Gorilla Glass 2 will allow same strength at 80 percent of size

Gorilla Glass 2 will allow same strength at 80 percent of size, likely to end up in iOS devices:

Corning Gorilla Glass 2 enables up to a 20 percent reduction in glass thickness, while maintaining the industry-leading damage resistance, toughness, and scratch resistance customers have come to expect from the world’s most widely deployed cover glass. The thinner Gorilla Glass 2 enables slimmer and sleeker devices, brighter images, and greater touch sensitivity. These benefits can provide electronics manufacturers with superior design flexibility as they address consumer demand for increasingly high-performing, touch-sensitive, and durable mobile devices.

[Another US company doing good work. And of course, all things being equal you can’t be too thin…]

Source: 9 to 5 Mac – Apple Intelligence

Tim Cook’s Compensation for Fiscal 2011 Revealed

Tim Cook’s Compensation for Fiscal 2011 Revealed:

Apple’s (AAPL) 2012 proxy statement filed on Monday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission reveals that Tim Cook, who took over the helm at the tech giant when Steve Jobs resigned at the end of August, was rewarded handsomely for taking over as CEO, with a compensation package totaling an impressive $376 million.
According to the filing posted online by Apple, Cook’s 2011 compensation included $900K in salary — a figure that far outstrips Jobs’ $1 a year — $900K in incentive pay and 1 million restricted shares of  Apple valued at $376,180,000, the closing price of the co.’s stock on August 24, 2011, which corresponds with the date the award was granted.

[Must be nice… OTOH…]

Apple CEO Tim Cook didn’t really make $378 million in 2011:

On paper, the shares were worth more than $376 million when the grant was made. But in 2011, they were worthless. Half of them will vest in 2016, five years after they were granted. The other half will vest in 2021 — “subject to Mr. Cook’s continued employment with the Company.”

[snip -Ed.]

For the record, Cook — who was Apple’s chief operating officer before he succeeded Steve Jobs as CEO last August — is a hands-on manager who makes Apple’s supply chains run on time. In fiscal 2011, his company generated $108 billion in revenue. In calendar 2011, its market value grew by more than $70 billion. As of September, it had $81.57 billion in cash and marketable securities in the bank and zero debt.

If Tim Cook had been paid $378 million in 2011, you could argue that he was worth it.

[Meaning, they might be worth a bundle in a few years, or a lot in many years, or maybe not. But it does give him incentive to hang around which is the point.]

Newspapers, Paywalls, and Core Users « Clay Shirky

Newspapers, Paywalls, and Core Users « Clay Shirky:

To understand newspapers’ 15-year attachment to paywalls, you have to understand “Everyone must pay!” not just as an economic assertion, but as a cultural one. Though the journalists all knew readership would plummet if their paper dropped imported content like Dear Abby or the funny pages, they never really had to know just how few people were reading about the City Council or the water main break. Part of the appeal of paywalls, even in the face of their economic ineffectiveness, was preserving this sense that a coupon-clipper and a news junkie were both just customers, people whose motivations the paper could serve in general, without having to understand in particular.

The article threshold has often been discussed as if it was simply a new method of getting readers to pay, to which the reply has to be “Yes, except for most of them.” Calling article thresholds a “leaky” or “porous” paywall understates the enormity of the change; the metaphor of a leak suggests a mostly intact container that lets out a minority of its contents, but a paper that shares even two pages a month frees a majority of users from any fee at all. By the time the threshold is at 20 pages (a number fast becoming customary) a paper has given up on even trying to charge between 85% and 95% of its readers, and it will only convince a minority of that minority to pay.

The Believer – Haterade

The Believer – Haterade:

When I think of the coiners of the term haterade, those young, mean/smart, media-obsessed bloggers on mean/smart, media-obsessed websites who seem to be able to whip up five hundred words of clever commentary in the time it takes people my age to think of an opening sentence, I wonder if their brains are wired in such a way that the slings and arrows of free-flowing obloquy don’t inflict quite as much pain on them as they might on their elders. The fact that they’ve developed several playful iterations of the word hate—you can hate on someone, show some hatitude, or simply be a hater—suggests that they’ve found a way to laugh at and therefore defang (reappropriate?) the whole gestalt. But I also wonder how often they get to experience the thrill of clueless abandon. I wonder if they’ve ever really been able to express anything—in print, on a blog, on Facebook, wherever—without on some level bracing themselves for mockery or scorn or troll-driven pestilence. I wonder if they could write something as controversial as “Safe-Sex Lies” (even in a more coherent form) and expect anything less than a full-blown assault from an electronic lynch mob and a lifetime of damning search-engine results.

[(Emphasis is mine) There is a age/generational aspect to this that I find in other venues as well. Anyone 10 years or so younger than I care to comment?]

Source: True_BS

It never ends how it starts

Opinion: It never ends how it starts:

One also has to ask what, if anything, did Hosking learn from the experience, given that when a team-mate told her over dinner Sunday evening her comments were spread across the Twitterverse, she told reporters the next day, “It’s gotten the world talking about women’s cycling, hasn’t it?”

[What I hope she learned is that Anthony Tan, the author of the opinion piece above, should be called the same name… Of course, the reporter should have reported it. That’s the gig. And it reads to me like you’re hoping that she struggles with her national program from here on out. I certainly hope that’s not how you feel. What most folks have forgotten is that you’re supposed to have an opinion, and you should feel free to express it, and the suppression (through career retribution) of those two things is what sucks, not the other way around.]

Source: VeloNews

USA Cycling Cyclo-cross National Championships

USA Cycling Cyclo-cross National Championships:

In a heavyweight slugfest for the ages, Jeremy Powers (Rapha Focus) withstood a barrage of blows from rivals accounting for eight of the last 11 national titles before ultimately delivering his own knockout punch and his first national championship.

Amidst raucous applause, a visibly moved Powers crossed the finish line first in the final event of the five-day USA Cycling Cyclocross Championships held at Badger Prairie Park near Madison, Wisconsin with a hard-fought and masterfully measured performance.

Tour de France Champion Greg LeMond to Attend Tour of the Battenkill

Tour de France Champion Greg LeMond to Attend Tour of the Battenkill:

Organizers of the Tour of the Battenkill announce that 3-time Tour de France champion Greg LeMond will be the guest of honor at the 8th annual event on April 14-15 in Cambridge, NY.  The former champion of the largest professional race in the world, LeMond will attend the largest one-day road race in America –the Tour of the Battenkill – and will lead the 22 mile non-competitive ‘Bike Marathon-Battenkill’ ride on parts of the challenging course just prior to the UCI 1.2 Professional Men’s race on Sunday morning.

#screwcable

#screwcable:

I’ve long believed that piracy is largely a business model problem not a human behavior problem. If you give people a legal way to consume the content they want, they will pay for it. But when you make it impossible to legally consume the content they want, they will pirate it. That’s what happened last night and that is what will happen every night there is a Knicks game on TV for as long as MSG and Time Warner Cable continue to figure out how to screw their customers.

[Round and round. And while I understand the annoyance, one can still choose not to pirate, despite the obnoxious state of the cable business.]

Source: A VC