Linked List: December 4, 2015

Friday, 4 December 2015

My thanks to Bellroy for once again sponsoring the DF RSS feed. Made from full-grain leather, Bellroy’s Travel Wallet holds your passport, airline tickets and cards, and even comes with a mini pen for completing customs forms and other paperwork. Pretty much the ideal travel companion.

Check out their site for their full range of excellent wallets and iPhone cases.

Samsung Executives Investigated for Possible Insider Trading ★

The AP:

South Korea’s financial regulator said Friday it is investigating possible insider trading by Samsung executives related to a contentious takeover deal. […]

South Korea’s Yonhap News reported that nine Samsung executives purchased as much as 50 billion won ($43 million) of Cheil Industries stock before Samsung announced a deal to combine Cheil and another Samsung company in May.

Shares of Cheil, which has members of Samsung’s founding Lee family as majority shareholders, surged after the announcement.

Shocking that this could happen at a company as scrupulous as Samsung.

The iPad Pro Has a Next-Generation Lightning Port ★

Andrew Cunningham, writing last month for Ars Technica:

Our full review of the iPad Pro covers a lot of ground, but there is one small item that escaped our notice. When iFixit tore the device apart, it found a USB 3.0 controller, and Apple has confirmed to us that the new iPad Pro will in fact support USB 3.0 transfer speeds over its Lightning port. USB 3.0 supports theoretical transfer speeds of up to 5Gbps, a little over 10 times faster than USB 2.0’s 480Mbps.

But those faster transfer speeds will cost you. The Lightning cable that ships with the iPad Pro is a standard USB 2.0-speed cable, and you’ll need to purchase USB 3.0 cables separately when they’re released at some undisclosed point in the future.

My old college pal Scott Boone asked me the other day if I could peep into the Lightning port on my iPad Pro review unit and check if it had pins on both the top and bottom inside the port. I looked, and indeed, it does. All previous Lightning ports, including in the new iPhones 6S, only have pins on the bottom.

iFixit, strangely, didn’t take note of this in their teardown. Scott even left a comment on their teardown asking about it:

Starting to see rumor sites picking up on the USB 3.0 thing. iFixit didn’t spend any time on that Lightning port in Step 15. Any chance you could dig deeper and see if the Lightning connector receptacle is now electrically double-sided? That sh/would provide the pin-count needed for USB 3.

I don’t know when we’ll see Apple take advantage of this new Lightning port (the cable that ships with the iPad Pro is still just USB 2), but I think it’s every bit as capable as USB-C. I bet it can handle not just USB 3, but also Thunderbolt and DisplayPort/HDMI 4K.

Nevada Lawmaker Sends Christmas Card Featuring Fully Armed Family ★

Beautiful way to mark a holiday celebrating the most famous pacifist in history.

Gun Industry Executives: Mass Shootings Are Good for Business ★

Lee Fang, reporting for The Intercept:

Last year, Tommy Millner, the chief executive of Cabela’s, a retailer that sells guns, boasted at an investor conference in Nebraska that his company made a “conscious decision” to stock additional weapons merchandise before the 2012 election, hoping Obama’s reelection would result in increased sales. After the election, the Newtown mass shooting happened, and “the business went vertical … I meant it just went crazy,” Millner said, according to a transcript of the event. Describing the “tailwinds of profitability,” Millner noted Cabela’s “didn’t blink as others did to stop selling AR-15 platform guns,” and so his company “got a lot of new customers.” The AR-15 is a high-powered assault rifle based on the military’s M-16 model but without the full automatic capacity,

Steven Miller, the chief executive of Big 5 Sporting Goods, another gun retailer, was asked by investor analysts in 2013 to describe the state of the market during a conference call that year. The “real surge” in firearm sales, Miller said, “took place following the tragedy in Sandy Hook.”

Should be a busy weekend for Cabela’s.

On Guns, We’re Not Even Trying ★

Nicholas Kristof, writing for the NYT:

For similar reasons, Ronald Reagan, hailed by Republicans in every other context, favored gun regulations, including mandatory waiting periods for purchases.

“Every year, an average of 9,200 Americans are murdered by handguns,” Reagan wrote in a New York Times op-ed in 1991 backing gun restrictions. “This level of violence must be stopped.”

He added that if tighter gun regulations “were to result in a reduction of only 10 or 15 percent of those numbers (and it could be a good deal greater), it would be well worth making it the law of the land.”

Introducing the IBM Swift Sandbox ★

Looks like IBM really is getting on board with Swift:

Hi, I’m John Petitto, one of IBM’s Swift developers located at IBM’s Mobile Innovation Lab in Austin. We love Swift here and thought you would too so we are making our IBM Swift Sandbox available to developers on developerWorks.

The IBM Swift Sandbox is an interactive website that lets you write Swift code and execute it in a server environment — on top of Linux! Each sandbox runs on IBM Cloud in a Docker container. In addition, both the latest versions of Swift and its standard library are available for you to use.

All you need now to start writing Swift code is a web browser. Very cool.

Final Play of Last Night’s Packers-Lions Game ★

Moments like this are why we Americans love football.

The second-to-last play of the game, not so much.

Update: This fan video on Instagram better illustrates just how athletically incredible Rodgers’s throw was.