Free Republic

It is the talk of the Valley. A high-stakes negotiation is taking place in Silicon Valley among some of the biggest names in the industry — Apple and Google among them — over accusations that they were involved in a collusion to prevent their employees from being hired at rival companies. The employees filed a class-action suit, contending that the illegal hiring practices cost employees $9 billion in lost wages. Now the companies are locked in mediation sessions, hoping to settle the case in the next several weeks. The question being whispered all over town now is how much will...

Love him or hate him, there's no doubt Steve Jobs was a fascinating, complex and contradictory figure. Two years on from his untimely death, you can now watch biopic Jobs on Netflix in the US. Ashton Kutcher dons the black turtle-neck in a dramatisation spanning Jobs' early life as a college drop-out in the 1970s to the launch of the iPod in 2001, taking in the period he left to start a rival firm and his eventual triumphant return. Director Joshua Michael Stern isn't afraid to portray the uncompromising Apple co-founder in an unsympathetic light, but moves too briskly through...

Jobs's Ultimatum: Lay Out a Vision Fast or Lose the Project In February 2005, Apple Inc.'s then chief executive, Steve Jobs, gave senior software engineer Greg Christie an ultimatum. Mr. Christie's team had been struggling for months to lay out the software vision for what would become the iPhone as well as how the parts would work together. Now, Mr. Jobs said the team had two weeks or he would assign the project to another group. "Steve had pretty much had it," said Mr. Christie, who still heads Apple's user-interface team. "He wanted bigger ideas and bigger concepts." Mr. Christie's...

Apple blew up the rules of branding because Jobs simply didn't recognize them. He didn't follow the approved checklist, and he never did what he was supposed to do. He knew that someone else's success wouldn't be his own, not because of his ego, but because it's a fact that imitating others has never resulted in great successes. He left it to Apple's competitors to produce lame, unsold computers with colorful lids, knockoff ads that inadvertently made Apple look better and a world of smartphones and tablets that look like iPhones and iPads. In doing so, Apple focused on doing...

Fresh out of Stanford Business School, I started a software company, T/Maker, with my brother Peter. He was the software architect and I was, well, everything else. Our little company was among the first to ship software for the Macintosh, and we developed a positive reputation among the members of the nascent developer community, which led us to expanding our business by publishing software for other independent developers. Two of our developers, Randy Adams and William Parkhurst, went to work for Steve Jobs at his new company, NeXT, and that’s how I ended up head to head with Steve Jobs....

Apple is not going to like this new book about Apple. The title -- "Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs" -- pretty much says it all. While author Yukari Iwatani Kane does say on page 336 of her 338-page book that "it's not too late for Apple to dazzle the world again," by that point she's made her conclusion clear -- Apple's long slide began the day Jobs died. Without him," the former Wall Street Journal reporter wrote in her book, which hit stores Tuesday, "everything changed. The dilemmas multiply and deepen. Solutions slip further out of reach." "Haunted Empire:...

<p>Traditional hard drive manufacturers are currently going through a paradigm shift—one where new solid-state hard drives, known as SSD, are taking market share and slowly eliminating traditional hard drives. SSD hard drives of one terabyte or more are slowly becoming affordable to the masses.</p>

It's no secret that both political parties are struggling to connect with voters. Strategists dream up marketing plans to increase their party's appeal to this constituency or that group. Sometimes they work, and sometimes they don't. But they never establish a deep and lasting connection with voters. That's because most of what the parties talk about is yesterday's news and is largely irrelevant to the realities of the 21st century. Consider the top issue before the nation -- the economy. President Obama wants to raise taxes and increase government spending to boost the economy and create jobs. Republicans disagree. Voters...

BERLIN (AP) -- An auctioneer says one of Apple's first computers - a functioning 1976 model - has been sold for a record 516,000 euros ($668,000). German auction house Breker said Saturday an Asian client, who asked not to be named, bought the so-called Apple 1, which the tech company's founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built in a family garage. Breker claims it is one of only six known remaining functioning models in the world. Breker already sold one last year for 492,000 euros. It says the computer bears Wozniak's signature. An old business transaction letter from the late...

Add another one to the man's list of prudent business decisions. As relates to his previously documented loathing of Fox News, it's now known that the late Steve Jobs backed up his harsh words by wisely withholding Apple's advertising dollars, according to an upcoming book about the 2012 presidential campaign. The book's author, Jonathan Alter, a Bloomberg political columnist and contributor to MSNBC, tells of Jobs "personally ordering that Apple ads be removed from Fox News," according to a blog post in the New York Times over the weekend. Alter's book, "The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies," is scheduled...

Jobs began rebuilding Apple not by focusing on products, suppliers, or market shares, but by asking a simple question: “Who is Apple and what do we stand for?”

MOSCOW, January 9 (RIA Novosti) – A memorial to world renowned tech innovator and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was unveiled in St. Petersburg on Wednesday. The monument, a giant replica of a black, late model iPhone with a screen that displays a photo and video slideshow of Jobs’ life, is located in the courtyard of the St. Petersburg National Research University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics. On the back, the monument features a QR code which observers can scan before being directed to a website commemorating the Apple co-founder

Dan Crow, another former Apple employee from the 1990s, also says Apple has shown itself to be doomed without Steve Jobs, in a piece for The Guardian headlined “We’ve Passed Peak Apple”: Why do I think Apple has passed its peak? There are a number of signs. The most visible recent one is the Maps debacle. Replacing Google Maps with an obviously inferior experience shows how much Apple has changed. Apple’s success had been all about offering users the best possible experience; suddenly it is willing to give users a clearly worse experience to further its corporate interests - in...

We’re fortunate in this country. Anyone can be born in a log cabin, or a condo in Hawaii, and grow up to become an idiot. Now before I get hot and bothered emails from people saying things like “I take offense to your language. My son’s an idiot. How do you think this makes me feel?” or this one from “MO”: “I married an idiot. And we struggle every day because his disability,” please understand that I don’t discriminate against idiots. No, not at all; I have voted for plenty of them.       Because we are also a tad unfortunate in...

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Apple Inc.’s shares are now down nearly 15% since they briefly passed the $700 mark in mid-September. The decline began shortly after Apple’s new Maps app started to get panned by reviewers following the launch of the iPhone 5 on Sept. 21. Jean-Louis Gassée, a former Apple executive and venture capitalist, wrote in his blog barely a week later that the company lost nearly $30 billion in market value after the “Maps fracas” and subsequent apology to customers by Chief Executive Tim Cook. Read more on Gassée’s blog. The shares continued their slide through October. The...

Dagny Taggart is not just the entrepreneurial heroine of Ayn Rand’s magnum opus novel, Atlas Shrugged. She is the inspiration of real women everywhere who are taking up her shield and fighting her battle for freedom using the weapons of entrepreneurship, education and free speech. The media continually talks about the “war on women.” What the media never admits is that the government is waging a war against women through unjust force. The government’s “weapons” include: domestic drones that violate women’s private property rights; unconstitutional taxes and regulations that make it nearly impossible for women to achieve their dreams; healthcare...

It was one year ago today that we learned of the death of Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs...and also we learned that Sarah Palin decided not to run for president. The death of Steve Jobs was shocking but not that unexpected. It was only a few weeks earlier that Drudge posted a horrifying photo of a very gaunt Steve Jobs being helped out of a car in what looked like a paper hospital gown. I thought posting the photo was in bad taste and Drudge quickly pulled it. Still, it was rather sad that all the billions of dollars...

When David Petraeus visited the Harvard Kennedy School in 2009, one of the meetings he requested was with author Doris Kearns Goodwin. Petraeus, who holds a PhD in International Relations from Princeton, is a fan of Team of Rivals and wanted time to speak to the famed historian about her work. Apparently, the great general (and current CIA Director) is something of a bibliophile. He's increasingly an outlier. Even as global literacy rates are high (84%), people are reading less and less deeply. The National Endowment for the Arts (PDF) has found that "[r]eading has declined among every group of...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Families waiting for San Francisco's cable cars on a recent morning couldn't help but notice Kenny the Clown, who wore a curly rainbow wig as he twisted brightly colored balloons into animal shapes for visitors, blasting Michael Jackson's "Smooth Criminal" from an iPad at his feet. Little did the clown know that the tablet doubling as his stereo would turn out to have been stolen from the home of the late Steve Jobs. "The thing that is embarrassing to me is I'm a huge fan of Steve Jobs," said Kenneth Kahn, 47, a professional entertainer who...

If you weren't already freaked out by clowns, you may be now. Kenneth Kahn, aka Kenny the Clown, a Fisherman's Warf icon and onetime aspiring mayor, is in trouble with the cops once more. But this time, it's not for his alleged Ed Jew antics or for juggling fire on a skateboard. No, this time, Kenny was caught with Steve Jobs' stolen iPad. Kahn said he didn't know the iPad had belonged to Apple's late co-founder. He thought it was just a gift from a friend, 35-year-old Kariem McFarlin of Alameda, according to media outlets. McFarlin was arrested Aug. 2...