Posts Tagged ‘german’

Warren Buffet thinks buying gold is dumb: specifically, he thinks that buying gold is speculation, not investing, because gold doesn’t do anything productive. Here, he waxes eloquent on the subject: “If you put your money into gold or other non-income- producing assets that are dependent on what someone else values that in the future, you’re        

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Warren Buffet vs goldbugs

If it wasn’t clear already , robots are well on their way to making us humans obsolete — witness the latest evidence in the form of all-robot band Compressorhead. The band just released a video of it performing seminal heavy metal band Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades,” and it’s among one of the more vulgar displays of robotic power we’ve seen in some time. The band may have been together for a few years now, but that doesn’t make the spectacle any less entertaining. The sound quality may not be great, but it’s pretty clear Compressorhead are a group of virtuosos, though we have yet to hear what any of the three-piece band sounds like when they step behind the mic. Unfortunately, the band’s site is currently down — but if you’re interested…

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Watch this: robot band riffs on Motörhead’s ‘Ace of Spades’

Samsung had hoped allegations of juror misconduct would win it a do-over in the Apple v. Samsung case, but tonight Judge Lucy Koh put those aspirations to rest by denying its request. Samsung had accused jury foreman Velvin Hogan of intentionally hiding information about a lawsuit he was involved in with Seagate. Samsung recently became a primary shareholder of the company, providing Hogan a reason to be biased. As such, the company had asked for an evidentiary hearing — in which all of the jury members would be brought back to the courtroom to be questioned about what impact Hogan had on deliberations — as well as a new trial

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Samsung’s juror misconduct argument will not result in a new trial with Apple

Shortly after Samsung accused Apple of infringing patents with the iPad mini and other new products, Apple has fired back, asking to add the Galaxy Note II, Galaxy S III with Android 4.1, and four other products to the latest lawsuit. While Apple has already added some of the devices, like the S III, to its suit, they’ve since received software updates, leading to another round of requested inclusions. The Galaxy S III mini, Samsung Rugby Pro, Galaxy Tab 8.9 Wi-Fi, and Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 round out the list. Other patent infringement cases have already been decided in favor of either Apple or Samsung, with the former winning a US trial decisively earlier this year

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Apple asks judge to add Galaxy Note II and other Samsung devices to latest suit

Apple has posted its Samsung Galaxy Tab design acknowledgement in several UK newspapers today following the scolding that it received from the courts over the “incorrect” online statement. Unlike the acknowledgement first served up on Apple’s website, the new notice takes a very dry approach to outlining the situation while also pointing readers to copies of the court’s judgements. The Verge has confirmed that a copy of the advertisement has appeared on page four of The Daily Mail , with The Next Web spotting the same notice in The Guardian . Apple was asked to run the statement in additional publications, including The Financial Times , in a font no smaller than Arial 14 and before page six. The company was also ordered to post a…

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Apple’s revised Samsung design statement printed in UK newspapers

Mere hours after the jury returned its $1.049 billion verdict in the Apple v. Samsung case, Judge Lucy Koh informed both parties that a hearing would be held in September to discuss any new injunctions Apple would be seeking againt Samsung’s products. A change in Koh’s strategy has shifted the playing field, however — and both sides now aren’t scheduled to discuss any new injunctions until December 6th. In an order filed this afternoon, Koh lays out the new post-trial schedule, writing that after considering the breadth of Apple’s recent injunction request , and “the additional post-trial motions that the parties have already filed and will file,” it makes sense to put the injunction discussion and the post-trial judgement requests on… Continue reading…

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Apple can’t ban infringing Samsung products until December under new court schedule

Samsung has already issued a statement commenting on its devastating loss in its legal tussle with Apple. The company pulls no punches, calling back to the stirring language it used in its closing arguments. We’re reproducing it in its entirety below. Today’s verdict should not be viewed as a win for Apple, but as a loss for the American consumer

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Samsung: today’s verdict ‘a loss for the American consumer’

We know how much Apple thinks it should be paid for Samsung’s alleged infringement, and now Samsung is making its wants known: according to two witnesses today, Apple should pay Samsung as much as $421.8 million if infringement is found. Dr. Vincent O’Brien testified about three utility patents covering email, photo browsing, and music playback functionality. SInce Samsung hasn’t lost any sales due to the alleged infringement, monetary damages come down to reasonable royalty rates: an estimate of what the two companies could have arrived at if they’d negotiated licenses themselves. O’Brien looked at a number of factors, including Apple’s own history of royalty payouts (according to his testimony, Cupertino has paid $1.4 billion in…

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Samsung rests its case after asking Apple for up to $421.8 million

Today a Samsung industrial designer testified that the company’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 project predated the launch of the iPad, and that Samsung did not redesign the tablet in response to the iPad 2 — despite an executive’s public statements to the contrary. Samsung called to the stand Jin Soo Kim, one of the company’s principal industrial designers, who stated via interpreter that the Tab 10.1 project began back in October of 2009 (Apple unveiled the iPad on January 27th, 2010). He then showed an email featuring a design that appeared to be quite close to the final product — and was dated a full three weeks before the iPad announcement.

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Samsung industrial designer claims the iPad 2 didn’t inspire thinner Galaxy Tab 10.1

Judge Lucy Koh has pushed several times for Apple and Samsung to settle their differences outside of the courtroom, and this morning she asked that the CEOs of both companies meet one last time before the case goes to jury. “I don’t mean to waste their time,” she said, but noted that she sees peril for both sides— even outside of the possibility of a hung jury. If Apple and Samsung’s primary goals have been to raise awareness of their intellectual property, Koh said, “mission accomplished.” Both Apple and Samsung agreed to the request. She made the comments after urging both sides to narrow their cases as well, hoping to reduce the number of claims in order to make things easier on the jury

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Judge requests Apple and Samsung CEOs meet one more time before case goes to jury

We’ve heard from quite a few experts talking about the design of Apple and Samsung products, but today in court an actual Samsung icon designer took the stand — and stated emphatically the company hadn’t copied any Apple designs. Testifying through a translator, Jeeyeun Wang explained that she was a senior designer in Samsung’s wireless design team, and had personally selected the green phone icon that Apple alleges was copied from the iPhone. Wang explained that Samsung designers work just as hard as any Apple designers, explaining that during the three-month period when she was working on the Galaxy S “i slept about two or three hours a night.” She explained that she had just given birth at the time, and that she had to spend so much… Continue reading…

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Samsung designer describes late nights when working on Galaxy S, ‘we did not’ copy iPhone

As Apple v. Samsung progresses, it’s been known for some time that it didn’t have to come to this: Apple had made overtures in the past toward the electronics giant in the past in an effort to secure a licensing deal that would cover patents it believed were being infringed, noting that Samsung is a “strategic supplier.” In court documents released today, we now learn that Apple had a dollar figure in mind in an October 2010 meeting — it was proposing that Samsung pay a base rate of $30 per touchscreen phone (Android, Windows Phone, Symbian, and Bada alike) and $40 per tablet, decreasing to $30 over the course of two years. “Samsung should respond favorably,” Apple’s slide deck notes.

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Apple asked Samsung to pay as much as $30 per Android phone, $40 per tablet for patent licenses

Apple’s Director of Patent Licensing and Strategy, Boris Teksler, took the stand this afternoon to provide a look inside the company’s stance on patent licensing — and the meetings and negotiations that took place between Apple and Samsung. The chain of events that led up to the trial began in summer of 2010, with the release of the Samsung Galaxy S. Teksler echoed the sentiments of other Apple executives we’ve heard from : the company was shocked.

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Apple patent director: only copycats like Samsung need our patents

Audi has long signaled its interest in getting into electric cars, but apart from the Tesla Roadster, “electric” and “ultra high-performance” really haven’t gone hand in hand. That stigma will start to lift once the German automaker launches the e-tron variant of its lauded R8 later this year, and this video shows what it’s like to lap the famous Nürburgring Nordschleife — a key barometer for any serious sports car — without the roar of an internal combustion engine just feet away. Even if you’re not a die-hard enthusiast, it’s striking to see a car moving this fast and hear virtually nothing but road noise and the occasional squeal of a corner taken at maximum attack. Nordschleife lap times are the automotive equivalent of an…

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Watch this: Audi’s electric R8 e-tron tears up Nürburgring in silence

Yesterday may not have been the best day in court for Apple , but Cupertino rebounded today, calling several witnesses that were able to effectively argue its case — while Samsung received another slap from Judge Lucy Koh. Samsung began the day by accusing Apple of tampering with one of the joint exhibits — an Epic Touch 4G — to make its icon layout look more like the iPhone. Samsung claimed to have learned of the issue over the weekend, and presented an alternative picture it said was taken Sunday night.

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Apple bounces back as the courtroom conversation turns to icons and iPads

While the last few days have been filled with theatrics from the Apple v. Samsung legal teams , today we got back to the two sides explaining their cases before the nine-person jury. Phil Schiller was up first , and walked the courtroom through the impetus for the original iPhone in 2004 — “We realized at the time that some phones weren’t any good as entertainment devices,” he said — as well as the success the smartphone had upon launch. In fact, after a few years the iPhone became so successful that the company had a simple shorthand for estimating sales of the newest version: “Each new generation sold approximately equal to all previous generations combined.” Pivoting to advertising expenditures, Schiller then outlined the company’s… Continue reading…

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Schiller, Forstall, and ‘Fight Club’: day three of Apple v. Samsung

Bryan Killett is a physicist working on the Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment (GRACE) for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. GRACE is a joint mission of NASA and the German Aerospace Center which collects satellite data to learn about Earth’s changing gravity field, specifically the high frequency changes associated with ocean tides. As the high tide comes in, more water is present, so gravity in that location is temporarily strengthened. These changes are detected with GRACE and used to improve ocean tide models

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Ask Dr. Bryan Killett About Climate Change and GRACE

We already got a look at some early iPhone designs inspired by Sony and the iPod , but court documents have revealed an assortment of different looks that were considered for Apple’s various iOS products — including several iPad designs featuring kickstands. Multiple versions of both the iPhone and the iPad are featured, and while we’ve seen some of these before — the iPad prototype with dual dock connectors was sold on eBay back in May — many of the designs are being revealed for the first time. Of particular note are multiple iterations of the iPad featuring different types of kickstands, what appears to be a 16:9 model with wide handles on either side, and an eight-sided iPhone with diagonal corners. Many of the iPad prototypes…

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iPad with kickstand and other ‘highly confidential’ prototypes revealed in court documents

walterbyrd writes with news that Apple has won a preliminary injunction against the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 across the European Union, thanks to a decision in a German regional court today. At the same time, the court re-affirmed the denial of an injunction against the Galaxy Tab 10.1N, a version of Samsung’s 10.1″ tablet that was modified to avoid infringing upon the same patents Apple had asserted earlier. The two companies are still fighting on the other side of the Atlantic as well.

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Apple Wins EU Ban of Smaller Samsung Tablet, Demands $2.5 Billion In Damages

Oliver Reichenstein is the founder and director of Information Architects, the Tokyo, Zurich, and Berlin-based design agency. iA’s usual trade is website design and consultancy along with the odd concept like the Twitter strikethrough , but the company has also found recent success in iOS and Mac app development . Writer for iPad is a pioneering minimalist text editor, and its focus-enhancing combination of sparse visuals and refined typography has since made the leap to OS X and the iPhone .

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Good design is invisible: an interview with iA’s Oliver Reichenstein

A UK judge in the High Court of Justice’s Chancery Division today ruled that Samsung’s Galaxy Tab does not infringe upon the design of Apple’s iPad because Samsung’s tablet isn’t well-designed enough to be confused with Apple’s product. In the ruling, UK Judge Colin Biriss said that Galaxy Tab models “do not have the same understated and extreme simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design,” concluding with the rather subjective claim that “they are not as cool.” The court did find that there were major similarities in the design, noting that “the view from the front is really very striking. The Galaxy tablets are not identical to the Apple design but they are very, very similar in this respect.” However, differences in the styling… Continue reading…

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UK Judge says Galaxy Tab does not infringe on the iPad, design ‘not as cool’

When Richard Posner, a judge on the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, senior lecturer for the University of Chicago Law School, and author of dozens of books on jurisprudence and economics says that “it’s not clear that we really need patents in most industries,” that’s a big deal. During his talk with Reuters, he spoke about his recent dismissal of the Apple v. Motorola case and his stance on patent law.

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In wake of Apple v. Motorola, Judge Posner speaks: ‘it’s not clear that we really need patents in most industries’

Not long ago, a higher regional court in Germany reportedly ruled that file-sharing site RapidShare would need to proactively monitor user uploads for copyrighted material — but in an apparent change of heart, that no longer appears to be the case. TorrentFreak reports that the German court has determined that RapidShare operates legally in the country, and that it has no obligation to monitor user uploads. Instead, its responsibility lies with monitoring external sites that link to copyrighted materials. The court ruled that RapidShare must make these files inaccessible. And while the file-sharing site doesn’t appear to have a problem with this in theory — CEO Alexandra Zwingli explained that this “is exactly what RapidShare has…

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RapidShare avoids takedown, but must become watchdog for ‘external’ violations

Google has posted a look back at Colossus, the world’s first programmable electronic computer. Created by Tommy Flowers at the Bletchley Park decryption center in England, it was designed to intercept and interpret coded messages sent by German machines during World War II. Bletchley Park was where the Engima codes were finally broken, but by 1943 the Germans were using a new and more complex system called Lorenz.

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Colossus: how the first programmable electronic computer saved countless lives

The 2010 Medal of Honor reboot brought the historic shooter to a modern Afghanistan conflict. This year’s Medal of Honor Warfighter , due out on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 on Oct. 23, brings the fight home, delving into the perspective of not just soldiers, but their familes. Electronic Arts promises that Warfighter will go beyond the battlefield and reveal the “heartbreaking side of war, told through the eyes of military families.” ” Medal of Honor Warfighter unveils intimate insights into the sacrifices of the warriors on the ground – and their families,” according to the game’s newly updated website. The game tells the story of U.S

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Medal of Honor Warfighter promises to show human side of war