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Apple Plans To Return $45 Billion To Shareholders Over Three Years
Apple Clearly Has A Quality Problem - But Not The Way You May Be Thinking
Apple's 'Disappointing' Quarter in Context
Test Finds Surface Pro's Storage Space Comparable To MacBook Air
The Document Foundation Announces LibreOffice 4.0
Business Users Losing Faith In Apple's iWork Office Suite
Seagate Unveils New 4TB Desktop HDD
How To Use An Old Mac As An AirPlay Device
A Valentine's Day Deal You'll Love On Adobe Photoshop Elements And Adobe Premiere Elements 11
Get Organized And Save Money: New DEVONtechnologies Bundles For Home Office Users
Apple Plans To Return $45 Billion To Shareholders Over Three Years
On Thursday Apple issued a statement, saying:
By early last year, Apple's cash balance had built to a point beyond what we needed to run our business and maintain flexibility to take advantage of strategic opportunities, so we announced a plan to return $45 billion to shareholders over three years. As of next week we will have executed $10 billion of that plan.
We find ourselves in the fortunate position of continuing to generate large amounts of cash, including $23 billion in cash flow from operations in the last quarter alone.
Apple's management team and Board of Directors have been in active discussions about returning additional cash to shareholders. As part of our review, we will thoroughly evaluate Greenlight Capitals current proposal to issue some form of preferred stock. We welcome Greenlights views and the views of all of our shareholders.
As a part of our efforts to further enhance corporate governance and serve our shareholders best interests, Proposal #2 in our proxy includes some recommended changes to our articles of incorporation. These changes were recommended independently of Greenlights proposal and would not preclude Apple from adopting their concept. Contrary to Greenlights statements, adoption of Proposal #2 would not prevent the issuance of preferred stock. Currently, Apples articles of incorporation provide for the issuance of blank check preferred stock by the Board of Directors without shareholder approval. If Proposal #2 is adopted, our shareholders would have the right to approve the issuance of preferred stock. As such, Proposal #2 has the support of many of our shareholders.
We remain committed to having an ongoing dialogue with our shareholders to get perspectives around return of capital and driving shareholder value.
Via:
http://goo.gl/0qkFY
Apple Clearly Has A Quality Problem - But Not The Way You May Be Thinking
Computerworld's Jonny Evans notes that typically if you buy a Mac, you're buying a machine that, if treated right, you'll still be using in half a decade's time, which he says poses a huge problem for Apple's executive team - to wit: how do they encourage users to upgrade systems more often without sacrificing their reputation for delivering high quality machines? Evans observes that the two most recent OS X versions, dating back to 2011, together account for only 62.2 percent of Mac-based Web traffic according to Net Applications data, which means that an awful lot of older Macs are still in active service.
"Apple clearly has a quality problem," says Evans - tongue firmly jammed in cheek, "Macs just work. This must be a nightmare for Phil Schiller, Jony Ive, Tim Cook and all the other senior Apple executives. What kind of a statement is that for a company that's now the world's leading PC maker (according to Canalys metrics finding one in five PCs sold globally is an iPad)?
"It must pain them to know the products they sell customers are generally so reliable they may still be used in six or seven year's time," Evans concludes, "that's twice the enterprise-accepted PC lifecycle (http://goo.gl/EBnrN)....The bad news just keeps on coming. Perhaps it should just give the money back to the shareholders......
For the full commentary visit here:
http://goo.gl/3bokw
Apple's 'Disappointing' Quarter in Context
Statista's Felix Richter says:
When Apple released its results for the December quarter on January 23, the initial reaction of analysts, industry pundits and investors was overwhelmingly negative. The fact that the company had narrowly missed some of the goals set by Wall Street analysts, was widely considered final proof that Apple's best days are behind it and, to quote one of the more extreme conclusions, that Apple is doomed. As a consequence, Apple's stock plummeted, shaving tens of billions off the company's market cap.
What most of the stories on Apple's demise overlooked, or chose to ignore, was the fact that the company had just delivered record revenue and one of the highest quarterly profits ever to be reported by any company - ever......
For the full report with graphics visit here:
http://goo.gl/6vqfh
Test Finds Surface Pro's Storage Space Comparable To MacBook Air
Appleinsider's Mikey Campbell says:
After wide-ranging media reports bashed Microsoft over questionable claims regarding the new Surface Pro's built-in flash storage, a side-by-side comparison between the tablet and Apple's11.6-inch MacBook Air reveal the two devices share the same amount of disk space.
Campbell also cites ZDNet's Ed Bott noting that the Surface Pro is a real, no-compromises PC that can power a 2560x1600 30-inch display, run Windows 8 Pro, supports Hyper-V virtualization, PhotoShop, and AutoCAD, and deserves to be compared head to head with another full PC like the MacBook Air.
For the full report visit here:
http://goo.gl/KMzZF
The Document Foundation Announces LibreOffice 4.0
The Document Foundation has announced the release LibreOffice 4.0, your editor's favorite free office software suite. They say LibreOffice 4.0 is the first release that reflects the objectives set by the community at the time of the announcement, in September 2010: a cleaner and leaner code base, an improved set of features, better interoperability, and a more diverse and inclusive ecosystem.
LibreOffice 4.0: A Community On Fire
In less than 30 months, LibreOffice has grown dramatically to become the largest independent free software project focused on end user desktop productivity. TDF inclusive governance and the copyleft license have been instrumental in attracting more than 500 developers three quarters of them being independent volunteers capable of contributing over 50,000 commits.
The Document Foundation says the resulting code base is rather different from the original one, several million lines of code having been added and removed, by adding new features, solving bugs and regressions, adopting state of the art C++ constructs, replacing tools, getting rid of deprecated methods and obsoleted libraries, and translating twenty five thousand lines of comments from German to English. All of this makes the code easier to understand and more rewarding to be involved with for the stream of new members of the Document Foundation community.
"LibreOffice 4.0 is a milestone in interoperability and an excellent foundation for our continued work to improve the User Interface," explains Florian Effenberger, Chairman of the Board of Directors. "Our project is not only capable of attracting new developers on a regular basis, but it also creates a transparent platform for cooperation based on a strong Free Software ethos, where corporate sponsored and volunteer developers work to attain the same objective."
LibreOffice 4.0: The New Features
LibreOffice 4.0 offers a large number of new characteristics, which are listed on this page:
https://www.libreoffice.org/download/4-0-new-features-and-fixes
• Integration with several content and document management systems including Alfresco, IBM FileNet P8, Microsoft Sharepoint 2010, Nuxeo, OpenText, SAP NetWeaver Cloud Service and others through the CMIS standard.
• Better interoperability with DOCX and RTF documents, thanks to several new features and improvements like the possibility of importing ink annotations and attaching comments to text ranges.
• Possibility to import Microsoft Publisher documents, and further improvement of Visio import filters with the addition of 2013 version (just announced).
• Additional UI incremental improvements, including Unity integration and support of Firefox Themes (Personas) to give LibreOffice a personalized look.
• Introduction of the widget layout technique for dialog windows, which makes it easier to translate, resize and hide UI elements, reduces code complexity, and lays a foundation for a much improved user interface.
• Different header and footer on the first page of a Writer document, without the need of a separate page style.
Several performance improvements to Calc, plus new features such as export of charts as images (JPG and PNG) and new spreadsheet functions as defined in ODF OpenFormula.
• First release of Impress Remote Control App for Android, supported only on some Linux distributions. (The second release, coming soon, will be supported on all platforms: Windows, MacOS X and all Linux distros and binaries.)
• Significant performance improvements when loading and saving many types of documents, with particular improvements for large ODS and XLSX spreadsheets and RTF files.
• Improved code contribution thanks to Gerrit: a web based code review system, facilitating the task for projects using Git version control system (although this is not specific of LibreOffice 4.0, it has entered the production stage just before the 4.0 branch).
LibreOffice 4.0: Under The Hood
There are a number of fixes and improvements primarily of interest to developers:
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/4.0#API_Changes.
Overall excellent backwards compatibility is retained for legacy extensions, but moving forward TDF is committed to a more pro-active approach to evolving the UNO APIs, with more functionality to be deprecated, and eventually dropped, in due time according to the six month release cycle throughout the LibreOffice 4.x release series.
During the last seven months, since the branch of LibreOffice 3.6 and during the entire development cycle of LibreOffice 4.0, developers have made over 10,000 commits. On average, one commit every 30 minutes, including weekends and the holiday season: a further testimonial of the incredible vitality of the project.
How to get LibreOffice 4.0
LibreOffice 4.0 is immediately available for download from the following link:
http://www.libreoffice.org/download/
Extensions for LibreOffice are available from the following link: http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center
Changelogs are available at:
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.0.0/RC1 (solved in 4.0.0.1)
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.0.0/RC2 (solved in 4.0.0.2)
and
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.0.0/RC3 (solved in 4.0.0.3)
LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at:
http://donate.libreoffice.org
Money collected will be used to grow the infrastructure, and support marketing activities to increase the awareness of the project, both at global and local level.
Business Users Losing Faith In Apple's iWork Office Suite
ZNet's Jason D. O'Grady says business Mac users are beginning to question their loyalty to iWork, Apple's office suite and prime competitor to Microsoft Office for Mac. Desktop iWork hasn't received a significant update since iWork '09 was released almost four years ago, and O'Grady says his sources tell him that Apple has repurposed most of its iWork developers to work on Pages, Numbers and Keynote for iOS - which continues to receive regular updates at the expense of the OS X version, and several business Mac users have told him they're becoming fed up with iWork for OS X's second-class citizenship, and only reason he can perceive for sticking with iWork at this point is because, at $60 for the suite ($20 per app from the Mac App Store), iWork is relatively cheap.
For the full commentary visit here:
http://goo.gl/oLsv8
Seagate Unveils New 4TB Desktop HDD
In a United Arab Emirates press release, Seagate has unveiled new 4TB Desktop HDD - currently the industry's only 4TB/4 disk desktop solution. With nearly 800,000 times greater capacity than the first desktop drive Seagate introduced in 1979, the new unit supports up to 800,000 photos, 300 plus hours of HD video or over 1,000,000 songs.
"By 2015 households which today routinely consume 1TB of data a month are expected to generate 20 times the amount of data than they currently save," says Richard Doherty, research director of the Envisioneering Group, a technology research and consulting company. "Consumer's continued appetites for securely saving and organizing high-definition multimedia requires higher performance and the most trusted and dependable drives. Seagate's new 4TB Desktop HDD provides the ideal solution for consumer's soaring need for storage in the home - now, and in the future."
The drive is claimed to deliver the highest average data rate on the market today, achieving 160 MB/second while saving 35% in power consumption over the competition. Seagate's own OptiCache technology has been incorporated boosting overall performance by as much as 45%.
The 4TB Desktop is equipped with a SATA 6 Gb/s interface for blazing-fast performance in a maximum-capacity drive. The unit's 1TB/platter technology reduces complexity inside the drive itself greatly improving storage reliability and reducing failure rate.
"Over the years, Seagate has been a valued partner contributing a vast array of storage solutions to our comprehensive selection of IT products," says Merle McIntosh, senior vice president of product management at Newegg North America. "Seagate's products are in high demand among our customers and we're excited to add their new 4TB HDD to our assortment. As consumer demand for content continues to climb, this new HDD will provide customers with the storage they need at a price they can afford."
How To Use An Old Mac As An AirPlay Device
MacFixIt's Topher Kessler says:
Apple's AirPlay feature is a convenient technology for sending audio to various devices. If you are on the same wireless network as the device then it will be available to your Mac, iPhone, or iPad to play music via iTunes, or even be used as a general audio appliance for system sounds.
In general, AirPlay devices are hardware accessories like routers such as Apple's AirPort, or media appliances like the AppleTV. However, if you are not willing to shell out about $100 or more for a new AirPlay and you have an old Mac lying around (especially a Mac Mini), then one option is to turn it into an AirPlay hub.
You can check it out at:
http://goo.gl/snJ2q
A Valentine's Day Deal You'll Love On Adobe Photoshop Elements And Adobe Premiere Elements 11
What's better than chocolate on Valentine's Day? The ability to preserve life's sweetest memories through vibrant home movies and photo creations. Treat yourself or someone you love to the Adobe Photoshop Elements 11 & Adobe Premiere Elements 11 software bundle at $30 off - that's US$119.99 - plus free shipping.
Offer ends February 17, 2013.
To purchase click here:
http://goo.gl/L5S0x
Enter offer code: Elements2013 or call 800-585-0774
Instant discount applies to the full version of Adobe Photoshop Elements 11, Adobe Premiere Elements 11, and Adobe Photoshop Elements 11 & Adobe Premiere Elements 11 software.
Pricing is available only through the online Adobe Store or through the Adobe Call Center at 800-585-0774. When purchasing through the Adobe Store, you must enter
offer code ELEMENTS2013 in the shopping cart before checking out when prompted to do so. To purchase through the Call Center, mention offer code ELEMENTS2013 when calling. OEM, education and volume licensing customers are not eligible.
This offer is valid in the U.S., Canada
(excluding Quebec), and Mexico. Offer valid from 8:00am (PST) on February 6, 2013, until 11:59pm (PST) on February 18, 2013. Savings are limited to one discount per customer. Prices are listed in U.S. dollars and do not include applicable local taxes. This offer and prices are subject to change without notice. Void where prohibited by law.
Follow Adobe Photoshop Elements & Adobe Premiere Elements
Share your stories, see how others are using Photoshop Elements & Adobe Premiere Elements, and learn great tips, tricks and techniques.
Facebook:
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Get Organized And Save Money: New DEVONtechnologies Bundles For Home Office Users
DEVONtechnologies LLC has added two new bundles targeted at home office users to its online shop: the Home Office Bundle consisting of DEVONthink Personal, DEVONagent Express, and DEVONsphere Express for just US $57.95, and the Express Bundle with DEVONagent Express and DEVONsphere Express for $11.95.
The new Home Office Bundle gives you everything you need to get organized at home or your small office/home office: DEVONthink Personal stores your data, DEVONagent Express finds you new information on the web with just one click, and DEVONsphere Express keeps your data available whenever and wherever you need it. All for just US $57.95 instead of $64.85.
And if you don't need the power of DEVONthink save 20 percent on the price of DEVONagent and DEVONsphere Express with the Express Bundle for US $11.95 instead of $14.95.
System requirements:
DEVONthink Personal and DEVONagent Express require OS X 10.6.8 or later, DEVONsphere Express at least OS X 10.6.6.
They can be downloaded as free trials from:
http://www.devontechnologies.com.
Home Office Bundle: US $57.95
Express Bundle: US $11.95
DEVONthink Personal only: US$ 49.95 (Mac App Store: $49.99)
DEVONagent Express only: US $4.95 (Mac App Store: $4.99)
DEVONsphere Express only: US $9.95 (Mac App Store: $9.99)
For two or more licenses there are attractive volume discounts available in the online shop.
More information:
http://www.devontechnologies.com
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