Academy Awards are chosen using two different systems, one for Best Picture and one for all the rest of the awards. The non-Best Picture awards go to the nominee with the most votes. Simple. But the Best Picture voting is a whole ‘nother thing.

Unlike the winners of the other categories which are determined by popular vote — i.e, a voter picks just one of the nominees and the Oscar goes to the that nominee with the most votes — the winner of Best Picture is arrived at by a more complicated system. The academy uses preferential voting, as it does to determine nominees in most other races, to determine the winner of Best Picture.

Here’s how preferential voting works:

Voters rank the Best Picture nominees. If one nominee garners more than 50% of the first place votes, it will win Best Picture.

If, as is more likely, no nominee reaches this threshold, the film with the fewest first place votes is eliminated, with its ballots being reapportioned to the second place choice.

Should no film cross the required 50% + one ballot threshold, the film with the fewest first place votes is again elminated, with its ballots being apportioned to the next choice still in play (i.e., if the second place choice is no longer in the running, then the ballot would be reapportioned to the third place choice and so on.)

This process of elimination and reapportion continues until one film reaches at least 50% + one ballots. That is the Best Picture winner.

Put more simply, if a film has one more than 50% of the vote, that film wins. If not, the bottom film is eliminated and those eliminated votes are recounted, going to the second choice on each ballot. Rinse and repeat.

Here are your nominees. Neil Patrick Harris will be hosting tonight. Should be a good show.

UPDATE: Fixed the voting description based on feedback from readers hdort and Irv and this link explaining the Instant Runnoff Voting (IRV) mechanism, also known as alternative vote (AV), transferable vote, ranked-choice voting, or preferential voting. Now the voting makes a lot more sense to me.

M.G. Siegler, writing for Medium:

Apple brought in around $182 billion in revenue last year. Their tech peers came in with the following: Google at $66 billion. Microsoft at $87 billion. Amazon at $89 billion. IBM at $93 billion.

You know who was a lot closer to Apple in this regard? Ford at $147 billion. GM at $155 billion. Volkswagen at $225 billion. These are now Apple’s peers in business. They’ve leveled up.

M.G. makes the case that Apple building a car is inevitable, that cars are in Apple’s DNA:

This is a very different Apple. This is a company about to dive headfirst into the luxury space with the Apple Watch. One lifestyle leads to another.

And we already know Steve Jobs wanted to build a car. Phil Schiller has said Apple thought about building a car in the past — and is a car guy. Jony Ive is a car guy. Eddy Cue, car guy. At some point, it would be almost like Apple was going out of its way not to build a car.

Interesting.

Mark Gurman, writing for 9to5mac:

Apple intends to release the upcoming iOS 8.3 as a public beta via the company’s existing AppleSeed program in mid-March, according to the sources. This release will match the third iOS 8.3 beta for developers, which is planned for release the same week. Apple then expects to debut iOS 9 at its June Worldwide Developer Conference, with a public beta release during the summer, and final release in the fall.

And:

In order to maintain a higher level of exclusivity, the public beta program for iOS will apparently be limited to 100,000 people, the sources say. Apple began seeding a select group of retail employees with iOS betas for minor releases in January. In the hands of developers since last year, iOS 8.2 will not enter public beta.

Seems like a solid idea. The more eyeballs on a release before Golden Master, the better. It will be interesting to see if Apple allows you to go back to the last public release once you have a beta installed.

BBC:

On Oscar night the usually car-clogged streets of Hollywood fall silent because everyone is at a viewing party or, if they’re very lucky, sliding into a dress by Dior or slipping on a tuxedo en route to the big show.

The streets aren’t entirely empty: countless limousines are zipping all over town, then making their way to the Dolby Theatre, more than a dozen blocks surrounding Hollywood Boulevard closed to all other traffic as the purring cars patiently wait to drop off their clients.

Parking’s as difficult as a diva at the best of times in Hollywood, so where do hundreds and hundreds of limos – and their suited and booted chauffeurs – go to wait until they have to pick up again?

I never know whether that would be a cool job or not.

OS X offers different tiers of protection that have evolved over time. Chris Hoffman, writing for HowToGeek.com, walks you through these levels, explains the weaknesses at each level.

Even if your Mac is securely encrypted, anyone with access to it — for example, a thief who stole your MacBook — could enter recovery mode and use the “Reinstall OS X” option to wipe your entire hard drive. This at least protects your personal files from a thief — they’ll just have to start over from scratch. However, it means a thief can quickly wipe your Mac and start using it.

Spoiler alert, best bet is to make a reliable backup of your Mac, enable FileVault encryption, use a password everywhere you can and use a different password at every opportunity.

UPDATE: Reader Beau Baldwin suggested a link to Apple’s Find My Mac page to round out this topic. Excellent idea, Beau!

Neil Cybart, writing for Above Avalon:

As we enter the wearables era, the notification is about to undergo one of its more significant advancements in history. The Apple Watch will improve on the pager from the 1990s and position silent haptic feedback as a notification. The ability to send and receive messages via “taps” on the wrist will turn the modern notification into a communication medium. While the smartphone may have taken the notification and run a little too far with it in the wrong direction, the Apple Watch will likely put the notification on a new, more sustainable path.

Interesting list of historical notifications. I would have started the list with smoke signals, designed to send messages from one hilltop to the next. How about a knock on the door? Or the tippety-tap of Morse code? Or that famous midnight ride?

Good stuff. [Via the always excellent iOS Dev Weekly]

But the kicker here is that the Fire TV actually works. My Apple TV has been plagued by poor performance and repeated crashes—sometimes right in the middle of a show. Every time that’s happened, it’s been faster to switch inputs to my Fire TV and resume the video there than it has been to wait for the Apple TV to finish its glacial restarting process.

I found this really interesting. It’s certainly not a good sign that the Apple TV has such poor performance when watching a program. If it was caused by Dan’s Internet, then the Fire TV wouldn’t work either, but it does. I don’t have many problems with my Apple TV, except when watching the NHL station—that usually sucks really bad.

My thanks to Edovia for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week. Screens is a beautiful, yet powerful VNC client for iOS and Mac that lets you connect back to your computer from the comfort of your living room, the corner coffee shop or anywhere in the world.

Until the end of the month, we’re happy to offer 20% off Screens for Mac to the readers of The Loop. Simply use this link to save!

Jim’s Note: I’ve used Screens for Mac and iOS since they were first released. I love them both.

Top Hat quickly answers the one question that indie developers have every morning: How well did our apps do in the App Store yesterday?

Top Hat lives in the Yosemite menu bar and shows up-to-date daily sales figures for your apps. Revenue from In-App Purchases is aggregated to give you a single total for each app. Weekly figures can be inspected by holding ⌥ as you click the Top Hat icon.

A great new app from Oisin Prendiville, the man behind Castro podcasting app, Unread and Tokens. I’m buying this.

Use the Mac creative tools you know & love, like Photoshop, with the touch experience of your iPad.

Made by some ex-Apple engineers (of course). This is one of the most exciting things I’ve seen in a while.

Les Paul’s personal 1954 Les Paul Custom “Black Beauty” sold to Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay last night for $335,500. According to the New York Times, Irsay’s guitar curator, Christopher McKinney, placed the bid at the February 19, 2015 auction held by Guernsey’s in New York City.

I would love to have this guitar. If only I had a few hundred grand laying around.

The Loop Magazine Issue 31:

Jim Dalrymple looks at the key to Apple’s success. Is it design, software, hardware? Maybe none of those things; Matt Gemmell talks about the colors of his various computer bags—It’s okay to skip safe; Darren Murph looks at where the DSLR is now that so many people are using an iPhone; Joe Caiati has a look at the origins of his writing; Steven Aquino has a wonderful story on how music and the iPod helped people with memories; With so many recordings of the same classical piece, Kirk McElhearn is still searching for the perfect recording, but does it exist?; Darren Murph looks at mobile data and how everything is being commoditized in mobile; and Tim Schock talks about the resurgence of the cassette… really.

You can download The Loop Magazine and preview the latest issue on your iPhone and iPad for free. A subscription is only $1.99 per month and you get access to all previous issues.

The Smithsonian:

In 1959, Xerox released the “914”—the first easy-to-use photocopier. The culmination of more than 20 years of experimentation, it was a much cleaner, “dry” process. The copier created an electrostatic image of a document on a rotating metal drum, and used it to transfer toner—ink in a powdered format—to a piece of paper, which would then be sealed in place by heat. It was fast, cranking out a copy in as little as seven seconds. When the first desk-size, 648-pound machines were rolled out to corporate customers—some of whom had to remove doors to install these behemoths—the era of copying began.

Or more accurately, the explosion of copying began. Xerox expected customers would make about 2,000 copies a month—but users easily made 10,000 a month, and some as many as 100,000. Before the 914 machine, Americans made 20 million copies a year, but by 1966 Xerox had boosted the total to 14 billion.

We don’t give much thought to the copier many of us have daily access to but this article makes a good argument for the ways it changed the world and asks if 3D printing might do the same.

Medium:

As the 19th century teetered into the 20th, the clank of typewriter keys went from solo to symphony. They were the weapon of choice for professional writers, the business elite, people with things to say and the need to say them quickly. They unintentionally provided a passageway for women to tread into workplaces from which they had long been banished, and greatly expedited the rate at which human thought could be translated into ink. An 1867 issue of Scientific American marveled at the “machine by which it is assumed that man may print his thoughts twice as fast as he can write them.”

Using a typewriter at times feels more like playing piano than jotting down notes, a percussive exercise in expressing thought that is both tortuous and rewarding.

Great story about a dying technology and the men who still service it. While I am nostalgic about typewriters and love their look and feel, there’s no way I’d ever want to go back to using one on a daily basis.

1998 was still a low point for Apple. Steve Jobs had just returned, had some new plans in place, but the triumphant arc of new products that would once again change the world had not yet begun.

The Chronicle of Higher Education sent two reporters, one a seasoned reporter and one fresh out of college, to a conference for college computing administrators to grab some time with Steve Jobs.

That fresh-faced reporter was Jeffrey Young. You can read his accounting of the interview here. And listen to the interview below.

[via iHeartApple2]

Jordan Kahn, writing for 9to5mac:

Evident by this long list of automotive experts, it’s clear Apple’s ambitions go well beyond just its iOS-based CarPlay in-dash system. Well beyond software too, as many of the names below are hardware engineers coming from Tesla, Ford and other notable automotive related areas. In fact, the majority of employees on this list that are reporting to team leader Steve Zadesky come from an automotive hardware background and many only joined Apple recently or around the time Cook reportedly approved the electric car project.

Jordan did a great job pulling together the list of Apple’s recent auto-related hires, along with some background for each one.

Fortune:

Apple holds the top spot for the eighth year in a row. In February, it became the first company to hit more than $700 billion in market value. As tech devotees await the launch of the Apple Watch in April, record smartphone sales were announced in January — 74.5 million phones in final three months of 2014– proving that the iPhone is still the product to beat.

What’s not to like?

Bloomberg:

Apple Inc., which has been working secretly on a car, is pushing its team to begin production of an electric vehicle as early as 2020, people with knowledge of the matter said.

The possibility of Apple building a car just took a slight turn towards the positive with this definitive quote from Bloomberg. Obviously, this is not a quote from Apple, so it is automatically suspect.

But add this bit of kindling on the rest of the stack, including the battery poaching lawsuit, which also moves the needle towards Apple investing in automobile hardware, as opposed to some form of Car OS.

We spent a lot of time discussing this on this week’s Amplified. Take a listen.

Apple has determined that a small percentage of MacBook Pro systems may exhibit distorted video, no video, or unexpected system restarts. These MacBook Pro systems were sold between February 2011 and December 2013.

More information is available from Apple’s Web site.

A nice looking bundle of 8 apps for Mac users. The apps purchased separately would cost $469, but they are selling it for $44.99. If you use code ULTRAMAC5, you can get it for $39.99.

Wired:

The Hangzhou store’s ceilings are almost 50 feet high, with no columns to be found. The façade of glass panels reaches from floor to ceiling without interruption, meaning Foster + Partners had to push well beyond their previous feats in glass manufacturing to get 11 seamless panes.

I’ve seen a lot of pics of this new store and it is an absolutely stunning architectural achievement.

Chinese PC maker Lenovo has found itself in the middle of a public relations disaster, following revelations that it sold a number of notebook computers with pre-installed software that hijacks users’ browser sessions to inject customized advertisements and seriously degrades the security of encrypted connections.

No matter what else they may do, everyone knows that Apple would never pull shit like this.

Really nice looking game for iPhone and iPad.

Re/code:

Twenty-five years ago today, a software application called Photoshop arrived, promising photographers and graphic designers a new realm of digital possibilities. But my brother John Knoll and I didn’t realize at the time just how broadly influential our little piece of software would become.

When I began writing the code back in graduate school instead of focusing on my PhD at the University of Michigan, I had no idea what it would become or how it would be used.

Photoshop might be the most complicated software application I’ve ever used. It’s an amazing tool.

Eric Clapton has been tapped for induction into the Blues Hall of Fame for his many musical achievements as well as for his role as a popularizer of the entire genre. He brought the blues to audiences in his native Britain and throughout the world, illuminating the work of the original blues artists who inspired him.

Well deserved.

Buzzfeed:

The snow in Boston may have been bad, but wait until you see what’s going on in Canada.

The amazing amount of snow in my and The Loop’s Publisher’s home province and other areas of Eastern Canada is reminiscent of what I remember seeing frequently as a kid. When you’re young, this amount of snow is magical. Thanks to Nicole Dalrymple for the link!

Digg:

When you leave a movie theater, you’re probably not thinking, “Man, the sound in that movie was mixed perfectly.”

Don’t worry, that doesn’t mean you’re bad at watching movies. The sound mix in a movie – the combination of the dialogue, soundtrack and sound effects – is designed to be unobtrusive. As one sound mixer put it to me, as soon as the audience notices something slightly off in the mix, “you’ve lost them.”

I love this behind the scenes stuff, especially about subjects most of us have heard of but have no clue what actually happens.

The new York Times:

A month ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health. At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my luck has run out — a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver. Nine years ago it was discovered that I had a rare tumor of the eye, an ocular melanoma. Although the radiation and lasering to remove the tumor ultimately left me blind in that eye, only in very rare cases do such tumors metastasize. I am among the unlucky 2 percent.

Beautifully written but no less heartbreaking.