The Rise and Fall of Nokia in One Chart

…and they plan to design and license smartphones again in 2016 when their agreement with Microsoft expires?!

LOLZ. U guys r funny.

Good luck with that.

Yahoo will be livestreaming the first NFL game this fall:

A couple of months ago, when the NFL announced that for the first time ever, it would show a regular season game (almost) exclusively on the Internet, it didn’t know who would handle the streaming or how much it would cost fans to watch the game.

Now it does: Yahoo will host the livestream of the Oct. 25 Jacksonville Jaguars – Buffalo Bills game, and it’ll be free to viewers around the world.

I’ve been on the Internet since 1995. I don’t see this going smoothly.

I foresee video streams dropping mad packets.

No one could have predicted a move like this by IBM back in the 80s or 90s or 00s:

In a memo to employees, IBM notes that starting today all employees (not just some select developers like in the past) can pick from a MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, or a PC when setting up a new or refreshed workstation. The machines will include new software for security, Wi-Fi, and VPN out of the box so employees just have to connect to the internet to get started, according to the memo. IBM notes that it currently has around 15,000 Macs deployed through its BYOD program, but plans to deploy around 50,000 Macbooks by the end of the year. That, according to the memo, would make IBM the biggest “Mac shop” around, and the company said it’s sharing what it learns through the new deployment with Apple as Apple assists through its device enrollment program.

We’re not just in the post-PC era, but the post-Windows era.

Feels good.

via Daring Fireball

Fun review of the Apple Watch by Craig Mod:

It is on my wrist. Do I wish it to be? Not really. Did I crave it? No. Well, maybe a little. I am human. And it is new. And it contains media. And itself may be new media. And it is good to know about these things. So it is on my wrist. This thing, black like crude oil upon Daniel Day Lewis’ brow. Quiet until it pings, so gently, like a sound from the future, bringing only a message to stand up you lazy man.

I’ll eventually have a strong(er) desire for a thing. A thing for my wrist.

But not yet.

Over at the The New Yorker, Stephen Witt tells the story of the The Man Who Broke the Music Business, Bennie Lydell Glover. It was published late last month and I finally got around to reading it. It’s fascinating.

On how Glover smuggled CDs of out the factory he worked at in Kings Mountain, North Carolina:

At the end of each shift, employees put the overstock disks into scrap bins. These scrap bins were later taken to a plastics grinder, where the disks were destroyed. Over the years, Glover had dumped hundreds of perfectly good disks into the bins, and he knew that the grinder had no memory and generated no records. If there were twenty-four disks and only twenty-three made it into the grinder’s feed slot, no one in accounting would know.

So, on the way from the conveyor belt to the grinder, an employee could take off his surgical glove while holding a disk. He could wrap the glove around the disk and tie it off. He could then hide the disk, leaving everything else to be destroyed. At the end of his shift, he could return and grab the disk.

That still left the security guards. But here, too, there were options. One involved belt buckles. They were the signature fashion accessories of small-town North Carolina. Many people at the plant wore them—big oval medallions with the Stars and Bars on them. Gilt-leaf plates embroidered with fake diamonds that spelled out the word “BOSS.” Western-themed cowboy buckles with longhorn skulls and gold trim. The buckles always set off the wand, but the guards wouldn’t ask anyone to take them off.

And on the “ethics” of the elite underground file sharing “crews”:

Scene culture drew a distinction between online file-sharing and for-profit bootlegging. The topsites were seen as a morally permissible system of trade. Using them for the physical bootlegging of media, by contrast, was viewed as a serious breach of ethical principles. Worse, it was known to attract the attention of the law. Kali put the word out that anyone suspected of selling material from the topsites would be kicked out of the group. Thus, for most participants membership in RNS was a money-losing proposition. They spent hundreds of dollars a year on compact disks, and thousands on servers and broadband, and got only thrills in return.

It’s a long, but great read.

Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends 2015 Report is out.

If you’ve never seen her report, I encourage you to do so. You might see a lot of statistics you either already know or consider obvious, but it’s an extensive and extremely thorough look at the state of the Internet.

Here’s just a few slides that stood out to me.

The evolution of content discovery:

I know a lot of old farts who don’t let their phones leave their sides:

…AND CAN WE STOP CALLING THEM PHONES?!

The other day I saw this article from the New York Times:

In Busy Silicon Valley, Protein Powder Is in Demand

Here’s a quote:

Boom times in Silicon Valley call for hard work, and hard work — at least in technology land — means that coders, engineers and venture capitalists are turning to liquid meals…While athletes and dieters have been drinking their dinner for years, Silicon Valley’s workers are now increasingly chugging their meals, too, so they can more quickly get back to their computer work.

This is absolutely ridiculous. If a person is working so hard that they can’t take a break, then they need a different job. If a person does not want to take a break, then they need to have breaks forced on them for their own good, and for the good of the rest of us.

I’ve been working in the tech industry since 2003, and as a salaried employee, at times there is pressure to work large amounts of overtime. When I worked remotely for a company in Silicon Valley, I would have to remind my supervisors and coworkers that while they were working on national holidays, I was not. The picture many people have of the working culture in Silicon Valley is one of foosball tables and being allowed to bring a dog to work everyday. What I found, instead, is a culture of workaholics who are either chasing an elusive fortune, or who are not cognizant of the fact their lives no longer belong to them, but to the company. As just about everyone who is not an hourly worker knows, there is usually no overtime pay for salaried positions. It’s not enough for companies to rent out a person’s life for 40 hours a week. They want free labor, as well.

It’s a travesty that this is the case. Past generations fought hard for fair pay and worker protections, including the forty-hour work week and breaks during a shift, that have steadily been eroded as labor unions have lost their influence. People died for these rights, at the hands of thugs hired by their employers, and from the U.S. military. They died for all of us, and the worst part about this situation is that modern-day workers have gone into arrangements where more and more of their time, for free, is ceded to their employers voluntarily.

This new fad of protein shakes replacing meals is but a small symptom of the larger problem of American workers not being fairly compensated for their labor. The people mentioned in this article should not be praised for their work ethic. They should be pitied. And the companies that employ them should be ashamed that they are, or are allowing, their talent to be exploited in such a way.

via Dinosaur’s Pen

Interesting new approach to harnessing the wind:

Farms dotted with the gigantic spinning blades of wind turbines have become a standard sight on long-distance road trips, but what if there was another way to capture energy from the wind? A startup out of Spain is working on that very idea. The company’s called Vortex Bladeless, and its turbines look like stalks of asparagus poking out of the ground.

Instead of using the wind to rotate a blade, the company’s pillars shake back and forth from the vortices created by the movement of air around the structure. Engineers look to avoid these forces when designing buildings and other structures, but the Vortex turbine takes advantage of this phenomenon to oscillate in the wind. Typically, a structure can only be optimized to oscillate at the specific frequencies caused by a certain wind speed, but Vortex says it is using magnets to adjust the turbine on the fly to get the most from whatever the wind speeds happen to be. Once the structure starts vibrating, an alternator in the base of the device then converts the mechanical movement into electricity.

The solution to the problem lies within the problem itself.

The story behind the first Photoshopped image*.

*According to Adobe, you’re not supposed to use “Photoshop” as a verb.

I don’t give a shit. They should be happy they’ve become part of popular culture and nomenclature. You google things on the Web and you photoshop images. End of discussion.

Jason Snell thinks it’s time to retire OS X:

They’re going to collide eventually. iOS is on track for version 9 this year, and if Apple continues incrementing OS X versions, we’ll be heading for 10.11. And, again barring any change in philosophy, in the summer of 2016 we’ll be talking about iOS 10 and OS X and things will get weird.

But this is an era where Apple appears to be amenable to change on many fronts. Tacking the lowercase letter i on the front of product names appears to be a thing of the past—hello, Apple Watch. (And while it would be bold for Apple to change the name of iOS to Apple OS, I can’t see it—it’s powering the iPhone and iPad, and those names aren’t changing anytime soon.)

So let me make a proposal. As long as Apple is showing a willingness to change, let’s get off 10 and take this one to eleven.

Makes sense to me.

via 512 Pixels

A few weeks ago I linked up to the story about Microsoft giving developers the ability to port Android and iOS apps to Windows.

At Ars Technica, Sean Gallager gets into more of the nerdy details and recalls IBM and Blackberry trying similar, unsuccessful moves:

Neither OS/2 nor BlackBerry 10 has made a success of this capability. There are two major problems with supporting foreign applications on a niche platform. The first is straightforward: it removes any incentive for developers to bother with the native platform. Investing in developing for a minor platform is already something of a gamble, and by telling developers “Oh hey, you can just use your existing Win16 or Android program…” as IBM and BlackBerry (respectively) did, you’re implicitly sending them a message. “Don’t bother learning our platform or writing native apps for it.”

And:

Even with Islandwood, porting iOS applications to Windows will require more work than Android apps require. While some Android apps will be 100 percent compatible with Astoria, that won’t be the case with Islandwood. There are differences between the platforms that need handling—Android and Windows Phone have a back button, for example, whereas iOS doesn’t—and devs will have to change code accordingly.

The impact this has will depend on the app. King’s Candy Crush Saga for Windows Phone is already using Islandwood, and the changes required were described as a “few percent.” CCS supports features including in-app purchases in its Windows Phone version, taking advantage of the StoreKit API mapping. However, as a game, its user interface is largely custom anyway. Apps that lean more heavily on UIKit may well need more work to ensure that their interfaces meet the expectations of Windows users.

It’s Microsoft’s last ditch effort.

Just when I was duped into thinking Nadella was running things differently at Microsoft, they go and announce the 7 different editions (!!!!!!!) of Windows 10.

Sigh.

Image taken from Slate (via kottke)