Heavy rains triggered the collapse of a retaining wall on one side of a railroad track. The road has partially collapsed when this video was shot. The guy who shot the video? His Jeep was one of the cars that got swallowed up.

The action happens about a minute into the video, and it happens fast. It does get a bit loud, so you might want to turn your volume down if you are at work.

This has happened before. Apple came away with worldwide rights to the iPhone name.

Happened with the iPad too.

My opinion? If Apple does come out with an iWatch product, they’ll find the path to protect the name legally.

Finally.

The big story here is that Bill Gates has been selling his Microsoft shares on a regular basis:

Gates, who started the company that revolutionized personal computing with school-friend Paul Allen in 1975, has sold 20 million shares each quarter for most of the last dozen years under a pre-set trading plan.

And now Steve Ballmer is the largest shareholder:

With his latest sales this week, Gates was finally eclipsed as Microsoft’s largest individual shareholder by the company’s other former CEO, Steve Ballmer, who retired in February, but has held on to his stock.

According to documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday, Gates now owns just over 330 million Microsoft shares after the sales this week. Ballmer owns just over 333 million, according to Thomson Reuters data.

If this trend keeps up (and he’s been doing this for about 12 years, so this is a true trend), Gates will have zero Microsoft shares in about 4 years. Will be interesting to see if he allows that to happen.

Many thanks to New Relic for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS this week. At New Relic, we make it super easy to build faster and better performing mobile applications. Is using New Relic really that easy? Yes, yes it is. We know you’re busy coding (and reading The Loop), that’s why in just five minutes you can deploy New Relic and be looking at game-changing data. Our first-of-its-kind SaaS mobile app monitoring solution pinpoints problems quickly in your mobile app. Spend less time troubleshooting, get more positive reviews and focus your time where it matters – on developing new features and growing your user base. Use New Relic to track your app performance across devices and networks and get full end-to-end visibility. The people using your app will thank you for it.

If you are in the market for a new MacBook Air, take a read.

Yesterday I posted a link to an article on the great works of software. My short list:

I would have placed Unix at #1, the original Mac OS at #2, Mac OS X at #3, and iOS at #4. But hey, that’s just me.

Yeah, totally missed the Apple I and Apple II, Apple DOS, and Woz’s version of BASIC. Not sure where they should go on the list, but Apple DOS and BASIC certainly belong.

The linked article is Woz reminiscing about his journey creating BASIC for the Apple I.

The key to games was BASIC. Bill Gates was unknown except in the electronics hobby world. Everyone in our club knew that he’d written BASIC for the Intel microprocessor. I sniffed the wind and knew that the key to making my computer good (popular) was to include a high-level language and that it had to be BASIC. Engineers programming in FORTRAN were not going to be what would start a home computer revolution.

The problem was that I had no knowledge of BASIC, just a bare memory that it had line numbers from that 3-day high-school experience. So I picked up a BASIC manual late one night at HP and started reading it and making notes about the commands of this language. Mind that I had never taken a course in compiler (or interpreter) writing in my life. But my friend Allen Baum had sent me xerox copies of pages of his texts at MIT about the subject so I could claim that I had an MIT education in it, ha ha.

A great article.

Ars Technica:

The second blockbuster Apple v. Samsung patent trial has ended, and it looks like a Pyrrhic victory for Apple.

The Cupertino company can notch a second win, but with far less damages than it requested. Apple wanted $2.2 billion, and the jury awarded it $119.6 million, or just over 5 percent of what Apple had requested.

I don’t think this ends here though.

As with any list, there will be much disagreement on what was included and left off the list. That aside, I found this to be a thoughtful read.

As far as I can tell, no truly huge world-shifting software product has ever existed in only one version (even Flappy Bird had updates). Just about every global software product of longevity grows, changes, adapts, and reacts to other software over time.

So I set myself the task of picking five great works of software. The criteria were simple: How long had it been around? Did people directly interact with it every day? Did people use it to do something meaningful? I came up with the office suite Microsoft Office, the image editor Photoshop, the videogame Pac-Man, the operating system Unix, and the text editor Emacs.

I would have placed Unix at #1, the original Mac OS at #2, Mac OS X at #3, and iOS at #4. But hey, that’s just me.

Don’t know if Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as El Chapo, was the world’s most notorious drug lord, but I do know that this was one ripping yarn.

Washington Post:

Major U.S. technology companies have largely ended the practice of quietly complying with investigators’ demands for e-mail records and other online data, saying that users have a right to know in advance when their information is targeted for government seizure.

“Later this month, Apple will update its policies so that in most cases when law enforcement requests personal information about a customer, the customer will receive a notification from Apple,” company spokeswoman Kristin Huguet said.

This is good news for the customer and brave of the companies involved to stand up to the government on this issue.

One of the most-requested features for Twitter’s mobile apps may be on the cusp of arriving. Some users of the company’s iOS and Android clients are now seeing an option to mute accounts that they follow, preventing another user’s tweets and retweets from appearing in their timeline. The user remains muted until you manually unmute them. In essence, then, the mute feature works as a kind of stealth unfollow — you won’t be seeing another person’s tweets, but they won’t know that.

I am a fan of the stealth unfollow. The first vital step in a more sophisticated curation process.

iCloud offers much more than cloud backup and storage solutions. For instance, iCloud provides features that make photo/video sharing with your friends and family members an enjoyable experience. You may share photos/videos using your iOS device, Mac (OS X v10.9 or later and either iPhoto or Aperture), Apple TV or Windows PC (Windows 7 or later) and iCloud Control Panel 3.0 or later. For the purpose of this article, we are going to show how you can share photos/videos on your iOS device or your Mac.

An updated how-to on photo sharing with iCloud, iOS, and your Mac.

The invitation says:

A new conversation about health is about to begin. Be there when it starts.

The event is planned for May 28th, 10:30 am, San Francisco.

The real value of a bridge into health care on the tablet, phone or wrist is in giving the user the opportunity to collect medical data and make it easier for a professional to diagnose and treat. Tracking my pulse rate while I run is certainly valuable, but, I’d argue, tracking a diabetic’s glucose level and making that data available to the appropriate diagnostician has more value, certainly to the diabetic.

If Samsung is dipping their toes in the latter space, sure hope they know what they are getting into. Sharing patient data, at least in the US, is an undertaking fraught with regulations and oversight (read about HIPAA and Title II privacy rules for a prime example).

I can only imagine that this is a defensive play in anticipation of Apple’s WWDC announcements. Think it’ll work? Think Samsung will take the wind out of Apple’s WWDC sails? Not a chance.

SI.com:

Bob Paulsen, co-founder of PlayerLync, told SI.com that teams have video and documents sent to their iPads—even when the device is asleep—within minutes after a game ends, allowing them to watch and review without an Internet connection (quite a popular feature for road teams that are sitting on a bus or taking off from a tarmac). Comments and information can easily be added and shared. “Coaches and players insert their own audio, visual, text and clips,” Paulsen says, “and securely send them to one another.”

We see some of this in Apple’s “Your Verse” TV ad.

John Biggs:

If you’ve ever wondered how some videos get popular while others languish in obscurity (or, on the flipside, if you’d like to know how to get some sweet views), look no further than an individual Samsung hired to push their video of a little, walking (Samsung-branded) SD card to social. I’ll refrain from linking to the video as it’s not very exciting.

I really do hate that company.

It would be difficult to choose just one quote from this article. I really enjoyed it.

You don’t need to pack a retail store from floor to ceiling to sell products. I really like the experience, as well.

code:deck is a standard playing card deck sporting a stylish modern design. Each individual card features a code excerpt describing it in one of many programming languages.

These are just great.

Kaleidoscope is one of the world’s best tools for spotting differences in images and text, and now it supports the ignoring of leading, trailing and line-ending whitespace too. Kaleidoscope integrates directly with Git, Subversion, Mercurial, P4, and Bazaar to fit perfectly in your workflow.

I always found many car manufacturers badly lacking in this area.

I’m sure there could be more.

I usually keep my levels at -6db to -10db as well. It’s going to fluctuate during the recording, but I like to leave some headroom.

Sony Corp slashed its earnings guidance for the third time in a year on Thursday to barely 10 percent of its initial outlook as further losses from its PC exit cast a pall over its struggling electronics division.

Harsh.

James Dempsey rounds up a few apps that he really likes on the Mac. I hadn’t heard of a few of these.

Each key is a little OLED screen. I’d imagine you could use the entire keyboard as a single discrete display, or switch keyboards on the fly, to an accounting keyboard, for example.

Fascinating possibilities.

From Quartz:

Facebook’s moves today point to its ambition to become the glue that holds the mobile internet together the same way Google is the glue that holds the web together. Google achieved dominance on the pre-mobile internet world wide web with a similar strategy. Not only did it bring people to the websites via search, it also created a massive data-gathering machine that tracks people across the web and runs AdSense, the web’s biggest ad network.

Facebook made a series of announcements at F8, the Facebook developer’s conference, laying out its agenda to achieve that same position in mobile.

It is arguable that with Applinks (Facebook’s platform for deep-linking), it could wield more power than Google, which makes mobile operating systems and apps but doesn’t have insight into what its users are doing when they’re in other apps.

Facebook certainly has ambition. Seems like they are missing a key ingredient, search. Though they do have the massive postings of their user base to data mine.

Apple offers Pages, Numbers, and Keynotes, counterparts to Microsoft’s recently released Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. As you might expect, Google has now joined the fray with their Google Docs and Google Sheets iOS apps.

From a comment on Google’s official blog:

This whole thing is rather odd. First Google made Docs and Sheets part of Drive. Now it’s breaking them back out into their own standalone apps. Except that they’re still part of Drive as well.

I agree. An odd branding move. Google’s version of Keynote and PowerPoint, Slides, is said to be on its way to iOS soon. [Via 9to5Mac]