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BC2009
On The Verge since Nov 01, 2011
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Incidentally the Senate accusation was that Apple had no employees in Ireland and no physical presence and the holding company was just a shell company to exploit a tax loophole (which, incidentally, is perfectly legal)
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Something doesn’t jive because Apple’s official statement to the Senate says that they have 4000 employees in Ireland and a campus in Cork that they just begun an expansion of.
If the Senate is upset that Apple set up a “holding company” to manage its investments then they are going to have to investigate 90% of corporate America and 100% of the Fortune 500.
I’m interested to see how Tim Cook’s testimony resolves any of these inconsistencies tomorrow. Either somebody is wrong or somebody is lying.
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A big part of it is a wider launch than the S3. The S3 certainly took longer to reach the USA, for example. Apple does this same thing with iPhone launches — make the launch wider to make each launch have a bigger initial impact in the press (and make eager buyers happy). The side effect is a bigger post-launch drop. For example, the iPhone 4 had a staged launch internationally, and because of this it remained a top-seller even 14 months after it was released with each new country of availability sustaining the sales. However, the 4S and especially the 5 launch was front-loaded with more countries on an accelerated roll-out scale. This means that the mid-product-cycle period sees a steeper drop in sales relative to launch.
The S4 will obviously be a big seller for Samsung — it could hit 70M to 80M units within a year from launch (the GS3 hit about 50M units after a year at a rate of about 5M to 6M per month on average). While the usual dip in sales will occur when Apple releases its next iPhone, it would seem the different player in this year is HTC’s One which is being reviewed as the “best Android phone” by many sites. Also, it would seem that HTC is spending the money to market the One since I keep seeing those “wouldn’t they sound better if they were facing forward” advertisements all the time and the “blink feed” advertisement as well.
I think HTC needs to make up some marketing ground, and they may do that and get a winner out of the One. But there was nothing HTC could do to stave off a huge launch for the S4 due to the incredible marketing and brand recognition that Samsung has built up.
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Posted: Best After-Market Car Stereo for Smartphone Integration?
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I don’t get bored with the OS because the OS has the purpose of getting me to my apps. Since I spend my time in my apps, the OS just needs to manage things like multi-tasking and battery life. The only really “exciting” OS I have seen recently is Windows Phone 8 since it provides some interesting UX. I say “interesting” because it is different and new, but not because it is necessarily better. I think the flashing tiles would get annoying to me after a while.
We’ve been using the same desktop OS metaphor for like two decades and I just don’t get it when folks say that they are bored with their mobile OS which is using the same metaphors as it did 5 years ago.
The OS only matters if you love tinkering, but it sounds like jailbreaking did not satisfy the OP’s craving for tinkering either which pretty much rules out Android as well since it is basically the same level of customization as jailbroken iOS.
My advice — stop worrying about your mobile OS so much, get some better apps to use and shut off the phone more often and do other things.
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His buddy is probably posting here trying to convince him to do it. :)
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The Verge is not my website or the OP’s website. It belongs to Vox Media and Josh Topolsky is the Editor in Chief. They will decide what The Verge will and won’t be and the audience will decide whether to read all of it or parts of it or none of it. There are certainly days where I skip right past the front page and dive right into a forum of interest because nothing on the front page is interesting to me. There are other days where I simply do not have time to read all the articles that are interesting to me.
At first I was annoyed at some of the articles that I considered to be “off topic”. Any of the stuff with a political stance bugged me and the weird pieces like that article about the guy who performed self-mutilation was really repulsive to me (especially with that image on the front page for five days straight). I did not like seeing that stuff in “my tech news.” However, I’ve really enjoyed the recent pieces on automobiles, the sci-fi movie reviews, “the end of the world” series, and the “pure science” pieces (like we see on ArsTechnica). So obviously, some of this stuff will appeal to some people but not others and the trick is finding your demographic and tuning the formula.
I’ve gone from trying to read all the articles on The Verge, to picking and choosing. If I find that there is less to pick and choose from that suits my preference eventually I may stop reading The Verge, and that is fine. I certainly don’t watch everything that ABC or CBS have to offer and I have nearly given up on NBC (which was the best network station 20 years ago). If I end up picking an article that I feel was a waste of time, I’ve simply learned to not comment at all rather than leave a “this does not belong on The Verge” comment. Anyway, that is my two cents worth.
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Agreed. Just because h4m0ny prefers The Great Gatsby (which is fine), it has to obvious that the tech-news demographic by-and-large would have more interest in Star Trek. A film like The Great Gatsby would be relevant if some new production method was used that was an advancement in movie production technology. But a film that is a sci-fi technology fantasy would certainly be interesting to most people who are already enthusiastic about technology.
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And the white levels are infinitely worse.
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It probably depends on how much you make phone calls versus using mobile data. Phone call power drain is pretty much consistent across devices and so the only way to increase it is to have a bigger battery. This is why iPhone 5 gets less battery life on phone call usage. However, internet usage and mobile apps depend heavily on the power efficiency of the processor and screen and memory. This is where iPhone 5 really shines and out-performs the competition.
For WiFi Hotspot, iPhone 5 outperforms just about everything but tablets and one phone:
For Web browsing on cellular or WiFi, iPhone 5 is best:
For straight voice usage, iPhone 5 is in the bottom half compared to larger phones:
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It’s actually a Samsung, but you just can’t tell the difference.
/s
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Hmmmm…. Now was the iPhone 4S the first to show the 4G indicator on a non-LTE network?
Answer: No, but it is fun to point the finger at Apple.
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Suppose a rich foreign citizen bribed an official his government to allow him to remove artifacts from a temple and then sell it to a US citizen for even more money than he bribed the official for. Suddenly, the US citizen has not bribed anybody, but the example still holds where a corrupt government can solicit payment for artifacts and then claim that somebody local was bribed and that the artifact was taken illegally and should be returned. So that example still holds despite bribery of a foreign official being a crime in the USA (and other nations).
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You say “Culture of Origin” like culture and ethnicity is some sort of constant. Today’s people are not the people of yesterday. Culture evolves, governments change, borders move, etc…. The current Greek government is hardly the same government that existed when these artifacts were created. Turkey is claiming they were created on their land, but it was likely at a time when Greece ruled that part of the land.
Even if Germany donated some of these items to Greece or to Turkey, wouldn’t it upset the other country? Ownership to a culture or ethnicity makes less sense than ownership belonging to the current government that claims the lands on which the artifacts were created within their own borders. Artifacts have a history that is tied to world history. It is part of what makes them interesting. Sometimes artifacts are moved back to where they were originally created or found for posterity, but sometimes they don’t.
I don’t condone stealing or looting items to sell on the black market, but I also cannot see the logic in trying to press some “reset” button that restores everything to the ownership as it was at a certain point in the past when those people who “owned” it are now dead and the countries and cultures that represent them have changed.
By all accounts, my heritage is mostly Italian, so if we did a reset button that took us back to the height of the Roman Empire then I suppose I should class-action style payout from most of Europe and the Middle East. It just makes no sense.
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How is it ridiculous? Do you think that anything ever taken by a conquering country should be given back to whatever that country looks like today? It just does not work. How many of the Egyptian artifacts were gained through conquest and plundering and forced labor?
With Egypt as a sovereign nation today, it is illegal to remove artifacts. When Egypt was not a sovereign nation then those artifacts could be moved because the ruling government did not make it illegal.
Governments change, countries change, borders move, this is all part of history. These artifacts are tied to that history. Indeed the “Library of Alexandria” was made up of items that were pilfered from other nations in the attempt to accumulate all of the world’s knowledge in one place? Even a referenced link on Wikipedia says this:
According to Galen, Ptolemy III requested permission from the Athenians to borrow the original scripts of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, for which the Athenians demanded the enormous amount of fifteen talents (450 kg of a precious metal) as guarantee. Ptolemy III happily paid the fee but kept the original scripts for the library.
So much of this stuff these days is uncertain and some of it is wrapped up in legend. But determining the proper owner of an artifact centuries after it has changed hands a dozen times is simply impossible.
Further, applying today’s legal statutes (like those in Egypt) to something that happened before those statutes or even the county’s current government was in place is just silly.
So you may think my argument is ridiculous, but I think the arguing for export of any item ever taken from any country that once was (even though it may have been later reformed under a new government) is about the most ridiculous argument I have ever heard! :D
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C’mon, you are singling out one of the sentences from one my comments in this thread and calling it an over-generalization like it is the only thing I said on this subject. Certainly some things were taken as part of the spoils of war. I don’t pretend that every museum piece was exported this way, but rather you are pretending that I pretend that to build a straw man that you can knock down.
Today’s generation of people do not need to try to undo history from the people who governed or were citizens of their country a hundred or more years ago. It is silly to try to undo history — we just need to learn from it. We should consider these things as “past the international/historical statute of limitations”. Let’s walk through some examples:
1) Should every citizen of the United States who is not of Native American descent surrender property rights to the various tribal councils for Native Americans to have the land redistributed and then should those people try to move back to whatever country their ancestors came from?
2) Should every Egyptian artifact built by Jewish slaves be sent to Israel as back-payment for slave labor with interest?
3) Should revenue from all US cotton production be handed over class-action style to African-Americans descendant from those taken as slaves for the next fifty years?
4) Should we redraw the borders in Europe to match what they looked like in 1500 A.D., 1400 A.D., 800 A.D? After all, land was taken and conquered that used to belong to somebody else who is now long dead.
You cannot undo all the wrongs of the past — especially when it comes to ownership and possession because so many countries who claim to “own” something may have taken it from somebody else or may have used forced labor or riches from another conquered nation to build it. You also have cases where countries have split into two and both might claim ownership to something.
Museums should do their best to curb looting and pilfering today, but you cannot undo history in its entirety.
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There are war crimes which are recognized by International bodies. Torturing and killing civilians who are being held prisoner in camps falls into that category. Taking or moving artifacts is not one of them. The comparison you are drawing seems a bit over the top.
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That sounds like local officials are partly to blame for that. But you can easily imagine a corrupt local government taking bribes, and then asking for items back from museums and then later taking more bribes for other or the same artifacts. You’d have to put the blame on the local government in that case (IMO). People are responsible for their government (even the corrupt ones). If a government is demanding that artifacts be returned and it was an official of that same government that allowed the artifacts to be sold in the first place, then it is kinda hard to put the blame on the current owner of the artifact or the people who removed the artifact.
They say possession is nine tenths of the law for a reason. It is because determining previous ownership or rightful ownership is a murky and uncertain task.
In cases were something is clearly being looted against local government knowledge and there is evidence to support that then items need to be returned. But trying to undo history is a huge mistake.
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How many of those Egyptian artifacts were created by Jewish slaves? Does Israel have a right to some of those artifacts? See how silly this can get? You cannot undo history — you can only learn from it.
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Yup. When Egypt was part of Britain it was perfectly legal because they were under the same government. You are spot-on.
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I agree….. The spoils of wars past are hardly the burden of today’s generation to make right. The reason that spoils were taken in war was to have the defeated side help pay for the cost of war to the victorious side. It actually makes sense. The fact that the artifact moved becomes part of its history and how it is tied to world history.
We can argue the motivations of every single war for decades, but obviously if the two sides disagreed back in history to the point of going to war, then there will likely not be any reasonable resolution those arguments hundreds of years later. The fact that the British and Spanish gave control of so many colonies to local governments says a whole in itself. I don’t see the point in trying to “repay” the perceived “wrongs” of the past by people who were not even alive when those wrongs were committed.
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As I said above, in some cases, victorious rebels of a civil war will sell/auction the artifacts that were owned by the deposed royals and nobles in order to fund their new government. In some cases, these treasures were local artifacts. I’m pretty sure this happened after the French revolution and I think it happened in Russia as well around the turn of the century.
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Nice.
I agree with Indy though. Back in the day, when two countries fought and one of them won, the other became the territory of the victor. When both countries are under the same government, then that government could legally move artifacts around as they saw fit. Later when the countries split again (usually by the victorious country relinquishing control to a local government) what sense does it make to restore all the artifacts and riches that moved around when the countries were one?
In other cases you have victorious rebels from a civil war selling off the treasures of deposed royals and nobles in order to fund their new governments (France anybody?).
Now I do think that if it can be proven that something was looted and then sold on the black market that it should be returned, but I’m not a believer in having the people of today trying to right every perceived “wrong” from history.
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It’s not as big a deal as it is with the iPhone 5S, but I would like a fingerprint sensor on all of my iOS devices for login. I would also like OS-level single-sign-on that apps can tie into (e.g.: a password vault that is decrypted using a hash of my finger print — that password vault needs to feed passwords into Safari when I ask it to auto-fill, but also for apps).
The problem with the current passcode entry on iOS is that a four-digit PIN is easy,but insecure, and an actual password is cumbersome and annoying every time you want to get into the device. Fingerprint login would be brilliant especially if it was integrated with a system-wide password vault that worked with saved passwords for third-party apps.
I would not mind if fingerprint entry got me into the device, but individual apps could still require a 1-Password-style single password entry for access with a timeout before reauthentication was required. Assuming fingerprint entry is not fully secure.
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Right across from the 20-foot ED209 replica downtown.
/s
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