67132739
submission
Frankie70 writes:
Apple invested more than $1 billion in an effort to make sapphire one of iPhone 6's selling point. But iPhone 6 released without the sapphire screen. GT Advanced Technologies, the small company chosen to supply Apple with enormous quantities of cheap sapphire, declared bankruptcy a month later. Recent documents from GT’s bankruptcy proceedings, and conversations with people familiar with operations at Apple and GT, provide several clues as to what went wrong. GT said that to save costs, Apple decided not to install backup power supplies, and multiple outages ruined whole batches of sapphire. The terms Apple negotiated committed GT to supplying a huge amount of sapphire, but put Apple under no obligation to buy it. In its bankruptcy documents, GT would later accuse Apple of using “bait-and-switch” tactics, and said the terms of the deal were “onerous and massively one-sided.”
54711809
submission
Frankie70 writes:
Taiwan’s Fair Trade Commission has hit Apple with a small fine and warned the company that it may face a more substantial penalty if it doesn’t stop interfering with carriers’ iPhone pricing and the prices of the plans carriers sell alongside the iPhone. “Through the email correspondence between Apple and these three telecom companies we discovered the companies submit their pricing plans to Apple to be approved or confirmed before the products hit the market,” Taiwan’s FTC said in a statement.
52933277
submission
Frankie70 writes:
From Reuters, U.S. tech giant Apple is under investigation in Italy for allegedly hiding 1 billion euros ($1.34 billion) from the local tax authority, two judicial sources with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters.
Milan prosecutors say Apple failed to declare to Italian tax authorities 206 million euros in 2010 and 853 million euros in 2011, one of the sources said, confirming a report by Italian magazine L'Espresso.
The Italian subsidiary of Apple booked some of its profit through Irish-based subsidiary Apple Sales International (ASI), thus lowering its taxable income in Italy, the source said.
28600687
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Frankie70 writes:
Siri’s dirty little secret is that she’s a bandwidth guzzler, the digital equivalent of a 10-miles-per-gallon Hummer H1.
A study by Arieso shows that users of the iPhone 4S demand three times as much data as iPhone 3G users and twice as much as iPhone 4 users, who were identified as the most demanding in the 2010 study.
In all, Arieso says that the Siri-equipped iPhone 4S “appears to unleash data consumption behaviors that have no precedent.”
27473846
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Frankie70 writes:
A few hours ago, hacking collective Anonymous disclosed that not only has it hacked the Stratfor website (since confirmed by Friedman himself), but has also obtained the full client list of over 4000 individuals and corporations, including their credit cards (which supposedly have been used to make $1 million in "donations"), as well as over 200 GB of email correspondence.
26828018
submission
Frankie70 writes:
Starting Sunday, December 11th at 6:00 p.m. Central time, 16GB and 32GB Touchpads will be available on HP's ebay store. A $79 accessory bundle will also be available, which includes a case, charging dock and wireless keyboard. The caveat with this deal is that these are refurbished TouchPads rather than the brand new models sold during the first firesale.
24631840
submission
Frankie70 writes:
It took more than three years, but Microsoft has finally learned to stop worrying and love Hadoop. Microsoft acquired a Hadoop pioneer as far back as the summer of 2008, its relationship with the platform has been uneasy at best, as the company continued to shed its traditional aversions to open source software. Any aversion to Hadoop disappeared on Wednesday, when the company announced that it will integrate the platform with future versions of its relational database, SQL Server, and its platform cloud, Windows Azure, an online service for hosting and readily scaling applications. The company is now working to port the Hadoop platform to Windows
24257902
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Frankie70 writes:
Slideshare has ditched Adobe Flash technology entirely, and rebuilt its website using the HTML5 markup language. This means that SlideShare is now viewable on every kind of mobile device, from iPads to iPhones to Android devices and beyond.
24042824
submission
Frankie70 writes:
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings just dropped a bombshell. In the wake of a rapid decline in Netflix’s stock price last week, Hastings is taking a bold step by separating the DVD and video streaming services. The DVD-by-mail service will now be called Qwikster, and the streaming service will maintain the Netflix brand.
22078456
submission
Frankie70 writes:
From the article "The Twitter account of the American Fox News Politics team was compromised and used to falsely announce the death of the US president.
Hackers, who identified themselves as "The Script Kiddies" and said they shared the spirit of prominent hacking group Anonymous, used the account to write: “BREAKING NEWS: President @BarackObama assassinated, 2 gunshot wounds have proved too much. It's a sad 4th for #america. #obamadead RIP”. "
This is a link to the Twitter Account — http://twitter.com/#!/foxnewspolitics -
18645794
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Frankie70 writes:
Matt Ridley writes about Angry Birds, an iPhone game which has sold more than 12 million copies. The spectacular trajectory of the Angry Birds computer game, from obscure Finnish iPhone app to global ubiquity — there are board games, maybe even movies in the works — is probably inexplicable. Ridley wonders if there is an evolutionary aspect to its allure. There is something much more satisfactory about an object tracing a parabolic ballistic trajectory through space towards its target than either following a straight line or propelling itself.
8607182
submission
Frankie70 writes:
Beware, enemies of India: Star Wars are back in fashion. With perennial (and nuclear armed) foe Pakistan always teetering on the brink of political collapse and neighboring regional superpower China taking greater strides into space technology, India has announced that it is developing an exo-atmospheric "kill vehicle" that will knock enemy satellites out of orbit.
3858517
submission
Frankie70 writes:
The world's cheapest car goes on sale.
Tata Nano — the car that caught the world's imagination as the cheapest ever — will finally be rolled out commercially on Monday in Mumbai in a mega event organised by Tata Motors.
Ben Oliver, contributing editor, Car Magazine, London test drove the car in December, 08. These were his first impressions. This was his verdict — "CAR's first ride in the Tata Nano felt far more significant and exciting than a first drive in a Ferrari or Lamborghini, because this car's importance is immeasurably greater. It won't compete on dynamics or quality with European or Japanese city cars, but it doesn't have to. What Tata has achieved at an unprecedented price is astonishing, although we'd guess it will cost Indian consumers closer to £1700 when it finally goes on sale, six months late, in March 2009."
