From Reuters. Fair warning – these are news shots and some are very graphic and disturbing but all are powerful.

TidBITS:

OS X 10.10.1 Yosemite has been out for a bit now and while it is working fine for many people, there are still a variety of complaints making the rounds on the Internet. Here then is a collection of five problems and solutions (or at least workarounds) that we’ve either experienced or had reported to us.

Not all of these will be applicable to everyone but some might help speed things up for you.

Popular Mechanics:

What a lovely video. What a delicate and sentimental homage to an elder statesmen of the land speed wars. What a beautiful, pastoral day, perfect for rolling out a… What uh…. What are they doing with the…. DEAR LORD. IT RUNS.

It’s called “The Beast of Turin” and it looks and sounds like the car Satan would drive. Thanks very much to Glenn Ramsey for the link.

Priceonomics:

To counterbalance its simplicity, the Slinky has an utterly complex backstory. The toy has dealt with a slew of uncanny circumstances — an inventor who fled to South America to join a religious cult, a seven-figure debt, a mind-boggling reemergence under unlikely leadership — and has somehow managed to persevere with very little redesign.

I don’t know how popular the Slinky is outside of Canada and the US but is there anyone who didn’t get one of these for a gift at some point? And how long did it take you (or your rotten little brothers) to break it?

Dan Frakes:

A couple months back, I tweeted that the iOS 8 share-sheet extension I really wanted was one that would let me send myself an email—in other words, to share the current thing via email, but to have the resulting email message pre-addressed to me.

Like Dan, I do this frequently on iOS and have been using and liking this little extension.

Time’s Lev Grossman, writing about Mark Zuckerberg’s relentless quest to get every human on the planet online and on Facebook:

The story of Facebook’s first decade was one of relentless, rapacious growth, from a dorm-room side project to a global service with 8,000 employees and 1.35 billion users, on whose unprotesting backs Zuckerberg has built an advertising engine that generated $7.87 billion last year, a billion and a half of it profit. Lately, Zuckerberg has been thinking about what the story of Facebook’s second decade should be and what most becomes the leader of a social entity that, if it were a country, would be the second most populous in the world, only slightly smaller than China.

This is an enjoyable, educational read. We get a sense of the current incarnation of Mark Zuckerberg and we get to know a bit about Facebook, the company.

When you walk into Facebook’s headquarters for the first time, the overwhelming impression you get is of raw, unbridled plenitude. There are bowls overflowing with free candy and fridges crammed with free Diet Coke and bins full of free Kind bars. They don’t have horns with fruits and vegetables spilling out of them, but they might as well.

The campus is built around a sun-drenched courtyard crisscrossed by well-groomed employees strolling and laughing and wheeling bikes. Those Facebookies who aren’t strolling and laughing and wheeling are bent over desks in open-plan office areas, looking ungodly busy with some exciting, impossibly hard task that they’re probably being paid a ton of money to perform. Arranged around the courtyard (where the word hack appears in giant letters, clearly readable on Google Earth if not from actual outer space) are restaurants — Lightning Bolt’s Smoke Shack, Teddy’s Nacho Royale, Big Tony’s Pizzeria — that seem like normal restaurants right up until you try to pay, when you realize they don’t accept money. Neither does the barbershop or the dry cleaner or the ice cream shop. It’s all free.

This sounds very much like Google’s approach, provide food and basic services so employees can spend more time focused on the job at hand.

My favorite:

Because of the limits of space and time, a lot of Silicon Valley companies don’t build new headquarters; they just take over the discarded offices of older firms, like hermit crabs. Facebook’s headquarters used to belong to Sun Microsystems, a onetime power-house of innovation that collapsed and was acquired by Oracle in 2009. When Facebook moved in, Zuckerberg made over the whole place, but he didn’t change the sign out front, he just turned it around and put Facebook on the other side. The old sign remains as a reminder of what happens when you take your eye off the ball.

Lots more to this, well worth the read.

Kirk McElhearn put up a page with a single question survey. If you would, please take a minute to click over to this page and answer the question. Once the results are known, Kirk will post them and so will we. Thanks.

Nice!

BBC:

Lawyers for Apple have raised a last-minute challenge saying new evidence suggested that the two women named as plaintiffs may not have purchased iPod models covered by the lawsuit.

The lawsuit covers iPods purchased between September 2006 and March 2009.

And:

But after lead plaintiff Marianna Rosen testified on Wednesday, Apple lawyers checked the serial number on her iPod Touch and found it was purchased in July 2009.

The other main plaintiff, Melanie Wilson, also bough iPods outside the relevant timeframe, they indicated.

“I am concerned that I don’t have a plaintiff. That’s a problem,” Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said at the end of the trial’s third day of testimony in Oakland, California.

Are you kidding me? What a show of ineptitude, as well as an incredible waste of time and money. If this wasn’t such a travesty, it’d be comedic.

Question is, will they be able to regroup with different plaintiffs who do have iPods bought at the right time?

Jim and Shawn talk about drum loops, Home Screen apps, the CIA and David Lee Roth!

Sponsored by Backblaze (Visit the link for a free trial and then it’s just $5/month per computer for unlimited backup, and it backs up fast) and lynda.com (Start learning something new by visiting lynda.com/thebeard and get a FREE 10-day trial where you can access all of their 2,400+ courses).

Wall Street Journal:

Barnes & Noble Inc. has terminated its commercial agreement for its Nook e-reader with Microsoft Corp. , a move it said provides a clearer path toward the impending split of its business.

The bookstore retailer bought out Microsoft’s preferred interest in Nook for about $120 million in cash and stock, freeing the software giant from further investments in the business.

Barnes & Noble added it expects the planned split of its Nook Media unit from its retail stores to occur by the end of August, behind its initial projection for a separation by March. Ending the partnership would also make it easier for Barnes & Noble to sell the division if it chooses to explore that option.

Considering that Microsoft poured $300 million into the deal in the first place, with a commitment of another $300 million to stave off debt, I’d call this cutting your losses and moving on.

For those with an interest in such things, here’s a link to the Form 8-K filed by Barnes and Noble. The 8-K is required when a publicly traded US company has news of major financial impact, like the retirement of a CEO or an upcoming merger.

New York Times:

As some in Europe call for multinational companies to pay more taxes, Britain on Wednesday proposed a new 25 percent tax on the local profits of international companies, including tech giants like Google that use complicated structures to reduce their tax burden. > The so-called Google tax, which would go into effect in April, is part of European efforts to force global companies like Amazon, some of which have faced criticism from local lawmakers for their aggressive tax-avoidance structures, to pay more tax in countries where they have large operations.

Google’s response:

A spokesman for Google declined to comment about the British tax announcement on Wednesday, but Eric Schmidt, the company’s executive chairman, wrote in The Financial Times in June that restrictions on companies’ tax structures would lead to “less innovation, less growth and less job creation.”

Tax incentives exist to bring corporate earnings to that locality. If you want Apple/Google/Amazon to funnel their money through your jurisdiction, you’ve got to give them a reason for doing so. If you raise the tax rate, they will move the shell game elsewhere. Similarly, when managing personal finances abroad, understanding regional tax policies is essential. For instance, filing your tax return in Thailand can offer expats beneficial tax arrangements, allowing them to make the most of local incentives.

Google is building what it hopes is a much less annoying replacement for CAPCHA, the mechanism that tests to see whether you are a bot or a human.

This latest version uses a much more mobile and human friendly series of puzzles. As an example, the CAPCHA might present an image of a cat along with a series of nine additional images, asking you to tap all the images that also contain cats. This turns out to be simple for a human to solve and much harder for a bot to solve than the mathematically misshapen text in a traditional CAPCHA puzzle.

Interesting article.

The iTunes antitrust trial started on Tuesday and the mud is definitely slinging.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Apple deleted music that some iPod owners had downloaded from competing music services from 2007 to 2009 without telling users, attorneys for consumers told jurors in a class-action antitrust suit against Apple Wednesday.

“You guys decided to give them the worst possible experience and blow up” a user’s music library, attorney Patrick Coughlin said in U.S. District Court in Oakland, Calif.

When a user who had downloaded music from a rival service tried to sync an iPod to the user’s iTunes library, Apple would display an error message and instruct the user to restore the factory settings, Coughlin said. When the user restored the settings, the music from rival services would disappear, he said.

Apple directed the system “not to tell users the problem,” Coughlin said.

Perhaps Apple is evil. Perhaps the company was so afraid of losing to Real Networks, and other competing music services/devices, that they intentionally erased competing music from users’ iPods. Perhaps.

Another possibility is that this was an emerging design problem. That is, the sort of problem that comes up with brand new technology as it evolves to meet unforeseeable demands. When those sorts of problems occur, you make the best of things, try to find a way to make the customer happy, and then you move on with a lesson learned.

Have you ever lost data due to poorly thought through design? I certainly have. When that happens, do you ever consider that that data loss was intentional, the result of corporate greed?

To me, that’s the dividing line here. Coughlin is painting a picture of evil intent. In all the years I’ve been using Apple products, I’ve just never seen that kind of thinking.

UPDATE: At the heart of this lawsuit is Apple’s reaction to Real Networks’ reverse engineering of the iPod so they could place their music on hardware that Apple built, without any agreement with Apple. When Apple forced a factory reset, the DRM-protected music was restored, but the music uploaded via the Real Networks hack was lost.

Snarkiness aside (you can read about Steve Jobs’ comments here), is this an unreasonable response on the part of Apple?

Bond is back. More importantly, Daniel Craig is back. The new Bond movie has been announced. It’s called Spectre, and it is due for general release in November 2015. And the cast is fantastic. In addition to Daniel Craig (my favorite Bond of all time), there’s Voldemort himself (Ralph Fiennes) and the always interesting Christoph Waltz (in my opinion, the highlight of Inglourious Basterds).

The rest of the cast looks terrific, though I will miss Dame Judi Dench (sniff). Also, there’s a fantastically sexy new car for Bond to race around in, a just revealed custom Aston Martin DB10.

Check out the video below for the official announcement, live from Pinewood Studios, with the cast ( and car) on stage.

Can’t wait!

Reuters:

An anti-discrimination bill championed by Alabama’s only openly gay lawmaker will bear the name of Apple Inc Chief Executive Tim Cook, a native of the state who came out as gay in October.

Democratic state Representative Patricia Todd said on Wednesday the technology giant was initially hesitant about having Cook’s name on her bill but later embraced the idea.

Very happy to see Apple changed their mind regarding this. The bill won’t pass though.

Revenues from online shopping on “Cyber Monday” surged 15.4 percent higher than last year, setting a new all time peak in U.S. ecommerce, with online mobile sales overwhelmingly driven by customers wielding Apple devices.

This doesn’t really surprise me that much. People seem to be very comfortable using their iOS devices for many things, including purchasing items from a variety of stores. This is something I see that sets Apple apart from its competitors—people have confidence in its products, which leads to confidence in doing other tasks, like shopping.

Petapixel:

This September, Airbus took to the skies to capture photos of five of its massive test and development A350–900s. The photo shoot was meant to celebrate the certification of the company’s latest twin-engine, wide-body jetliner.

It was also probably one of the most expensive photo shoots we’ve ever come across.

At a cool $300 million for each of the five A350–900s, the cost of the subjects alone totals $1.5 billion dollars.

Any five element photo shoot is complicated. An airborne photo shoot is a thousand times more complicated. Doing it with five massive, quarter of a million-pound aircraft is utterly remarkable. Great video.

Eddy Cue:

“We feel we have to fight for the truth,” says Cue. “Luckily, Tim feels exactly like I do,” he continues, referring to Apple CEO Tim Cook, “which is: You have to fight for your principles no matter what. Because it’s just not right.”

Preach it, brother. I agree.

Colossal:

Ontario-based photographer Stephen Orlando is fascinated with human movement and uses programmable LED light sticks attached to kayak paddles, people, racquets, and other objects to translate that movement into photographic light paintings.

As I photographer myself, from an artistic point of view, these photos are fascinating. But the technical aspect of capturing the images in this way are equally interesting.

Twitter:

In our continuing effort to make your Twitter experience safer, we’re enhancing our in-product harassment reporting and making improvements to “block”.

This issue is a giant hairball for Twitter but one that has been long overdue for them to address. I’m looking forward to seeing this rolled out. I’m not looking forward to seeing how it will inevitably be abused.

I really like Amazon and Bezos for that matter. I hate the way the company continues to say how good it is without providing any kind of numbers to back it up. As much as I like them, the criticism is well founded.

Tech Republic:

Jonathan Zufi decided to take some of his thousands of photos of Apple products and collect them into a giant, self-published coffee table book. The result was Iconic: A Photographic Tribute to Apple, a 350-page tome filled with gorgeous pictures of products from Apple’s 30-year history.

I don’t think it’s the ultimate gift (a working Apple I would be), but I have this book and it is gorgeous. It would certainly make a great gift for any Apple fan.

Medium:

Every day tens of thousands of high-speed optical recognition cameras silently snap digital photos of plates, capturing in milliseconds an image of each tag and sometimes the driver as well. They are difficult to see if you’re not looking for them, but the sleek devices can be found clamped to patrol cars and the vehicles of debt chasers as well as mounted along streets and highways and in parking garages and shopping centers. A single reader, once activated, works furiously without assistance, capturing thousands of plate scans per shift.

But there are bugs.

We are being spied on in ways we don’t imagine, for reasons we can’t fathom and by “authorities” with little to no oversight.

The documents reveal that the agency worked behind the scenes for years, beginning after the release of the disco-inflected “Push Comes To Shove” single in 1981…

HAHAHAHA

“The last thing we wanted was to have another ‘Panama’ on our hands,” he added.

LOL!

“That being said, none of us could possibly have foreseen that For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge would indirectly result from our actions,” he added, solemnly shaking his head.

This is just classic. I love The Onion.

This is quite an article from former Google+ UX designer, Chris Messina.

[Via BGR]