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.

Farhad Manjoo:

For the better part of a month, I’ve been trying to replace the laptop that I use for my daily work, an Apple MacBook Pro, with Microsoft’s new tablet computer, the Surface Pro 3. I say “trying” because that’s what it has felt like; this is a machine that I’ve had to put a lot of work into adjusting to, in the hope that, at some point, I’d get used to it and see some kind of payoff.

Microsoft had an interesting idea with the Surface tablet, but I believe they failed to adequately build the infrastructure necessary to make the tablet successful. I have maintained from the beginning that desktop apps are not a good fit for a touchscreen device. I still believe that to be true.

Ever wondered how Amazon really works? The linked article gives you an insider’s look at all the moving pieces that work together to let you buy practically anything you’d ever want.

Shoppers take for granted that Amazon will have what they want. The only time they notice is when Amazon doesn’t. “The biggest failure you can have is not to have what they’re looking for,” says Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor, which makes cloud-based software for third-party sellers to analyze their sales and marketing campaigns on Amazon, eBay, Google, and elsewhere.

Starting in 2006, the rate of Amazon’s sales growth took off, an upswing Wingo credits to the launch of unlimited 2-day shipping through Amazon Prime the previous year alongside the rise of the company’s third-party marketplaces. The arrival of third-party sellers fueled an “explosion in selection,” Wingo says, that also gave Amazon a powerful way to hedge the risk of stocking products too far out along the long tail of marginal popularity. Instead of sinking its own money into inventory that might sit for 60 days, Amazon could let someone else fill in that gap.

Lest you think this is merely a puff piece:

Such power and speed can come at a grave price. Amazon is facing a federal investigation into the death of a worker at a Pennsylvania fulfillment center who was reportedly struck and pinned by a pallet jack she was operating. Much has also been written about how the unrelenting nature of Amazon’s fulfillment system can foster exploitive, sometimes hazardous working conditions that have become the target of at least one set of class-action lawsuits.

On the heels of Sunday’s passive aggressive Tim Cook profile (my take here, Jim’s take here), The Times posted a brief interview they did with Jony Ive that served as background material.

Jony Ive has the heart of a sculptor. He works with a variety of material, immersing himself, learning the various properties, then brings out the design hidden in the material.

Deep in the culture of Apple is this sense and understanding of design, developing and making. Form and the material and process – they are beautifully intertwined – completely connected. Unless we understand a certain material — metal or resin and plastic — understanding the processes that turn it from ore, for example – we can never develop and define form that’s appropriate.

There’s a strong sense of legacy, of values deeply entrenched in the Apple culture.

Steve established a set of values, and he established preoccupations and tones that are completely enduring – and he established those principles with a small team of people. I’ve been ridiculously lucky to be part of it. But Tim was very much part of that team – for that last 15 or 20 years.

Steve Jobs was the driving force that created this culture, but Tim and Jony, Craig and Phil, and the myriad talented folks who work with them, they carry this culture in their DNA, they bring these products to life, carry that legacy forward.

I find it terrifically interesting that the same player can kick two different balls in exactly the same way and have the two balls curve in different directions.

“The details of the flow of air around the ball are complicated, and in particular they depend on how rough the ball is,” says John Bush, a professor of applied mathematics at MIT and the author of a recently published article about the aerodynamics of soccer balls. “If the ball is perfectly smooth, it bends the wrong way.”

By the “wrong way,” Bush means that two otherwise similar balls struck precisely the same way, by the same player, can actually curve in opposite directions, depending on the surface of those balls. Sound surprising?

It’s all about the Magnus Effect.

This phenomenon was first described by Isaac Newton, who noticed that in tennis, topspin causes a ball to dip, while backspin flattens out its trajectory. A curveball in baseball is another example from sports: A pitcher throws the ball with especially tight topspin, or sidespin rotation, and the ball curves in the direction of the spin.

But it gets more complicated than that.

“The fact is that the Magnus Effect can change sign,” Bush says. “People don’t generally appreciate that fact.” Given an absolutely smooth ball, the direction of the curve may reverse: The same kicking motion will not produce a shot or pass curving in a right-to-left direction, but in a left-to-right direction.

Fascinating article.

Reuters:

Apple Inc reached an out-of-court settlement with U.S. states and other complainants in an e-book price-fixing class action lawsuit on Monday, effectively avoiding a trial in which the iPad maker faced more than $800 million in claims.

Apple is currently awaiting the results of its appeal of last July’s finding that Apple was liable for colluding with publishers. Yesterday’s settlement proposal has to be approved by the judge and is contingent on the outcome of the appeal.

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.

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.

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.

Even though Facebook forbids the buying and selling of Facebook pages, there is a thriving black market with a “likes” cartel. There’s a dark side to this, with DDoS attacks part of the cost of doing business. Like so:

“Bro.”

The message had been sent by someone who wasn’t his friend on the social network, someone using the alias “Anthony.*” It was a name Fyk had come to know and dread.

Minutes later, the traffic on his website, FunnierPics.net, nosedived. Google Analytics showed the number of active readers drop from 3,000 to zero instantly.

When Fyk, known online as Jason Michaels, clicked over to his company’s Facebook page, WTF Magazine, he found another message from Anthony.

“Site’s down :(.”

Fyk’s business was under attack, and not for the first time. He’d spent the past few years locked in ferocious virtual combat over his Facebook pages, battling a shadowy group of adversaries that he and his friends call Script Kiddies, on the assumption that they’re young hackers who exploit low-level vulnerabilities on others’ sites.

Fascinating read.

This is a good high-level overview of Apple’s newly announced Metal framework and shader language. Apple’s goal is to replace use of the general purpose OpenGL ES with the far more precisely targeted Metal.

The linked article is a good read, even if you are not a developer.

One announcement from WWDC that didn’t get much fanfare was a rule change concerning virtual currencies. From the App Store review guidelines:

Apps may facilitate transmission of approved virtual currencies provided that they do so in compliance with all state and federal laws for the territories in which the app functions

This rule change opened the door to the return of bitcoin to the App Store in the form of the Coin Pocket app. From coindesk.com:

Apple is making good on its recent bitcoin policy shift, with a new bitcoin wallet app appearing for download in the iOS App Store.

The ‘Coinpocket’ app is described by its developer as a wrapper for a previously available open source HTML5 version, this time with full access to the camera hardware for QR code scanning.

Credit Citation: https://criptoeconomia.com.br/trading/trading-app/

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, the video didn’t really have a proper director.

“It was a fairly new thing then, people using music videos as promotions for movies. It’s hard for Ivan to sit around and watch someone else direct something,” says Medjuck, who also has a small role in the video. “Ivan just sort of took over, as he is wont to do.”

When Ray Parker Jr. arrived on the set, Reitman told him, “Ray, you’re going to have a famous video because you’re going to have Ivan Reitman direct your video and I’ve never done a video before or after. There won’t be another one. This is it.”

30 years ago. Still a great movie. But I’ve always hated that video.

Dengue is a scourge of a disease. It’s spread by mosquitos and kills more than a million people every year. For more hints on how to spot if your home is infested with mosquitoes, you can check out the articles published online.

The disease is carried by mosquitoes, mostly the Aedes aegypti. Found in urban areas, Ae. aegypti has proven a particularly difficult mosquito species to control—it has developed a resistance to common insecticides and, because it bites during the day, bed nets are no protection against it. But now Brazilian health officials are running a pilot program using genetically modified mosquitoes to breed the population to death. The mosquitoes are the invention of British biotech company Oxitec, and they’ve had a gene inserted into them that kills them. In the lab, the mosquitoes can be fed a sort of antidote: a supplement that keeps them alive until it’s time to release them. Once they’re released, the clock starts ticking.

To get rid of them you can try using  an indoor insect fogger or indoor insect spray to kill mosquitoes and treat areas where they rest. These products work immediately, and may need to be reapplied. When using insecticides, always follow label directions. Only using insecticide will not keep your home free of mosquitoes. If you need more help, you can try this out. > > Oxitec’s mosquito-suppression solution consists of releasing the modified male mosquitoes into the wild—male mosquitoes don’t bite; it’s the females who do. The Oxitec males mate with female mosquitoes and create progeny that also have the lethal gene. Without the supplement, those progeny die. “By applying the Oxitec Control Programme to an area,” the company’s website says, “the mosquito population in that area can be dramatically reduced or eliminated.”

Remarkable. Here’s hoping this works, with no hidden consequences.

If you’ve ever kicked a soccer ball around, hit one with your forehead, you’ll appreciate this animated take on the evolution of soccer ball construction.

I found this profile frustrating, vexing. The tone is objective, but the prose manages to be damning at the same time, working in all the standard, shopworn stereotypes the Apple community has gotten used to having thrown their way.

Mr. Cook, who is 53, took over leadership of Apple nearly three years ago, after the death of Steve Jobs, the company’s revered founder. Like Walt Disney and Henry Ford, Mr. Jobs was intertwined with his company. Mr. Jobs was Apple and Apple was Jobs.

There’s this sense that Tim Cook is an empty shirt. I don’t have a problem reflecting on Steve Jobs and comparing Tim Cook’s approach to Steve’s. But there’s an undertone of snark to this profile, very well hidden. Except that it rises to the top in the title of one particular section, taken from this quote:

Mr. Brown’s colleague Chad Zeluff, 27, who saw Mr. Jobs deliver the keynote in 2007, put it this way: “Jobs is to Lennon what Cook is to Ringo.”

Leaving the question of Ringo Starr’s talent off the table, the comment is intended as a straight-out insult. Where’s the balance in posting a single negative quote? And then promoting that quote to a headline status to make it more prominent.

Consider this:

Ryan Scott, the chief executive of Causecast, a nonprofit that helps companies create volunteer and donation programs, called Mr. Cook’s charitable initiatives a “great start.” But Mr. Scott added that its programs are “not as significant as what other companies are doing.” Apple’s ambitions “could be much higher,” he said, given its money and talent. By comparison, Microsoft says that, on average, it donates $2 million a day in software to nonprofits, and its employees have donated over $1 billion, inclusive of the corporate match, since 1983. In the last two years, Apple employees have donated $50 million, including the match.

At first blush, this appears to be a crushing inditement of Tim Cook’s charitable initiatives. But the measurement is of employee gifts, not Apple’s. Apple matches in exactly the same way as Microsoft. More to the point, the author includes two numbers in the comparison, $1 billion for Microsoft versus $50 million for Apple. That is a huge difference, indeed. But let’s do a little math. That $1 billion was given over 31 years and is a self-reported number. The Apple number is over 2 years and no source for the number is given. Do that math and you’ll find that the numbers are much closer. To be truly objective, you’d really need to know the Microsoft donation numbers over the same 2 year period as the quoted Apple numbers.

Is Tim Cook perfect? No, of course not. But this article misses the point entirely. Take a few minutes and read this piece by John Gruber, entitled Only Apple. To me, this piece really captured the spirit of Apple under Tim Cook.

During the keynote last week, John Siracusa referenced The Godfather, quipping:

Today Tim settles all family business.

I’d say it’s more that Cook settled the family business back in October 2012. Last week’s keynote was when we, on the outside, finally saw the results. Apple today is firing on all cylinders. That’s a cliché but an apt one. Cook saw untapped potential in a company hampered by silos.

And:

Jobs was a great CEO for leading Apple to become big. But Cook is a great CEO for leading Apple now that it is big, to allow the company to take advantage of its size and success. Matt Drance said it, and so will I: What we saw last week at WWDC 2014 would not have happened under Steve Jobs.

I couldn’t agree more.

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.

Everyone knows about Pete Best and Stuart Sutcliffe, the former drummer and bass player for The Beatles who missed out on perhaps the biggest opportunity in musical history. But here are some other candidates for the Mount Rushmore of lousy timing.

Who controls the cloud? Interesting article on the companies battling it out for cloud supremacy.

Kyle Russell writes for Tech Crunch and covers Google Glass, among other things. Worlds collide as Kyle appears on a crushingly satirical Daily Show piece (seen below) on Glass.

The linked article gives an insider’s view on the making of the video.

Rather than respond to the show’s criticisms of Glass (because, let’s face it, they have a point), I thought it would be fun to shed light on what it’s actually like to film a segment on The Daily Show.

First off, we all knew exactly what we were getting into. I was contacted by a producer of the show who identified himself as such. There were no attempts made to trick any of us with claims that they were a news team from out of town.

An entertaining read. Watch the video first.

I’ve long been a fan of Miles O’Brien. He’s my kind of journalist, always curious and digging for understanding. Though he has covered a wide range of stories in his career, his focus has always been science and technology.

Then this happened.

I was on a reporting trip in the Far East, first to Japan for a story about the Fukushima reactor and then to the Philippines for one about genetically modified rice. As I was packing up my TV gear, a heavy Pelican case of equipment fell on my left forearm. What began as a fairly bad bruise evolved, over a couple of days, into something life-threatening: acute compartment syndrome, which blocks blood flow. When I got to a doctor in Manila, he recognized the problem and sent me in for emergency surgery. He tried to save the arm, but it was too late. It was a life-or-limb decision.

The linked story is really about life after the loss of his arm. Great read.

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.

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.

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.

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.