TechEye |  |
- Microsoft owes $1 billion in Denmark
- AMD Temash APU spotted
- New York's crime is now mostly online
- Steve Jobs made major tablet mistake
- Cisco probed for selling $millions of kit in West Virginia
- Judge halves Apple damages
| Microsoft owes $1 billion in Denmark Posted: 04 Mar 2013 04:17 AM PST The peasants of Redmond are shaking in their boots after it was discovered that Steve Ballmer had skimped on paying Danish taxes - Danegeld. Danegeld is what civilised nations pay to make sure that they do not get invaded by Vikings armed with large axes. The last person in England who tried to avoid paying Danish taxes was Aethelred the unready, and it ended rather badly for him. According to the Nyheder newspaper, the Vole owes the Danish Treasury about a billion dollars in what is its largest tax avoidance case. The government is working out a way of getting its paws on its cash without having to pillage New York, like it did plain old York. If the vikings can squeeze the cash out of Microsoft they could finance a new super hospital, build the next Silkeborg Motorway or hire 15,000 teachers. It all started when Microsoft bought the Danish IT outfit Navision. Vole set the price of the rights to the Navision programme much lower than the market price and let its Irish subsidiary buy the rights of its Danish subsidiary. This meant that the value of the Danish company made too small to be taxed. Indeed if Microsoft had its way it would get a refund. Microsoft's Danish subsidiary previously made $11 billion dollars so the taxes should be about $5 billion plus interest of 0.8 billion. After the Irish manoeuvre it made sod all. In Ireland the tax rate is a lot lower than Denmark. Vole insists that it has obeyed the rules, but received a nasty surprise when it got its tax bill which followed a Danish investigation. Microsoft has done a sterling job hiding its money from the tax authorities for years and exploited every loophole there is to find. However, with most European countries short of cash, and regular tax payers bled dry, big multi-nationals are finally being told to stop being bludgers.        |
| Posted: 04 Mar 2013 03:14 AM PST AMD's much awaited Temash APU appears to be getting ready to hit the shops. CPU World has found a 2013 roadmap that provided some details on upcoming generations of AMD Accelerated Processing Units (APUs). It shows the model numbers of unreleased chips, including A6-1450 "Temash" APU, A6-5200 "Kabini" part and "Richland"-based A8-5545M and A10-5750M. Details are fairly light. All of them are quad-core processors, but there is a promise that AMD will also introduce dual-core versions. One of the possible candidates likely to be dual cored is the A4-1200 which was mentioned in the footnotes on the "Tablets with AMD Accelerated Processors" page on the AMD website. That page lacked many details other than the fact that the A4-1200 had two CPU cores, clocked at 1 GHz. It also has integrated Radeon HD 8180 graphics. None of the material CPU World discovered revealed the chip's exact TDP, although there were a few hints. Projected power stats in different usage scenarios showed that a system "S3" state the A4-1200 APU consumes 1.2 Watt when idle, 1.4 Watt during browsing, and 2.35 Watt when playing h.264 online video at 1080p resolution. If you add up all the numbers, and divide by your shoe size, you get a figure for the total platform power. This is 2.8 Watt, 3.7 Watt and 5.3 Watt respectively. The footnotes contain results of some benchmarks for several upcoming chips. AMD A6-1450's score in 3DMark 06 was 2624. This is about 10 percent lower than E2-1800. This makes the chip less interesting than the Brazos APU,which is clocked at 1.7 GHz and has higher TDP.     |
| New York's crime is now mostly online Posted: 04 Mar 2013 03:04 AM PST New York's criminals are turning to the internet as a safer way of lifting cash. Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance, during a cybercrime symposium at Pace University said that prosecutions for cybercrime and identity theft in Manhattan have increased by 50 percent in the last five years. According to the Epoch Times, he suggested that rather than robbing banks it is easier for criminals to rig ATM machines and scan credit cards. Vance said that cybercrime is the fastest growing crime trend in New York. Manhattan coppers now record cybercrime and identity theft as their most frequently reported complaints. He added that the problem has reached a point where nearly every crime in the city involves a computer somewhere. Homicides, financial crimes, even gang cases all have some IT components. He said that it was not just small-time crooks acting on their own,. Many local criminals are working with international hackers and Russian organised crim, the latter realising that cybercrime is less risky, yet more lucrative than the drug trade.     |
| Steve Jobs made major tablet mistake Posted: 04 Mar 2013 02:56 AM PST Apple founder and cargo-cult saint Steve Jobs might not have been as infallible as his followers believe. Jobs did not think that anyone would want to buy a tablet which was less than ten inches, declaring that they would be "dead in the water". He claimed that ten inches was the perfect size and no fanboy would ever want anything smaller as their girlfriends would laugh at them. New figures on the sale of seven inch tablets have made a mockery of Jobs' consumer instinct infallibility. It shows that consumers were much more interested in smaller form factors in the first place. This left a huge hole in the Apple line up which was swiftly filled by rivals including Amazon's Kindle Fire. While Apple itself woke up to the fact that people wanted seven inches and issued their own tablet, that appears to have wasted the market for the larger model. NPD DisplaySearch recently released some estimates on tablet panel shipments in January, and the data shows a huge drop in larger sizes nine inches and above accompanied by an increase in smaller sizes at seven to 8.9 inches. Shipments of 9.7-inch panels fell dramatically from 7.4 million in December to 1.3 million January which is an 82 percent drop off. Microsoft is now in the ever shrinking larger tablet market with its 10.6-inch Surface. The trends seem to suggest that this market is the kiss of death for tablets, so it probably is not something that Microsoft wants to celebrate. The fact Steve Ballmer lacks seven inches indicates that Microsoft's thrusting tablet plans may end up flaccid. All this would suggest a good reason why Apple has reduced 9.7-inch panel orders from LG Display by 90 percent in January to just 600,000, while Sharp has nearly halted production of that size as well. According to the Motley Fool, Apple has reduced its overall iPad build plans amid a shift toward the iPad Mini. In December, DisplaySearch committed heresy by saying Apple would only sell 88 million units instead of 100 million. This is still a respectable feat, marking 34 percent unit growth from the 65.7 million iPads sold in 2012. If the number of units being sold are cheaper, seven inch tablets, Apple has much less to celebrate. Fortunately for Apple the iPad Mini has a higher hardware gross margin than the larger model. DisplaySearch estimates that the total panel market will jump from 160 million in 2012 to 254 million in 2013, with more than half of those displays going toward smaller devices. One has to wonder what Apple would look like if Jobs had started with a 7.9-inch form factor and expanded up. It would have locked Samsung and perhaps Amazon out of the market before they even started.     |
| Cisco probed for selling $millions of kit in West Virginia Posted: 04 Mar 2013 02:49 AM PST Cisco is in hot water because its sales teams sold hundreds of high capacity routers to the State of West Virginia which it did not need. According to the Charleston Gazette, governor Earl Ray Tomblin has ordered state officials to reconsider where they've installed hundreds of high-capacity internet routers paid for with $24 million in federal stimulus funds. The state placed oversized routers are in hundreds of public facilities which not only would fail to stimulate anything, but pretty much act like a chocolate teapot when it comes to internet use. Each Cisco 3945 series router cost $22,600. Hundreds of them have already been installed in "community anchor institutions" - schools, libraries, planning agencies, health centers, state police detachments, county courthouses, state agencies and other public facilities. State and federal lawmakers also have slammed the router deal and Tomblin plans to appoint a group made up of technology experts from state government and the private sector. Cisco said it would take back routers if West Virginia can't find an appropriate place to put them, although there have been some suggestions from the governor's office. John Earnhardt, a Cisco spokesperson, said that there would be no problem in Cisco taking the routers back. He said that there was a positive impact of broadband infrastructure on education, job creation and economic development, which is well established. The routers were delivered in July 2010 but many remained boxed up in storage. The state paid $8 million for a five year warranty on the routers. Cicso has given the state a three-year extension on the warranty because they were not used. Cisco claims that this is to show the company's commitment to the project. The question is why Cisco even suggested the routers to small community groups, and why government officials gave the idea the thumbs up. CEO John Chambers hails from West Virginia so should know which sort of routers its public libraries need, and they probably did not need bullet proof heavy duty versions. For the use that some libraries get they probably would have been happy with dial up.     |
| Posted: 04 Mar 2013 02:08 AM PST Apple's thermonuclear patent troll war against Samsung has run aground spectacularly. A federal judge slashed a $1.05 billion jury award by more than 40 percent and set a new trial to determine damages. It is usually said that Apple won its patent claim, which effectively was over the rounded rectangle shape, every time the patent war story is mentioned. True, the iPhone maker convinced the jury that the Korean company had infringed on its iPhone and iPad patents, but the actual value that the jury awarded was a bone of contention because it seemed to have gone through rather quickly and had not added things up properly. Judge Lucy Koh of the US district court, Northern District of California in San Jose, decided to strike $450,514,650 from the jury's award. She also decided that the two companies may once again square off in a California court to decide how much of the $450.5 million struck from the damages, associated with 14 Samsung products, should stand. Koh said the jury had incorrectly calculated part of the damages and that a new trial was needed to determine the real dollar amount. She rejected Apple's motion for an increase in the jury's damages award and ordered a new trial on damages for the 14 devices, which include the Galaxy SII. Shares in Apple closed down 2.5 percent on the back of the ruling, while Reuters noted that shares in Samsung rose 1.1 percent this morning.     |
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