spheric

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spheric
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  • First look: Mac Pro and Apple Pro Display XDR [u]

    sphericspheric
    mr lizard said:
    The Pro Stand resembles the iMac G4 display arm in functionality, with the addition of rotation, and is an additional $999 purchase. A VESA adapter is $199. The display does come with a basic stand.
    The display comes with a basic stand? That hasn’t been mentioned anywhere else, including Apple. Is there a source for this info?
    Looks like misinformation. 

    The techspecs page lists the VESA mount and the Pro Stand, and under "what's included" it only mentions the display itself, a power cable, and a Thunderbold 3 Pro cable. No mention of a basic stand.

    https://www.apple.com/pro-display-xdr/specs/
    dysamoriafastasleeph2p

  • Full-screen Touch ID could come to the iPhone with acoustic fingerprint imaging

    sphericspheric
    Don't others have ultrasonic fingerprint readers? The problem is that they're really easy to fool with a 3D texture, since they have no way to discern actual living tissue the way the Touch ID sensor does. 
    macplusplusleftoverbacon

  • Video: Everything you need to know about the new AirPods before you buy

    sphericspheric
    beowulfschmidt said:
    radarthekat said:
    MisterKit said:
    It’s interesting that Apple is tweaking the latency specs. I don’t know if wireless can in theory ever match the too small to perceive latency of wired headphones/speakers. This is the primary deficiency of devices lacking physical analog ports. It is not just a convenience. It is critical when working on audio in real time.
    Absolutely.  Latancy can be eliminated by some clever tech, though not sure if anyone has done this.  The connected device could perform a round trip sample to determine latency, then offset the audio a bit forward in time relative to the video to account for it.  I bet you could get very close to perfect.  
    It seems unlikely to me that anyone who actually requires no/low latency will choose wireless anyway.  I use wireless when I'm doing yard work or at the gym.  Latency doesn't matter a whit there.  When I'm playing a competitive game, I use wired everything, including controllers.
    Stage musicians have been using wireless in-ear systems for monitor playback, and wireless transmitters for guitars and other mobile instruments, as well as hand mics, for many years. 

    It's just that those transmitters — both back in the analog days, and modern digital systems — run on zero-latency protocols. 

    Bluetooth has latency that makes it unusable for those scenarios. 
    n2itivguyfastasleep

  • USB audio-in adapter?

    sphericspheric
    What you are looking for is a „USB class-compliant“ audio interface. That means it will Just Work, with no drivers or anything needed. 

    They start at about $20 and literally have no upper price limit. 

    It’s really just a question of deciding on a budget and walking into your neighbourhood music store. 
    ajmas

  • Apple agrees to pay French government $571M in back taxes

    sphericspheric
    hexclock said:
    spheric said:
    hexclock said:
    spice-boy said:
    What are you folks so obsessed about how much tax Apple has to pay? You should be concerned that you get almost nothing for the taxes you pay if you live in the US. Apple is in the top 3 richest corporations in the world, they must obey the laws of the countries they operate in. 
    I believe Apple has complied with all laws in counties it operates in. It just seems like that when the EU needs more money, they pick some big US Corp and slap a new tax on them. That’s the optics of it, so prove me wrong. 
    For one, since you haven't been following along: The issue is NOT that Apple didn't comply with the laws of Ireland. It's that Irish law was in violation of EU law, because it gave Ireland an unfair competitive advantage when vying for corporate investors. 
    If Irish regulations were illegal under EU law, they weren't enforceable; ergo: Apple owes back taxes.

    Whether it's Apple who owes, or Ireland who ought cover for it, is under dispute — which is why the money Apple has put up remains in escrow until it's been decided.  
     

    Second: Just because you personally never, ever hear about ANYTHING the EU does unless it concerns an American corporation, doesn't mean it's not happening. 

    Not all of these are directly tax evasion, but many are effectively that, in terms of illegal subsidies (as is Apple in Ireland): 
    Energy company Engie. 
    Real Madrid - 20.3 Million € (and six other Spanish football teams). 
    Deutsche Post — somewhere between 500 Million and 1 billion €. 
    Belgian B-Post, as well. 
    Nürburgring GmbH (the race track operator) — half a billion. 
    Olympic Airlines — about 150 million. 
    and plenty, plenty more. This is just a couple of choice examples from the first page of a Google search. 

    I think it may be a symptom of your not being able to think of many European companies beyond Daimler and VW, full stop. 

    It's sort of like how most Americans seem to think that the EU must hate US corporations and hits them with massive anti-trust punishments (Microsoft, Google), when in fact, there are anti-trust rulings all the time, and the vast majority of them concern illegal pricing cartels between EU corporations. You obviously never hear about that, because it's outside of your sphere of interest.

    And in fact, even we here hardly hear about it, because frankly, it's kind of not so interesting to hear that four electronics companies have been fined twenty million Euros for price-fixing the lightbulb market.  
    Ok, well thank you for explaining some of that. I have been following along, although your point about spheres of interest is well taken. As you point out, it does seem like the EU targets American businesses, and maybe rightly so. My original point to all of this is where are the European mega corporations that get the same treatment by the US government.
    If Ireland has been breaking EU law for so long, why wasn’t it addressed years ago? Anyway, good discussion. 
    One specific reason why the Irish situation (which is off-topic, strictly speaking, since this is about France) primarily affects US corporations is because the whole scheme (until 2014) was based upon differences between US and Irish tax law: the US considers a company taxable where it is registered, while Ireland considers it taxable where it is controlled. So if you register a US-owned subsidiary in Ireland, but put that under control of an off-shore company based in a tax haven that receives all the profits, Ireland considers your income taxable in that tax haven and collects nothing on the revenue generated in Ireland. The US government, in turn, considers your income taxable by Irish law, so you end up paying nothing. 

    This obviously doesn’t work for Euro corporations wanting to operate within the US, so you’re not going to see a similar issue as with Apple in Ireland crop up there with Daimler or BMW or Fiat Chrysler or whatever. 

    As for this French case: Europe is different from the US. While the US is comprised of 50 States and a handful of territories, those are all under centralised federal government and not independent. They are first part of the US and within that framework granted freedoms and leeway. 

    The EU works from the opposite direction: EU states are first and foremost independent states, and then they are also governed by EU regulations and legal requirements they’ve agreed to, but the frameworks are (apparently) much more complex, and it takes a long time for everything to get worked through every country’s individual legislature. So stuff that changes gets earmarked, watched, and once the legislature is clear, the process of going through courts and assessing the damage can begin. 

    At least, that’s my layman’s understanding. 
    muthuk_vanalingamhexclockpropod