The most significant quote of the article: "we expect overseas cash balances will continue to grow unless tax laws encourage U.S. companies to repatriate money".

The corporate tax rate for what Apple is doing is around 35%; that is, Apple would have to pay 35% of their cash pile in taxes if they repatriated it. Which would be generally reasonable if not for the fact that it was already taxed once in the originating country on the original sale. As a result the 35% tax rate is essentially a kind of 35% tariff on exports and foreign sales. You only need to pay it once if you sell within the US, but you pay it along with a second set of local taxes on anything you sell outside of the US, regardless of whether it was even made here. The ultimate effect is that if every dollar were immediately repatriated, foreign sales would either be immensely less profitable than domestic sales, or American companies would be at a significant competitive disadvantage against foreign companies that aren't getting taxed twice (e.g. Samsung).

Congress needs to give up on this pipe dream that they can have 35% of the profits made off of all foreign sales. When no one else is double-taxing like this, it makes the American tax system look foolish and antiquated.

Its not amusing at all. Amazon dominate by competing on old fashioned things like price,

Competing on price is an understatement. Amazon was losing money on purpose; it's more fair to say Amazon was competing via predatory pricing . Lose money on books now until everyone else has been run out of business, then significantly raise the prices once they're the only game in town. The outcome of that would have been something that would have benefited no one but Amazon.

On a side note, the wholesale model doesn't make any sense for ebooks anyhow. It's based around the realities of inventory, which wouldn't apply to ebooks.

You're not wrong, but using the generic reckless driving laws requires proving that the driver was actually being reckless, which inevitably leads to a long trial where the suspect argues that they were still taking due care despite their self-imposed handicap. When you enumerate badness you get to skip proving whether something is bad, and simply have to prove the suspect was doing the action. This is why we have laws against specific things like drunk driving and text messaging.

Yes, but that requires proving that the driver was actually driving without due care, which inevitably leads to a long trial where the suspect argues that they were still taking due care while wearing the glasses. When you enumerate badness you get to skip proving whether something is bad, and simply have to prove the suspect was doing the action. This is the same basic rationale for why laws were passed specifically to deal with text messaging.

I could not find a version of retail Windows 8 anywhere

You're looking for something that doesn't exist because it's no longer needed.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Microsoft-Windows-WN7-00403-English-Version/dp/B009HI2W66/ref=sr_1_2?s=software&ie=UTF8&qid=1367939128&sr=1-2&keywords=windows+8

OEM is the new retail. MS unified the TOS; Win8 OEM's terms are essentially identical to Win7 retail's terms, including the ability to resell it.

This had better be News For Nerds, because it sure isn't Stuff That Matters. If you don't have a good technical article to post, then don't post anything at all. These flamebait stories are getting old.

Secure Erase is even more brilliant than that. Modern SSDs (and phones) run 128bit/256bit AES encryption full-time. So when the drive needs to be Secure Erased, they simply throw away the key and generate a new one.

As a result the data has been rendered inert in a fraction of the time it would take to actually overwrite it, and without needing to put all of the cells through a P/E cycle.

Intelligence is additive. Stupidity is multiplicative.

Strictly speaking they don't need to be off the network; the threat isn't other XP machines in general, it's things coming straight from the Internet or through other computers connected to the Internet. Put the XP machines on an airgapped network (and epoxy the USB ports if you can) where they can't transmit or receive malware, and those machines could very well run forever.

Tech companies regularly use both GAAP and non-GAAP in their statements, and for good reason, so non-GAAP should not immediately be dismissed.

GAAP is very much the bottom line - it's damn near every penny spent and earned accounted for in the final income statements. Importantly, this includes both the core business and one-off gains/losses such as settlements, restructuring costs, and write-downs. This is very important for investors as it means a company can't simply hide certain types of charges, so if a company lost a ton of money on such charges investors will see it on the bottom line.

However because GAAP includes those one-off charges, it's not very good for comparing the core business on a quarterly and annual basis. As a result tech companies will almost always compute both GAAP and non-GAAP financial results, with non-GAAP results throwing out one-off charges (and a couple of other changes) so that investors can see the results of just the core business, with all of the noise thrown out. This allows investors to evaluate the core business on its own, so that they can see whether the company would have been healthy outside of those charges, or if the core business is suffering too.

Both are important, and that's why both are included. Despite what you may think there's nothing devious about it; including both instead of just GAAP means that investors can quickly see and track the financial status of both the company and the core business. News articles in turn may quote one or another (or both), but this is purely optional on their part. On the actual reports you will always see GAAP regardless of whether non-GAAP is included too.

This isn't about kids spending money. It's about deceitful advertisements that trick people in buying stuff.

Bingo. Since the late 80s firms have routinely been slapped down for predatory practices when it comes to kids. TV is the most obvious example - toy commercials have been forcibly unbundled from their parent programs and standards have been imposed to prevent the Chocobot Hour problem - but regulations have been put in place elsewhere for similar reasons. The US already has COPPA for dealing with the Internet, which prevents firms from collecting information on children under 13, for largely the same reasons.

Anyhow, not to go on an anti-corporate rant here, but this isn't anything new. Kids are stupid/naive and easily influenced, and less scrupulous businesses have long attempted to do an end-run around parents by targeting kids directly, which is why these regulations are in place. Parents should absolutely keep a close eye on what their kids are doing and nothing the government can do will replace that, but parents are ultimately competing against firms employing graduate level psychological methods. Kids are all but helpless here, so it's not a fair fight to say the least.

Parents should not have to fight against firms blatantly predating on their kids, which is what some of these kid-focused games are trying to do.

Good catch. I meant to go for "classic Direct3D" there, but my fingers did their own thing it seems. Direct3D itself was introduced in 1995, and was brutally extended up through 2004 with D3D9.0c.

Agreed. They're going to pull a Dx10 - Vista. Windows 8 was a COLOSSAL failure, so just like Vista, now they have to force the market to give them money.

Dammit. It's been 6 years now and I'm getting tired of this stupid falsehood. Direct3D 10 wasn't limited to Vista for superficial business reasons. There are some extremely important technical factors that required overhauling parts of Windows alongside D3D10.

The graphics stack below the API was almost entirely overhauled, as per the Windows Display Driver Model. Context switching, multithreading, virtual memory, splitting up the driver into user-mode and kernel-mode components, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. People forget just how broken Direct3D 9 was (and is); it was created at a time when the term "GPU" didn't exist yet and a video card was little more than a texturing unit and a raster op pipeline, and then brutally extended over the years to incorporate functionality like T&L and shaders. The whole thing predicated on a driver model that basically treated the video card as nothing more than a special class of peripheral, whereas with WDDM the GPU was finally promoted to a special class of processor within Windows.

Direct3D 10 in turn takes advantage of these low-level changes, particularly the changes to memory management. As a result, you can't have D3D10 without WDDM and the modern graphics stack it brings.

So the only way to bring D3D10 to XP would have been to create a cutthroat version of it that had little in common with Vista's version, or to backport the entire Vista graphics stack to XP, At which point you would have Vista whether you liked it or not, since you just brought over one of the biggest changes in the OS, and all of the bugs, growing pains, and incompatibility that brings.

If your company really is in the market for purchasing laptops, then a company of that size would be able to order any OS they wanted regardless. Or alternatively roll out their own OS, since an organization that large is undoubtedly going to be volume licensed anyhow. Business customers aren't suddenly stopping purchases due to Windows 8 any more than they were Vista/7 when they wanted XP.

That's the thing though, it doesn't work. At least not particularly well.

XP was fundamentally a transitional OS. It's half-way between the bad old days of Win9x/DOS where there was no security and practically everything ran in the kernel, and Win Vista which institutes a proper security model along with evicting most drivers to the user-mode. The stability improvements alone made XP a vast improvement over Win9x, but it's still not a secure operating system.

The reality of the situation is that users (business and consumer alike) need to suck it up one more time and move to Win6.x. Yes it's painful, yes it's expensive, and yes, learning is hard. But Win6.x is the first Windows OS that implements a modern (and dare I say *nixy) security model. It's the first Windows OS with good 64bit CPU support. It's the first Windows OS with a graphics stack worth half a damn. Heck, it's the first Windows OS that doesn't run IE as Admin.

We must make the transition now, just one more time. After that, if users want to stop on Win6.x, that's okay. Even Vista perfectly fine since it implements all the major security features that make Win6.x necessary. Like any other OS there will come a time when Win6.x grows old and tired, but unlike XP Win6.x was built to last. It was built to be secure and even now, more than 6 years after its launch it doesn't have any significant faults. It's built to withstand the world that comes with the age of the always-on Internet.

But we can't stop on XP. XP is fundamentally broken and was never meant to be used like this for this long. Use Win 8, use Win 7, hell, use Vista, but please don't stop on XP.