Steven Max Patterson

Author Archives: Steven Max Patterson

If Apple’s Irish tax loophole is a fraud, the whole tech industry is guilty

Apple’s profits in Ireland are “a fraud,” said Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz in an interview with Bloomberg Television’s Tom Keene. True it is, but almost every tech company uses the same loophole for which Stiglitz blamed the U.S. tax system.Stiglitz said: “Our current tax system encourages companies to keep their money abroad, opens up a vast loophole through what is called the transfer-pricing system that allows them not only to keep their money abroad but, effectively, to escape taxation.”How it works In international markets, companies manipulate higher costs, reducing taxes by using easily understood transfer-pricing. In this simplified example below, a product sells for $1,000 and costs $500 to produce. The taxes in the U.S. would be $175. But if the cost to produce it can be inflated to $600 and recognition of the sale and the cost transferred to a lower-tax country such as Ireland, $175 in taxes are saved.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google and Apple: Apple could be the next AOL

Apple announced its financial results on July 25 and Alphabet/Google on July 26. After-hours trading drove Alphabet’s market cap up over Apple’s. The chart above is a non-scientific indicator of expectations about the future of both companies. The expectations favor Google’s continued growth.Apple reported a drop in iPhone shipments and a drop in Mac shipments, both confirmed by IDC, as well as a decline in the average selling price of iPhones as the company struggles to compete with Android phones with the new low-cost iPhone SE. Every financial report places Apple’s hopes for renewed growth on the iPhone 7, which is due to be announced in September.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Russian involvement in DNC WikiLeaks email heist unproven

Almost 20,000 emails were stolen from the Democratic National Committee’s Microsoft Exchange server. Not enough information has been made public, however, to determine if only the Russian state penetrated the DNC’s network and were the actor that stole the email files.I spent two days digging through WikiLeaks, monitoring the news, talking to security analysts and reading English and Russian message boards. The picture is incomplete because the DNC has not released enough data to conclude that the Russians stole the email files.  + Also on Network World: U.S. cyber incident directive follows DNC hack +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Motorola’s Moto Z smartphone redefines the meaning of mobility

Lately, reviewing Android phones has become difficult—difficult because the quality of the phones has become so consistently good. Android reached parity with iOS with the Kitkat release. Since then the component quality spiked upwards, delivering clear and colorful screens, smooth performance and long battery life at decreasing price points. It leaves the reviewer with little to nitpick over other than the cameras. And recently, the difference in camera quality in all but the economy-tier improved dramatically.The Moto Z Droid and the Moto Z Force change this with Moto Mods, an ingenious way to add hardware features. Management at One Infinite Loop must be wondering how Apple’s designers were caught asleep at the innovation switch.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to wipe an Android phone: The paranoid edition

As a naturally paranoid person, I wiped the Moto G4 and G4 Plus that I recently tested before returning them to Motorola. This isn’t the first tutorial about how to wipe an Android phone, but it is the first one written by a paranoid person. In this tutorial, one more step, critical to safely wiping an Android device has been added. There could be an evil entity extracting personal information from lost, stolen or discarded Android phones or those sold by the unwary on by Craig’s List and Ebay. Maybe not, but I don’t want to find out.  To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How Facebook keeps you from hating its apps

An app has to do a lot of things for you to love it—and do only two things wrong to make you hate it: perform sluggishly and consume a lot of power.Facebook operations engineer Antoine Reversat revealed what Facebook does to prevent those two things and keep users from uninstalling its apps. He showed me the automated mobile testing lab, which has never before been disclosed to the public, that he designed and operates. The system automates testing of Facebook’s mobile apps, Messenger and Instagram for iOS and Android.Almost 2,000 Android and iOS smartphones are housed in 60 racks at Facebook’s Prineville, Oregon, data center. The standard-sized, specially designed racks hold 32 phones each, interconnected to a server. Linux servers interconnect Android phones, and Mac Minis interconnect iPhones. The phones are remotely controlled and monitored during the testing using an automated system that, like much of what Facebook does, will be open sourced for other mobile testers to use and contribute improvements.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook’s OpenCellular base stations to connect more mobile users

Facebook’s Aquila Unmanned Aircraft research project, which uses solar-powered drones to fill the internet access void in unconnected regions of the world, could be overtaken by the company’s latest development.  Facebook announced today that it will apply its open source influence and expertise to a new open-source, mobile, voice and data cellular base station called OpenCellular—a cellular base station in a box. The first implementations are expected to be available this summer.Facebook’s move represents breathtaking potential. Another company, Range Networks, has proven the feasibility of the model. Now, with Facebook’s extensive resources, this feasibility could become a reality, connecting the 4 billion not-yet-internet-connected people and the 10 percent of the world’s population who lack simple cellular voice and SMS connections.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Moto G4 and G4 Plus: Phones continue to get better and cheaper

iPhones and cable TV have a lot in common: Consumers tend to buy more than they need. iPhones and the Android flagship phones have more features than an individual consumer will use—like cable TV has a lot of channels that an individual consumer won’t watch. Given the choice, consumers might shave their consumption of both and save a few hundred dollars to a thousand dollars a year.Compare the prices of Apple’s entry-level iPhone SE to the Moto G4 Plus. It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, but an insightful one, nevertheless. The comparison is in a way apples to oranges. The iPhone SE has Apple’s powerful brand, an NFC chip for payments, and a glass and metal design. The G4 Plus, on the other hand, lacks the NFC chip and is has a mostly plastic exterior design. But the G4 Plus has a larger higher-resolution screen and its storage can be expanded with a microSD cards with as much as 128GB. Depending on the configuration of the Chinese-manufactured devices, the G4 Plus costs $150 to $200 less than the iPhone SE.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reports of Google building a phone are preposterous

In January 2014, Google sold Motorola Mobility to Lenovo. Imagine Google CEO Sundar Pichai now telling the Alphabet board that after buying and making Motorola into one of the best mobile device makers in the world, selling it was a mistake and the company should invest billions to recreate it. It would be like GE starting a TV network after it sold NBC to Comcast or HPE starting a PC division after it spun off its PC business.So, what is Google doing? The Motorola turnaround is a good place to start explaining what Google is doing.Google recruited Regina Dugan, former chief of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), into Motorola during the turnaround. The 50-year-old government agency is charged with preventing strategic surprises from—and creating strategic surprises for—America’s adversaries. DARPA earned a reputation for producing high-impact results quickly. A few of DARPA’s many innovations include the internet, global positioning satellites (GPS), drones and micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Consumers’ love for streamed TV keeps growing

The number of consumers watching more than 10 hours per week of over-the-top (OTT) streamed video grew by 50 percent annually, and binge watching viewing grew from 12.2 percent to 18.32 percent. That’s according to a survey (pdf) of 1,086 consumers by Limelight Networks, which also showed strong growth and rapid shifts in consumers’ online video consumption.Almost 70 percent of consumers subscribe to at least one paid OTT stream video service, such as Netflix or Hulu. And the number of consumers who have have at least one OTT streamed video jumped by 15 percent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why Apple’s Photos announcement should offend you

The new Apple Photos now labels photos based on facial recognition and content such as landscapes and objects so that users can search and sort photos. Apple copied what Google announced last year. This is good news for Apple users. No one wants to deny iPhone users a better experience organizing their photos. But any of them with a lick of sense about scientific research should also be offended.Apple stood on the shoulders of giants to produce Photos. Photo labeling isn’t new. It was one of the first areas of machine learning research to be tackled by machine learning researchers after character recognition. Almost all the software or concepts used to do this could be open source.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Lenovo wants consumers to take Google Tango for granted, so does Google

Gamers and R&D labs creating new applications for augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) have been the source of enthusiasm for this new category. But most people have only a superficial opinion—or no opinion—about these exciting emergent technologies because they haven’t become relevant in their lives. The two early use cases, games and immersive 360-degree video, represent large future businesses that few people have experienced.Yesterday, Lenovo introduced the Phab2 Pro, which is both an AR device and has all the features of an Android smartphone. It’s a more approachable form of AR because the consumer looks through the Phab2 Pro like a looking glass and doesn’t feel awkward donning a strange-looking headset or visor. It feels normal—like taking a picture or video.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Qualcomm’s Connected Car Reference Platform to connect smart cars to everything

With 200 to 300 microcontrollers and microprocessors in the typical automobile, cars are already pretty smart. And Google’s and Tesla’s continued development, as well as auto manufacturers’ R&D investments in preparation of autonomous cars, indicate cars are about to get much smarter.That increased intelligence means vehicles will have more silicon devices that are more integrated, with more densely packed circuitry. Functional modules, such as control systems, infotainment, and autonomous steering and braking, multiply the number of chips per car that semiconductor manufacturers can sell into each car.To fill the gap between the connectivity capabilities of today’s cars and the complex connectivity in next-generation cars, Qualcomm today announced its Connected Car Reference Platform intended for the car industry to use to build prototypes of the next-generation connected car. Every category from economy to luxury car will be much smarter than the connected luxury car of today, creating a big opportunity for Qualcomm to supply semiconductors to automakers and suppliers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Understanding Deep Text, Facebook’s text understanding engine

“One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know.”That Groucho Marx quote illustrates why it’s difficult for computers to understand humans. When programming for computers to understand humans, one must account for vagueness, ambiguity and uncertainty to distil the meaning of human language.Facebook announced today that it can now do that with Deep Text, a deep learning-based text-understanding engine running a neural network that can understand with near-human accuracy the textual content of several thousands of posts per second—and in more than 20 languages.Consumers interacting with computers Consumers regularly interact with computers trained with machine-learning techniques that understand human language. Ask Siri for the best Japanese restaurant in San Francisco, and Siri will give you a list of restaurants. Or ask Google how many people live in Lisle, Illinois, and Google will reply with the answer from the U.S. census. These intelligent systems parse the question like school children, using syntax to diagram a sentence and then answer the question with structured data sets: the list of restaurants labeled San Francisco and Japanese or the quantity of people labeled Lisle, IL, in the census database.To Continue reading

Sirin Labs unveils luxury smartphone for security-conscious traveling executives

Today, Sirin Labs announced an ultra-secure luxury smartphone called the Solarin for the international business person who wants both style and security. It will compete with the category of phones produced by Silent Circle, GranitePhone, BlackBerry and Samsung phones with KNOX mobile security software.This is a well-timed introduction, matching the shift to mobile from PCs.Even with price of the Solarin starting at £9,500 (~$13,750), there is a market for smartphones that prove to be impenetrable. That’s because the cost of providing managed services to secure executives’ devices can be quite high. Also, the price of the phone is far less than the cost of a breach should a phone fall into the wrong hands.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

12 reasons why mobile already ate the world, according to Ben Evans

Evidently discarding any reservations he might have had about mobile becoming the dominant computing platform, Benedict Evans, Andreesen Horwitz venture capital analyst and blogger, says mobile is no longer in the process of eating the world, but that “mobile ate the world.”Evans made the statement during his yearly mobile presentation, which he published at the end of March. Over Memorial Day weekend, I read his presentation, which has become a high-tech industry touchstone, and summarized the tall tent poles of this 76-slide tome for those short on time. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Startup Nervana joins Google in building hardware tailored for neural networks

At the MIT EmTech Digital conference, startup Nervana announced plans to design and build a custom ASIC processor for neural networks and machine learning applications that the company’s CEO, Naveen Rao, claims will run 10 times faster than graphic processor units (GPU).The news comes after Google last week announced it had secretly deployed its neural network and machine-learning-tailored processors in its data centers about a year ago. The company reported that its custom processor had improved performance by an order of magnitude. Google’s approach and improvements in performance validate Nervana’s technical strategy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google AI expert explains the challenge of debugging machine-learning systems

Google Director of Research and renowned artificial intelligence (AI) expert Peter Norvig, presented an entirely different side of AI and machine learning at the EmTech Digital conference. He compared traditional software programming to machine learning to highlight the new challenges of debugging and verifying systems programmed with machine learning do what they are designed to do.Traditional software programming uses Boolean-based logic that can be tested to confirm that the software does what it was designed to do, using tools and methodologies established over the last few decades.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google Daydream is a contrarian platform bet on mobile virtual reality

Google is betting that its Daydream platform for mobile virtual reality—announced last week at Google I/O 2016—will be good enough, its performance will evolve faster and its price will drop faster than immersive VR headsets such as the top-tier Oculus and HTC Vive.Given a choice between a perfect immersive VR headset that costs at least $1,800, plus a PC upgrade, or good mobile VR like Google Daydream that stretches the smartphone upgrade budget by only a few hundred dollars, all but the most serious enthusiasts will choose Daydream.+ More on Network World: Google I/O 2016: Google’s biggest announcements +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Android apps run securely on Chrome OS in Linux containers

With first-quarter shipments exceeding Macs in the United States, Chromebooks are very popular. Schools and enterprises choose Chromebooks for their very streamlined use case: low cost, fast boot security, simplicity and ease of administration.Chromebooks just got a little more complicated, but for the better, with Google’s announcement that the Android Play Store will be available on Chromebooks and that Android apps will run on the Chrome operating system. The million Android apps—which include popular apps such as Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Word and Skype and games such as Clash of Clans and Angry Birds—will remedy the Chromebook’s relative app sparsity.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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