Delta will distribute Microsoft Surface 2 tablets to its pilots and not Nokia’s “Sirius” tablet as originally planned. The move comes in the wake of a deal to distribute Nokia Lumia 820 smart phones to nearly 19,000 flight attendants.

Note to self: Never fly Delta.

This is very smart.

In a bid to make the ballpark experience more engaging for fans, Major League Baseball plans to roll out Apple’s new iBeacons technology to deliver targeted information and offers based on a fan’s location within the park, according to a new report.

Plan on seeing this in place in time for the beginning of next season. Brilliant!

This is an interesting take on the iPhone sales data.

If this single product were its own company in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index, IPhone Inc. would outsell 474 of those companies—ranking between Wells Fargo (WFC) ($90.5 billion) and Marathon Petroleum (MPC) ($84.9 billion). The iPhone’s $88.4 billion in annualized revenue tops 21 of the 30 component companies in the Dow Jones industrial average—it would be the ninth-biggest stock in the Dow 30.

I’ve been an Apple fan since the Apple II days, have watched the company go through the wringer, teeter on the edge, bear a lot of trash talk. To watch this success unfold is incredibly gratifying to me. And, I’m sure, to the rest of the community.

I think this long time underdog status is part of the reason Apple fans are so enthusiastic about new product rollouts. Samsung can easily see the quality of the product, but I think they can’t see the beating heart underneath it all.

Slow release ultra capacitor technology, assuming it successfully makes its way to market, should be a real boon for small devices. Filling an ultra capacitor with power is like filling a glass of water. Happens in seconds, not hours.

But using capacitors to provide a steady flow of energy is something new. Still, like other capacitors, the new ones can be recharged quickly. The remote control can recharge in five minutes and run for many hours, maybe even days, depending on how often it is used to change channels, Mr. Sund said. And unlike the lithium-ion batteries used in phones, laptops and, now cars, capacitors do not lose storage space with age.

Doesn’t seem to be any barriers for remote controls and cameras. Key is, can they make this technology small enough to squeeze into an iPhone, yet still have it carry enough power to be useful.

Grantland:

Twenty years ago, people talked about Myst the same way they talked about The Sopranos during its first season: as one of those rare works that irrevocably changed its medium. It certainly felt like nothing in gaming would or could be the same after it.

If you remember the game, you remember that feeling of landing on Myst Island for the first time, staggeringly bereft of information in a way that felt like some kind of reverse epiphany, left with no option but to start exploring.

People who had never gamed before in their lives bought new computers so they could play Myst.

I remember playing Myst and being dumbfounded, confused, exhilarated, frustrated and fascinated all at the same time.

BBC News:

In the early hours of the 26th of September in 1983, the Soviet Union’s early-warning systems detected an incoming missile strike from the United States. The protocol for the Soviet military would have been to retaliate with a nuclear attack of its own.

But duty officer Stanislav Petrov – whose job it was to register apparent enemy missile launches – decided not to report them to his superiors, and instead dismissed them as a false alarm.

His decision may have saved the world.

Chilling story and terrifying to think what might have happened.

Steve Ballmer took the stage last night for his final annual employees meeting.

He departed to the strains of Michael Jackson’s “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” the song played at Microsoft’s first employee meeting in 1983, followed by “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” from the finale of “Dirty Dancing,” getting a standing ovation from the 13,000 or so Microsoft full-time employees in attendance.

“We have unbelievable potential in front of us, we have an unbelievable destiny,” said a visibly moved Ballmer, reusing a quote from the 1983 meeting. “Only our company and a handful of others are poised to write the future,” he continued. “We’re going to think big, we’re going to bet big.”

That’s just so Ballmer. I find his popularity mystifying. Watching the end of an era.

In this issue, Philip Michaels takes a humorous look at bad songs from otherwise great artists; Michael T. Rose looks at raising children in the modern day of TV; Marcus Mendes wonders why people aren’t as fanatic about what guitars people play as they are about what gadget you use; Chris Domico surveys friends and family to see what they do for backups; and Matt Dusenbury gives us a guide to coffee shop co-working.

Voting for the Sound on Sound Awards is open.

Oh, sweet justice!

People buying Galaxy Note 3s are finding out that they’re “region locked.” If you buy one in Europe, it won’t work outside of Europe. If you buy one in North America, it won’t work outside of North America. Even if the phone is unlocked and you use a SIM from a local carrier, the Galaxy Note 3 won’t work.

Nice job, assholes.

Have a new 3rd generation Apple TV and an iOS device that supports Bluetooth Low Energy? Then you have everything you need to do “tap to setup”. Follow the instruction in this Apple support document.

In a nutshell, you touch your iOS device to your Apple TV and a login screen will appear on your device. Login to your Apple ID, follow the instructions, and your Wi-Fi network and password, iTunes Store account, and Language and region format preferences will be transferred to your Apple TV.

This is cool. I bet the next Samsung phone will do this, too!

Godspeed You! Black Emperor (that is the name of the band) won this year’s Polaris Prize, given to the best full-length Canadian album for the album Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!. The album is brilliant, one of my absolute favorites, and you can listen to it in the embed below.

But what makes the linked article so worth reading is the band’s response to the folks who gave them the prize. Take a look.

This is sad.

This is the complete text of Businessweek’s interview with Jonathan Ive and Craig Federighi, parts of which appeared last week. Every bit as revealing as the Cook interview. I get a real sense of the excitement these two have working with each other. Clearly, they love what they are doing. This from Ive:

I have always found—and I know the ID team has always found—that the discoveries you make when you are lucky enough to sit next to somebody who represents a completely different expertise, those discoveries can be really profound, and they’re really exciting.

Federighi on process:

We would prototype. We would review how it felt. Did it really work in the way we hoped it did once it was in our hands? We would get versions of it that we would live on, and then we would get together and we’d say, “I’m using it and I like this, but this bit is not coming together quite the way we wished,” and we’d iterate. So a lot of those conversations are just driven by perfecting the product together.

Ive on the emergence of parallax:

One of the things that we were interested in doing is, despite people talked about this being “flat,” is that it’s very, very deep. It’s constructed and architected visually and from an informational point of view as a very deep UI, but we didn’t want to rely on shadows or how big your highlights could get. Where do you go? I mean, there is only so long you can make your shadows.

It wasn’t an aesthetic idea to try to create layers. It was a way of trying to sort of deal with different levels of information that existed and to try to give you a sense of where you were.

There’s so much great stuff here. Interesting to hear their back and forth on complexity and collaboration, on working for Tim Cook, and the changes Tim Cook brought to Apple’s supply chain. Brilliant read.

This is an important step. To give you some perspective on the size of a nanotube:

100 microns – width of human hair 10 microns – water droplet 8 microns – transistors in Cedric 625 nanometres (nm) – wavelength of red light 20-450 nm – single viruses 22 nm latest silicon chips 9 nm – smallest carbon nanotube chip 6 nm – cell membrane 1 nm – single carbon nanotube

Fascinating.

Nineteen companies caught writing fake reviews on websites such as Yelp, Google Local and CitySearch have been snared in a year-long sting operation by the New York Attorney General, and will pay $350,000 in penalties.

Wow.

Seriously Samsung?

Some of these are fantastic. My favorite? The hackey-sack guy in the Apple Store. Wow.

No. Your iPhone is not waterproof.

“Update to iOS 7 and become waterproof” claims the ad (see below) explaining that “In an emergency, a smart-switch will shut off the phone’s power supply and corresponding components to prevent any damage to your iPhone’s delicate circuitry.”

C’mon, people. Use your noggin.

Nice walkthrough of the changes that came to the Photos and Camera apps with the move from iOS 6 to iOS 7.

Tim Cook’s promise to “double-down on secrecy” seems to be working, at least as far as analysts are concerned.

Fast forward to this year’s iPhone lauch: Munster, after observing iPhone 5c & 5s launch day lines and taking notes, reiterated his firm’s prediction of weekend sales of 5 to 6 million, detailed as “2.5 million iPhone 5s” and “3 million units” of iPhone 5c.

In parallel, KGI analyst Ming-Chi Kuo predicted sales of 6 to 8 million.

When Apple announced sales of 9 million iPhones over the weekend, Munster told Bloomberg, “When I saw that 9-million number, I basically fell out of my chair.”

This from a guy who is traditionally on the high side when it comes to predicting Apple unit shipments.

I really like the Line 6 gear.

Scouting NY:

the properties in Monopoly were in fact named after the streets of Atlantic City. Monopoly itself has a long and complicated history, but the addition of Atlantic City-based street names can be traced to one Ruth Hoskins. Hoskins had learned a version of the game in Indianapolis, and upon moving to Atlantic City in 1929, made her own copy from scratch naming properties after streets where her friends lived.

This past weekend, I was driving through south Jersey, and decided to make a quick detour through Atlantic City to see what the Monopoly board looks like in real life.

I had forgotten that the Monopoly properties were real. Sadly, none of them match up to what I imagined them to look like.

Chuck Wendig:

You don’t want books to be pirated; you implement DRM. DRM mostly just pisses off regular users who suddenly have reduced access to the thing they thought they owned. They decide to become pirates, instead, because it’s easier and it gives them the access to the content in the way that they want it.

DRM creates — and then challenges — pirates.

It punishes regular readers.

Funny, interesting piece from the writer about publishers and publishing.