Apple News: Smart money bet against Apple just before it hit a 12-month high
Two reports from Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs about where institutional investors placed their bets last quarter suggest that the “smart money” is not always so smart. In a note to clients issued Friday, Morgan Stanley’s Katy Huberty reports that allocation to Apple among the top 100 investors in the stock fell last quarter to 2.0% – near the low end of its historic range of 1.6% to 4.5%. “Importantly,” she writes, “Apple remains the only large cap tech name for which institutional ownership is below the S&P 500 weighting of 3.2%.” In other words, the smart money pulled out of Apple just before the stock began a run that took it to a 12-month high of $609.85 Thursday, up 10% for the year.
Read full story => Fortune
Technology News: Microsoft wins right to disclose FBI’s demand for info about Office 365 customer
In a significant victory for transparency and free speech, a federal judge in Seattle granted Microsoft permission to unseal documents related to an FBI investigation into one of its cloud customers. The case relates to a National Security Letter issued to Microsoft in 2013 that ordered the company to turn over information about one of its enterprise customers, whose identity remains a secret. The customer stores data on Microsoft’s Office 365, a service that lets companies keep email and work collaboration tools in the cloud.
Read full story => Gigaom
Programming News: Upgrading to Ruby 2.1 (and why complex regexes will inevitably hurt you)
When we first launched FreeAgent, it ran on Ruby 1.8.6 MRI (and Rails 1.2!). We graduated to 1.8.7 REE when that became popular, then in the summer of 2011 we upgraded to Ruby 1.9.3. We’ve been running on that version (1.9.3-p194 to be specific) ever since. It has served us well, but performance is not one of Ruby 1.9.3’s strong points and we’ve seen our application server response time gradually grow over the years to the point where we really wanted to do something about it. Just over a year ago, Ruby 2.0 was released. This introduced DTrace support and GC optimisations, both of which were of particular interest to us at FreeAgent since they allow us better insight into what Ruby is spending its time doing. As an added bonus, we also expected an improvement in performance. Late last year we spiked up a branch of FreeAgent that ran on Ruby 2.0 but before we’d even started to QA this, Ruby 2.1 was released on Christmas Day!
Read full story => Freeagent
Photography News: Forget the Street Photography Gimmicks, Concentrate on the Image
A lot of what gets praised as great street photography these days has to do with juxtaposition, forced perspective or some bizarre subject matter. For sure, those images deserve their due. However, I tend to favor photos that have great light and composition, and where the subject is a little more sublime. Take this picture by Swiss photographer Alexander Ess, for example. The three girls aren’t doing anything particularly exciting but the photo captures a sense of detachment, or perhaps boredom. You’re especially drawn to the girl on the left, whose face is wonderfully highlighted by the soft light coming through the window.
Read full story => HuffingtonPost
