You’ve no doubt seen time lapse videos, where the action in a video is speeded up by trimming a video to show only one frame in ten, say. Time lapse videos are jumpy.
Microsoft’s research labs have introduced a new form of time lapse video, called Hyperlapse. Words don’t do it justice.
The video below is long, but thoughtful and riveting. It make the case that just as horses have been replaced by technology, humans are next. If that sounds like silly logic, invest one minute, just to see what you think.
From the narrative:
Self driving cars aren’t the future. They’re here and they work. Self-driving cars have driven hundreds of thousands of miles up and down the California coast and through cities, all without human intervention. The question is not if they’ll replace cars, but how quickly.
They don’t need to be perfect, they just need to be better than us. Human drivers, by the way, kill 40,000 people a year with cars, just in the United States. Given that self-driving cars don’t blink, don’t text while driving, don’t get sleepy or stupid, it’s easy to see them being better than humans because they already are.
Self driving cars replacing human drivers is already a done deal. That die is cast. This is just one small example of what is coming.
Ashley Durance:
“The thing about the East Coast is it’s so beautifully Canadian.”
The Publisher and I were lucky enough to have been born in Nova Scotia, Canada. He is lucky enough to still live there. Even though I’ve been gone for 25 plus years, I still think of Nova Scotia my home. This photo series captures some of the beauty of it.
There are some great tips in here.
Elizabeth Holmes is only 30 years old, but has a lifetime of success. Back in 2003, Holmes was a sophomore at Stanford University and envisioned a process of performing blood tests with a device that required much less blood (just a drop) than existing blood tests (normally requiring a vial or two of blood).
Fast forward to today, and she’s a billionaire, running Theranos. Her goal is to change the world. She wears black, and operates her company in super stealth mode, jealously guarding her company’s secrets.
This is a fascinating story, one that reminds me in many ways of Steve Jobs and Apple.
SmartThings started as a KickStarter in 2012. Astonishing.
Right around the closing rounds of last month’s World Cup matches, armed robbers raided a Samsung electronics factory in Brazil, subduing workers and guards before making off with about US$6.3m worth of mobile phones and computers.
Turns out, part of that booty has surfaced in Paraguay, about 1,000 km due west. Here’s a Google Translate version of the story [Hat tip to Marcus Mendes].
Last week, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh rejected the US$324.5 million Apple, Google recruiting lawsuit settlement. This week, Apple shareholder R. Andre Klein sued the Steve Jobs’ estate, along with Tim Cook and others, claiming Apple “misled investors and damaged the value of the company”.
The case was filed by shareholder R Andre Klein on behalf of all Apple shareholders.
In the papers, he criticised Jobs’ “zealous pursuit of profits”.
“Jobs’s conduct is a reminder that even widely respected businessmen can knowingly commit unlawful acts in the zealous pursuit of profits.
“In this case, Jobs and the other individual defendants knowingly caused Apple to enter into agreements that violated California law and US antitrust laws.”
The Verge:
Apple’s CEO Tim Cook is the latest notable person to undertake the Ice Bucket Challenge, and doused himself with icy water in the name of charity at a company event earlier today. The challenge was created to raise money for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. So far, numerous celebrities and tech personalities have undertaken the challenge, including Apple’s marketing chief Phil Schiller, who posted a shots of himself getting doused on a beach today.
“Under the rules you also get to call out others who have to do the challenge themselves, or face social shame.” Really? Do you really think these kinds of powerful people can be peer pressured into doing things?
Some people are sick bastards.
Behold, Hanx Writer, created by Tom Hanks. Hanx Writer recreates the experience of a manual typewriter, but with the ease and speed of an iPad.
I must admit, this is a pretty cool app. It’s great when someone can take a passion, like a typewriter, and create an app. The @AppStore will have a live chat with Hanks this morning at 9 am PT.
The network effect is the idea that the value of a product or service is dependent on the number of others using it. If you are breaking ground on a new business area that depends on the network effect, this anecdote offers some terrific insight.
The anecdote goes this like: One telephone has no value. Two telephones have a wee bit of value. After 100 phones, you may know someone with a phone, and if so, then there is value in you signing up for telephone service. After 100,000 phones, you very likely know many people with phones. And at 1,000,000 phones, many of your friends, colleagues, and family will have phones, making the service highly valuable.
Interesting read, especially if you’ve got a bit of the entrepreneur in you.
Here’s one for Gruber’s Claim Chowder file. Pandora CFO Mike Herring, speaking with Oppenheimer Securities analyst Jason Helfstein at an investment conference:
I don’t have much comment on Beats. Frankly, it’s not a competitive service in any form today. iTunes Radio is much more of it, competitive service and really had no impact on us long-term. If we do our job well, they’ll continue to provide the best service possible, I think Apple has been a really important partner to us in a lot of ways, we don’t see that changing any time soon. So only time will tell but we feel really confident in our position.
Time will tell on this one. Certainly Beats in its current form is not a directly competing service, but I would definitely not bet against Jimmy Iovine (with his incredible music industry contacts) and Apple (with the iTunes ecosystem and a massive war chest in place).
From a letter released today by Lisa Jackson, former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and now Apple’s environmental director:
> Recently, we received some questions about whether the chemicals benzene and n-hexane are used in the manufacturing of our products. Apple treats any allegations of unsafe working conditions extremely seriously. We took immediate investigative action, sending specialized teams into each of our 22 final assembly facilities, and found no evidence of workers’ health being put at risk. We’ve updated our tight restrictions on benzene and n-hexane to explicitly prohibit their use in final assembly processes.
At the same time, Apple also released their Regulated Substances Specification to the public. The spec is complex and the list of regulated substances is both detailed and quite long. Benzene and n-hexane are both prohibited “from use in all final assembly manufacturing processes” and other uses are subject to specified breathing zone restrictions.
Hard to fault Apple’s methods here. They’ve laid it out for all the world to see. Now its all up to the supply chain auditing process to make sure these prohibitions are taking hold, as well as ensuring traceability in logistics.
The Daily Beast:
For years, one man has approved virtually every beer label design in the United States. Among brewers, he’s a tyrant. A legend.A pedantic pain in the ass.
Brewers and legal experts speak of him in hushed tones, with equal parts irritation and reverence.
And he goes by the name “Battle.”
I’d never thought of the fact that someone would have to approve beer labels.
The Globe and Mail:
Sugars are themselves toxins, some researchers suggest, that cause obesity, diabetes, hyper- tension and Alzheimer’s disease. Sugar has joined salt and fat on the list of dietary evils. Governments and health experts are urging people to cut back their daily intake.How did we get ourselves into this unhappy state?
It’s a shame something so many of us love and crave is potentially so deadly.
Connectedly:
One of the easiest ways for to jump into the connected home space is with some awesome connected lighting. Smart lights are simply bulbs (and usually a bridge or hub) that replaces your standard light bulbs and offer more functionality — namely being able to control them from your smartphone or tablet. These Wi-Fi bulbs are typically more expensive than standard bulbs, but last just as long (if not longer), plus they go above and beyond just keeping you out of the dark.
If I was a home owner, I’d probably investigate these (and other) kinds of lighting systems. Do any of you use/recommend any particular system you use in your own home?
Wired:
For almost nine months, I have been trying to set up an interview with (Edward Snowden) – traveling to Berlin, Rio de Janeiro twice, and New York multiple times to talk with the handful of his confidants who can arrange a meeting. Among other things, I want to answer a burning question: What drove Snowden to leak hundreds of thousands of top-secret documents, revelations that have laid bare the vast scope of the government’s domestic surveillance programs?
Interesting story about a fascinating and polarizing person.
An interactive children’s story platform, that lets you create a 3D character of your child and make him/her the hero of every story.
Go watch the video—it’s brilliant!
Iain Anderson had his daughter recite the famous All the world’s a stage monologue from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, one line at a time.
This is fascinating to watch, certainly, but it also raises an interesting point. I found the meaning in this monologue much clearer, much easier to digest, because it was broken up into fragments, each of which was filmed as an individual scene. There’s a lesson there for teachers, I think. Regardless, enjoy.
Intel’s current chip architecture, branded as Haswell, uses a 22 nanometer process. They are about to roll out a significantly smaller and faster architecture, known as Broadwell, which uses a 14 nanometer process.
Because Intel’s new chip is so small—25% smaller than its predecessor—and requires substantially less power, it may allow for the creation of tablets and other devices without the whirr and thickness of the cooling fans currently used to keep chips from overheating. That’s not a guarantee, but it’s the first time it’s been a serious design possibility.
Running with less energy may seem like a minor thing, but it’s everything for mobile devices—which are basically giant batteries inside pretty cases, with a few other components. It’s also a broadside against a major Intel competitor, ARM Holdings. ARM chips are cheap to make and don’t require much power—enabling thinner, lighter devices with smaller batteries. They’re used in iPhones, iPads, Androids, Windows phones, and some Windows tablets.
This is an important pivot for Intel. Broadwell is their first chipset designed with mobile devices in mind. Unfortunately for Intel, this solution came late enough to the game to give ARM a real leg up on the market. Is this chip small enough and cheap enough to turn Apple’s head? Remains to be seen.
One thing worth a look. If you look at the slide deck at the bottom of the linked article, check out pages 22-24 for some pretty cool pictures of actual Haswell and Broadwell transistors. For an even better look, here’s a link to the original Intel deck.
There was trouble on the internet yesterday.
Tuesday Morning, various networks experienced outages from 4-6am EDT (8-10am UTC). [It] appears the outage was the result of a somewhat anticipated problem with older routers and their inability to deal with the ever increasing size of the Internet’s routing table.
Older routers were designed to handle an impossibly huge, not possible to pass, 512K router table entries. So big. No chance this could ever be an issue. Except now we’re hovering right around that threshold and some older routers with that limit are being tested and found wanting.
From this Cisco document:
In March, 2014, the Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) Report, which provides statistics on the global Internet routing table, reported that the global Internet routing table had passed 500,000 routes for the first time in Internet history.
Most platforms have more than enough space to support larger routing tables, but the default configurations might require adjustment. As the Internet routing table approaches 512,000 routes, it can cause the Catalyst 6500 and 7600 3BXL-based modules to exceed the default routing TCAM allocations.
Bottom line, this is fixable, even without switching out your old routers. Presumably, yesterday’s outage has spurred IT folks to action.
It’s a growth spurt.
PC World:
Amazon.com has introduced a card reader coupled with smartphone and tablet apps that aim to provide small businesses with a way to accept payments on these devices.
The company is positioning its Amazon Local Register as a secure card reader and mobile app that will provide local businesses a broad set of tools to accept credit and debit cards through a smartphone or tablet and keep track of their operations, it said Wednesday.
The service can only be used to accept payments in the U.S., and a U.S. bank account is required for transferring funds from the Amazon Payments account to the user’s bank account.
At least in the short term, this is excellent news for both consumers and small businesses, as Amazon will push down the per transaction fee, down to 1.75 percent per swipe til the end of the year, then rising to 2.5 percent per swipe.
Square collects a fee of 2.75 percent per swipe, while PayPal Here charges 2.7 percent per swipe transaction in the U.S. and Intuit’s GoPayment starts at 1.75 percent per transaction.
Cult of Mac:
The tragic news of Robin Williams’ sudden death has sent most of us on a YouTube binge, watching TV shows, movies, and stand-up comedy bits from the funniest man who ever lived, and now Apple is paying its respects to late-comedian with a new iTunes section.
CoM says, “if you scroll through you can find 40 of his other gems like “Death to Smoochie”…” I’m sorry. I loved Robin Williams but “Death to Smoochy” was an awful movie.
This article demonstrates how to use CSS transforms, perspective and some scaling trickery to create a pure CSS parallax scrolling website.
Check out the demo.
TUAW:
There’s a copy of the U.S. Constitution on each and every Mac in the Dictionary app.You’ll not only find such exciting information as who was on the editorial staff and advisory board for the Dictionary, but also a bunch of useful references.
In addition to the aforementioned Constitution of the United States of America, there’s also a complete Language Guide, a history of the English language, a list of the fifty states and each state capital, a list of every President of the U.S. from George Washington to George W. Bush (not sure what happened to the current incumbent…), the Declaration of Independence, a list of countries of the world, a list of chemical elements from hydrogen to meitnerium, a cross-reference of standard to metric measure conversions, and the Arabic, Hebrew, Greek and Russian alphabets.
Kind of interesting, especially for us trivia nerds, but a little odd to have this info buried in the Dictionary app.
Today marks five years since the passing of one of the world’s most unique innovators of all time, Les Paul.
Much respect Les.
Wow, these are just great.
Certainly worth looking at the numbers and reading Tim Cook’s message.
Sébastien Page:
Even though they might not be able to activate the lost or stolen device, they might still try to put it up for sale, and if you don’t know what to look for, you might very well be buying an iPhone that has been locked and cannot be activated.
Good advice.