Shaun McGill takes a look back at the the last two decades of mobile devices leading up to the iPhone. This piece is almost 12,000 words, so make sure you have some time.

Dave Hamilton explains some of the details about Apple’s new Fusion Drive.

Brier Dudley for the Seattle Times:

Word of the layoffs surfaced earlier and was confirmed in an internal memo to employees from founder Mark Pincus. The memo said the company is cutting 5 percent of its full-time workers and closing its studio in Boston. That would be around 150 of its roughly 3,000 positions. Also proposed is the closure of studios in Japan and the United Kingdom.

An early social gaming success story, Zynga flew too high, too fast and is now having to correct, at the expense of employees.

Some great shots.

It’s $20, but for me it’s worth it.

Gary Ng:

A recent study commissioned by Research in Motion has concluded it is cheaper and safer for companies to keep using BlackBerrys despite the proliferation of the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) phenomenon.

RIM sucks balls. That’s why companies opened up the gates and let employees use whatever device they wanted. The other operating systems caught up and passed RIM and there is no turning back on that now.

Eric Slivka:

The deteriorating relationship between Apple and Samsung that has seen the two companies reducing their component supply deals is now extending to LCD panels, with Samsung reportedly ending supplies of the panels to Apple next year.

After one month of availability, Apple’s iOS 6 has been installed on 60 percent of iDevices in the U.S. and Canada, and will possibly see further growth with the expected debut of a 7.85-inch “iPad mini” on Tuesday.

Apple’s newest OS is over 60% and Android’s latest release is less than 2%. It’s great to be open and winning.

The agency said it has relied on RIM for eight years, but the company “can no longer meet the mobile technology needs of the agency.”It also said it analyzed Apple’s iOS-based devices and Google Inc’s Android operating system and concluded that, for the near term, Apple’s iPhone services offer the best technology for the agency because of Apple’s tight controls of the hardware platform and operating system.

Seriously, who’s surprised? They could have gone with Android, but it leaks passwords like a sieve.

Having lived in the South for a period of time, I can tell you that this video is not the least bit surprising or unusual.

There was once a time when the launch of a new Windows operating system was a huge deal for the technology departments in many businesses. Not anymore. Microsoft Corp’s release of Windows 8 on Friday is likely to be a non-event for most companies — and some experts say many may never adopt it.

Microsoft has lost the confidence of its customers — business and personal. You can’t release as much shit as they have over the last decade and expect your customers to keep forgiving you.

The text editor that suits your iPad! No file lists, no folders, no documents in the classic sense — just paper stacks and an infinite amount of sheets. Edit and navigate by standard gestures, all perfectly mapped to the tasks at hand. Interacting with digital texts never felt so natural.

Plus: Dropbox, Box.com and WebDAV Sync, ePub export, RTF creation, Markdown support, and then some. Grab it this week at The Loop Special price of just $2.99!

Android applications downloaded by as many as 185 million users can expose end users’ online banking and social networking credentials, e-mail and instant-messaging contents because the programs use inadequate encryption protections, computer scientists have found.

Of course, iOS doesn’t have this problem, so all of you Android owners that want to switch from the malware infested, security sucking Android can make the move any time.

I didn’t know this story.

I’d like to thank djay for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week.

The Apple Design Award winning app, djay, transforms your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad into a complete and portable DJ system, letting you mix your music library on a hyper-realistic turntable interface. Perform live, record mixes on-the-go, or enable Automix mode and let djay mix your favorite playlist automatically. With unprecedented ease-of-use and innovative multi-touch mixing features, djay breaks barriers in DJ technology and offers a unique experience for beginners and professionals alike.

djay now supports the iPhone 5 and takes full advantage of the gorgeous 4-inch screen. djay for iPhone and iPod is on sale for only $.99 and djay for iPad is on sale for only $9.99! Get it now and become the DJ you’ve always wanted to be.

Yahoo! Homes:

In what world does a two-bedroom apartment cost $50 million?Why, Midtown Manhattan, of course.Naturally, this apartment at 50 Central Park South is no ordinary two-bedroom apartment. For one thing, it’s bigger than you might imagine for a two-bedroom. But it’s also smaller than you might imagine for $50 million, at 4,500 square feet. Even by Manhattan luxury standards, we’d say that’s worthy of a double-take, or at least a surprised blink: $11,000 per square foot.Apartment 33 occupies a full floor at the Ritz-Carlton New York, Central Park, one of just a dozen residences at the Central Park Ritz.

Hard to imagine an “apartment” being worth that kind of money but then again, like the old saying goes, “The rich are different from you and I.”

CNN:

WHEREAS, the respective Parties, the Apple Fanboys (also known as “Apple Fanbois,” “Fanb0yz,” “iPhoners” or simply “The Mac Faithful,” among many other names) and the Samsung Fanboys (also known as “Apple H4terz,” “Galaxians” or “Androiders”) seek a lasting peace, both online and off, and…WHEREAS, online forums, queues for new products and technology blogs have become polluted with smack talk, useless feature comparisons and Photoshopped ads meant to deride and belittle each other’s device preference, and…WHEREAS both sets of Parties recognize that a competitive market is both critical and necessary for continued technological innovation to benefit all, especially early adopters…NOW, THEREFORE, the Parties agree to abide by the agreements herein, enumerated in the terms of the articles set forth below.

This is actually pretty darn funny.

Glenn Fleishman for Boing Boing:

If you have access to this quaint thing called “broadcast television,” whether over the air or through cable or satellite receivers, you might have seen me win $15,199 last night by ultimately correctly recalling Karl Marx’s name in the nick of time. That was a squeaker. I’ll be on again this evening, and you’ll see how I perform this time around.

Glenn Fleishman will be familiar to many readers for his work at Macworld and elsewhere. He’s wicked smart, so it’s no surprise to me at all that he was on Jeopardy, and that he did well.

Goldfinch helps you keep up with the best articles, photos and videos shared by your friends and followers on Twitter and Facebook.

Looks interesting if you are very active on both social networking platforms.

Some great stuff here.

From the Comic Sans Project.

Who’s in worse shape?

Brendan Sinclair for Gamesindustry.biz:

Audience management firm Playnomics has released a report on user engagement for social games it tracks, and the findings show that players aren’t exactly patient in giving free-to-play titles time to hook them. The group found that from July through September, roughly 85 percent of new players in the US never went back to their games after the first day. And of those who joined in the first part of that stretch, 95 percent had become inactive by the end of September.

Unfortunately, most of the time with free-to-play games, you get what you pay for.

Will Oremus for Slate:

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the state has decided to crack down on free education, notifying California-based startup Coursera that it is not allowed to offer its online courses to the state’s residents. Coursera, founded by Stanford computer science professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, partners with top-tier universities around the world to offer certain classes online for free to anyone who wants to take them. You know, unless they happen to be from Minnesota. A policy analyst for the state’s Office of Higher Education told The Chronicle that Minnesota is simply enforcing a longstanding state law requiring colleges to get the government’s permission to offer instruction within its borders. She couldn’t say whether other online education startups like edX and Udacity were also told to stay out.

Someone ought to warn Apple that iTunes U is apparently illegal in Minnesota.

This is one of the stupidest things I’ve heard of. The state’s position is completely unenforceable. Time for the bureaucrats running the Office of Higher Education to get their heads out of their asses and recognize it’s 2012. Unless they’re going to shut down the Internet in Minnesota, I highly doubt they’re going to be able to stop people from learning stuff online there.

Friend of The Loop Julio Ojeda-Zapata follows up in a piece published in Pioneer Press. Apparently the state is easing restrictions on online schools:

Hey, all you colleges and universities not in Minnesota: Want to offer a free, online, not-for-credit course to people living here, no questions asked? This is your lucky day. The State of Minnesota has stopped enforcing a 20-year-old statute requiring such institutions to go through a lengthy registration process before they could offer no-cost Internet coursework.

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop:

“I think you’re going to see a trend where operators, starting in the West, begin to say, ‘We need a third ecosystem to really begin to happen. We really need to double down on it. We need to cause it to happen.’”

The company’s strategy is to wait until carriers are tired of selling millions of iPhones and Android devices and force Nokia products on us. Yeah, that’ll work.