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The Stationary-Vehicles Edition Monday, April 10, 2017

How Not To Create Traffic Jams, Pollution And Urban Sprawl, by The Economist

And then, unfortunately, there’s the car park. For 14,000 workers, Apple is building almost 11,000 parking spaces. Many cars will be tucked under the main building, but most will cram into two enormous garages to the south. Tot up all the parking spaces and the lanes and ramps that will allow cars to reach them, and it is clear that Apple is allocating a vast area to stationary vehicles. In all, the new headquarters will contain 318,000 square metres of offices and laboratories. The car parks will occupy 325,000 square metres.

Apple is building 11,000 parking spaces not because it wants to but because Cupertino, the suburban city where the new headquarters is located, demands it. Cupertino has a requirement for every building. A developer who wants to put up a block of flats, for example, must provide two parking spaces per apartment, one of which must be covered. For a fast-food restaurant, the city demands one space for every three seats; for a bowling alley, seven spaces per lane plus one for every worker. Cupertino’s neighbours have similar rules. With such a surfeit of parking, most of it free, it is little wonder that most people get around Silicon Valley by car, or that the area has such appalling traffic jams.

NVIDIA To Release Pascal Drivers For macOS, by Ryan Smith, Anandtech

The fact of the matter is that neither of these groups is very big relative to the much bigger Mac user base – who wants to do real professional work on an unsupported video card setup? – but they are vocal, and they do need increasingly powerful video cards, like the rest of the PC market. But more to the point, given Apple’s announcement that they’re going to eventually fix the Mac Pro’s GPU woes, but not for at least another year, this is a chance for NVIDIA to take a low-risk pot shot at Apple for their dGPU follies. At a minimum, it’s a nice gesture to Mac users (whom tend to spend big on hardware), and perhaps, it makes for the start of a grassroots campaign to get an NVIDIA GPU in the next iMac or Mac Pro. And while only NVIDIA knows for sure if they planned this before this week’s Mac Pro announcement or they just got lucky, it comes across as a clever move by the company.

Stuff

Apple Clips (For iPhone), by Michael Muchmore, PC Magazine

You may be wondering: Why did Apple publish Clips, a fun video editing and sharing app? That seems more like the domain of Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook. But Apple has the video software technology, thanks to its excellent iMovie and Final Cut Pro applications, so why not? The flexible, capable Clips app offers a unique combination of video effects, and it really is fun to use.

RetriCAM: A Fun iOS Camera App With Real-time Filters, by Aaron Lee, Apple World Today

The app lets you apply more than 50 different filters in real time when you're taking pics.

Notes

Dropping Imagination Technologies Gives Us A Rare Look At How Ruthless Apple Can Be, by Sam Shead, Business Insider

Some analysts are speculating that Apple could swoop in on Imagination now that its valuation has fallen off a cliff and acquire it for half the amount that it would have paid a week ago. [...]

But acquiring Imagination after sinking the company's stock would attract criticism and a lot of bad PR for Apple, which would be especially unwelcome now that the European Union is scrutinising the company's every move in Europe.

No EU Country Has Claimed On €13bn Apple Tax, by Colm Kelpie, Irish Independent

"I can say that I have not been given any official indications from any country that they intend to seek further tax for their own country as a result of the commission's decision," Mr Noonan said in a response to a parliamentary question from Independent TD Tommy Broughan. [...]

The money is due to be put into an escrow account, which would be established via a commercial contract with Apple. But the deadline for that was early January and the money has still not been deposited.

Satirical News Show ‘China Uncensored’ Censored By Apple In Hong Kong And Taiwan, by Oiwan Lam, Global Voices

In the letter to Cook, Chappell stressed that while he is aware of the restrictions in China, the management of Apple's Hong Kong and Taiwan app stores should be different.

Bottom of the Page

I sure hope that one day, self-driving cars will be the only vehicles allowed on the roads and highways. Each car should be extremely small -- just the seats and nothing else. Think chairs, with walls. In fact, maybe all cars should be single-seaters. If you really want to talk to spouse, who is in the next car, you'll just facetime each other. The two cars should be smart enough to travel close enough so that you can just use bluetooth to communicate with each other.

If you happen to be transporting a lot of stuff -- say, luggages to the airport -- you'll just summon another self-driving taxi-car that is just big enough to transport your stuff.

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Bascially, Wall-E on earth.

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Thanks for reading.