Linked List: August 8, 2019

Thursday, 8 August 2019

Mud Maker: The Man Behind MLB’s Essential Secret Sauce 

Emma Baccellieri, writing for Sports Illustrated:

This always does the trick. It prevents anyone from exploring what he’s actually doing, which is what he’s done for decades, what his father did before him, and his grandfather before him: Bintliff is collecting the mud that is used to treat every single regulation major league baseball, roughly 240,000 per season.

Mud is a family business; it has been for more than half a century. For decades, baseball’s official rule book has required that every ball be rubbed before being used in a game. Bintliff’s mud is the only substance allowed. Originally marketed as “magic,” it’s just a little thicker than chocolate pudding — a tiny dab is enough to remove the factory gloss from a new ball without mucking up the seams or getting the cover too filthy. Equipment managers rub it on before every game, allowing pitchers to get a dependable grip. The mud is found only along a short stretch of that tributary of the Delaware, with the precise location kept secret from everyone, including MLB.

I’ve long known that baseballs are treated with mud, but I had no idea it all comes from the same source. And it’s crazy that even MLB doesn’t know the exact location.

The History of Clarus the Dogcow 

With FileMaker changing its name back to Claris — with an i — it’s worth revisiting Stephen Hackett’s history of Clarus — with a u — the dogcow.

FileMaker Goes Back to ‘Claris’ 

Claris:

“Claris stems from the Latin root ‘clarus,’ which means ‘clear, bright and shining,’” said Brad Freitag, Claris CEO. “Nothing better encapsulates the company’s mission: to empower the problem-solver with smart solutions that work for their business. By extending the reach of our platform as a modern, multi-faceted, and powerful merger of on-premises custom apps and third-party services, our customers can streamline their business processes across the cloud services that they use every day.”

If this name change doesn’t bring a nostalgic smile to your face, you probably weren’t a Mac user in the 1990s. FileMaker is still going strong, but back in the day, Claris had a slew of great Mac productivity apps.

Uber Posts $5.2 Billion Loss and Slowest Ever Growth Rate 

Kate Conger, reporting for The New York Times:

Uber set two dubious quarterly records on Thursday as it reported its results: its largest-ever loss, exceeding $5 billion, and its slowest-ever revenue growth.

The double whammy immediately renewed questions about the prospects for the company, the world’s biggest ride-hailing business. Uber has been dogged by concerns about sluggish sales and whether it can make money, worries that were compounded by a disappointing initial public offering in May.

Is there any evidence to suggest that Uber will ever turn a profit? I just don’t see it.

Samsung Galaxy Note 10 

Dieter Bohn, writing for The Verge:

The Note 10 starts at $949 and comes in just one configuration: 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. The Note 10 Plus starts at $1,099 with 12GB RAM / 256GB storage and you can spend $100 more to get 512GB of storage. Both are available for preorder today and will ship on August 23rd.

Kind of interesting to ship the regular Note with just one storage configuration. Also: Samsung’s first flagship phones without headphone jacks.

The Note 10 Plus 5G — temporarily exclusive to Verizon in the U.S. — will cost $1,300. I don’t think that’s crazy — for most people, their phone is both their most-used, most-important computer and their main camera.