loquitur

Massiveattack87 said:

[....]
Apple Car has never made sense. 

Since the Tesla Model 3 debuted as a minimalist software-driven iPad on wheels, indeed, an Apple effort never made sense. (Although I don't drink Elon Musk Koolaid, I'm quite happy with my Tesla, only needing windshield washer fluid and tires over the last five years.)

What value did they think they would add?  Apple doesn't do much in the way of batteries, etc. I'd really like to know
from the ex- amps among the 2,000 what Apple thought their angle would be over just being a "me too" EV.
Further, why did it take them that long to "say no" -- just bureaucracy?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, my stereo(!) class-A amplifier Apple iPod Hi-Fi is still going strong,
not using the decrepit iPod connectors (or the useless boom-box battery mode), but as a wired
sound bar for my kitchen TV.  If I want to get really fancy, I suppose I could airplay something
to it using ye olde airport express connected via the optical jack!  (Old farts at play.)

To Apple non-coder outsiders, layering an OS atop other hardware always seems like
sleight-of-hand, possibly because of Apple's infamous secrecy.  But it's SOP
in the industry.  (I'm long-retired from participating in such at the defunct Sun Microsystems,
which maintained software builds for SPARC, Intel, PowerPC, and even HP's Itanium.)

Some of the transition stuff is motivated by contractual obligations.  
I believe for Motorola/IBM they had a 15-or-20 year exclusive arrangement to use just that architecture.  
Steve Jobs analogized it to a marriage contract.  Maybe they had something similar for
Intel -- I vaguely recall details (partly-redacted) which show up in SEC documents.
So when the exclusivity ends, and either the vendor has fallen behind the competition,
or you are allowed to roll-your-own, it's always wise to have a Plan B lined up
beforehand.   

Aside: yes you can certainly get a divorce mid-stream at a cost.  Tesla did this due to a rift
with Mobileye, and their transition to Nvidia served them until they could vertically integrate better.

mikethemartian said:

Rayz2016 said:

Thrashman said:

 Coming out. - Not sure what you do in your private life is anyone’s business- so not sure why you bring it up.

Someone asked her what her proudest moment was; she answered honestly.

 Do you think she should have said, "learning to ride a unicycle" just to protect your delicate self?

If I could learn to ride a unicycle it would be my proudest moment. Especially if I could juggle at the same time. :-)

Well, yeah!  My grad school adviser (same as for Ken Thompson at Cal Berkeley, of Unix fame) did that trick.
That would be Elwyn Berlekamp of M.I.T. (prof at age 23), and chairman of three departments at UCB (math,
computer science, and electrical engineering), R.I.P.   One of his fave things (besides juggling 5 golf balls off
the floor whilst chatting with his students) was to ride thru the halls of Berkeley's Evans (Cory?) Hall on a
unicycle while juggling four hatchets.  Yup, the good ole days, before Bell Labs Unix, thence
BSD, formed the basis of the Apple Unix kernel.

Refresher:  There are two parallel systems involved with patent validity.

One is the patent office itself who issued the patents and wants to nullify them
saying they were overbroad and anticipated by network standards committee
documents (RFCs) fleshing out end-to-end encryption.  The PTAB authority
has domain-level experts.

The other system is the courts, who use different standards, and non-expert lay juries
including the ones attached to the infamous Eastern District of Texas who are easily
swayed by lawyers in the adversarial system.

The Supreme Court has commented that it's strange to have two systems, but
Congress designed it this way and only the legislative branch can try to straighten the
messy system out with new law.   So, it's a turf war.

Meanwhile the security standards were implemented by different companies (including
Cisco, Apple, and Microsoft) in different ways.  These companies rolled out actual
products, but VirnetX peddled the overbroad patent claims saying they were "first".

Dr. Short may have had some nifty implementation wrinkle, but VirnetX wants folks to
believe they invented end-to-end encryption, when what they do is basically implement
DNS lookups to secure domains ending in .scom.   This is not stuff that appears as
novel in textbooks on network security, just a workman-like engineering effort
subject to multiple re-invention.

To add to the insult, VirnetX thinks their one improvement idea is worth multiple
hundreds of millions, or a significant percentage of sales.   The iPhone utilizes literally
thousands of hacks -- Apple and the rest of the industry would pay this amount only
for complete bundles of thousands of patents from established cellphone technology
companies like Qualcomm and ye olde Motorola.   So the issue of proper "apportionment" is
in flux.   Adding to all that is the Supreme Court decision in Alice v. CLS Bank,
which since 2014 has provided a dim view of software patents in general.

Since VirnetX conned some patent clerk to accept broad language in their issuance
which may even be upheld by appeals courts, they may yet win on a technicality,
but it won't be because they invented *the* way to turn an iMessage from the color green
(unsecure SMS) to the color blue (a bit more secure, until backup-to-iCloud at least).