Ron Amadeo, Android Police, gives a lengthy review of the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1:

On paper, it all sounds very good. Reality, however, is an entirely different story. It’s not enough to just have a good idea, you have to actually make it real, you need to build it.

I’m sad to report that Samsung failed at execution on all fronts.

Ouch. Looks like Samsung has some work to do with their original products.

Samantha Felix, Business Insider:

Check out how these famous brands have altered their logos — for better or for worse — since they originally opened their doors.

This is a good companion to a link I posted in May.

(Note: Microsoft’s new logo isn’t reflected in Felix’s piece.)

NBC News:

Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, died Saturday, weeks after heart surgery and days after his 82nd birthday.

I always enjoy watching recordings of the Apollo 11 coverage. I can only imagine the excitement and intrigue way back in 1969 as people watched live. To me, Armstrong was the embodiment of our fearless child-like wonder and belief that anything is possible.

John Nelson, IDV Solutions, created a very cool visualization of all tropical storms and hurricanes since 1851. What makes it especially interesting is that the image is centered on the South Pole. Check it out.

Raphael Minder, writing for the New York Times:

A case of suspected vandalism in a church in a northeastern village in Spain has turned out to be probably the worst art restoration project of all time.

Yikes. An old lady turned Jesus into a monkey-like creature. Feel bad for that Church.

From an infographic by Thomas Pardee for Ad Age:

What might be surprising – and infuriating to social-media gurus everywhere – is how little candidates and their teams are using social media for engagement. As we noted last week, Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism study found that both campaigns are treating social as a broadcast medium more than anything else.

Clearly, President Obama is dominating the social media scene. However, it is interesting to see how little true interaction the candidates have with their constituents. It looks like Facebook, Twitter, and the like are being used mainly as cheap broadcast distribution channels. There is power in direct communication - a power not currently exploited.

(via: NextDraft)

Bryan Lewis Saunders:

After experiencing drastic changes in my environment, I looked for other experiences that might profoundly affect my perception of the self.  So I devised another experiment where everyday I took a different drug and drew myself under the influence.

This may be one of the coolest and intriguing things I have seen in awhile. It reminds me of spiders on drugs.

Eric Slivka, MacRumors.com:

Microsoft’s market capitalization peaked on December 30, 1999, reaching an intraday high of $119.94 per share. With Microsoft having documented 5,160,024,593 outstanding shares as of October 31, 1999 in its quarterly earnings report, the company would have had a market capitalization of $618.89 billion on December 30.

Apple’s most recent quarterly filing listed 937,406,000 outstanding shares as of July 13, 2012, and with the company’s stock price hitting $660.73 today, its market capitalization reached $619.37 billion.

Even crazier, Apple is now worth over $200 billion more than its nearest competitor, Exxon Mobil, and almost $400 billion more than Microsoft. If you want to put a picture to this, check out the divergence of Apple and Microsoft over the past decade.

Katie Fehrenbacher, GigaOm:

In a rare visit to Facebook’s Prineville data center on Thursday, the temperature hit a high of 93 degrees outside. While the cows we passed on the 20-minute drive from the Redmond, Ore. airport searched for any semblance of shade, Building No. 1 of the data center was as noisy as an industrial factory, with air flowing through the cooling rooms and the humidifier room spraying purified water onto the incoming air at a rapid rate. It’s like peeking inside a brand new Porsche while it’s being driven at its fullest capacity.

Pretty cool infrastructure photos. An interesting statistic in the article: Facebook has an estimated 180,000 servers - Google has over one million.

Michael Lopp, writing at Rands In Repose, on Steve Jobs’ famous “one more thing” ending at Apple keynotes:

The best stories, the ones we love, have a surprise ending. Since Steve returned to Apple, an essential part of the keynote was the anticipation of the unexpected, and that means aggressive and invasive secrecy. Not because they don’t want you to know, but because they want to tell you a great story.

Since diving into the Mac platform with both feet in late 2005, one of my favorite things is watching the Apple keynote address.¹ The “one more thing” at the end was the icing to the keynote’s cake. As much as Steve Jobs was a visionary, he was a better showman. He understood that telling the story of a device was as important as its implementation. Jobs would artfully and slowly describe how a product or service would integrate with your life and make it better. Just when you were fully onboard and excited to go buy the product - BOOM! - one more thing, it’s even better than you thought. That anticipation built an excitement around Apple’s products that no other company has matched. Whether you think it is silly or not, there is no denying that Jobs masterfully humanized technology in a world filled with bland, soulless products laden with awful corporate jargon.