When I first read about stack ranking, I thought it was one of the stupidest fucking things I’d ever heard of. It actively dissuades talented people to work alongside one another, and, in fact, encourages people to surround themselves with the most mediocre idiots they can. Hopefully this one of many things the next Microsoft CEO will change when he or she cleans house.

The Stillwater brewery teamed up with Dan and David Thiesen, co-owners of the fair’s Ball Park Café, to create the beer. It will have a warm tan color, like the exterior of a mini donut, and a sweet, malty taste. As an added touch, it will be served in a glass with cinnamon and sugar on the rim.

This just might be crazy enough to be good!

A brilliant collection of anecdotes from past and present “Saturday Night Live” cast members on auditioning for the show.

Chevy Chase:

We had our cast and were back at [Studio] 8H, and there was a little room nearby with a long desk which could act as a stage. Lorne asked everybody to go up there and do something. At the end he said, “Chevy, get up there and do something.” So I made up some strange story about Gerald Ford. It was pretty clear that I was a funny guy. I was taller than everybody, and very handsome.

Heh. Lots of wonderful stuff here.

According to AllCast developer Koushik Dutta, the most recent Chromecast firmware update not only breaks the functionality third-party apps were using to stream local media and other stuff that doesn’t have built-in Chromecast support but breaks it on purpose.

It’s like they don’t want people to buy it.

Uber is a car service with a kick-ass iOS app. Launch the app and a map appears showing all the “black cars” in your area, with the time until the closest one can get to your location. Tap a button, the car is instantly dispatched. When the driver gets close, they’ll call and/or text you to let you know the car is near. You rank the drivers (1-5 stars) and they rank you, too. Terrific experience, just a bit more expensive than a cab, but much more convenient and incredibly reliable.

The fact that they are raising so much money is a sign of both the maturation of this space, and of its competitive nature.

The size of our devices are stuck at something of a bottleneck. We can’t exactly make them smaller because they’re so reliant on large, easily visible displays. So, the industry makes do, and makes the devices thinner, which reduces overall size without compromising display size. One object standing in the way of even thinner laptops is the hinge, and Apple might have found a way to remove that from the design equation.

Yesterday, a new patent application was published that describes “flexible segments” that interlock to form a rigid material. The material used isn’t some kind of top-secret new wonder metal only found deep within Apple’s subterranean volcano lair, but rather a process that can take rigid material — such as plastic or metal — and can cut it in such a way to create the flexible segments. The flexible segmented hinge could bend at various degrees, but that depends on the segments being cut in different patterns.

Intriguing.

Good.

Many thanks to F-Sim Space Shuttle for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week. F-Sim Space Shuttle is a fun and highly realistic flight simulator for iOS. Your goal is to land one of the most amazing aircrafts ever built: the Space Shuttle Orbiter. Flight dynamics and the head-up display are simulated in great detail and accuracy. During descent the orbiter is an extremely heavy, unpowered glider, so there’s only one chance to get it right. Air speeds two times faster and glide slopes seven times steeper than a typical airliner approach make for a unique challenge.

Landing a space shuttle is not easy, but there are several landing aids and tutorials that will help you make your first safe landing. Every landing is rated, and more experienced pilots can try a perfect landing or add more challenges (night approaches, crosswind landings, system failures, and much more). A landing analysis screen shows how you performed and how you can improve future landings. You’ll also get a score that can be uploaded to Game Center. You can watch breathtaking replays of your flight from different camera angles and even record your replays to the camera roll in full HD.

Legendary singer Linda Ronstadt, 67, told AARP today that she “can’t sing a note” because she suffers from Parkinson’s disease. Diagnosed eight months ago, Ronstadt began to show symptoms as long as eight years ago. But she ascribed her inability to sing to a tick bite (“my health has never recovered since then”), and believed the shaking in her hands resulted from shoulder surgery.

Parkinson’s is a devastating disease for anyone to suffer from, and it’s certainly afflicted other celebrities – Michael J. Fox and Muhammad Ali come to mind immediately. Regardless, it’s a huge tragedy for the music world to lose such a beautiful voice.

(Via Gawker)

The United States offered to ease the terms of a proposed civil injunction against Apple Inc for conspiring to raise e-book prices, but the company said the revised proposal is still designed to “inflict punishment” and must be rejected.

Sounds to me like Apple is in this for the long haul.

Samsung might have a 10-figure advertising budget, but it still managed to create an ad with such bad acting (and horribly sexist undertones) that it was pulled shortly after being spotted–and relentlessly mocked–by Reddit members Thursday.

It’s just painful to watch.

Ben Bajarin:

By owning all the key components from designing the system-on-chip, to the hardware and software security layers, the operating system, the hardware itself, and the underlying cloud framework, Apple is uniquely positioned to create a security solution unlike many others.

A new advertising campaign allows companies to pay CNET to repost positive reviews on their homepage. Guess who took advantage of that program? You guessed it, Samsung.

You can read it for yourself.

That’s the best news Microsoft has had in years.

This is a fascinating proof of concept.

Making the storage and access of data more convenient, artist Anthony Antonellis implanted an RFID chip into his hand that can store data which can be wirelessly accessed by a smartphone.

The chip is the size of a grain of sand and only holds about 1K of data, but it does work. Antonellis can use his smartphone to store data on the chip and retrieve the data as needed. The technology requires him to actually touch the implant with his phone, as the antennae’s reach is about 1 cm.

From Eadweard Muybridge and George Méliès to James Cameron and Phil Tippett, the history of movie effects is basically the greatest bedtime story never told. Except it’s a yarn so full of dragons, dinosaurs and mimetic polyalloy killing machines sent back from the future that you’d never get any sleep after hearing it. As Life Of Pi and Avatar amply demonstrate, there are many chapters still to be written and innovations still to be forged, but whether in-camera, matte, prosthetic, CG, or just lovingly modelled by a man with a passion for Plasticine, effects have brought magic to the movies since the silent era. In a unique celebration of the art, Empire asked the people who make them happen to pick their favorites.

Each one of these really brings a new appreciation to the effort involved and the incredible effect achieved. The closeup of Davey Jones from Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man’s Chest, for example, really gives a sense of how breathtakingly realistic the effect is. Love this.

Will Apple build a TV set? Will they become a content distributor? The answer is complicated. This article does a good job laying out all the parameters.

One alternative being considered is that Apple could essentially become a cable company itself. Under that scenario, sources say, Apple would launch what is formally known as a virtual multichannel video programming distributor. MVPD is the catch-all term for pay TV services, whether delivered over cable lines, satellites, or otherwise. A virtual MVPD would offer such content entirely over the internet. Intel, Google, and Sony are known to be preparing virtual MVPDs of their own.

Just as happened in the music space, companies like Apple act as a disruption to an existing business model. In this case, the disruption to the TV space has been going on for a long time. A new studio system is evolving and, in many cases, succeeding. Netflix broke through with “House of Cards”, creating and distributing content completely outside the traditional mechanisms.

However Apple’s television service is formally regarded, it will still be seen as disrupting the TV industry. In its talks with content companies, say sources, Apple notes that it has nearly 600 million iTunes accounts and is good at getting people to pay for content. It made similar claims when it negotiated with companies in music and publishing, and it has indelibly changed those industries.

This is going to get interesting.

Peter Kafka:

Kennedy also dismissed concerns about Apple’s impending iTunes Radio launch, which will directly compete with his service. This one would be easier to take at face value if Pandora’s PR machinery wasn’t working so hard to downplay Apple’s entry.

But, for the record, Kennedy repeated the lines he has always used to describe competition in the past. “We’ve now been around for eight years. We’ve seen competitors large and small enter the market and, in some cases, exit the market,” he said. “I’ve never seen an analysis that identifies an effect from any competitor … we don’t see the picture changing.”

Yet Pandora is removing the 40 hour listening limit for mobile users two weeks before Apple introduces iTunes Radio. Pandora may not have seen any effect from previous competitors, but they’ve never faced Apple before.

BlackBerry, Nokia and Microsoft never thought they’d see any effect from Apple either. You see where that got them.

We don’t know how much Apple paid for the several-person team it acquired very recently. But we heard from people knowledgeable about the deal that the company plans to directly integrate Embark’s technology into Apple Maps.

Nice scoop for Jessica Lessin.

So App Cubby is no more, but the people are the same. David Barnard is one of the good guys in the development scene who cares about his customers and the apps he makes. He’s showcasing a new app called Perfect Weather on the Contrast Web site.

The new Nexus 7 has all the makings of a great tablet but it’s been plagued by multiple problems ever since its release, including faulty GPS and a bug-riddled touch interface. Because of this, Consumer Reports is warning tablet fans to avoid buying Google’s newest tablet until the company fixes all these issues. The publication in particular singles out the Nexus 7′s shoddy touch screen implementation as particularly headache-inducing.

Apple is probably sending a cake to the Nexus 7 team for making its tablet suck so bad.

ReadQuick helps you read faster than ever before. Designed for the iPad, this app helps you speed read your way through your reading list. ReadQuick displays the articles of your choice one word at a time at a pace you set. It is the only app that teaches you how to speed read while getting through your daily reading.

It has support for Pocket, Instapaper and a Featured, as well as giving you your reading stats.

Great article by Bobby Solomon on how making “hollow icons” aren’t going to confuse your users.