Linked List: May 22, 2012

Tuesday, 22 May 2012

Ford Gets Its Logo Out of Hock 

Speaking of logos:

In 2006, Ford pledged its famous logo, along with virtually all of its U.S. assets, as collateral to secure a $23.5 billion loan to restructure its ailing business. At the time, Ford was criticized for betting the company, including all its factories and other trademarks like Mustang and F-150, to take on more debt, but the loan ended up being Ford’s savior, providing an important cushion that allowed it to escape bankruptcy a few years later, unlike General Motors and Chrysler Group.

Under terms of the loan, all collateral would be released when two of the three major credit rating agencies restored Ford’s debt rating to investment grade. Standard & Poor’s upped its rating on Ford a few weeks ago. Today, Moody’s did the same, raising Ford’s senior unsecured ratings to Baa3 from Ba2 and Ford Credit to Baa3 from Ba1.

Sure hope I never have to hock #4a525a.

Former Apple employee Joe Moreno, on the switched orientation of the Apple logo on Mac laptops a dozen years ago:

Opening a laptop from the wrong end is a self-correcting problem that only lasts for a few seconds. However, viewing the upside logo is a problem that lasts indefinitely.

I remember this change being surprisingly controversial. It wasn’t about being confused how to open the laptop, but about to whom the Apple logo should look “right” — you, the user and owner of the machine, or everyone else while you’re using it. Today, this seems to be a settled debate. Does any laptop maker still orient their logo the other way?

Update: Lenovo ThinkPads, for one, still orient the logos the other way. As for which way is “right”, Daniel Jalkut has a good analogy.

This Week, in Ketchup-Bottle Technology News 

Austin Carr, writing for Fast Company:

The result? LiquiGlide, a “super slippery” coating made up of nontoxic materials that can be applied to all sorts of food packaging — though ketchup and mayonnaise bottles might just be the substance’s first targets. Condiments may sound like a narrow focus for a group of MIT engineers, but not when you consider the impact it could have on food waste and the packaging industry. “It’s funny: Everyone is always like, ‘Why bottles? What’s the big deal?’ But then you tell them the market for bottles — just the sauces alone is a $17 billion market,” Smith says. “And if all those bottles had our coating, we estimate that we could save about one million tons of food from being thrown out every year.”

Really is a little freaky.

Jury Flummoxed Over Google-Oracle Patent Fight 

Caleb Garling, reporting for Wired:

Basically, the ’104 patent covers a way of improving the software compilation — the process of translating programming code into an executable application. The method described uses “symbolic references” to identify data during compilation rather than numeric memory locations. Oracle argues that Dalvik uses symbolic references, but Google says it doesn’t.

The jury has been deliberating over the claims for a week now, and on Tuesday, it had two more questions for the court, and both were related to the nuances of “symbolic references” and how they apply to data retrieval.

How could a randomly-selected jury possibly decide this? No knock intended against the jurors themselves — and it sounds like they’re doing their best to make an informed decision. But there’s a difference between a jury of your citizen peers and a jury of your technical peers.

‘Alternative Mobile Computing Devices’ 

Dell CFO Brian Gladden, after the company reported another disappointing quarter:

Our notebook business contracted 10% as we saw a more aggressive competitive environment particularly in the entry level and emerging markets. We believe some of the tougher competitive environment can be attributed to channel inventory rebuilding, following the hard disk issues of the past two quarters. In addition, we are seeing more consumer spending diverted to alternative mobile computing devices.

Dell’s market cap closed today at $26+ billion.

Hard to believe this was just six years ago.

New Google Doodle Uses Web Audio API 

Web audio: the post-Flash web frontier. I can’t stop playing with this thing, so fun.

Andy Baio’s XOXO Festival 

Looks like a great event. I’m fascinated to see how Kickstarter does for pre-selling conference tickets. In my mind, Kickstarter feels ideally suited for this — but Kickstarter often surprises me.

Why Dan Ackerman Thinks a Retina Display on a MacBook Could Be a Bad Idea 

Speaking of Apple and retina displays, Dan Ackerman:

For example, today I could easily tell someone shopping for a laptop that a good sweet spot to look for in a premium 13-inch laptop is a screen resolution of 1600 × 900 pixels. In the future, would I have to suggest 1600 × 900 if a laptop is from one list of PC makers with one type of DPI technology, and a second set of recommended resolutions for brands that use different DPI settings? Good luck fitting all that on the shelf tag at a brick-and-mortar retailer.

I can’t tell if this is a joke, parodying the antiquated specs-driven process of buying a Wintel PC, or if Ackerman really has zero clue about how Apple works, and why people buy Apple products.

Here’s how Apple will sell retina display MacBooks: by telling us and showing us that they’re jaw-droppingly beautiful. That’s it.

THX1136 

Big scoop by 9to5 Mac:

Both of these phones sport a new, larger display that is 3.95 inches diagonally. Apple will not just increase the size of the display and leave the current resolution, but will actually be adding pixels to the display. The new iPhone display resolution will be 640 × 1136. That’s an extra 176 pixels longer of a display. The screen will be the same 1.94 inches wide, but will grow to 3.45 inches tall. This new resolution is very close to a 16:9 screen ratio, so this means that 16:9 videos can play full screen at their native aspect ratio.

We’ve also heard that Apple will be taking full advantage of their new pixels. Apple is currently testing builds of iOS 6 that are custom-built to the new iPhone’s display. These builds include a tweaked home screen with a fifth row of icons (besides the stationary app dock) and extended application user interfaces that offer views of more content. Apple is able to pull this off with the same sharpness as the current iPhone Retina Display because of the additional pixels.

What I’ve heard from a couple of little birdies is only that Apple has been noodling with increasing the height of the display, keeping the width and pixel density exactly the same as on the iPhone 4 and 4S. I had not heard an exact pixel number for the new height. 1152 made some sense, but doing some math after reading Weintraub’s report, 1136 makes a lot of sense.

First, at 1136 × 640, you get a diagonal of 1,303.877 pixels after applying the Pythagorean theorem. There are no such thing as fractional pixels, but what I’m talking about here are pixels as a unit of length, equal to 1/326 inch. Divide 1,303.877 by 326 and you get 3.9996 inches. Boom, a “4-inch” display. I’m sure if Apple instead went to 1152 pixels in height — which works out to 4.042 inches — they’d still just call it a “4-inch” display, for the sake of neatness, but it’s at least somewhat interesting that 1136 is the closest they could get to precisely 4.0 inches.

Second, aspect ratio. With a 640-pixel width — which everything I have heard and seen reported suggests is set in stone — there is no way get to precisely 16:9:

(16/9) × 640 = 1,137.777…

You can’t cut seven-ninths of a pixel. 1138 × 640 would be a tad closer to 16:9, but 1136 × 640 is within five-thousandths of an inch of exactly 16:9. So I think Apple would be safe to bill an 1136 × 640 display as sporting a 16:9 aspect ratio.

Update: 1136 × 639 would be exactly 16:9. One pixel away.

‘Pete Rose: Here Now’ 

Heartbreaking 8-minute short film on Pete Rose’s day to day life, selling autographs and baseball memorabilia. Directed by Eric Drath and produced by ESPN Films.