TechEye |  |
- Intel justifies tablet subsidies
- Apple copies glorious North Korean operating system
- Spying law might quietly die
- Sony kills off its funky Vaio chicken
- Google backs down in EU spat
| Intel justifies tablet subsidies Posted: 06 Feb 2014 02:27 AM PST Intel CFO Stacy Smith has raised an eyebrow or two at Barrons when he popped around for tea and biscuits. He was facing tough questions about a report penned by Bernstein Research's Stacy Rasgon , who speculates that Intel will be selling tablet chips at or below cost. Rasgon pointed out what seemed to be an embedded cost, or implicit cost, if you will, of $51 incurred by Intel for each tablet chip shipped, including subsidies, in terms of the impact to gross margin. Smith did not deny that is what Chipzilla was up to but said "Anyone who thinks we have a $50 cost for these chips is wrong". He said that the special costs Intel is incurring that are pushing down gross margin for the company this year are not the cost of the chip itself. Rebates, in the form of "contra revenue," and one-time engineering fees, called "NRE," are meant to reduce the "total bill of materials," which includes the higher cost of things such as DRAM and other circuitry that must go along with Intel's tablet chips. Smith said that the chips themselves will maintain "competitive prices" compared to offerings from other vendors, he insists, without Intel having to sacrifice gross margin, even for tablets whose retail price is $199 or lower. He added that Chipzilla can cost-reduce to match the lower prices of such products, noting that the cost to Intel to produce an Atom chip is one-fourth the cost of its top-of-the-line "Core i7" parts. New versions of Atom chips next year, "Broxton" and "Sofia," will bring down Atom's costs further, Smith said/ This cunning plan will be in operation when Intel flogs Quark, some in the single-dollar price range. Quark is the new line of chips for smart wearable computers and such, introduced late last year. Smith said he had no fear of lower price points because it was in the nature of technology for prices to come down and for things to become more and more useful, so that people adopt the technology. Intel will still get paid a competitive price for its chips, across different competitive segments, he claimed. "We were originally targeting the $500 tablet market with our chips, because we have been bringing high performance into that market. But the bill of materials for Atom chips at this point has very little to do with the SOC itself. The memory that works with our SOC is high-end, more like what you'd find in a PC. And so we are doing the value engineering to bring down the cost of that to our partners. That takes a little time to do. But by the end of this year, the bill of materials delta, if you will, gets pretty small," Smith said.        |
| Apple copies glorious North Korean operating system Posted: 06 Feb 2014 02:25 AM PST The imperial fascist lapdogs in the Western media have finally noticed that the glorious technical engineering prowess of the North Korean people has far exceeded its own. The latest version of the Apple OSX platform looks a lot like the Red Star OS which was personally designed by Kim Jong-un in his dinner break on the back of a copy of the Workers Digest. Red Star OS is the country's "home-grown" software that is installed on computers found mostly in libraries and schools. Previously the North Koreans said that it inspired the Microsoft's Windows system and it did bear an uncanny resemblance to XP. Despite living in a country very much shut off from the outside world, many people in North Korea do have access to technology including mobile phones. Internet access, for instance, is locked down, with most users able to visit only a handful of sites mostly serving up state-sponsored news. Like the MacOS, Red Star OS is peppered with North Korean propaganda. Its calendar tells users it is not 2014, but 103 - the number of years since the birth of former North Korean leader Kim Il-sung. We are told that Apple considered developing a calendar using Steve Jobs' birthday but that was rejected and being too far ahead of its time. This latest version is believed to have been released some time in 2013. Imperialist media snort that North Korea must have copied Apple, some even believe that Kim Il-sung has not got the smarts to produce an operating system of his own and it must have been developed by the Chinese. But everyone in North Korea knows that it was Kim Il-sung who inspired Apple and the Chinese and before that Microsoft.     |
| Posted: 06 Feb 2014 02:19 AM PST The US government seems set to let a particular clause in its Patriot Act die off, which means that all that spying it is doing on the world will suddenly become illegal. Section 215 of the Patriot Act will be allowed to expire, as members of both parties in Congress are lining up behind anti-NSA protesters. Senator James Sensenbrenner, who drafted the law has warned that the legal justification for the NSA's wholesale domestic surveillance program will disappear next summer if the White House does not restrict the way the NSA uses its power. What this will mean is that unless the White House changes the scale of the surveillance programmes for which the National Security Administration (NSA) the agency will be acting illegally. Provisions of Section 215, allow the NSA to collect metadata about phone calls made within the US, and give the government a "very useful tool" to track connections among Americans that might be relevant to counterterrorism investigations. However most Americans were shocked at the scale of the surveillance and lengths to which the NSA has pushed its limits was a "shock". Now Sensenbrenner has written the USA Freedom Act, a bill to restrict the scope of both Section 215 and the NSA programs, which has attracted 130 co-sponsors. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) has sponsored a similar bill in the Senate. Review panels appointed by the White House have also slammed Section 215 and the scope of the programs the NSA justifies under it. It did not like the NSA practice of collecting telephone metadata in bulk "raises serious threats to privacy and civil liberties," "lacks a viable legal foundation," and has demonstrated only limited value. The US Justice Department has yet to work out what it will do if Section 215 dies, or if any of the Freedom bills become law. It could suddenly find that all that investment it made in spying technology and databases will have to be scrapped. Of course, it could always assassinate key congressmen pretending to be terrorists and hope that inspires the rest to renew Section 215, we guess that is plan B and it will have to move fast if it wants that sort of campaign to pay off.     |
| Sony kills off its funky Vaio chicken Posted: 06 Feb 2014 02:17 AM PST Sony has announced that it is quitting the computer business and is splitting its TV division into a separate unit as it warned it expects steep losses this year. It is also ordering the loss of 5,000 jobs in a bid to trim $988 million a year from fixed costs in the longer term. Losses in the TV business have long dogged its efforts to do better in other areas. Sony's core mobile and home entertainment businesses also fell short of its expectations, and Sony said it now forecasts a net loss of $1.1 billion in the fiscal year ending in March. It previously expected a smallish net profit. The job cuts, which will come in both TV and PC divisions, are to be implemented by March 2015. The cost savings are to kick in by the 2015-2016 financial year, Sony said. The Vaio PC division, as widely expected, will be sold to investment fund Japan Industrial Partners, which will set up a separate company to take over the operations. The TV operations will be spun off into a separate unit by July 2014, Sony said. Having last turned an annual operating profit in the year ended March 2004, Sony's TV business piled up losses of $7.5 billion in the nine fiscal years before the current one. Sony officials said the business will keep losing money. But Sony's problems have been around for more than the current year. In fact the outfit has appeared to have been suffering from self-delusion for years. Even before the PC industry tanked, there were those of us who were wondering what Sony was playing at. For example for years people wondered why Sony was, allowing its Playstation console to be priced well above that of its rivals Nintendo and Microsoft. In the case of Microsoft, it was even peddling a machine which was not any better than the Xbox for a much higher price. Yet for some reason officials at Sony thought that it was better and people would buy ait nyway. Of course, it was wrong, but that arrogance did not go away for years. Now the latest results and restructuring indicate that many of Sony's chickens have come home to roost.     |
| Posted: 06 Feb 2014 02:16 AM PST After threats of a $5 billion fine, search engine outfit Google has finally agreed to make concessions on how it displays competitors' links on its website. Google struck a deal with the European Union regulator that ended a three-year antitrust probe and avoided a fine. It has to stick to the deal for five years. The search engine outfit may still face a second EU investigation, this time into its Android operating system for smartphones and this could get it into a bigger mess. This current row was the subject of a European Commission investigation into its internet search practices in November 2010, when more than a dozen complainants, including Microsoft whinged. Two attempts to resolve the case failed because Google claimed it had done no evil. Not everyone is happy with the EU deal. Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said he would accept Google's latest concessions without consulting the complainants, which seems to have prompted a furious response from critics. David Wood at lobby group ICOMP that counts Microsoft and four other complainants among its members said that without a third-party review, Almunia risked having the wool pulled over his eyes by Google. German online mapping services outfit Euro-Cities said it had given up on the Commission and would take its grievance to the courts . "Today's announcement still leaves many questions open. We will continue to take legal action about Google's business practices in the German and, if necessary, EU courts," its chief executive Hans Biermann said. Google's success in escaping financial sanctions mirrors a similar outcome in the United States last year, where the company received only a mild reprimand from the Federal Trade Commission.     |
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