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This is great.

New for 2014, Jackson commemorates 30 years of sonic mayhem with the 30th Anniversary Soloist. This master-built limited-run homage to the godfather of high-performance guitars is the perfect combination of past and present, with features that evoke the Soloist’s debut year of 1984 and contemporary Jackson design elements.

Hell yes!

“Apple is subject to the same tax laws as scores of other international companies doing business in Ireland,” the company said in a statement. “Apple pays every euro of every tax that we owe. Since the iPhone launched in 2007, our taxes in Ireland have increased tenfold. Apple is proud to have been doing business in Cork, Ireland, since 1980.”

Every country, state, province, and county in the world offers tax breaks to big companies in hopes they will open businesses in their area. All of the people complaining about Ireland would line up to offer Apple incentives to relocate to their towns. This is just silly.

There’s some great advice here.

Toontrack’s drum products are among my favorites.

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TripAdvisor:

For the second year in a row, Vancouver’s Stanley Park was named the World’s Best Park in the TripAdvisor Travelers’ Choice poll. It’s North America’s third-largest park and gets eight million visitors per year.

Similar to Central Park in the sense that it is an oasis (big enough to get lost in) in the middle of a major city, Stanley Park offers much more and in a wider variety than any city park I’ve ever been in.

I have two Slingbox devices that I use everyday. I wouldn’t trade them for anything.

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Toronto Star:

The ocean’s apex predator does kill people, but we are much more devastating to sharks than they are to us. And now, conservation-minded scientists are learning more about what makes sharks tick.

I’ve swum with sharks in the Caribbean. An amazing experience.

. American Journalism Review:

Brian Krebs, 41, of KrebsOnSecurity.com, sits at his Northern Virginia home office, showing me his daily routine. A shotgun in a case leans against the corner of the room. On his desk sit four busy computer monitors and two laptops. One of the monitors has video feeds from security cameras around his house; the others show a range of underground forums and websites that sell stolen personal information and credit cards.

It’s the home of a man who understands that a malicious intruder could come from anywhere.

Except for war zone journalists, Krebs may be the bravest journalist working today.

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Ars Technica:

How long, exactly, do SSDs last?

It’s a difficult question to answer because estimating an SSD’s life requires taking a whole lot of factors into consideration—type and amount of NAND used in the drive, overall write amplification, read/write cycle, and more. TechReport…has been subjecting six drives to a long-term torture test to actually measure, rather than estimate, the drives’ service life.

The results are impressive: the consumer-grade SSDs tested all made it to at least 700TB of writes before failing.

The long term viability of SSDs has always been a concern so it’s good to see reports like this coming out that may put some of those to rest. The speed improvements of SSDs are definitely worth it.

Independent artists could disappear from YouTube “in a matter of days” after the Google video service confirmed it was dropping content from independent labels that have not signed up for its upcoming subscription music service.

Holy sweet shit.

Apple on Tuesday published a new page on its iBookstore, offering users the opportunity to pre-order upcoming books from publisher Hachette Digital.

. Wired:

One year after the first revelations of Edward Snowden, cryptography has shifted from an obscure branch of computer science to an almost mainstream notion: It’s possible, user privacy groups and a growing industry of crypto-focused companies tell us, to encrypt everything from emails to IMs to a gif of a motorcycle jumping over a plane.

But it’s also possible to go a step closer toward true privacy online. Mere encryption hides the content of messages, but not who’s communicating. Use cryptographic anonymity tools to hide your identity, on the other hand, and network eavesdroppers may not even know where to find your communications, let alone snoop on them. “Hide in the network,” security guru Bruce Schneier made his first tip for evading the NSA. “The less obvious you are, the safer you are.”

I’m not nearly paranoid or worried enough to go through a lot of this effort but it’s still an interesting idea – what if you needed to be completely anonymous?

Another great article from Ben Thompson.

If it’s good, Facebook could take a significant share of this market. Many consumers will use this type of service simply because they use Facebook all the time, making it the default service.

This particular part of the bill would give the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration the ability to enforce a set of rules for navigation apps on smartphones, which many drivers find more convenient and less expensive than built-in navigation systems. These rules would be subject to change, and apps would have to comply as regulators see fit.

I’m not opposed to regulation and safety, but I’d really like to see something done about people texting while driving, instead of listening to turn-by-turn directions from a smartphone.

You can choose how much you would like to pay for the digital edition of this book.

Beacons installed inside retail stores like Saks or grocery outlets can send proximity-based alerts to shoppers at the precise moment — and location — that they’re enabled to make a decision on a purchase. This is the holy grail of retail advertising, which normally takes a scattershot approach to ‘pre-advertising’ shoppers or tries to guesstimate when they’re in the vicinity of a product.

I’m not convinced this is something I want when I go shopping. Admittedly, when I do shop, I tend to know exactly what I want and where it is, so maybe I’m not the target market.

Wow!

But the district and Dell, its partner in the project, have failed to develop a customized platform that could serve students and teachers “directly enough or quickly enough,” Silva said. That work has been halted — with Dell agreeing to refund the $665,000 it has been paid in the form of future technology upgrades.

This happened a couple of weeks ago, but I’m just getting caught up. Just horrible for Dell. Hopefully other school districts will learn a lesson from this.

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The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Starbucks is teaming up with Arizona State University on an exclusive program that could send thousands of its baristas, store managers, and other employees to ASU Online for their undergraduate degrees, with the coffee company picking up about three-quarters of the tuition tab.

The unusual program, the Starbucks College Achievement Plan, will be available to more than 100,000 of its employees. The partnership, which could cost Starbucks hundreds of millions of dollars a year, is likely to add luster to the company’s reputation for corporate social responsibility.

While it’s not the “Starbucks pays for college!” story some media outlets portray it to be, it’s still a great perk of working for the company and a way for employees to get or complete a degree.

Daniel Eran Dilger:

A new profile of Apple’s chief executive, titled “Tim Cook, Making Apple his own” actually says little about Cook and virtually nothing noteworthy about how he is leading Apple. Instead, the New York Times simply recounts more predictions of doom for the company in a piece filled with fictions and fallacy.

Another Apple hit-piece from the New York Times, but without anything to really say. Tim Cook and Apple are coming off one of the most successful WWDCs in its history, but the Times has decided to make shit up because Tim wouldn’t give them an interview. Apple is fighting to change entire industries, while the New York Times fights for relevancy—Apple is doing the better job.

ScreenCrush: In 1984, music videos were still a fairly new phenomena and on the day of the soundstage shoot all the pieces were in place. The song was finished. Actress Cindy Harrell would play the female lead opposite Parker. But, … Continued

Happy Father’s Day from all of us to all of you fathers out there!

My thanks to Many Tricks for sponsoring this week’s RSS feed on The Loop. Many Tricks offers a number of apps to make using your Mac easier, more productive, and even more fun. Check out Moom, their impressive window moving and zooming tool; Name Mangler, which makes renaming tens of thousands of files a snap; Witch, a tool to let you quickly switch to any open window; or any of their other apps at Many Tricks.

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Computerworld:

Samsung has now announced 11 different Android tablets since the start of 2014. Here’s the thing: Choice is beneficial only when it means something. Flooding consumers with a billion overlapping variations of the same basic concept does little more than cause confusion and dilute your brand.

Put another way, when faced with that menagerie of confusingly named and difficult to distinguish options, what’s a typical consumer going to do? You guessed it: Buy an iPad.

Amazing – and not in a good way.

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Chicago Tribune:

A motorcyclist who shot video of himself speeding away from police was sentenced to four years in prison Friday.

The charges stem from an October, 2012, incident in which Hamza Ali Ben Ali tried to goad a Westmont police officer into a high-speed chase after the officer tried to stop him along Cass Avenue. A seven-minute video shot from a camera affixed to Ali’s Honda CBR 1000 shows a police car with flashing lights following the motorcycle into a gas station before the motorcycle zooms away.

Two weeks later, footage of the pursuit was uploaded to YouTube.

This guy can only be described as the stupidest person in the world right now.

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Daring Fireball:

“Only Apple” has been Tim Cook’s closing mantra for the last few Apple keynotes.

Is this true, though? Is Apple the only company that can do this? I think it’s inarguable that they’re the only company that is doing it, but Cook is saying they’re they only company that can.

I’ve been thinking about this for two weeks.

I spoke at a MUG group this evening and made a similar point and there’s no doubt this is Tim Cook’s Apple.

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TechCrunch:

App developers know that having good ratings and reviews means more users will be wiling to download their app. And thanks to ratings’ influence on Apple’s ranking algorithms, it will help their app be better discovered via the App Store’s Top Charts as well. Because of this, some — okay, many — developers manipulate their apps’ positions by posting fake ratings and reviews. It’s sort of common knowledge these days, in fact. Any brief, glowing, five-star review is immediately suspect.

As it turns out, it’s suspect to Apple, too. And now the company is doing something about it.

This is one of the reasons why I never pay any attention to ratings on the App Store. The only ratings I care about are from friends or trusted sources.

. Politico:

Sports are a reflection of national character and aspirations, and it is no coincidence, I think, that soccer has had a hard time catching on in the United States. Simply put, soccer—call it “football” if you must—is a tragic game, and thus it cuts deeply against the grain of the American ethos.

Americans are an optimistic people. We like scoring too much to enjoy a game that is more about preventing success than achieving it.

We go through this conversation every four years.