or go bankrupt.
Apple charges firms to create accessories as part of its ‘made for iPhone’ scheme which approves add-ons, although the firm has never revealed how much it charges to join the scheme.
Manufacturers must also buy a special ‘authentication chip’ for some of their accessories, a move by Apple to cut down on unapproved accessories, and it is believed the chip is even found in some iPhone headphones.
‘It will be nearly impossible to make unlicensed devices,’ said Mr Scoble. ‘Unfortunately these design goals mean making obsolete the something like 10 power chargers in my home. Sigh.’
Sirio Brozzi of the website Awesome Robo hit out at the move, and blogged: ‘People are stunned by this possibility, myself included. I mean, why fix something that’s not broken?’
Mr Brozzi believes the move is planned to give both Apple and accessory makers a huge new market.’
Have you guys ever heard of “planned obsolescence”?’ he added. ‘It’s a practice which encourages planning and designing a product so it’s only useful for a limited time, before becoming obsolete.’
…………….. let’s look closely at the facts around the Flashback Trojan causing all this consternation, and clear up what it is versus what it is not, and put the results of the incident in perspective.
Yes it’s true that some 600,000 Macs are confirmed to have been infected. The claim, first made by Dr. Web, an outfit I had never heard of, has since been corroborated by Kaspersky Labs, whose research and analysis capabilities are well-respected. More than half of the compromised machines are in the U.S., 95,000 in Canada, 47,000 in the U.K., and 41,000 in Australia.
The trojan targets a vulnerability in software that is not even an Apple product: Java. You’ll recall that Java is add-on software created by Sun Microsystems and now the property of the software giant Oracle. Rather common, it is no longer shipped as a default add-on to Apple’s Mac OS X beginning in 2011, when Apple first shipped Lion.
Through this hole in Java, certain Web sites are serving up malicious Java applets. Once inserted on the machine, the software then prompts the user to enter the password they use to run the machine. It attempts to trick the user by appearing as an update to Adobe’s Flash video and animation software.
If the user doesn’t fall for the trick, it tries something else. Here again it checks to see if there are any Microsoft Office applications on the machine, or Skype. If there are, it deletes itself.
Then it does something interesting. It scans the contents of the Mac’s hard drive to determine if certain applications are present, and if they are, it deletes itself. Among those applications are security tools such as Little Snitch, a networking security tool, or Packet Peeper, another security tool. It also deletes itself if it sees the user has installed XCode Mac developers tools, and any kind of anti-virus software.
Presuming it finds none of them, it proceeds to contact a command-and-control server for the purpose of downloading and installing more malware. That malware is being used to commandeer the Macs and generate Web traffic to boost revenue for some pay-per-click ads on Web sites, making money for someone who’s behind the scheme. Nothing surprising there.
Apple has issued a fix to Mac OS X that closes the hole in Java, and you can protect yourself by running Software Update from within your machine’s System Preferences. Today would be a good day to do that if you haven’t already. Once you’ve done this you’re no longer vulnerable to the attack.
If you’re among the 600,000 already compromised you can turn to third parties to help you remove it. F-Secure has some instructions here for determining if your machine is affected. If you’re comfortable running some commands in the Mac’s terminal program, there are also some good instructions here at ArsTechnica.
So what does all this say about the state of security on the Mac? Nothing that wasn’t true already. No system is perfectly secure, and this, along with MacDefender, amounts to exactly the second security incident worth mentioning to hit the Mac in about a year. The number of machines affected is less than 1 percent of the 63 million Macs currently in use around the world.
The conventional wisdom has often held that Macs are targeted by malware less often than Windows machines because of their relatively small market share. This still has some merit, but the fact is that Windows is also where the vulnerabilities are. Historically, Mac OS X has been substantially less vulnerable to this sort of thing than Windows.
Does that let Apple off the hook entirely? No, though to its credit, Apple had a fix ready within a week of learning of this vulnerability. That’s not exactly a pokey response, especially when the problem lies not directly within Apple’s software, but in Oracle’s.
via What’s This? A Mac Virus? No Actually It’s a Weakness in Java. – Arik Hesseldahl – News – AllThingsD.
Let’s get one thing straight. The media, as usual, is not only blowing this out of proportion but also not keying on the right part of the problem. This is not a Mac issue but a java problem. Java had and exploit(java itself has become an exploit…much like activex..but worse) that apple didn’t patch as quickly as oracle(the developer of java). Keep in mind that OSX Lion does not contain java so only folks who forever whatever reason can’t or won’t run the latest Lion release were the only ones vulnerable. Frankly I banished java from my network a looooong time ago…as the amount of websites that require it for proper operation aren’t enough to even bother with. How to NOT get infected? uninstall Java..never install it in the first place.
The design geniuses at Apple, who are yet to come up with an iPhone 4 which did not have some serious design flaws, are scratching their heads about the latest problem which has hit the cargo cults latest toy.Apple recently released the iPhone 4S which was an iPhone 4 with some software that only Americans could use and the stupid antenna design abandoned. While it was a clever idea to make users pay for something that many manufacturers would be morally bound to recall, it turns out that the iPhone 4S has a design problem all of its own.For some reason the iPhone 4S loses battery faster than its users can charge it. Normally this is not a problem. The iPhone only has to be charged long enough for its users to attempt to convert other people to the Apple cult. It is not as if they use it to call their friends. But it seems that the iPhone 4S cant even manage this task.With normal use, it dropped 19 percent in 50 minutes and sometimes the battery dropped away at an even faster rate than that. Battery life has been dropping ten per cent an hour even when the optional location settings have been switched off.Since the only thing different about the iPhone 4S and the iPhone 4 is the chip, the fault has been narrowed down to the operating system that was also installed on the phone. It turns out that the iOS 5 cant really handle the new hardware.After shedloads of complaints on Apple bulletin boards and lots of suggested fixes an Apple store staff member was able finally to fix the problem.He claimed it was because the OSs location services was constantly checking location especially for the Time Zone.He was able to solve the problem by switching everything off in the Location Services > System Services menu except for Cell Network Search. His phone now lasts “pretty much the whole day”.While the fault has been causing frustration for users, Apple has done its usual “refusing to comment” thing. To admit there is a fault, means that the iPhone 4S is not as perfect as Apple says it is, and that would create a religious paradox.However, behind the scenes, the outfits engineers have been contacting some iPhone 4S owners who have complained of battery life issues individually and asked them to install a monitoring program on their phones to try to diagnose the problem.But the Sydney Morning Herald has found another serious software fault affecting battery life on the iPhone 4SMathew Peterson, who runs the Australian app development company TheLittleAppFactory, said he found that another problem affecting the iPhone 4S battery life was the iCloud contacts syncing code, which crashes repeatedly when it hit corrupt contacts in a loop.This harms those who have upgraded from previous iPhone models and causes the phones processor to work extra hard. The result is that the phone runs “noticeably warm” and it causes “the battery to drop 20-30 percent in 10-15 minutes”.It can be fixed by disabling contacts in iCloud or restarting the device. Peterson said that you really have to install the entire OS and then copy the contacts back on.
via Iphone 4S drains battery like a vampire – Turns users into Zombies | TechEye.
Whoopsie.
Apple’s new “Siri” feature, the voice-activated personal assistant built into the iPhone 4S, leaves owners’ spanking new smartphones partially unguarded.
Those of us who work in the security arena have often banged on about the importance of securing your smartphone with a password or passcode to prevent unauthorised access.
Most mobile phone manufacturers have recognised that as so many people use their smartphones to manage their their diaries, their private communications, and their social lives, it’s good to have some form of security.
Which leaves Apple with some egg on its face regarding Siri.
Even if an iPhone 4S is locked with a passcode, a complete stranger can come up to your smartphone, press the button and give Siri a spoken command.
via Has Siri left your iPhone 4S unlocked? | Naked Security.