This mild rejection of the current tablet landscape is worth your time:
In general, it’s less optimal to have an output area that also doubles as an input area. This is why the mouse and keyboard will be with us for decades hence—because they let you keep your hands away from what you’re trying to focus on.
Go check this out. Via Reddit.
Interim Apple Chief Under Fire After Unveiling Grotesque New Macbook:
CUPERTINO, CA — In his first major product release since stepping in for an ailing Steve Jobs last month, interim Apple CEO Tim Cook faced a storm of harsh criticism Monday after unveiling a grotesque new version of the company’s popular MacBook that many in attendance described as “disgusting.”
Cook presented the bizarre, malformed new product to stunned silence during a media event at Apple headquarters, revealing a device that, while vaguely similar to a computer in certain respects, appeared to be encased in a thick, flesh-like coating that was visibly moist and engorged.
“Oh, my sweet God,” Apple employee Kurt Starfeldt said after viewing the MacBook up close. “It appeared to be discharging some sort of mucus-type substance from the headphone jack and making these weird murmuring sounds. And then it started quivering at one point when Tim was demonstrating how to use the touch pad. It was quite upsetting, actually.”
and
One customer, who had been anticipating the release of the new MacBook for months, claimed he felt “nauseous” when multiple software applications running at once caused the computer to started wheezing.
“I tried to force-quit some of the programs, but it got all slow and began to turn this sickly purple color,” Bill DeLain, 39, said. “Finally I hit the eject button and a tray popped open and spit out a bunch of teeth. Why does it have teeth?”
So, about Egypt:
Some kids made a video using real footage and CGI’d first-person shooter graphics.
Update: Actually, turns out they’ve done these for lots of video games.
This video is pretty cool: time lapse footage of a spiderweb being built, plus slow-motion footage of subsequent bug capture, and — as a bonus — some spider-on-spider food theft.
This may be the finest image on the entire Internet.
How many spaces do you put after a period?
If you said anything other than “one,” you are unequivocally and completely wrong.
If you think two is correct, it’s probably because of your (outmoded) typing training:
Most ordinary people would know the one-space rule, too, if it weren’t for a quirk of history. In the middle of the last century, a now-outmoded technology — the manual typewriter — invaded the American workplace. To accommodate that machine’s shortcomings, everyone began to type wrong. And even though we no longer use typewriters, we all still type like we do.
The problem with typewriters was that they used monospaced type — that is, every character occupied an equal amount of horizontal space. This bucked a long tradition of proportional typesetting, in which skinny characters (like I or 1) were given less space than fat ones (like W or M). Monospaced type gives you text that looks “loose” and uneven; there’s a lot of white space between characters and words, so it’s more difficult to spot the spaces between sentences immediately. Hence the adoption of the two-space rule — on a typewriter, an extra space after a sentence makes text easier to read. Here’s the thing, though: Monospaced fonts went out in the 1970s. First electric typewriters and then computers began to offer people ways to create text using proportional fonts. Today nearly every font on your PC is proportional. (Courier is the one major exception.) Because we’ve all switched to modern fonts, adding two spaces after a period no longer enhances readability, typographers say. It diminishes it.
Warren Ellis explains why. This is annoying, since the model makes sense, but the owner’s attitude post-Saturday was “1 down, 534 to go.” So fuck them.
Sign up now to get your lifeclock!
JWZ points us to WordLens, which must be seen to be believed.
Voyager 1 is about to leave the solar system behind. It is, somewhat obviously, the farthest man-made object ever, and will remain so barring any new launches of very, very fast probes.
Cool.
This scale-of-the-Universe app is sort of like an interactive Powers of Ten.
World of Warcraft’s newest expansion officially became available at midnight last night. My shipment is delayed a week or more for some reason, but I thought I might play a bit just now.
Instead, I have a flashback to 2005:
The comicwriter and Internet god has a forum where he interacts with fans. Recently, he issued an artists’ challenge:
1977. London. You have been tasked with producing the poster for Malcolm McLaren’s JUSTICE LEAGUE film.
This is the consensus winner, and it is 93 kinds of awesome and perfect.
My Sprint Overdrive is doing very, very well today; it wasn’t too many years ago that home connectivity of 4Mbit down/1 up was considered speedy, and plenty of people never bother buying anything faster even today.
There’s a trick to it, though. It turns out that you can’t really discuss magnetism (or electricity, or gravity) in any meaningful way without understanding more about physics than your average meathead juggalo does. Feyman explains.
Unsurprisingly, falling asleep can take some getting used to. Just as you are nodding off, you can feel as though you’ve fallen off a 10-storey building. People who look half asleep will suddenly throw their heads back with a start and fling out their arms. It gets easier with time. One Russian crew member is renowned for doing without a sleeping bag and falling asleep wherever he ends the day. Anyone still awake after bedtime would see his snoozing form drift by, slowly bouncing off the walls, his course set by the air currents that gently pushed and pulled him.
Go and read: Beware the Garden of Steven.
Apple has released the guidelines for its new “Mac App Store,” and they’re basically the same as for the iPhone: an iron hand controlling the whole process, no guarantee of placement, a 30% cut to Apple, and a whole lot of rules that limit content.
Walled garden crap like this is objectionable on a phone, but Apple’s getting away with it because of how fragmented the market has been. Walled garden bullshit on a real desktop platform is complete and utter horseshit, and deserves to be denounced from every quarter. Seriously, Steve, fuck this. It’s obnoxious and controlling, and could seriously damage your platform.
So, this is sort of delightful and hilarious.
If you travel at all, or take your laptop (or phone, these days) into places that may have a wifi network you can use — airports, hotels, coffeeshops, conference centers, etc. — you’ve seen the everpresent mystery network “Free Public Wifi.” Maybe you’ve even tried to connect to it — I never have, since it looks obviously fake to me, but I have always wondered why it’s there.
Well, NPR has the story. The gist it this:
When a computer running an older version of XP can’t find any of its “favorite” wireless networks, it will automatically create an ad hoc network with the same name as the last one it connected to -– in this case, “Free Public WiFi.” Other computers within range of that new ad hoc network can see it, luring other users to connect.
The hilarious part of this is that the notion of this mythical network has spread based entirely on this bug for years now, but nobody actually knows where the original, valid “Free Public Wifi” network was. It just lives on, a digital zombie, in the memories of a million out-of-date Windows laptops. Here’s a more detailed walkthrough of how the network ID has spread; it really is “viral,” just nondestructive.
Bonus: It’s not the only one. If you see ad-hoc networks out in the wild named things like “dlink” or “linksys,” they’re probably the result of the same bug.
Please follow this handy guide to email.
Herein, he explains why, barring some pretty enormous (i.e., almost magical) developments w/r/t energy production and storage, not to mention propulsion systems, nobody is going to visit that new planet. Possibly ever.
tl;dr? Basically, people have no damn conception of just exactly how far apart things are in the universe, and what kind of energy it takes to move anything of consequence.
(Via JWZ.)
Can someone explain why iTunes needs special ID3 tags to be set on MP3 files for them to sort properly into the “Podcast” area? And, if this is the case, why iTunes lacks the ability to backfill these values FOR you if you acquire podcast MP3s from other sources (such as one’s RSS reader, which (unlike iTunes) never decides to stop downloading a given podcast because it’s been too long since I listened to an episode).
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal had a good one the other day.
DarkPatterns.org exists to document and shame companies that design their sites or applications to prevent users from being able to do what they want easily (e.g., unsubscribe from a newsletter).
If you’re doing this kind of thing, you’re a jackass.
Skynet’s gonna be really pissed about this, Mohney.
San Francisco has a brand new attraction: The House of Air, an indoor trampoline park. Check it out.
Twenty years ago, Teresa signed up for Wil Wheaton’s fan club — except she never got her packet. Somehow, it got lost. Understandably, she was upset.
She got her packet last week, along with a letter from Wil addressed to “8 year old Teresa.” Win.
Comics Alliance gives us covers from Great Comics That Never Happened. Here’s an example:
AChron is a “real-time strategy” game that includes time travel within the game itself.
I’m glad you asked. This long-form history of the game franchise that made EA is well worth your time.
Some gems from late in the article:
When Madden left the Raiders, he took a job at the University of California, offering a course called “Football For Fans.” Three decades later, he’s still teaching. In a way, so is his game. Current Tampa Bay Buccaneers coach Raheem Morris told game producers that playing “Madden” has influenced the way he runs his team. Before scoring a game-winning touchdown last season, Denver Broncos receiver Brandon Stokley killed clock by running parallel to the goal line, an unconventional move familiar only to anyone who has ever picked up a control pad. Years ago, Madden wanted his namesake to resemble a television broadcast; by the late 1990s, network producers were flipping the script, deploying skycams and electronic first-down markers, peddling their own brand of hyperreal entertainment. Life imitating art.
[…]
Talk turns back to real football. The Super Bowl. Indianapolis versus New Orleans. In the first half, Saints coach Sean Payton went for a touchdown on fourth-and-goal, eschewing a “gimme” field goal. He opened the second half with an onside kick. Madden watched the whole thing from his California studio, incredulous and oddly transfixed. Even now, two months later, the old coach knows exactly what he was seeing.
“I was thinking, ‘S—,'” Madden marveled, “‘this guy is playing a video game!'”
Firefox 4’s Tab Candy feature looks absolutely delicious.
This video is pretty sick already, what with the crazy tricks the rider is pulling on those ramps, but here’s the real trick: it’s all shot with a $1700 Canon 7D mounted on a hobbyist’s remote controlled helicopter (granted, a spendy one).
Actually, this is a double oops; first, the story itself, and second, that I’ve been sitting on this unfinished post for months. Here’s a short bit, but read the whole thing story of a commodities futures trade gone very, very wong:
Brad’s phone rang with the telltale tone of an inner-office call. “Yeah,” he briskly blurted out as he picked up the phone, “what’cha ya need?” That was actually his nice way of answering the phone. As the senior trader at Execor, one of the world’s largest energy trading companies, Brad didn’t need to impress anyone and, in his mind, displaying anything less than vicious hubris would be a sign of weakness.
“Err,” the receptionist nervously answers, “there’s a… err, delivery for you, sir. They–“
“Hmphf,” Brad’s scoff cut her off. “So just sign for it, then! Is that really that hard to do? You can do that, can’t you?”
“Well sir,” the receptionist winced, “they’re asking for mooring instructions? And we need to pay wharfage charges? They said you’d know. I’m at a loss.”
“Fine,” Brad scowled, “I guess I have to do everything around here!” He slammed down the phone and marched out of his corner office. Despite Execor’s location — the “old docks” district — their office was one of the most posh in the city. On one end of the expansive, former warehouse sat the executive suites, which had a tremendous view of the city skyline. The other end — where Brad was headed towards — was the reception which overlooked its own, private bay on the river.
“Okay, I’m here!” he angrily announced once he stepped foot in the lobby. “So let’s do this! What do I need to–“
Brad stopped mid-sentence. His eyes were immediately drawn through the floor-to-ceiling windows and onto the river bay that Execor’s building overlooked. There was an absolutely gigantic barge — nay, an armada of tightly-connected barges — overfilled with enormous piles of coal that was attempting to dock in front of the building. “What… the… fuuu–“
Doctor Hoo provides all 11 Doctors as though they were owls.
I just got a Sprint Overdrive, and let me tell you right now that the 4G service, when you can get it, fucking rules:
That’s faster than the wifi in this hotel has ever been (the hotel is generally excellent; it’s just a shame their network is fragile). It probably doesn’t hurt that said hotel is around the corner from Sprint Headquarters.
Via the recently resurfaced Agent Mantler, Heathen proudly point you to Go For Launch over at Air & Space:
In this unique time-lapse video created from thousands of individual frames, photographers Scott Andrews, Stan Jirman and Philip Scott Andrews condense six weeks of painstaking work [preparing the Discovery] into three minutes, 52 seconds.
Blizzard co-founder Frank Pearce on DRM: “We need our development teams focused on content and cool features, not anti-piracy technology.”
A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages (widely linked, and which I think I’ve pointed out before, but anyway). Some bits:
1957 – John Backus and IBM create FORTRAN. There’s nothing funny about IBM or FORTRAN. It is a syntax error to write FORTRAN while not wearing a blue tie.
and
1972 – Dennis Ritchie invents a powerful gun that shoots both forward and backward simultaneously. Not satisfied with the number of deaths and permanent maimings from that invention he invents C and Unix.
and
1980 – Alan Kay creates Smalltalk and invents the term “object oriented.” When asked what that means he replies, “Smalltalk programs are just objects.” When asked what objects are made of he replies, “objects.” When asked again he says “look, it’s all objects all the way down. Until you reach turtles.”
and
1983 – Bjarne Stroustrup bolts everything he’s ever heard of onto C to create C++. The resulting language is so complex that programs must be sent to the future to be compiled by the Skynet artificial intelligence. Build times suffer. Skynet’s motives for performing the service remain unclear but spokespeople from the future say “there is nothing to be concerned about, baby,” in an Austrian accented monotones. There is some speculation that Skynet is nothing more than a pretentious buffer overrun.
Awesome gallery of Sci-Fi lunchboxes of yore. I had the Six Million Dollar Man one and the Clash of the Titans one. I may have had the BSG one, too, but memory fades.
Today is the 30th anniversary of the release of Pac-Man, which Google is celebrating as only they can. Hint: Click “insert coin.”
