Linked List: June 15, 2024

Saturday, 15 June 2024

Pixar’s ‘Inside Out 2’ Heads for Historic $140–$150M Box Office Opening ★

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter:

Pixar’s tentpole earned a massive $62 million on Friday, well ahead of expectations and putting the movie on course to open in the $140 million to $150 million range domestically over Father’s Day weekend, one of the top three starts ever for an animated film and the second-best for Pixar. Rival studios believe it could climb as high as $155 million to $160 million, but Disney is being more circumspect. Friday’s haul includes a huge $13 million in Thursday previews.

Great news for a great studio that needed a hit. Maybe we should stop griping about Pixar making sequels and just encourage them to make great films, original or not.

Japan Enacts Law to Mandate Third-Party App Stores, and You’ll Never Guess Which Devices Aren’t Included ★

Kyodo News:

Japan’s parliament enacted Wednesday a law to promote competition in smartphone app stores by restricting tech giants Apple Inc. and Google LLC from limiting third-party companies from selling and operating apps on their platforms.

The law will prohibit the providers of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android smartphone operating systems, app stores and payment platforms from preventing the sale of apps and services that directly compete with the native platforms’ own.

Laws like this are protectionist attacks that specifically target two U.S. companies — Apple and Google. The United States should treat this as a trade war, and reciprocate by passing legislation mandating third-party game stores and payments on game consoles from Sony and Nintendo. See how they like it. It’s patently hypocritical that Japan’s law targets only phones; this law wouldn’t exist if Sony were a player in phones and mobile platforms.

Violations of the new law will bring a penalty of 20 percent of the domestic revenue of the service found to have breached the rules. The fine can increase to 30 percent if the companies do not cease the anticompetitive practices.

Unlike the EU, which believes it can assess fines comprising a hefty percentage of companies’ worldwide revenue (which, in the case of the DMA, I doubt they’ll ever collect), Japan, quite reasonably, only assesses fines on companies’ Japanese revenue.

Ken Kocienda Left Humane ★

Ken Kocienda, who was Humane’s head of product engineering, has left the company. his Twitter bio and LinkedIn profile both state “working on something new”:

Working on something new. Past: Humane, 15 years at , inventor of iPhone autocorrect, author of “Creative Selection”

Kocienda’s book Creative Selection is one of the best insider descriptions of working at Apple ever written, and two years ago he was a splendid guest on The Talk Show.

Never Change, Samsung, Never Change ★

This listing for a vintage Samsung VR400G VHS VCR doesn’t state what year it came out, but it’s a pretty safe bet it was after May 6, 1998.