Insight: How Samsung is beating Apple in China

Samsung beats Apple in China

GUANGZHOU, China/SEOUL (Reuters) - Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook believes that "over the arc of time" China is a huge opportunity for his pathbreaking company. But time looks to be on the side of rival Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, which has been around far longer and penetrated much deeper into the world's most populous country.

Apple Inc this week said its revenue in Greater China, which also includes Hong Kong and Taiwan, slumped 43 percent to $4.65 billion from the previous quarter. That was also 14 percent lower from the year-ago quarter. Sales were weighed down by a sharp drop in revenues from Hong Kong. "It's not totally clear why that occurred," Cook said on a conference call with analysts.

Neither is it totally clear what Apple's strategy is to deal with Samsung - not to mention a host of smaller, nimbler Chinese challengers.

Insight: How Samsung is beating Apple in China | Yahoo! Finance

Google’s Revamped Nexus 7 Spotted In Newly Leaked Press Image

Google Nexus 7

In just a few days now, Google’s Chrome and Android chief Sundar Pichai will be joined by a slew of journalists and media types to nosh on some breakfast and show off the newly-revamped Nexus 7. If you haven’t yet had your fill of leaks, none other than @evleaks has come through with one final (seemingly press quality) image of the updated tablet and its gigantic bezels ahead of its July 24 unveiling.

Yeah, the new Asus-made tab doesn’t look too different from the version we’re all so used to, though the dimples that flecked the back of the original are gone, and that front-facing camera has finally found a friend in a 5-megapixel sensor that sits on the device’s rear. One of the bigger gains here is the addition of a much higher resolution 7-inch display — the updated 7′s screen will run at 1920 x 1200, a big leap from the 720p panel we saw the first time around. As usual, we can’t discount what’s ticking under that redesigned hood, and the new Nexus tab is expected to pack a quad-core chipset running at 1.5GHz, 2 or 4GB of RAM, and dual rear-facing speakers.

Google’s Revamped Nexus 7 Spotted In Newly Leaked Press Image | TechCrunch

Microsoft Windows Root Certificate Security Issues

Executive Summary

In the default configuration for Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (SP2), if a user removes one of the trusted root certificates, and the certifier who issued that root certificate is trusted by Microsoft, Windows will silently add the root certificate back into the user's store and use the original trust settings. This prevents a Windows XP SP2 user from declaring a Microsoft-trusted certification authority as untrusted unless the user turns off the Windows component that controls this feature.

Microsoft Windows Root Certificate Security Issues

Note: Windows Vista works quite differently than Windows XP SP2 in this regard, and has significant but different problems with Microsoft-trusted root certificates: the user cannot mark them as untrusted. The differences between the two versions of Windows are covered in the last section.

Microsoft Windows Root Certificate Security Issues | Proper.com

Introducing 12P

I2P is a scalable, self organizing, resilient packet switched anonymous network layer, upon which any number of different anonymity or security conscious applications can operate. 

Each of these applications may make their own anonymity, latency, and throughput tradeoffs without worrying about the proper implementation of a free route mixnet, allowing them to blend their activity with the larger anonymity set of users already running on top of I2P.

• Applications available already provide the full range of typical Internet activities - anonymous web browsing, web hosting, chat, file sharing, e-mail, blogging and content syndication, newsgroups, as well as several other applications under development.
• Web browsing: using any existing browser that supports using a proxy.
• Chat: IRC, Jabber, I2P-Messenger.
• File sharing: I2PSnark, Robert, iMule, I2Phex, PyBit, I2P-bt and others.
• E-mail: susimail and I2P-Bote.
• Blog: using e.g. the pebble plugin or the distributed blogging software Syndie.
• Distributed Data Store: Save your data redundantly in the Tahoe-LAFS cloud over I2P.
• Newsgroups: using any newsgroup reader that supports using a proxy.

Introducing 12P | 12P

New project: Reactive Extensions for Ruby

A brief intro into the project: Reactive Extensions for Ruby

The Reactive Extensions (Rx) is a library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs using observable sequences and LINQ-style query operators. Using Rx, developers represent asynchronous data streams with Observables , query asynchronous data streams using LINQ operators , and parameterize the concurrency in the asynchronous data streams using Schedulers . Simply put, Rx = Observables + LINQ + Schedulers.

Reactive Extensions for Ruby

Whether you are authoring a traditional desktop or web-based application, you have to deal with asynchronous and event-based programming from time to time. Desktop applications have I/O operations and computationally expensive tasks that might take a long time to complete and potentially block other active threads. Furthermore, handling exceptions, cancellation, and synchronization is difficult and error-prone.

New project: Reactive Extensions for Ruby  | Rx.rb

The irrelevance of Microsoft

Quarterly numbers are all well and good, but sometimes it takes a really long-term chart to see what's going on. This one shows unit sales and average selling prices of PCs (including Macs, not that it matters) since 1995, the year Microsoft sealed its victory with Windows 95.

Microsoft unit sales and average selling prices of PCs since 1995

This is really a classic illustration of the demand curve; falling prices and rapid growth in unit volumes, mainly driven by the growth of the PC internet. And, of course, the dip downwards in the last few quarters. The contrast with the exploding sales of the new wave of mobile UNIX devices is pretty obvious.

Demand curve, falling prices and rapid growth in unit volumes

The irrelevance of Microsoft | Benedict Evans 

Samsung unveils 1TB 840 Evo solid-state drive

1TB 840 Evo solid-state drive

Following up on the SSD 840 series that came out in November 2012, Samsung today announced its new entry-level solid-state drive, the 840 Evo.

The main difference between the two is the fact that the 840 Evo offers up to 1TB of storage space, double that of the 840 series, and significantly faster performance.Like the previous drive, the 840 Evo comes in the 7mm-thick, 2.5-inch design and supports the SATA 3 (6Gbps) I/O standard.

Samsung unveils 1TB 840 Evo solid-state drive | CNET News