Linked List: December 30, 2014

Tuesday, 30 December 2014

Algebra 

Michael Cieply, reporting for the NYT:

“The Interview” generated roughly $15 million in online sales and rentals during its first four days of availability, Sony Pictures said on Sunday.

Sony did not say how much of that total represented $6 digital rentals versus $15 sales. The studio said there were about two million transactions over all.

This, from a newspaper that two years ago ran an Op-Ed headlined “Is Algebra Necessary?” Apparently, algebra is necessary for New York Times reporters and editors, because if they had a basic grasp of it, they’d understand that Sony revealed the exact split between $6 rentals and $15 sales: 1.67 million rentals ($10 million), 0.33 million sales ($5 million).

Credit to Dan Meyer for making this connection.

Analyst Says Android Hardware Profits Tanked in 2014 

Ina Fried, reporting for Recode:

While Android continued to gain market share in the global smartphone market, it saw a significant drop on another key metric: Profits.

Analyst Chetan Sharma estimates that global profits in the Android hardware market for 2014 were down by half from the prior year — the first year that there has been any significant drop.

Vintage 2011 claim chowder from Henry Blodget: “Android Is Destroying Everyone, Especially RIM — iPhone Dead In Water”.

The Future of Cocoa 

Mattt Thompson:

Having Objective-C and Swift code interoperate in a meaningful way from launch was a strategic — and arguably necessary — decision. Allowing the more adventurous engineers within a team a low-risk way to introduce Swift into existing code bases has been crucial to the wide adoption the new language has already seen. But for all of the effort that’s been put into source mapping and API auditing, there’s an argument to be made that Cocoa has become something of a liability.

What if we were to build a new Foundation from the Swift Standard Library? What would we do differently, and how could we learn from the mistakes of our past?

This may seem an odd thesis for NSHipster, a site founded upon a great deal of affection for Objective-C and Cocoa, but it’s one worth exploring.

His title — “The Death of Cocoa” — is provocative to be sure, but he’s talking about the long, long term.