Today’s previous post on artificial engine noises linked to Porsche’s announcement from last year on their electric Mission E:

Don’t call it a 911: Porsche spent much of its presentation at this evening’s Volkswagen Group press conference talking about the new 911, yes, but the real news is the Mission E — an all-electric four-seater with a design that’s well beyond anything Porsche’s ever made. The company is focusing on “long-distance driving” with this concept, but that’s not to say it won’t be exciting to drive: Porsche is promising 600 horsepower, a 0-62mph time “under” 3.5 seconds, a top speed of over 250 km/h (about 155mph), and a total range of over 500 kilometers (311 miles) while driving in a “sporty” manner. Those are Tesla Model S numbers, and it stands to reason that Porsche could command at least the same amount of money, too — well over $100,000 in top configurations. And the company says the Mission E can store an 80 percent charge in just 15 minutes using an 800-volt “Porsche Turbo Charging” system, even faster than Tesla’s Superchargers.

It’s now been over a year since the Mission E was announced and we still haven’t seen anything. I’m skeptical if Porsche has a the ability to assemble a team that can take on Tesla and their computer engineering and AI savvy.

I’ll believe the superior technical specs Porsche is flaunting when I see them.

Yesterday Microsoft launched their Slack competitor, Teams.

Then Slack responded in a full-page ad and on their site/Medium:

Dear Microsoft,

Wow. Big news! Congratulations on today’s announcements. We’re genuinely excited to have some competition.

We realized a few years ago that the value of switching to Slack was so obvious and the advantages so overwhelming that every business would be using Slack, or “something just like it,” within the decade. It’s validating to see you’ve come around to the same way of thinking. And even though — being honest here — it’s a little scary, we know it will bring a better future forward faster.

However, all this is harder than it looks. So, as you set out to build “something just like it,” we want to give you some friendly advice.

That, my friends, is what’s called passive-aggressive. It’s also douchey. This is how nerds talk shit. Soooo intimidating.

After checking out their product video, I’m quickly reminded of what I just wrote earlier today about Microsoft always being a day late and a dollar short.

I’ve been using Slack for a few years now with different companies. I think it’s solid, but I don’t think it’s as amazing as a lot of reviews make it out to be. From the two companies I’ve used it at I’ve actually found Slack to be the place where a lot of people waste time not working, posting animated GIFs and sharing stuff. I’m sure those companies were complete edge cases.

The reality is I won’t be using Microsoft Teams unless a client or the company I’m working for asks me to. It looks interesting based on the screenshots and you can clearly see where they’ve been influenced by Slack.

On October 26th, Microsoft unveiled their new all-in-one, touchscreen Surface Studio.

From everything I’ve seen and read about it, it looks like an amazing integration of hardware and software. This integration used to be the sole domain of Apple, but now Microsoft and Google are coming to realize the practical and financial benefits of controlling the whole widget.

First thought: will this machine make me move to Windows? No.

Second thought: will this machine make other people move to Windows? I’m not sure.

It’s in Microsoft’s DNA to be a day late and dollar short on everything they’ve done, at least for the last decade. Windows Phone was late, their Surface tablets were late, and now an iMac competitor. I’m feeling a little déjà vu with the Surface Studio.

Microsoft is like the kid in college who needs until the summer to finish their thesis paper. Sure they might turn a great paper, but everyone else has moved on.

In case you forgot, the original Microsoft Surface was a big-ass, $10,000 table. In 2007, when the original iPhone launched and the race kicked into high gear for dominance in mobile computing, Microsoft decided to go big and impractical. Now let me be clear: the Surface Studio is way more practical than its great grandpappy was, but there still is a wiff of impracticality in it.

Microsoft is going after the high-end, creative segment of the desktop market with the Surface Studio, a segment dominated by Apple. They’re barely making a dent in the mass market with their phones, tablets, and laptops. So now they think they can eat Apple’s lunch and steal away desktop users? It’s possible, but I’m not convinced.

On the other hand, there’s been considerable backlash over the new MacBooks Apple announced, but we’re only a week out. Let’s see where we are this spring. We’ll be seeing new Mac desktops by then too.

Comma.ai cancels the Comma One following NHTSA letter:

Renowned iPhone hacker turned entrepreneur George Hotz (aka geohot) has cancelled his autonomous driving startup’s first official product, the Comma One aftermarket add-on that would’ve allowed certain cars to gain Autopilot-like highway driving assistance abilities.

Hotz announced the news on the Comma.ai official Twitter account, noting that the decision to cancel was made after he received a letter from the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The NHTSA letter explained that given its mandate of ensuring safety on U.S. roadways, it needed to ensure the Comma One is compliant with regulations before it can be offered for sale.

Some of these startups are fragile little snowflakes, aren’t they? One letter from the NHTSA and they’re done. Hey Hotz: this isn’t just publishing code to a fucking server, you’re putting physical vehicles onto physical roads.

I’m all for innovation, but safety is kind of important. The transition we’ve begun — from humans driving cars to cars driving themselves — is not something we can take lightly or we run the risk of killing many people.

In the longterm, after we’ve conducted thorough tests and ironed out the kinks, I’m certain autonomous vehicles will be multiple times safer than us humans driving ourselves. Robots don’t drive angry, robots don’t play Pokémon Go while driving and end up killing a young boy, and robots don’t drive drunk.

This Old-Ass Commodore 64 Is Still Being Used to Run an Auto Shop in Poland

Over at Slate, Franklin Foer reports on a weird log of communications between Donald Trump’s servers and a bank in Russia:

In late July, one of these scientists—who asked to be referred to as Tea Leaves, a pseudonym that would protect his relationship with the networks and banks that employ him to sift their data—found what looked like malware emanating from Russia. The destination domain had Trump in its name, which of course attracted Tea Leaves’ attention. But his discovery of the data was pure happenstance—a surprising needle in a large haystack of DNS lookups on his screen. “I have an outlier here that connects to Russia in a strange way,” he wrote in his notes. He couldn’t quite figure it out at first. But what he saw was a bank in Moscow that kept irregularly pinging a server registered to the Trump Organization on Fifth Avenue.

[…]

The researchers quickly dismissed their initial fear that the logs represented a malware attack. The communication wasn’t the work of bots. The irregular pattern of server lookups actually resembled the pattern of human conversation—conversations that began during office hours in New York and continued during office hours in Moscow. It dawned on the researchers that this wasn’t an attack, but a sustained relationship between a server registered to the Trump Organization and two servers registered to an entity called Alfa Bank.

And:

Tea Leaves and his colleagues plotted the data from the logs on a timeline. What it illustrated was suggestive: The conversation between the Trump and Alfa servers appeared to follow the contours of political happenings in the United States. “At election-related moments, the traffic peaked,” according to Camp. There were considerably more DNS lookups, for instance, during the two conventions.

Could there be a bigger black-kettle-calling pot in the world than Donald Trump?

Om Malik, writing for The New Yorker:

That Samsung is facing such steep costs suggests the appeal of the original Apple design. When I asked John Maeda, the former president of the Rhode Island School of Design, why, then, people have turned on the design of the iPhone 7, he pointed out that perhaps these critics “seem to believe that there’s some as yet unimaginable transcendence that can happen in a small, palm-shaped, rectangular device.” Maeda said that he spent time with designers at Sony and felt their frustration designing a television set “because all you can really do is design the rectangle that the TV sits within. . . . Everything else around that screen really doesn’t matter.” The same problem holds for the iPhone. All that matters is the screen—its size, brightness, and resolution. “Now that we have all those dimensions sated, it’s basically the challenge of designing a TV set all over again,” he added.

Regarding the designers at Sony, they’re literally thinking within the the box. This is like a mobile phone designer saying in 2006, “All you can really do is either a clamshell design or something like a Palm Treo or Blackberry,” then you fast forward to 2007 and the iPhone exists. Clearly there are some small-minded people working at Sony.

To say that, “everything around the screen […] doesn’t really matter” misses the point and many opportunities completely. What a shitty way to think. Disregard for hardware is why Samsung currently has exploding phones major airlines are banning from flights.

Hardware and software are two sides of the same coin.

In September Vlad Savov wrote a great piece for The Verge on how hard it’s getting for competitors to keep up with the iPhone:

It is to Android manufacturers’ great credit that they’ve been able to build phones the size of an iPhone with specs many times better. But even once they’ve negotiated the RAM, display, battery, and design issues, they come up against the classic problem of fragmentation. Each new generation of iPhone has only one processor and two screen sizes and resolutions — so game designers and app developers know the exact hardware that they’re targeting with their new software. With Android, on the other hand, there’s a diversity of processor and graphics chips, unevenness in screen sizes and resolutions, and never any certain minimum standard of either hardware spec or software API.

This only speaks to the internal hardware that optimizes performance. There’s the external hardware you feel when you have a phone in your hands and it’s one of the main reasons so many people covet Apple products. The fit and finish. Yes, Steve Jobs’ dad taught him to use quality wood on the back side of a cabinet no one would see, but he knew damn well the front mattered a hell of a lot too. It all matters.

Hardware continues to evolve. In most cases it’s incremental with the occasional leap every so often. Apple is barely scratching the surface of what’s possible. They were the first to introduce pressure sensitivity on their multi-touch screens with 3-D Touch on the iPhone 6S. Before that they were the first to introduce a fingerprint reader on the Home button in the form of Touch ID on the iPhone 5S.

Steve Jobs famously said (via):

Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

On the flip side of that quote, design is not just how it works, but what it looks and feels like.

It’s also really great if it the battery doesn’t explode in your pants.

American author, philosopher, and neuroscientist Sam Harris wonders if we can we build AI without losing control over it in his new TED Talk.

I first discovered Sam Harris earlier this year when he was a guest on The Joe Rogan Experience and it was great (Episode #804).

BBC News: Tesla cars get hacked:

Tesla has updated its software after researchers from China hacked into the operating system of its electric cars.

The team from Keen Security Lab remotely manipulated the brake system on a Tesla while it was on the move, from a distance of 12 miles (19km).

It used to be computers were the only things that were hacked, but now that cars are computers with wheels, they can be hacked too.

Welcome to the new normal.

Farhad Manjoo doesn’t think Apple is cutting edge anymore:

The absence of a jack is far from the worst shortcoming in Apple’s latest product launch. Instead, it’s a symptom of a deeper issue with the new iPhones, part of a problem that afflicts much of the company’s product lineup: Apple’s aesthetics have grown stale.

Apple has squandered its once-commanding lead in hardware and software design. Though the new iPhones include several new features, including water resistance and upgraded cameras, they look pretty much the same as the old ones. The new Apple Watch does too. And as competitors have borrowed and even begun to surpass Apple’s best designs, what was iconic about the company’s phones, computers, tablets and other products has come to seem generic.

And

It’s not just that a few new Apple products have been plagued with design flaws. The bigger problem is an absence of delight. I recently checked in with several tech-pundit friends for their assessment of Apple’s aesthetic choices. “What was the last Apple design that really dazzled you?” I asked.

This article could have been written 5 years ago. If people keep writing ‘Apple is Doomed’ stories, I suppose there’s a chance they’ll eventually come true.

I’m curious if automobile news sites complain that the Porsche 911 doesn’t delight anymore. That the design is basically the same as was last year and the year before that.

Perhaps the problem isn’t with Apple’s design chops, design chops I feel are still top notch. Perhaps the problem is with Manjoo and people like him. It’s easy to become jaded and fickle. It’s as if people expect (demand?) the things they buy will solve all their problems and constantly delight them in the process.

I think what happened is Manjoo was given a creative writing assignment: Apple presented a great, albeit iterative product lineup, we need you to show us why is was shit. If this was the case, Manjoo was doing a great job until the last two paragraphs:

And while Apple has slowed its design cadence, its rivals have sped up. Last year Samsung remade its lineup of Galaxy smartphones in a new glass-and-metal design that looked practically identical to the iPhone. Then it went further. Over the course of a few months, Samsung put out several design refinements, culminating in the Note 7, a big phone that has been universally praised by critics. With its curved sides and edge-to-edge display, the Note 7 pulls off a neat trick: Though it is physically smaller than Apple’s big phone, it actually has a larger screen. So thanks to clever design, you get more from a smaller thing — exactly the sort of advance we once looked to Apple for.

So Apple’s design prowess is in trouble, but Samsung continues to make smartphones that are practically identical to the iPhone. So this means what? Samsung’s industrial design is superior to Apple’s?

And then comes Manjoo’s final caveat:

An important caveat: Samsung’s software is still bloated, and its reputation for overall build quality took a hit when it announced last week that it would recall and replace the Note 7 because of a battery defect that caused spontaneous explosions. To the extent that making a device that doesn’t explode suggests design expertise, Apple is still ahead of Samsung.

Ok, so Apple continues to break sales records with their phones, has top-rated customer satisfaction but somehow, “The real danger is in Apple’s long-term reputation.” Not Samsung’s reputation because I guess we all know they’re rip-off artists so they get a pass.

It looks like Microsoft has some updates coming to Skype:

It was recently reported that Microsoft wanted to buy Slack for $8 billion. Slack, for those unfamiliar, is a messaging app for teams that’s been getting quite popular recently. Now, Microsoft is working on a direct Slack competitor under the Skype brand, according to people familiar with the matter.

Meet Skype Teams.

Skype Teams is going to be Microsoft’s take on messaging apps for teams. Skype Teams will include a lot of similar features which you’ll find on Slack. For example, Skype Teams will allow you to chat in different groups within a team, also known as “channels”. Additionally, users will be able to talk to each other via Direct Messages on Skype Teams.

Now this is the Microsoft of old that I know and love: reacting to what other companies are doing, rather than innovating on their own.

As a longtime user of Skype, it’s hard for me to see how Microsoft has improved it since they bought it in 2011.

Marco Arment, creator of the podcasting app I use on my iPhone, Overcast, explains why podcasts don’t use VBR MP3s, even though they’re more space-efficient and sound better:

AVFoundation, the low-level audio/video framework in iOS and macOS, does not accurately seek within VBR MP3s, making VBR impractical to use for long files such as podcasts. Jumping to a timestamp in an hour-long VBR podcast can result in an error of over a minute, without the listener even knowing because the displayed timecode shows the expected time.

I’ve been using time-jumping links on YouTube videos for years. It’s really handy.

Like this clip of George Carlin naming the seven words you can’t say on television (circa the mid ’70s). Here is a link starting from the beginning, and here is a link jumping right to him saying the words.

It’s too bad podcasts don’t support this. I splice in sound effects and little easter eggs throughout my podcasts all the time. It would be great to have direct links to them instead of having to remember the timestamps.

Apple is going to remove abandoned apps from the App Store:

It’s cleaning time in the App Store. Apple sent an email to its developer community indicating that there will be some upcoming changes in the App Store. If an app no longer works or is outdated, it’s going to get removed from the App Store. And it’s about time.

“We are implementing an ongoing process of evaluating apps, removing apps that no longer function as intended, don’t follow current review guidelines, or are outdated,” Apple wrote.

And:

And Apple is not going to stop at abandoned apps. The company will also fight spammy app names. For instance, if you search for “Instagram” on the App Store, one of the first results is an app that is called “[app name] Photo Collage, Picture Editor, Pic Grid, F…” and then it gets cut off.

It’s about time. I’d rather have less & better than more & shitty.

Ars Technica: Kansas couple sues IP mapping firm for turning their life into a “digital hell”:

Ever since James and Theresa Arnold moved into their rented 623-acre farm in Butler County, Kansas, in March 2011, they have seen “countless” law enforcement officials and individuals turning up at their farm day and night looking for links to alleged theft and other supposed crime. All of these people are arriving because of a rounding error on a GPS location, which wrongly points people to their farm.

I love it: “because of a rounding error on a GPS location”

Oops.