Porsche CEO has no plans to go down self-driving route

Reuters:

The comments from Porsche Chief Executive Oliver Blume show that some car makers believe their drivers want to remain firmly in control at the wheel.

“One wants to drive a Porsche by oneself,” Blume said in an interview with regional newspaper Westfalen-Blatt published on Monday.

“An iPhone belongs in your pocket, not on the road,” Blume added, saying that Porsche did not need to team up with any big technology companies.

Even though some Porsches do come equipped with Apple’s CarPlay, it makes corporate sense to take this line. Besides, why would you buy a sports car only to let a computer have all the fun?

Moose doubles as plow in chest-high snow

Outdoor Hub:

Wildlife experts advise that if you run across a moose on a trail in the winter, it may be prudent to turn around and leave. Just like you, moose would rather walk on trails than sink their legs into deep snow. Whatever else you do, don’t approach the moose or try to push it off the trail. Moose can be aggressive animals, especially when they are already tired. As you can see in the video, this moose decided to speed through a patch of snow rather than confront the skiers.

I’ve encountered a couple of moose in my life and they are gigantic, stupid and therefore terrifying animals. Never get into a confrontation with them. As this video shows, you will lose. I find it safer just to not go into the woods.

iPhone 5se and its place in the Apple universe

iMore:

Tim Cook recently said that 60 percent of customers on an iPhone 5s or earlier have not yet upgraded to an iPhone 6 or later. When we polled our readership late last year, a majority of our readers told us they were happy with the current sizes — almost 58%.

Whether Apple does this in the spring or not, it certainly makes sense for the company to serve the end of the market that doesn’t need or want one of the ginormous iPhone 6 variations.

Inside Facebook’s decision to blow up the Like button

Bloomberg:

It’s a way of creating a connection, even if it’s superficial. If users click like on a post about the Red Cross’s disaster relief efforts, they feel as if they’ve done something to help. (In January, Sandberg went so far as to suggest that likes could help defeat Islamic State: By posting positive messages on the terror group’s Facebook pages, users could somehow drown out the hate.) Liking someone’s photo is an awkwardness-free way to make contact with someone you haven’t seen in years. Alternatives to like will let Facebook users be a little more thoughtful, or at least seem to be, without having to try very hard.

I think that “without trying too hard” is the sad key to the Like button. Regardless, the article is an interesting look behind the scenes at Facebook and the massive amount of discussion and thought that goes into something seemingly so simple and obvious.

An oral history of the space shuttle Challenger disaster

Popular Mechanics:

It was supposed to be one of the greatest achievements in the history of the United States space program.

A civilian—a schoolteacher, an emissary of the hope for tomorrow—was going to space. Christa McAuliffe, a thirty-seven-year-old mother of two from Concord, New Hampshire, had been selected from eleven thousand entrants to NASA’s Teacher in Space contest. She became a symbol of optimism and progress amid Cold War tension. And the rest of the shuttle crew was itself a representation of the strength of American society: Gregory Jarvis, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Michael Smith, and Commander Dick Scobee. Two women, one of them Jewish. An African- American. An Asian-American. They were the most diverse group of astronauts NASA ever assembled.

On the morning of January 28, 1986, despite concerns within NASA and among others working on the launch that the weather was too cold, the shuttle Challenger blasted off. Seventy-three seconds later, it broke apart in long, grotesque fingers of white smoke in the sky above Cape Canaveral, Florida.

While it was thirty years ago today, I still remember it vividly. I had turned the TV on specifically to watch the launch. I never missed one. I loved watching any kind of NASA launch and had since I was a kid. After Challenger, I never watched another one.

We’re the only animals with chins, and no one knows why

The Atlantic:

“It’s really strange that only humans have chins,” says James Pampush from Duke University. “When we’re looking at things that are uniquely human, we can’t look to big brains or bipedalism because our extinct relatives had those. But they didn’t have chins. That makes this immediately relevant to everyone.”

Indeed, except in rare cases involving birth defects, everyone has chins. Sure, some people have less pronounced ones than others, perhaps because their lower jaws are small or they have more flesh around the area. But if you peeled back that flesh and exposed their jawbones—and maybe don’t do that—you’d still see a chin.

So, why do chins exist?

In the category of “things I wasn’t expecting to think about today”, I would put high on the list, “Why do human beings have chins?” It’s actually a very interesting article and, spoiler alert, scientists really don’t know why.

Cramer: We’re valuing Apple with the wrong number

CNBC:

Cramer thinks the brand loyalty for Apple is so great customers won’t switch to another company. So maybe Apple doesn’t need to worry about peaking phone sales. Maybe it just needs to keep selling more devices, and let the service stream do the talking.

“By this time next year, it wouldn’t shock me if that service revenue number becomes the key metric, especially with the iPhone 7 right around the corner,” Cramer said.

I find Cramer physically hard to listen to (his voice is like finger nails on a blackboard to me) and I’m not going to give him a pass on his late realization of the importance of brand loyalty when it comes to Apple, but the piece and the video have some interesting thoughts as to why analysts can’t seem to get their heads around Apple and why they seemingly treat Apple so harshly. I don’t know if his conclusion that service revenue will be a key metric in the future is correct but it’s something to keep an eye on.

What is the fastest speed of any object on the earth?

Talon Torres:

…(it) had been launched at six times Earth’s escape velocity. That’s one hundred fifty thousand miles per hour. Forty-five miles per second. Nine times faster than the Space Shuttle, six times faster than the fastest moon rockets. Faster than the Voyager spacecraft, which, having reached over 35000 miles per hour, are now leaving the solar system and have for years been claimed to be the fastest man-made objects ever. To which I now say: Pshaw and poppycock…

So somewhere in the New Mexico desert, unknown and unmourned, lies an American relic, a piece of history like no other: the fastest man-made object ever.

I have no idea who the writer is but it’s a great story and the answer will surprise you. The amount of energey required is mindboggling. Thanks to John Molloy for the link.

No need to fret, Apple is doing fine

The New York Times:

Let’s get this out of the way first: Despite what you may have heard, the iPhone is not dying. Neither, by extension, is Apple.

It’s true that in an earnings report on Tuesday, after weeks of speculation by Wall Street that iPhone sales would finally hit a peak, Apple confirmed the news: IPhone sales grew at their lowest-ever rate in the last quarter. And the company projected total sales of as much as $53 billion in the current quarter that ends in March, which would be a decline of 8.6 percent from last year and Apple’s first revenue drop in more than a decade.

But if Apple is now hitting a plateau, it’s important to remember that it’s one of the loftiest plateaus in the history of business. The $18.4 billion profit that Apple reported on Tuesday is the most ever earned by any company in a single quarter.

It’s necessary to start with these caveats because people have a tendency to react strongly, almost apoplectically, to any suggestion of weakness on Apple’s part.

Yesterday’s earnings report followed the usual script – Apple announces amazing numbers and everyone says, “Yeah, but what’s next!?” I think Apple Executives and The Board of Directors look past the stock price at a much longer time frame. This allows them to, if not ignore the rending of garments, at least keep it in perspective. Apple is still, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future, a very succesful company.

Photographing the SR-71 Blackbird

Blair Bunting:

There was once a time when men flew a jet that tore the air apart, nearly revealing the physics that had served only to hold it together. It was an aircraft that screamed as quietly as the night, flying for almost ten years before it was even known to exist. To many, it is considered the greatest aircraft innovation ever gave us; it is the SR-71 Blackbird.

I was not among those fortunate to see it fly, my viewership of this spectical (sic) is, and will always be, limited to History Channel documentaries with the sound cranked to 11. However, I could not help but feel the sense of awe when stepping out of the van at Beal Air Force Base and the PA officer saying, “here is your SR-71, Mr. Bunting.”

Even after all of these years, it is still the most magnificent airplane I’ve ever seen. I remember the day it buzzed the city of Vancouver to promote the local airshow. I was literally standing in awe, mouth agape, as it flew by.

The vinyl record factory that makes your niche music dreams come true

Wired:

It’s odd when you think about it. Records are archaic technology, a format that is not at all portable and subject to all manner of degradation, from scratches and skips to pops and clicks, if it isn’t properly and lovingly cared for. But audiophiles insist vinyl offers superior sound. We’ll stay out of that debate, but you have to admit it is pretty cool how vinyl works.

There’s a process to it that borders on artistry, something Wiper—who loves records—discovered during a visit to Record Industry, a pressing plant in the in the Dutch city of Haarlem. The British photographer followed every step in the process, from making the master to pressing the wax to shrink-wrapping the finished product. “Seeing how it’s done really makes you realize how amazingly clever this old-fashioned technology is,” he says.

The process of creating the actual vinyl record is fascinating. The slide show included with the story makes me wish for a video of the incredibly detailed process. Almost makes me want to buy vinyl again. Almost.

For a gadget geek in the Oval Office, high tech has its limits

The New York Times:

In this always-on, always-connected world, what good is a Fitbit with no GPS or an iPad that can’t connect to the cloud?

Hint: Ask President Obama.

Mr. Obama is the first true gadget geek to occupy the Oval Office, and yet his eagerness to take part in the personal technology revolution is hampered by the secrecy and security challenges that are daily requirements of his job.

The President is obviously a fan of technology but the demands of the office dictate what he can use and how he can use it. Contrary to the opinion of some web sites, President Obama doesn’t “diss” Apple by not using their products. He’s constrained from using them because of their capabilities.

Anandtech’s Apple iPad Pro review

Anandtech:

Overall, the iPad Pro has proven to be a very different experience for me than previous iPads. The design is definitely familiar, with the same industrial design and general feel as previous iPads scaled up to a 12.9” form factor.

On the SoC side, we’re finally seeing a major player in ARM SoCs directly competing with Intel on their home ground of sorts, and the results are at least somewhat shocking. Despite a handicap on process node, the CPU of the A9X isn’t all that far off from Skylake Core M. And while A9X can’t go toe-to-toe, Apple is for the first time capable of reaching Intel’s level for some workloads. Otherwise on the GPU side, Apple arguably bests Intel.

Here is the incredibly detailed iPad Pro review you’ve been waiting for.

Apple CEO Tim Cook met with Pope Francis in the Vatican on Friday

Appleinsider:

A peek at the schedule of Pope Francis has revealed that the head of the Catholic Church met with Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook on Friday, though what the two discussed remains a mystery.

Carol Glatz of the National Catholic Reporter snapped a picture of the Pope’s schedule on Friday, revealing that the pontiff had a meeting scheduled with Cook at 11:30 a.m. local time. Tom Cheshire of Sky News later confirmed that the meeting took place, as highlighted by Business Insider.

Cook’s meeting with His Holiness comes one week after Pope Francis met with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Apple rival Alphabet.

Oh, to be a fly on the wall of that meeting.

Google paid Apple $1 billion to keep search bar on the iPhone

Bloomberg:

Apple received $1 billion from its rival in 2014, according to a transcript of court proceedings from Oracle Corp.’s copyright lawsuit against Google. The search engine giant has an agreement with Apple that gives the iPhone maker a percentage of the revenue Google generates through the Apple device, an attorney for Oracle said at a Jan. 14 hearing in federal court.

Considering how valuable that piece of virtual property is, I bet Google thinks they got a bargain in the deal.

Apple to release Q1 earnings on the analysts’ conference call, January 26th

Apple:

Apple’s conference call to discuss fourth fiscal quarter results is scheduled for Tuesday, January 26, 2016 at 2:00 pm PT/5:00 pm ET.

As always, this call is open to the public via the webcast. Only analysts are allowed to call in and ask questions. It promises to be yet more record numbers for Apple.

The strange life of Q-tips, the most bizarre thing people buy

The Washington Post:

Q-tips are one of the most perplexing things for sale in America. Plenty of consumer products are widely used in ways other than their core function — books for leveling tables, newspapers for keeping fires aflame, seltzer for removing stains, coffee tables for resting legs — but these cotton swabs are distinct. Q-tips are one of the only, if not the only, major consumer products whose main purpose is precisely the one the manufacturer explicitly warns against.

I’m sure I’m as guilty as anyone when it comes to using Q-tips in a way that can be harmful but at least I’m not my mother. She’d use bobby pins (kids, ask your grandmother) to “clean” her ears.

How Donald Trump got everything wrong about Apple in one sentence

Re/code:

Donald Trump, the billionaire and leading Republican candidate for President of the United States, says he wants Apple, the biggest technology company in the world by market valuation, to make its computers and other products in America. It made for a good sound bite, but it betrayed a deep ignorance of how the tech economy actually works and the role of American workers in it.

When it comes to understanding technology, as he has proven time and again, Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

He’s an utter buffoon. He’s either ignorant about the power he’d have as president or being deliberately stupid. Either way, he’s proving unfit for the job he wants, let alone the job he has.

Mapping places in America where prohibition never ended

Atlas Obscura:

If you think that Prohibition is a thing of the past, think again. There are a surprising number of places in the U.S. where the sale and consumption of alcohol is still illegal.

While Prohibition was repealed in 1933, many municipalities opted to keep the ban in place. Thirty-three states allow for localities to prohibit the sale of alcohol, and in some cases consumption and possession. Kansas, Tennessee and Mississippi are dry states by default and require individual counties to opt in to sell alcohol.

When I lived in the Southern US, I always found it weirdly quaint, but annoying nonetheless, how many places had prohibitions on the sale and service of alcohol. The best example is Lynchburg, Tennessee, the home of Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey. You can’t drink Jack Daniel’s in the place where it’s distilled.

App Store prices increasing in Canada, Mexico and more thanks to exchange rates

iMore:

Apple will soon be increasing the prices of paid apps and in-app purchases in a handful of countries due to exchange rate changes. App Stores affected by the change will be those in Canada, Israel, Mexico, New Zealand, Russia, Singapore, and South Africa. Those using in-app subscriptions in Russia and South Africa will need to resubscribe.

These sorts of adjustments are not uncommon. The changes in pricing are expected to take place across these countries in the next 72 hours, according to an email sent to developers by Apple.

While this is disappointing, it’s not surprising. The Canadian dollar in particular has dropped like a stone in the past few months.

8 reasons you should buy a 50mm f/1.8 lens

Petapixel:

When people ask me what lens they should get after buying their first camera, I always tell them to buy a 50mm f/1.8 lens because it’s one of the cheapest and one of the coolest lens you could buy.

Why should you buy it? Here are 8 different reasons.

One of the first lenses I recommend beginning photographers buy is one of the “Nifty Fifties”. They are relatively inexpensive, generally better than the kit lens that came with your camera, great in low light conditions and will force you to move your feet to get the shot rather than just zooming into it.

The 62 richest people in the world now own as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion

MIC:

The most shocking statistic in the report, released Sunday, is this: In 2015, a mere 62 people held the same amount of wealth as “the bottom half of humanity” — 3.5 billion people. Identifying the reasons why this is happening is as important as the statistic itself.

Things are getting bad, quickly: In 2010, it took 388 individuals to match the wealth of the bottom half. But in the past five years, wealth has become so concentrated in the hands of the global elite that the number has reduced dramatically.

This story is more than just a little depressing.

These are the signs Apple is working on the next major computing platform

Business Insider:

It’s all but a given that Apple is developing a car (even Elon Musk called the project “an open secret” in the auto industry). But when it comes to a new kind of personal computing gadget, several recent acquisitions and hires hint that Apple is at least exploring augmented reality.

As always, Apple is tight lipped about what it’s cooking up in its research and development labs. But a recent series of acquisitions and hires shows the company is at least experimenting with augmented reality.

Let’s take a look at the evidence.

BI is using the tired cliche of “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” but what do you think? Is VR/AR “the next major computing platform”? While tech nerds may be salivating over VR and AR, do you think The Normals want this platform? Will VR be the next HD TV or the next 3D TV?

Apple demands widow get court order to access dead husband’s password

CBC:

A Victoria widow is outraged over Apple’s demand that she obtain a court order to retrieve her dead husband’s password so she can play games on an iPad.

“I thought it was ridiculous. I could get the pensions, I could get benefits, I could get all kinds of things from the federal government and the other government. But from Apple, I couldn’t even get a silly password. It’s nonsense,” 72-year-old Peggy Bush told Go Public.

Experts warn this is a growing problem, as more people die leaving important information and valuable digital property on computers and electronic devices.

The news media is typically and gleefully playing up this story (it will get resolved by Apple without any court order required), it does bring forward some of the issues we are and will continue to have with our digital lives.

Apple’s home page tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Apple:

“Life’s most persistent and urgent question is ‘What are you doing for others?'”

Tim Cook has often said that Dr King is one of his heroes and today, on Martin Luther King Jr Day, Apple’s front page is dedicated to him.

The 7 worst ad campaigns of 2015

Venturebeat:

It’s always been important for advertisers and content creators to consider their target audience when developing an ad campaign. In the past year, however, we have seen a slew of ad campaigns that seem to have skipped over this essential, yet obvious, standard. Perhaps advertisers forget that unless they carefully understand and represent their audience’s values, they’ll get bombarded with aggressive tweets, posts, pins, and shares, calling them cold, insensitive, and downright ignorant.

These kinds of campaigns can easily be avoided if advertisers learn to engage better with their consumers so that they truly grasp their audience’s character.

That said, here are seven ad campaigns that just plain failed in 2015.

As much as many of us, myself included, hate most of the advertising we see, a good campaign can really capture our attention. Sadly, so can a bad one. These campaigns make you wonder how the hell they managed to make it out into the wild.

License to (not) drive

Steven Levy:

I press a button on the steering column, and a female voice accompanied by an icy synthesizer note — the kind of thing you hear when monorail doors are about to close — intones the word, “Autodrive.” Something catches in my throat; it may be the closest thing I’ll know to flying the Millennium Falcon when it thrusts into hyperspace. In truth, not much really changes. The Lexus rolls forward and rambles down a street in a neighborhood that is all streets and no buildings or people, a Potemkin village of roadways. There is an intersection ahead with a stop sign. The car stops. My foot has not touched the brake.

I am behind the wheel of a Google self-driving car.

There is no doubt autonomous cars are the future so these articles about the early days fascinate me. There are still a lot of issues, both inside the car and out, that need to be resolved before fantasy becomes reality though.

Museum opens doors to largest collection of pinball, arcade games for one weekend only

The San Gabriel Valley Tribune:

For kids of a certain age — say, 35 and up — it’s the stuff dreams are made of: more than 900 vintage pinball and arcade games, with almost no duplicates among them.

Although many of these machines once sucked quarters out of pockets at a dizzying pace — Dragon’s Lair alone likely drained more piggy banks of allowance money than anything else in 1983 — they’ll all be available to play for a single price this weekend at the Museum of Pinball in Banning.

How much fun would it be to spend a weekend in this place?

GoPro cuts jobs after a big drop in action camera sales

Engadget:

It’s tough times for GoPro’s fledgling empire. The action camera maker is cutting the jobs of about 7 percent of its workforce (roughly 105 people) after poor sales during the fourth quarter, particularly in the first half. It doesn’t have a detailed explanation for the drop, but it recently slashed the price of the notoriously expensive Hero4 Session — clearly, it misjudged how much people were willing to pay for the tiny cube cam.

As my very smart friend Ben Bajarin said on Twitter, “GoPro simply maxed their user base, peaking essentially. No reason for base to buy new ones and no product to expand their TAM.”

In other words, everyone who wants a GoPro likely already has one. As a motorcyclist, I always thought it would be cool to have one until I realized, I’m never going to watch/edit/post the video so why bother?

Is Apple’s Tim Cook “completely clueless?”

Motley Fool:

While reasonable people can disagree about Apple’s iPhone sales, Global Equities Research Co-Founder Trip Chowdhry pulls no punches with his newest Apple commentary. Instead of discussing the merits or limitations of the company as an investment, Chowdhry resorts to ad hominem attacks, calling Apple CEO Tim Cook “completely clueless.” If you set aside the unnecessary rhetoric, and dig into Chowdhry’s concerns, his argument doesn’t pass muster.

Chowdhry is known for making wild and mostly wrong predictions about Apple. Remember his 2014 claim that Apple “…only (has) 60 days left to either come up with something or they will disappear”? But, as the article points out, these claims are more about Chowdhry and his company’s profile than they are about any accuracy about Apple. Which makes his pointless name calling even more disgusting.