Day: 16 May 2013

Gullible Finance ⇥ esjewett.com

On Tuesday, a little-known trader from Nashville named David Trainer wrote a blog post claiming that Apple stock is worth around $240 per share.

Ethan Jewett decided to fact-check this bit of speculation:

Turns out, the analysis is based on a “what if” scenario assuming that Apple had a Return On Invested Capital (ROIC) for 2012 of 70% and for 2013 (to date) of 52%. These drive a calculated Economic Book Value per Share around $240, which is apparently Trainer’s target.

Because the media loves controversy, Trainer appeared on CNBC and was featured on MarketWatch, despite his calculations lacking any factual merit whatsoever, and nobody promoting his theory questioned nor double-checked his math. Asinine.

Google Urges Fast Adoption of VP9 Video Compression ⇥ news.cnet.com

Stephen Shankland, for CNet:

“If you adopt VP9, as you can very quickly, you’ll have tremendous advantages over anyone else out there using H.264 or VP8, (its predecessor),” said VP9 engineer Ronald Bultje in a talk here at Google’s developer conference. “You can save about 50 percent of bandwidth by encoding your video with VP9 vs. H.264.”

From what I can find, the only widely-used products with VP8 implemented are YouTube and Skype, but the former also supports H.264-encoded video. The latter must also partially support H.264 because its iOS app appears to use the Core Video framework. Why would VP9 be adopted greater than VP8 has (or, for that matter, get greater play than Theora, Lagarith, OpenAVS, or any of the other free video codecs)?

Furthermore, why doesn’t Google spearhead the adoption of the codecs they proselytize by encoding their Play Store’s movie library in VP8 or VP9 format?1 Why doesn’t Google recommend VP8 or VP9 to their Android developers?

Standards are great; that’s why we have so many of them.

  1. Google doesn’t publicly acknowledge what video format their Play videos use; however, their requirement for Flash Player strongly suggests H.264 encoding. ↥︎

Everything Apple Needs to Introduce at WWDC to Appease the Internet ⇥ carpeaqua.com

Justin Williams:

With WWDC just a few weeks away, I thought it’d be beneficial to the Internet at large to compile a working list of everything that is expected of Apple during their Keynote and subsequent “State of the Union” addresses in order to appease the Internet. Failure to introduce each and every one of these features and updates will result in another stock price plummet, calls for Tim Cook’s ouster and an infinite amount of comments on tech blogs decrying that Android is superior to Apple’s iOS.

No pressure.

The Android Detour ⇥ stratechery.com

Ben Thompson, on the almost complete lack of Android from this year’s very long Google I/O keynote:

For Google, Android was a detour from their focus on owning and dominating web services; it ensured that those services would be freely accessible in this new world of computing, including on the iPhones and iPads that were used liberally in nearly every keynote demo. And, now that Android is successful, Google is back to focusing on “the best of Google”.