Macstories:

Apple has started promoting games that don’t have any In-App Purchases on the front page of the App Store. Currently featured in the UK App Store and likely expanding to the U.S. store later today as part of the App Store’s weekly refresh, the section is called ‘Pay Once & Play’ and it showcases “great games” that don’t require users to pay for extra content through IAPs.

Great to see Apple promoting these games. Go out and buy one or two.

New York Times:

David Carr, a writer who wriggled away from the demon of drug addiction to become an unlikely name-brand media columnist at The New York Times, and the star of a documentary about the newspaper, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 58.

An incredible loss for journalism and writing. I devoured everything he wrote, not because I agreed with everything he said but because he wrote so damn well. He will be sorely missed.

A lot has been made lately about Apple breaking or ignoring the law of large numbers.

The performance stoked analysis, such as “Apple shows a flagrant disregard for the law of large numbers” and “Here’s how Apple gets away with breaking the ‘laws’ of business.” (Jean-Louis Gassée, an industry analyst and former Apple executive, correctly acknowledged the dual-law phenomenon in a blog post on Sunday, “How Many Laws Did Apple Break?”)

And let’s not forget M.G. Siegler’s excellent Medium post, “Apple, The Oil Company?”.

To a mathematician, the law of large numbers has to do with probability theory. From the Wikipedia page:

In probability theory, the law of large numbers (LLN) is a theorem that describes the result of performing the same experiment a large number of times. According to the law, the average of the results obtained from a large number of trials should be close to the expected value, and will tend to become closer as more trials are performed.

In other words, if you flip a coin 5 times, you might get 5 heads in a row. That is not a good model of the probability of flipping a coin. Do it 100 times, you’ll likely get closer to a 50-50 mix. 1000 flips will yield an even better model. In this case, 1000 is probably a large enough number for this model. That’s the law of large numbers.

So when all these articles started appearing touting Apple and the law of large numbers, there was some understandable confusion. Turns out, there’s a financial model also known as the law of large numbers. From the Investopedia page:

A principle of probability and statistics which states that as a sample size grows, its mean will get closer and closer to the average of the whole population. The law of large numbers in the financial context has a different connotation, which is that a large entity which is growing rapidly cannot maintain that growth pace forever. The biggest of the blue chips, with market values in the hundreds of billions, are frequently cited as examples of this phenomenon.

In this context, Apple appears to be growing beyond the limits of such a large company. They are “breaking the law”.

If this interests you, read the rest of the Investopedia page. Thanks to M.G. Siegler for pointing me in this direction and to Stu Mark for stirring this particular pot.

Kirk McElhearn:

Lossless music streaming is becoming a thing. A small company, Tidal, that started out in Norway, which offers lossless streaming, was recently purchased by one Jay-Z, even though it has a few users. It has just announced that it will be expanding its service to a total of 30 countries.

The French company Deezer, which offers Deezer Elite, a lossless streaming service, is expanding this to 150 countries. And the French Qobuz has been offering lossless streaming for a while, but hasn’t yet spread very far.

So what does all this mean? Is lossless streaming a good thing? What are the pros and cons of streaming lossless music?

Interesting read.

More than 1500 people responded to the poll. As a reminder, there are three Apple Watch models from which to choose and two sizes for each model. The entry level is the Apple Watch Sport, the mid-level the Apple Watch, and the premium model is the Apple Watch Edition. The two sizes for each model are 38mm and 42mm.

Over 4 out of 10 respondents (43.58%) chose Apple’s 42 mm Apple Watch, which offers a polished or space black stainless steel case and a choice of straps, far outpacing the runner-up, the 42 mm Apple Watch Sport, which offers a space gray or silver anodized aluminum case and a Sport Band, at 26.19%.

In third, the smaller 38 mm Apple Watch was chosen by 12.12%, followed closely by the 38 mm Apple Watch Sport at 9.06%. Both Apple Watch Edition model sizes, 42 mm and 38 mm, with an 18-karat rose or yellow gold case and a choice of exclusive straps, combined to hit 9.06%.

You can add your voice to the poll here.

TheHill.com:

Apple CEO Tim Cook will speak at the White House cybersecurity summit Friday at Stanford University, according to an event invitation.

The White House is expected to reveal its next executive action on cybersecurity at the summit, which will bring together tech executives, leading academics and government officials to discuss ways in which the government can better collaborate with the private sector on cybersecurity initiatives.

This is about privacy and the ongoing battle over government access to our emails and digital lives. This is an opportunity to find a path that works for both sides, or at least better understand the issues at stake. Tim Cook will be there. Other notables will not.

Bloomberg:

The top executives of Google Inc., Yahoo! Inc. and Facebook Inc. won’t attend President Barack Obama’s cybersecurity summit on Friday, at a time when relations between the White House and Silicon Valley have frayed over privacy issues. Facebook Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, and Google’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt all were invited but won’t attend the public conference at Stanford University, according to the companies. Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook is planning to be at the event, where Obama is scheduled to give the keynote speech and have a private lunch with a select group of attendees.

If not attending the event is a form of protest, it is ill timed and ill informed. Go to the event. Make your voices heard. Stand up for your customers and your shareholders.

Launch the ColorDrop app, pick an image from your library (or take a new picture), pinch to zoom in on an area, then touch and hold to bring up a popup showing you the RGB and hex versions of the pixel you are touching. Slide your finger around to visit other colors, all in real time. Press the Inspect button to reveal a boatload of detailed color space info on the current color.

If you work with color, this is definitely worth checking out. Runs on both iPhone and iPad.

As much as we might not like Google’s business model of selling our information and habits to anyone that will pay, I agree with Brian—Google isn’t going anywhere.

This is great. I laughed.

The size limit of an app package submitted through iTunes Connect has increased from 2 GB to 4 GB, so you can include more media in your submission and provide a more complete, rich user experience upon installation. Please keep in mind that this change does not affect the cellular network delivery size limit of 100 MB.

This is good. As we move farther down the road with apps, they are becoming more complex and require more space. Science apps and games can be especially large, but they are both popular categories.

ZZ Top, the famous beard-heavy blues rockers from Houston, Texas played their first show on February 11, 1970. Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill and Frank Beard Knights filled the rafters of the Knights of Columbus Hall off U.S. 90 at a gig arranged by DJ Al Caldwell.

ZZ Top’s early music was very blusey, and still is to be honest.

Scott Jordan:

While I am playing much of our strategy close to the (SCOTTe)vest – and keeping a few aces in my pockets (since I am Pocket Man) – I just have to tease some of our favorite developments in our bid to rescue SkyMall.

More than just a catalog. Sure, it looks like a catalog. But SkyMall has always been entertainment first, and shopping second. That’s the secret sauce that made it so compelling. While the “social sharing” of SkyMall’s content was limited to just exposing your travelling companion yet another outrageous product, the content was always entertaining.

We will dial up that entertainment aspect of SkyMall by embracing it as a source of creative content.

I’m a big fan of SCOTTeVEST and, while this seems like an insane waste of money, I hope they pull it off.

BusyContacts brings to contact management the same power, flexibility, and sharing capabilities that BusyCal users have enjoyed with their calendars. What’s more, BusyContacts integrates seamlessly with BusyCal forming a flexible, easy to use CRM solution that works the way you do.

I really like the work these guys do. Great looking app.

Popular Mechanics:

The paper on which tonight’s edition is being printed arrived, as it does each week, from four different paper mills—two in Quebec, one in Ontario, and one in Tennessee—where it was packaged into rolls large enough to serve as the business end of a steamroller: 2,200 pounds each and fifty inches in diameter. Eighteen-wheelers carried them to a Times storage facility in the Bronx, where more trucks took twenty rolls each from there to the plant in Queens, where manned forklifts deposited each one in a four-story warehouse that can hold 2,231 just like it.

For all of its problems and issues, The New York Times is still my favourite paper and this is a really interesting story about how it ends up in physical form.

The Wall Street Journal:

Anki Overdrive is the latest proof that videogames are coming to real life. The tiny AI-powered cars, which surprised robotics and slot-car fans alike when they first hit the market in 2013, will get new customizable tracks—plus hotter designs and abilities—when they arrive this fall.

But this second generation swaps out the simple roll-out mat tracks that the first cars drove on for a set of modular tracks that you can lay out any way you want. The new tracks are made up of plastic pieces that magnetically snap together. You can even create terrain—bridges, banked turns and dead-end cliffs.

I had the original track and, while interesting, it quickly lost our interest because of the track limits. This new setup looks fantastic.

Re/code:

Oh God, what is this?That’s the first thought you might have when a notification appears on your iPhone or iPad prompting you to download a “Carrier Settings Update.”If you’re like me, you’ll shrug and tap the Update button (YOLO!). But others might be a little more wary, and want to know what the update is for and whether it’s safe to download before taking any action.Unfortunately, getting answers to these questions is much harder than it should be.

I had this happen while setting up a friend’s phone yesterday. Finding info on what it is was frustratingly difficult.

The New York Times:

if you’re going to ever think about buying lottery tickets, a moment like this — when the Powerball jackpot has reached remarkable highs — is the best possible time.

The biggest and most generally applicable reason buying lottery tickets is a non-terrible idea is this: It is fun to imagine one’s future after arriving at vast wealth.

I’ve always loved the Fran Leibowitz line of, “Your odds of winning the lottery are the same whether you play it or not.”

TED:

It’s a piece of cake. You can’t put lipstick on a pig. Why add fuel to the fire? Idioms are those phrases that mean more than the sum of their words. As our Open Translation Project volunteers translate TED Talks into 105 languages, they’re often challenged to translate English idioms into their language. Which made us wonder: what are their favorite idioms in their own tongue?

Many of these are even more nonsensical in English. My favourite is, “You sing like an elephant farted in your ear!” Hat tip to Lori Taber.

Blah, blah, blah, Apple should repurchase their shares, blah, blah, blah, make me more money, blah, blah, blah.

About a year ago, AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint, T-Mobile, Cellcom, Bluegrass Cellular, and US Cellular (collectively organized via the Cellular Telephone Industries Association, or CTIA) agreed to a series of provisions with the FCC to make it possible for consumers to unlock their phones.

The deadline for that agreement was yesterday, February 11th. Which means that, as of right now, you have the right to unlock your phone, provided you meet the basic criteria for unlocking.

You can read the FCC human-friendly version of the provisions here. Worth a few minutes of your time to do so. Know your rights.

And you can read the CTIA version of the guidelines here.

Good to have these links handy if you run into any resistance trying to unlock your phone.

[Via Ars Technica]

If you are new to Photos for OS X, the coming replacement for iPhoto, spend a few minutes reading this piece Jason Snell wrote for TidBITS.

Then take a look at this FAQ, responses to questions raised by the TidBITS article.

From the TidBITS article:

The banner feature of Photos is its integration with Apple’s iCloud Photo Library service. You can (optionally) set Photos to automatically upload your photos to Apple’s iCloud servers, where they’re backed up and accessible from iOS devices. (iOS device access will be included in iOS 8.2, an update that will presumably be delivered around the same time that Photos is released.)

My photo library is well past the default maximum size of my iCloud account. My question is, once Photos for OS X is released to the public, will that limit increase? Or will Apple customers making the move to Photos be forced to choose to either take on a monthly iCloud storage fee or stick to local storage? Is this a business development strategy for Apple?

Karen Webster, in her weekly piece for PYMENTS.com, interviews PayPal’s GM of Retail, Brad Brodigan. She then follows this with some cogent analysis. The whole thing is worth reading, but here’s a few nuggets:

What merchants see in the mobile opportunity in-store is the opportunity to remove friction, and not introduce it, into the shopping experiences of their customers.

And, today, in-store, that isn’t the act of paying for something.

What does introduce friction is a consumer trying to keep track of offers, coupons, sales, shopping lists, preferences, reviews, recommendations, pricing, inventory availability, having to mill around the store looking for stuff, and then having to schlepp to a specific place in a store and stand in line to pay for something. Not only does all of this introduce friction for the consumer, it introduces friction for the merchant, too – not to mention lost sales opportunities.

Making the payment process painless is only half the solution. Integrating with the world outside the iOS ecosystem is the other half. Reducing the friction between Apple Pay and the world of loyalty programs, coupons, shopping lists, and preferences will ultimately steer and speed consumer adoption of Apple Pay.

PayPal is starting to look a lot more like a company that’s placing its bets on leveraging the synergies between its merchant services group and its consumer payments capabilities and a lot less like a company that is trying to double down on being a “payments” company.

That suggests that PayPal’s ambition isn’t to compete as a payments app with Apple Pay (or Samsung Pay) at the point of sale for payment – but to perhaps take a page out of the Alipay play book and become a commerce and financial services brand that creates a trusted and reinforcing circle of services around businesses and consumers.

The sense here is that PayPal is conceding the payments war, trying to diversify outside that area to remain relevant.

This weekend, a man wearing a skull mask posted a video on YouTube outlining his plans to murder me. I know his real name. I documented it and sent it to law enforcement, praying something is finally done. I have received these death threats and 43 others in the last five months.

This is just unreal. You have to read this piece.

The Led Zeppelin reissue campaign continues in 2015, turning the spotlight on the double album Physical Graffiti. The deluxe edition of the group’s sixth studio album will arrive 40 years to the day after the original debuted on February 24, 1975. As with the previous deluxe editions, Physical Graffiti has been newly remastered by guitarist and producer Jimmy Page and is accompanied by a disc of companion audio comprising previously unreleased music related to the original release.

It’s available for pre-order.

Heineken NV, the world’s third-largest brewer, forecast growth against a tough market backdrop in the year ahead after reporting higher revenue for 2014 and increasing its dividend.

I’ve done my part.

A Craigslist ad selling a guitar:

“THIS GUITAR WILL NOT PLAY DOOM METAL. This guitar needs to play GOOD RIFFS and not BORING doom riffs. If your favorite band is Black Sabbath, I can’t sell this guitar to you. If you own a Fender or Gibson and want to upgrade, I can’t sell this to you (Ibanez Japanese guitars are the PRIME of guitar craftsmanship crafted by the ancient Japanese wizards—if you think otherwise, you haven’t played one of these HEAVY METAL BATTLE TANKS.)

“If you want to play REAL GUITAR RIFFS, this guitar is for you! If you have a Marshall full-stack in your bedroom, THIS GUITAR IS FOR YOU. If you say you are ready to buy this guitar and show up to buy it wearing a Mastodon shirt, I can’t sell it to you. I MEAN RIFFS, not some banjo jangle pentatonic shit. If you own an HM2, this guitar is perfect. You can get the perfect chainsaw distortion with these HOT HIGH GAIN RAIL PICKUPS. Real riffs only.”

That’s some funny shit.