The wealth inequality in the US goes beyond being a Democrat or a Republican.
This is not an equal playing field.

via Upworthy

Eric Chemi at Bloomberg Businessweek puts things into perspective for the iPhone haters:

If [the iPhone] 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
That’s a big Twinkie.

Bill Gates on the legendary Control-Alt-Delete:

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has finally admitted that forcing users to press the Control-Alt-Delete key combination to log into a PC was a mistake. In an interview at a Harvard fundraising campaign, Gates discusses his early days building Microsoft and the all-important Control-Alt-Delete decision. If you’ve used an old version of the software or use Windows at work then you will have experienced the odd requirement. Gates expains the key combination is designed to prevent other apps from faking the login prompt and stealing a password.
Before Control-Alt-Delete was used to log into Windows machines it was how you restarted the whole computer. My father taught me this back in the pre-Windows days of the early 80s.
In middle school I taught this trick to my friend Dave. When we went to the mall we would reboot all the computers on display in Sears and then run out. The sales people on the floor were usually computer illiterate and had no idea what we had done.
It didn’t take much to keep us amused back then.

— seen in Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake, but thanks goes to sharp-eyed reader Patricia Miller, who correctly attributed these lines to Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart.

Ballmer’s thoughts on Microsoft’s inability to gain significant market share with Windows Phone:

Speaking at Microsoft’s financial analysts meeting today, CEO Steve Ballmer was refreshingly realistic about the company’s struggles in smartphones and tablets. “Mobile devices. We have almost no share,” he admitted on stage, before noting he didn’t know whether to be enthusiastic over his admission or uncomfortably tense. “But I’m an optimistic guy, any time we have low market share sounds like upside opportunity to me.” That upside opportunity is the key reason Microsoft moved to secure Nokia’s phone business.
Stevey-Steve, this isn’t a matter of optimistically seeing the glass half full. Google, Apple and Blackberry drank 96% of the milkshake in US and that’s after Microsoft trying to fill it for 3 fucking years.
Or perhaps the glass was completely full and Ballmer took a BB gun and shot a bunch of holes into it.
Or maybe It’s last call, Ballmer’s hammered stupid and the bartender isn’t serving him anymore.
Ok, I’m done with the glass analogies.

taken from Alice in Wonderland

—Thomas Edison

From Daniel Eran Dilger at Apple Insider:

It turns out that while the tech media spent most of 2013 complaining that Apple “wasn’t innovating,” Apple was secretly developing its new Mac Pro supercomputer, perfecting its Authentech-based Touch ID technology that the industry has been flummoxed to copy, completing iOS 7 (while Google took a Kit Kat break with Android Key Lime Pie) and OS X Mavericks (while Microsoft fiddled as Windows 8 burned), while also bringing an entirely new 64-bit mobile architecture into production ahead of the world’s leading chip designers and foundries (which didn’t see a pressing need to move to 64-bit and lacked Apple’s experience in doing so), and, as nearly a side project, spending billions to build out a series of new iCloud data centers…
via Jason Putorti

Webdesigner Depot thinks slab serifs are perfect for the web right now.
I know this already.

1955 Lincoln Indianapolis Exclusive Study by Carrozzeria Boano Torino.

via Megadeluxe

Great interview with Horace Dediu for Forbes.com:

Q: Is Tim Cook the right CEO for the company at this time?

A: I hold the belief that he’s been CEO for much longer than it seems. Jobs was not a CEO in any traditional sense. He was head of product and culture and all-around micromanager. He left the operational side of the company to Cook who actually built it into a colossus. Think along the lines of the pairing of Howard Hughes and Frank William Gay. What people look for in Cook is the qualities that Jobs had but those qualities and duties are now dispersed among a large team. The question isn’t whether Cook can be the “Chief Magical Officer” but rather whether the functional team that’s around Cook can do the things Jobs used to do.
Sharp insights.

I hate iOS Safari. It has nothing to do with me being a web developer. I just find the performance of the browser to be substandard compared to a desktop browser. That’s to be expected considering the machine sitting atop my desk has somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 times the processing power of my iPad, but every time iOS Safari struggles to play an animated gif or fails to load a simple js slideshow, I get a little frustrated. It would be one thing if iOS Safari couldn’t handle heavy lifting, but it regularly balks at tasks that browsers on desktops mastered a decade ago.
Trying another browser is no guarantee of better performance, either. The same performance issues hinder Chrome for iOS, as well. Once again, it’s all about the hardware.
Anyway, the point is, I’m not happy with browsing in iOS, and so am open to new browser apps that purport to offer an improved experience. That’s why I was excited to try out Coast, the new browser for iOS developed by Opera. There’s been a lot of fanfare in the tech press since its release a couple days back, and it’s well deserved.
Coast, being still subject to the hardware limitations of iOS devices, doesn’t offer much in the way of performance improvements, at least from what I’ve seen in the past couple days I’ve had to play around with it. But that’s not what makes Coast an improvement over every browser I’ve used on a mobile device, regardless of the operating system.
Coast’s strength is in its interface. It’s, well, minimalist. That word is easily overused in technology, but minimalism is a worthy goal for app development, especially in environments such as mobile where real estate is limited. Opera achieved this goal in part by doing away with the URL bar, a feature that has been ubiquitous in browsers. Imagine that, a browser with no URL bar.
What a user gets instead is a home screen, not unlike the home screens of phones and tablets anywhere. Instead of apps, the home screen in Coast has websites. A user can add and remove icons for any web page they see fit. For pages not represented by an icon, there’s an integrated URL/search bar prominently placed on the home screen to aid the user. While in a website, a small nav bar at the bottom allows the user to return to the homes screen or swipe through history. There are no tabs, just many, many past pages waiting for the user in the history.
So, the URL bar hasn’t completely disappeared, it’s just moved. One clunky feature of this interface is that, in the current build, you have to jump out of a website to the home screen in order to enter a new address. I can’t speak for the developers, but they left a lot of real estate in that bottom nav bar, and an icon that pops up a field would be nice. Yep, it’s a neat idea to get rid of the URL bar, but the reality seems to be more challenging.
The interface isn’t completely intuitive (it took me a good five minutes to figure out how to close a web page), but once a user gets the hang of it, it becomes natural. Once I got used to it, I began to like Coast enough that it’s now my default browser.
The point of Coast seems to be to introduce the smoothness of apps into a browser. In that, it’s hindered only by the fact that websites are not apps, and websites are what Coast is presenting to the user. However, Coast is a wonderful start at shaking up the way a browser is supposed to work. Once those rules can be shown to be arbitrary and unnecessarily restrictive, the web can only get better.

Rachel Metz at MIT Technology Review says Apple Needs a New Category to Reinvent.
I love that Apple is the only company that ever is ever told it needs to “reinvent” anything.
It’s also the typical, jaded and cynical response we often find in the technology press to anything new announced by Apple. It’s also extremely short-sighted and stating the obvious. Once a revolution happens, evolution steps in to define things. This is the case with the iPhone. It came into the world in 2007, revolting against all the “smartphones” at the time. Since then it’s been a constant and consistent refinement of the product and platform, interspersed with some mini-revolts along the way–the App Store, new Maps and Retina displays to name a few.
Maybe some of those examples aren’t as mini now that I look at them, but I digress.
The point is, if anyone is aware of when and where revolutions and evolutions in consumer electronics need to take place, it’s Apple. Sure, on a month-to-month, year-to-year basis Apple’s announcements might seem minor, but take a step back and look at the bigger picture if you want a better view of where things are headed.
Maybe I’m wrong, and Apple coasts on the successes of the iPhone and iPad for the next 10 years.
Ha, yeah right.