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czhiddy

944 karma · joined December 1, 2009

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czhiddy··on Apple Vision Pro: Apple’s first spatial computer
Roughly double the amount of pixels = "slightly higher resolution"?
czhiddy··on Clip control on the Apple GPU
I mean, the other poster "guaranteed" it, so I don't know who to believe here.
czhiddy··on Ask HN: Should an experienced engineer join a startup?
$1M in W2 earnings isn't that unusual for senior engineers at companies that have seen significant stock growth. Suppose you had a $200k salary, $500k RSUs over four years, $50k/year bonus offer mid-2017. The last batch of stock vesting in 2021 would have pushed total stock adjusted compensation close to the 7 figure mark.

NVDA has seen over +500% stock growth during that time. Apple has gone up close to 400%, GOOG over +200%.

What's interesting is that even if we ignore the recent dip, FB has only gone up +150% since mid-2017. If you held through the recent dip, that falls to something around +60% over four years.

czhiddy··on Trying to get past the 500 nits limit of the MacBook Pro (and failing)
By that logic, WebUSB is a bug specific to Blink-based browsers, since it doesn't work on anything else?
czhiddy··on Google Stadia shuts down internal studios, changing business focus
I was looking forward to seeing some of the games that would have only been possible on Stadia's architecture. Imagine a Battlefield-style game with a larger map and over 500+ simultaneous players.

Hopefully the games that SG&E do finish showcase what's possible when a developer targets Stadia's strengths.

czhiddy··on The M1 MacBook Air is the best computer I've ever owned
OP: "In-N-Out is my favorite fast food restaurant." You: "No, you're wrong."
czhiddy··on U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests
The stark difference in the response to these "protests" vs the DC BLM protests:

https://twitter.com/RedR1dngHood/status/1346908557560537091

czhiddy··on M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness
Those 2000+ scores are from hobbyist enthusiasts overclocking the Zen 3 CPUs, with elaborate liquid nitrogen cooling setups at the highest scores.

Stock Zen3 single core scores average around 1650: https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks

czhiddy··on Apple, Epic, and the App Store
If Apple has a monopoly on the iOS App Store market, then it follows that Epic has a monopoly on the Fortnite add-on market, right?
czhiddy··on ARM Macs and Virtualization: It's going to be great
If 16GB of memory isn't enough to run a text editor or glorified IRC client, then the problem is probably the horribly bloated software.
czhiddy··on Wide Color Photos Are Coming to Android
Proper wide-gamut colorspace support has been around on macOS since 2015: https://webkit.org/blog/6682/improving-color-on-the-web/
czhiddy··on Apple to contribute to U.S. teen's education for spotting FaceTime bug
What makes you think this was the first audit? Shipping a bug doesn't imply that zero QA was done.
czhiddy··on Behind the Pixel: Google’s First Real Threat to Apple’s iPhone
“The difference with this device is that we started from the beginning,” says Dave Burke, who runs Android engineering.

Started from scratch, yet the end result looks like a iPhone knockoff from a random Chinese shanzhai company?

http://i.imgur.com/LlqaAPO.png

czhiddy··on Ask HN: Where are 150k to 200k salary job in Silicon Valley?
For software engineering at least, any of the big companies here (FB/GOOG/AAPL/LNKD/TWTR/etc) will easily pay $150k+ for someone with 9 years of experience. If you perform well the first year or two, your yearly RSU package will easily equal the salary.

Just apply and be firm during negotiations.

czhiddy··on Apple’s declining software quality
How is Firefox crashing an Apple issue, assuming you don't hit the same problems with Chrome?
czhiddy··on Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World
> I don't see anything unbelievable or even particularly unusual.

Let's go back in time to a point when Apple's #'s roughly matched Googles.

https://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/10/18Apple-Reports-Fou...

$28.27b revenue, $6.62 profit.

In 2011, Apple's P/E ratio hovered around 14, with a stock price that fluctuated around $46-$56 throughout the year:

http://financials.morningstar.com/valuation/price-ratio.html... http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/aapl/historical

A P/E ratio of 14, and the company basically tripled their numbers in ~4 years. Does Google's P/E of 35.7 suggests we can look forward to a rough 10x increase in Google's numbers over the next 4 years?

czhiddy··on Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World
I have a friend who works at Lab126 with some really interesting stories about the dysfunctional environment there. He's basically one of a handful or so engineers who have more than a 4 year tenure in his division. Their PMs are basically all fresh out of college. After the complete disaster that was the Fire phone, that team and its director got promoted and placed in charge of Lab126. As expected, everything went to shit.

No idea what the rest of the company is like, but internally, Lab126 employees treat it as a stepping stone until their resume or skillset becomes good enough for Apple, Google, etc.

czhiddy··on Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World
If you add in the same comparison to Facebook's numbers, the valuations look even more puzzling (using the most recent quarter):

* Apple's quarterly revenue: $75.9b * Apple's quarterly profit: $18.4b * Apple's market cap: $538.7b * Apple's P/E ratio: 10.24

* Google's quarterly revenue: $21.3b * Google's quarterly profit: $6.8b * Google's market cap: 517.6b (pre-earnings) * Google's P/E ratio: 35.37 (pre-earnings)

* Facebook's quarterly revenue: $5.84b * Facebook's quarterly profit: $2.56b * Facebook's market cap: $319b * Facebook's P/E ratio: 89.22

Do investors really think Facebook can grow at the pace a 89.22 P/E ratio suggests? They're quickly reaching the point where everyone in the world who can get a Facebook account already has one. They're pushing hard to spread to poorer areas by offering Internet access, but how much marginal revenue/profit can a poor rural farmer add? If Facebook somehow magically increased their numbers tenfold at the same growth rate, which would make their numbers roughly match Apple's, the current P/E ratio would make them a 3.19 trillion dollar company.

People knock Apple for relying too heavily on iPhone revenue, but Google gets a pass because their even more unbalance reliance on search has a "bigger moat"? Their core product, ads, is something most people despise and put up with, not something they seek out. Let's hope that some of their moonshots actually pan out.

czhiddy··on Apple Watch – 6 Months Later, Not That Great
> The only problem with making this argument for Apple specifically is that their stock price seems to figure in revolutionizing an industry every few years.

Not really. http://financials.morningstar.com/valuation/price-ratio.html... - Apple's P/E ratio has never exceeded 20 during the years of peak iPhone growth.

Compare with say, Facebook, which has a ~85 P/E ratio currently. Do investors expect a 300B market cap company to expand at the rate of 2010 Apple?

czhiddy··on Apple Reports Record Fourth Quarter Results
Wall Street usually has wildly unrealistic expectations for Apple, so expect this modest beat to be spun as a significant miss.
czhiddy··on The Great Smartphone War
I've heard my chip designer friend mention in passing that the "Chinese wall" between the Samsung fab group and the Samsung design groups is occasionally porous.
czhiddy··on iPad Air
The iPad4 doesn't pack an A7.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A6X

czhiddy··on HP Chromebook 11 Review
"Google is particularly proud of the lack of any visible vents, screws or speakers."

"Google uses the bottom plate as a heat spreader with a bit of thermal interface material making direct contact to the Exynos 5250 SoC."

"It used to be that you’d have to spend tons of money to get a notebook with a good keyboard, Google seems devoted to fixing that."

Interesting how a search for "HP" results in almost no hits in the article text. The quotes above suggest that Google designed the device and HP was nothing more than a dumb OEM. While they've certainly stumbled big time in recent years, I'd still expect their hardware design / manufacturing knowledge to dwarf Google's.

czhiddy··on Chaos Computer Club breaks Apple TouchID
Which glass surface? The oleophobic glass on the iPhone itself?

If the print was copied directly from one of the phone surfaces, you'd think that the CCC would want to include that little tidbit.

czhiddy··on Chaos Computer Club breaks Apple TouchID
> Just use brute force or dictionary attack over the wire. Given that most users use 4-digit pass codes, this can be done usually in minutes, almost always in less than an hour.

It's clear you've never actually attempted this. The timeout between passcode entries increases with the number of consecutive failures. Get 10 wrong in a row, and the device is wiped (if the user has chosen that option).

> Or, if your target is paranoid and uses a very long passcode, target the charger rather than the device itself. iOS assumes any physical device to which it is connected when unlocked is secure. Replace the usb brick with a small computer (e.g. Raspberry Pi) in a convincing looking Apple-esque case. Then wait until your target plugs in his iDevice and unlocks it. You can then dump the drive, or side load malicious code.

This no longer works on iOS 7. The user has to manually choose to trust the computer they're attached to prior to any communication going across the wire.

czhiddy··on iPhone 5s Teardown
> There is no "M7 co-processor" [1] chip in the device - possibly it's just marketing for some part of the A7?

Not sure why the iFixit guys jumped to the conclusion that it was possibly marketing fluff. It is an SoC after all, the M7 doesn't have to be a separate chip on the logic board.

czhiddy··on Why was Mini USB deprecated in favor of Micro USB?
You're saying that Apple's 30 pin connector, introduced in 2003, was a copy of a "industry standard" that was designed in 2010?

Maybe that's why you're struggling to find a source that "directly confirms it".

czhiddy··on Obama administration vetos Apple iPhone 4, 3G iPad 2 product ban [pdf]
Where was all this outrage when South Korea banned the iPhone until 2009 to protect the local cell phone makers?

http://www.crn.com/news/networking/220100939/south-korea-lif...

czhiddy··on Looking at CPU/GPU Benchmark Optimizations in Galaxy S 4
Why? Because they spend a fortune on advertising.

Anyone who's used a S3/S4 knows most of the S-"features" are pure gimmicks that a fairly competent engineer could implement in less than a week. HTC phones are much more sturdy and better designed, IMO.

I was vacationing in Hong Kong earlier this month, and the subway stations were just completely plastered with various 15-foot tall Galaxy posters. Some of the features they were promoting were just laughable - simultaneous photos with the front and back camera composed into a picture-in-picture result? Really?

czhiddy··on Samsung overtakes Apple as world's most profitable mobile phone maker
> They need to do better, but they have little reason to pack it in.

http://allthingsd.com/20130705/htc-profit-misses-expectation...

They're still profitable, but for how long? If they don't engineer a turnaround, they'll be solidly in the red a year from now.

At that point, they have plenty of reasons to pack it in.

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