Lots of great Mac games here from Aspyr.

Jim Dalrymple and Dan Benjamin talk about the evolution of a small business, making things you like instead of what the audience wants, wearable tech, guitar modeling vs. the real thing, and more.

From Microsoft’s MSDN blog:

Consistent with our previously announced commitment to match Amazon on prices for commodity services, we are cutting prices on compute by up to 35% and storage by up to 65%. We recognize that economics are a primary driver for some customers adopting cloud, and stand by our commitment to match prices and be best-in-class on price performance.

First Google announced their price cuts, then Amazon followed suit. Took a while, but that third domino finally fell.

Welcome to the cloud commodities market.

Has it been another year again?! Because, really, reading the work of these pundits, it seems like it’s been a lot longer. But catalog the atrocities we must! For history must know … that … uh …

Ladies and gentlemen, the Macalope.

If you know the difference between the Apple A6 and the A7, and if the term ARMv8-A means anything to you, then this read will likely bring you great joy. Anand Lal Shimpi is one smart guy.

So very great. From The Verge’s post:

There’s one particularly interesting shot around two minutes into the video that shows Obi Wan Kenobi being run through by Darth Vader’s lightsaber. In Lucas’ cut of Episode IV, the blade passes through an ethereal Obi Wan; in the early shot, it rips through his cloak, leaving a trail of fire and the aging Jedi’s upper body hanging in the air as his lower body slumps to the floor.

[Via The Verge]

Slide Rule is a terrific resource, a collection of online courses of all stripes.

Education is changing, with great educators from around the world increasingly putting their amazing courses online. We believe we are in the early days of a revolution that will not only increase access to great education, but also transform the way people learn.

SlideRule is our way of contributing to the movement. We help you discover the world’s best online courses in every subject – courses that your friends and thousands of other learners have loved.

Many of the courses are free, some are gathered from places like Lynda.com and have an associated fee. If you have any interest in moving into a new field or just stretching yourself, spend a few minutes to browse the course catalog. Some great stuff here.

For the UN’s International Day for Mine Awareness and Assistance in Mine Action taking place on April 4, New Museum in New York City will host an exhibit that uses iBeacons to simulate a virtual minefield and let anyone experience the danger of land mines.

Fantastic use of iBeacons.

Time:

If you wanted to pick a single date to mark the beginning of the modern era of the web, you could do a lot worse than choosing Thursday, April 1, 2004, the day Gmail launched.

Scuttlebutt that Google was about to offer a free email service had leaked out the day before. But the idea of the search kingpin doing email was still startling, and the alleged storage capacity of 1GB—500 times what Microsoft’s Hotmail offered—seemed downright implausible. So when Google issued a press release date-stamped April 1, an awful lot of people briefly took it to be a really good hoax. (Including me.)

Gmail turned out to be real, and revolutionary. And a decade’s worth of perspective only makes it look more momentous.

I still remember getting that Google press release and thinking, “This is the stupidest April Fool’s Day prank ever.”

Speaking as an amateur photographer, I think Allyson Kazmucha did a great job with this comparison. Looking at the pics, I don’t think the panoramas were a tie—the iPhone 5s won that.

“Mozilla’s new CEO, Brendan Eich, is an opponent of equal rights for gay couples,” the message said. “We would therefore prefer that our users not use Mozilla software to access OkCupid.”

“What Google have done thus far, I wouldn’t be seen dead wearing. It really looks pretty stupid,” he said.

Indeed.

[Via Om]

Great news for China.

Johnny Cash is one of the best ever. I wish I could have met him.

This is so incredibly cool.

Steven Aquino:

So often, the tech commentariat — and a few of my Android-loving friends — disparage Apple for a perceived “lack” of innovation, arguing that Cupertino has failed to deliver to market anything truly innovative and revolutionary since introducing the original iPad in 2010.

The problem with exclusively tying innovation to hardware is that it misses, obviously, the innovation that can be made in terms of software. More specifically, I contend that an underrated aspect of Apple’s ability to innovate is the strides made by Apple’s Accessibility efforts, particularly on iOS.

What a great article.

VintageZen:

I’ve collected print ads from Apple, from their earliest days in the late 1970s to the present, which illuminate their continued focus on simplicity in design. In the first part of this two part series, I’ll look at Apple’s first twenty years of advertising.

We often think about Apple’s TV commercials when we talk about their advertising but for many years, it was all about print ads. How many of these do you remember?

Satya Nadella formally names Scott Guthrie as EVP of Cloud and Enterprise, Phil Spencer boss of all things Xbox, and Stephen Elop, former Nokia CEO, as EVP Microsoft Devices Group.

TechCrunch:

Late last night, a tweet was spread far and wide showing that a DMCA notice had blocked a file from being shared on a Dropbox user’s account.

What was going on? Was Dropbox suddenly doing something sketchy? Were they suddenly lurking around their users’ folders, digging for copyrighted material hiding amongst personal files?

Nope. The system is neither new, nor sketchy. It’s been in place for years.

You may have seen the original tweet fly around on the weekend. As is often the case, if you wait – rather than Chicken Little panic – someone comes up with a good explanation for the “offence”.

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This argument has been going on for a long time and I always find it interesting.

Eat24 is a food delivery service, with a pretty sizable following on Facebook. All that is about to change.

From the Eat24 blog:

Dear Facebook,

Hey. It’s Eat24. Look, we need to talk. This isn’t easy to say since we’ve been together so long, but we need to break up. We’d love to say “It’s not you, it’s us” but it’s totally you. Not to be rude, but you aren’t the smart, funny social network we fell in love with several years back. You’ve changed. A lot.

Eat24 spent years accumulating fans and likes on Facebook and is so upset with changes Facebook is making, they are deleting their entire Facebook presence.

From the linked re/code article:

The crux of the problem lies in a number of changes Facebook is making to its News Feed algorithms, according to recent reports, that when implemented will drastically reduce the number of people who will see a marketer’s posts.

Instead, it’s a way to shift marketers over to actually forking over cash to Facebook by paying to promote their posts to their thousands — or in some cases millions — of followers.

Both the blog post and the re/code article are fascinating reads. They each touch on the issue of Facebook being a huge battleship making a very slow change in direction, from accumulating followers to reaping revenue.

As with any major change, there will be breakage. If Facebook’s new algorithms and revenue model provide value, Facebook will succeed. If not, Facebook will either find a better path or will slowly fade in significance.

New York Times:

Some features in Samsung devices that Apple objects to are part of Google’s Android operating system, by far the most popular mobile operating system worldwide, running on more than a billion devices made by many manufacturers. That means that if Apple wins, Google could have to make changes to critical Android features, and Samsung and other Android phone makers might have to modify the software on their phones.

Given the incredible complexity of bringing a new Android OS to market, and the glacial adoption rates, this could be crushing. But I suspect the change will either be delayed to death, or be solved in a cross-licensing or financial arrangement.

On Thursday, April 3rd, Google will split their stock, creating two stocks, each of which will start at approximately half the current share value. I thought the logic behind the split was interesting.

Via Seeking Alpha (free reg-wall):

The current shares you see trading are Class A. For each Class A share, investors will receive a share of the new Class C stock. If you assume that the market works properly, each of these shares will trade for about $560 post split, based on Friday’s close of $1,120.15.

Class C shares will have no voting rights, which is why Google is doing this. With this move, the goal is to keep co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in control for a longer time period. The two own mostly Class B shares, which contain 10 times the voting power of Class A shares. A recent AP article states that the two own 56% of shareholder votes despite owning less than 15% of stock issued.

Once shares are split, Google can start using the Class C shares for compensation, acquisitions, and other dilutive items. Since these shares contain no voting power, Page and Brin won’t have their voting rights reduced as quickly as they would under the old system. At the end of 2013, according to the 10-K filing, Google had 335.832 million shares outstanding, of which 279.325 million were Class A, and 56.507 million were Class B.

Seems to me, the fact that there will be two different stock classes, one with voting rights and one without, will cause confusion in the market. Why would someone buy Class C shares when they could get Class A voting shares for the same price?The market will correct all this, I suspect, but still, if you have even the teeniest interest in the stock market, an upcoming learning experience.

She left behind a remarkable body of work — from her poignant diaries to her magnificent essays to her little-known children’s books to “the longest and most charming love letter in literature” — and a cohort of heartbroken friends, but the most stirring thing she left behind was her suicide letter to her husband Leonard.

Great timeline on the Strat. I would love to have one of the 60th anniversary models.