THE DEFIANT ONES, a four-part documentary event, will debut on HBO in 2017, it was announced today by Casey Bloys, president, HBO Programming. Director Allen Hughes (“Menace II Society”) has made an unquestionably bold film about the unlikely but ultimately unbreakable bond of trust and friendship between two street-smart men from different worlds who have shaped many of the most exciting and extreme moments in recent pop culture.
And:
Set amid many of the defining events of the past four decades, THE DEFIANT ONES tells the stories of Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre — one the son of a Brooklyn longshoreman, the other straight out of Compton — and their improbable partnership and surprising leading roles in a series of transformative events in contemporary culture.
And:
Allen Hughes filmed Iovine and Dre over a three-year period in making THE DEFIANT ONES. In addition to extensive interviews with Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, who speak frankly about their highs and lows, the show includes interviews with such music icons as Bono, David Geffen, Eminen, Nas, Ice Cube, Gwen Stefani, Jon Landau, Tom Petty, Trent Reznor, Snoop Dogg, Bruce Springsteen and will.i.am. The series also features never-before-seen footage from a multitude of recording and writing sessions with Eazy-E, JJ Fad, Stevie Nicks, N.W.A., Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen and U2, among others.
According to Apple’s System Status page, the iTunes Store, the iOS App Store, and the Mac App Store are currently unavailable for some users, making it impossible to do things like purchase new apps and download app updates.
I’m affected by this. I’m also getting a message that says iTunes can’t process purchases right now.
More people are switching from Macs to Surface than ever before. Our trade-in program for MacBooks was our best ever, and the combination of excitement for the innovation of Surface coupled with the disappointment of the new MacBook Pro – especially among professionals – is leading more and more people to make the switch to Surface, like this. It seems like a new review recommending Surface over MacBook comes out daily. This makes our team so proud, because it means we’re doing good work.
Microsoft has come out with things like this in the past for products competing with Apple, including a mock funeral for the iPod years ago—the number of times they’ve done that makes it hard for me to believe them. However, if this is true, Apple has a problem.
Apple is rolling out a fix for the iCloud Calendar spam issue that has plagued users over the past few weeks. On iCloud.com, the company has added a new Report Junk feature. This lets users remove spammy invites from their calendar and reports the sender to Apple for further investigation.
The feature is currently only available on Apple’s iCloud.com Calendar web app but it is likely to roll out to the iOS and Mac native Calendar in a future software update.
This is a fascinating article on WSJ. It profiles a new service called Music Aficionado that caters to getting the older crowd to pay for music.
Although older, wealthier fans raised in the age of record stores make up the demographic that is most comfortable with the idea of paying for music, they’ve been among the most reluctant groups to pay for monthly streaming subscriptions, which offer ad-free access to up to tens of millions of songs.
I’ve seen this myself. People with millions of dollars that are using free services or just using their own music, instead of paying for a service. I pay for Pandora, Apple Music, and Spotify, but I’m not sure any of them really talk to me as a long-time music buyer and listener. Pandora is probably the best, followed by Spotify, but it feels like Pandora’s new service may have an edge in this next year because their new service will be tailored around what you listen to and like instead of pushing the music the service wants you to listen to.
While older consumers can generally be slower to adopt new technology, there are other factors at play. Streaming companies have been primarily built by young techies and generally use what Mr. Penn calls a “DJ model” to cater to a younger audience, promoting pop-heavy playlists that serve primarily as soundtracks for activities such as partying, exercising and “chilling.” Record companies, meantime, haven’t rushed to convert their album buyers to subscribers, since physical music sales are still highly profitable and accounted for nearly 40% of the recorded music industry’s global revenue last year.
The over-50 “demo is largely being ignored in the digital world even though these folks are the most passionate about music because they lived all of it the first time around,” said Fred Goldring, a 58-year-old veteran music lawyer.
Agreed. This is why I think Pandora has a chance—they’ll show me what I want to see as a music listener.
When I open up Apple Music and see the newest Pop/Hip Hop in my “For You” section, one of two things is happening: Either Apple’s “Love” feature doesn’t actually work, or they are pushing these albums to all users regardless of their choices. Either way, it’s not good for the user.
Apple released the next major update for iOS this morning. You can download iOS 10.2 by going to Settings > General > Software Update on your iOS device.
“Just seeing how defenses are playing me, playing us,” James told cleveland.com. “Kind of watching and paying attention to the minutes I was in, so at the last three minutes of the first quarter when I come out, I can watch and see from when I was in. Then I go back in for the second, and I get it once again at the six minute mark of the second quarter. Just trying to stay above the curve and see how i can help.”
James is the only one using the iPad on the Cavs at this point, but he’s using it wisely. Studying how the other team is playing him on the court and seeing if he can come up with ways for the Cavs to counteract that.
That got me thinking about some of my favorite games.
One in particular, Nanuleu, came to me by way of this post from John Vorhees’ series of game posts for MacStories. Nanuleu is minimal in design, incredibly easy to learn to play, and strong in subtle strategy. Lots of replay value, and they’ve recently added more content to broaden the experience.
Glixel: What’s it been like working with Apple? How did the partnership for Super Mario Run come about? They’re supporting it a lot more than they usually do with individual games.
Miyamoto: The timing was really fortunate for both of us. On the Nintendo side we’d been talking a lot about going into the mobile space but we hadn’t decided that we were going to make a Mario game for smartphones. As we were talking about what we were going to create we started asking ourselves about what a Mario game would need to be. So we were experimenting with some things and we came up with the base idea, and that’s what we eventually showed to Apple.
Part of the reason we took it to Apple was that in order for us to have the performance we wanted we needed some development support to ensure that the game would run the way we expected. Because Nintendo is always trying to do something unique we also wanted to try and do something different on the business side too. We really didn’t want to do something in the free to play space, but in order to make sure we had the opportunity to do what we wanted [offer a taste of the game for free, and charge $9.99 to unlock the whole thing], we had to talk to the people who are actually running the shop. Naturally the people on the App Store initially told us that the free-to-play approach is a good one, but I’ve always had this image that Apple and Nintendo have very similar philosophies. As we started working together, I found that to be true and they became very welcoming of trying something new.
If you are a gaming fan, take a few minutes to read the interview.
Shigeru Miyamoto is an incredibly influential part of modern gaming’s history. The Super Mario and Zelda franchises are his creations.
The game Super Mario Run carries that DNA, that gaming delight, over to the iPhone. And somehow it does that in a game that only requires a single finger to play.
Right now, my iMac’s uptime (the time since my last restart) is nearly four days. And Safari is using 6.81GB of RAM, by far the largest memory hog on my Mac. The app itself is using about 1GB, but each tab, each window also uses RAM. You can see this in Activity Monitor (located in /Applications/Utilities), by selecting the Memory tab.
And:
As you can see [in the image in Kirk’s original post], the most egregious RAM user is Google Docs, which requires more than 500MB RAM for a single, blank document. Open a few more Google docs, and you’ll see that number quickly balloon. (It’s not clear whether this is Google’s fault or Apple’s fault.)
A lot of this memory usage depends on how long the pages or tabs have been open. If I launch Safari on my 12-inch MacBook, and open the exact same tabs, it only uses 2.8GB RAM. Of course, if I leave them open for a long time, that RAM usage will increase.
I fired up Activity Monitor on my Mac and tapped the Memory tab. My Safari only used 321MB (Less than 1/3 of Kirk’s 1GB).
I then created a new Google Doc blank document which used 193MB (again, much less than Kirk’s result), and added more Google Doc documents, each of which weighed in at slightly less than the original.
I don’t doubt Kirk’s results, but I suspect that there’s more here than simply Safari being a memory hog. It’d be interesting to see a more controlled experiment, loading known pages in a controlled environment after a fresh restart.
San Francisco Police Department has released footage of two recent Apple store robberies in the Bay Area, which took place on November 25 and November 29 (respectively) in the vicinity of Chestnut Street in San Francisco.
The first video captures three perpetrators daringly walk in, grab whatever they can and swiftly storm out – and all of that in the window of less than 15 seconds. Similarly, the second clip catches four men perform the same maneuver with almost identical pace.
In both cases, startled staff and customers merely watch the criminals make off with a bunch of gadgets in their hands.
It’d be interesting to know what Apple is doing about this problem, if anything. Does this fall into the category of nuisance, a small enough loss that Apple writes down the loss and moves on? Is there a stealth effort, after the fact, that tracks down the thieves via a Find My iPhone type mechanism?
Alphabet CEO Larry Page, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg are among the small group of top tech leaders who will attend a summit with President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday at Trump Tower in Manhattan, according to numerous sources with knowledge of the situation.
Those who will be attending (although most of the companies declined to comment to Recode) along with Page, Cook and Sandberg, include: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella; Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins; IBM CEO Ginni Rometty; Intel CEO Brian Krzanich; and Oracle CEO Safra Catz.
“I plan to tell the President-elect that we are with him and will help in any way we can,” said Catz in a statement. “If he can reform the tax code, reduce regulation and negotiate better trade deals, the U.S. technology industry will be stronger and more competitive than ever.”
Being a session guitarist is a vastly different gig than being a member of a band in the studio. Session guitarists are a great breed of musicians that can be very helpful on a project if asked.
You walk into a local multiplex a few minutes after the lights have dimmed. You find your seat to the first trailer, some confection involving superheroes or zombies. As the light flickers over you, strings churn from the speakers, interrupted at certain intervals by a massive blast of indistinguishable brass, like an alphorn next to an amplifier.
The internet and the sound’s creator refer to it as BRAAAM. It may sound synthetic, but it’s usually produced with brass instruments and a prepared piano. Although it has its roots in a scoring style composer Hans Zimmer employed for much of the early ’00s, the BRAAAM heard in seemingly every trailer was first recorded for Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film Inception, and has been adapted, copied, and even outright sampled ever since. Is BRAAAM something that happened to us, or is it something we, as moviegoers, desired?
Along with the “Wilhelm Scream“, probably one of the most recognizable, and therefore annoying, sounds in movies today.
A dash of graphene can transform the stretchy goo known as Silly Putty into a pressure sensor able to monitor a human pulse or even track the dainty steps of a small spider.
The material, dubbed G-putty, could be developed into a device that continuously monitors blood pressure, its inventors hope. It also demonstrates a form of self-repair that may herald smarter graphene composites.
Example number eighty gazillion of how cool science is.
Each year, Popular Science picks the 100 greatest new innovations in science and technology to feature in our Best Of What’s New issue. These are the breakthroughs that will shape the future—and some may even make great Christmas presents.
There are some really cool and really expensive potential gifts on this list.
If you ask either of us for our opinion on the best place to buy Mac software, here’s our opinionated answer: We strongly recommend buying direct over using the Mac App Store.
At a personal level, we both always try to buy direct, using the App Store only when there’s no direct alternative.
Why do we think you should buy direct? Because we feel the advantages of buying from the Mac App Store are greatly outweighed by the disadvantages of buying from the Mac App Store.
Here’s a comparison of the two methods of buying, with what we view as some of the pros and cons of each.
The Mac App Store works for those who want more of a hands off approach but I’ve always preferred to buy direct from the developer. This piece does a good job of laying out the pros and cons of each method.
While the exact reason for the delay remains unclear, a person familiar with the development of AirPods told The Wall Street Journal that Apple’s troubles appear to be related to its “efforts to chart a new path for wireless headphones,” in addition to resolving what happens when users lose one of the earpieces or the battery dies.
I’ve been using the AirPods since they were introduced at the event and I love them. I’ve had a couple of very minor issues over the last couple of months, but nothing significant. These things are going to sell really well.
Samsung Electronics Co Ltd said on Friday that a software update for Galaxy Note 7 smartphones will be released mid-December in the United States preventing them from charging and functioning as mobile phones, rendering them useless.
Good, they are dangerous to the general public.
However, Verizon Communications Inc said it would not take part in the update because of the added risk this could pose to Galaxy Note7 users that do not have another device to switch to.
Are you kidding me? These things have caught on fire mid-flight!
Shigeru Miyamoto has confirmed that Nintendo’s upcoming iPhone game Super Mario Run will require an always-on internet connection to play, which Miyamoto said is “a requirement that’s been built into the game to support security.” The security element is one of the big reasons why the company decided to launch on iPhone first, Miyamoto said, and it helps the game’s three separate modes function together while always keeping the software secure and safe, preventing piracy in the process.
I get why Nintendo is doing this but it makes the game less functional for a lot of people. Not everyone has a solid internet connection or unlimited data plans on their iOS devices.
The Christmas tree: it’s a quintessential part of the holiday season. But it turns out not all festive trees are made equal — at least not when it comes to environmental friendliness.
So, which is better for the planet — a freshly cut tree or a fake one?
The short answer, which may come as a surprise to some, is a real tree. But it’s actually more complicated than that.
No surprise to me. I’m from Nova Scotia, a large tree farming area. I won’t allow a fake Christmas tree in my home for aesthetic and economic reasons.
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The first thing to say about The Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York” is that it is absurd when described in words.
Take an ever-soused Irish folk/punk band that includes a tin whistle player named Spider. Put them within a soaring orchestral arrangement, and task the shambolic front man with delivering a Christmas song. Make it a duet with a stage-fright afflicted singer who never quite became the pop starlet she wanted to be. The result is possibly the most sentimental Christmas song ever constructed, yet loved by people who spend December telling you, oh, how they despise sentimental Christmas songs.
While I wouldn’t call it the “greatest Christmas song of all time”, it is a great song and the article does a good job of describing its power.
You know how when you sit on your couch, the Wi-Fi on your laptop cuts out? Or when you’re in the bathroom your phone refuses to connect? From Google to Netgear, everyone’s rolling out expensive “Mesh Network” kits that promise to fix Wi-Fi dead zones. But only some people should shell out the $300-$500 for one.
Mesh networks have become the “new cool thing” for tech blogs to talk about and the article does a good job explaining what they are. But it also points out they are really only useful in very specific situations. It’s why I don’t think, hope and rumor to the contrary, Apple is intending to replace their wireless products with mesh networking ones.
Most Christmas customs in the US share two characteristics. First, it’s usually hard to pin down their origins to a single source. And second, their roots almost always reach back to religious custom — Christmas being the second most important feast day (behind Easter) on the Christian calendar — but have been happily adapted and, in some cases, scrubbed of religious content to make them more broadly palatable.
The celebration of Advent — whether with wreaths in church or calendars at home — is among these customs. On the one hand, it’s one of the major seasons celebrated by most Christian churches in the Western tradition: Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Episcopalians, Lutherans, and many additional Protestant churches mark the roughly month-long period with special observance.
But the word Advent comes from the Latin word for “arrival” — adventus — which means non-Christians can celebrate it simply as a fun countdown to Christmas. In that respect, it’s also become a marketing opportunity for retailers, mostly through Advent calendars, which have been around since the 19th century and have, of late, grown steadily more, shall we say, creative.
Many of us (non-religious) people know of the Advent Calendar but do you know its origins? When I was a kid, it was just a way to get more chocolate.
