Buried in a site devoted to early robots is my dream man, Electron. Russian, born in 1967, he has 4ft-wide shoulders, waltzes, plays chess, and while he only understands 112 commands, his steely gaze is reassuringly paternal. [CyberneticZoo via BotJunkie]
According to Jonathan Schwartz—then Sun's CEO—that's what Steve Jobs told him over the phone after Sun presented Looking Glass, a desktop concept similar to Mac OS X's. After that, Schwartz verbally cockpunched His Steveness and shut him up:
"Steve, I was just watching your last presentation, and Keynote looks identical to Concurrence – do you own that IP?" Concurrence was a presentation product built by Lighthouse Design, a company I'd help to found and which Sun acquired in 1996. Lighthouse built applications for NeXTSTEP, the Unix based operating system whose core would become the foundation for all Mac products after Apple acquired NeXT in 1996. Steve had used Concurrence for years, and as Apple built their own presentation tool, it was obvious where they'd found inspiration. "And last I checked, MacOS is now built on Unix. I think Sun has a few OS patents, too." Steve was silent.
And probably foaming at the mouth, and wanting to send Luca Brasi to get Jonathan brand new cement shoes.
Even while Apple uses BSD as the basis for Mac OS X, I bet Jobs realized the stupidity of his call, realizing that Sun had a very strong IP portfolio, and plenty of ammo to fight Apple back. Something that HTC—or Google, for that matter—, when it comes to phones, don't have. [Johnathan Schwartz via Silicon Alley Insider]
Several people are reporting that there are odd charges on credit cards they've used to make purchases from online retailer Monoprice. This is what the company had to say:
A few of our customers recently reported to us that information from credit cards they used on the Monoprice website had been misused. We promptly began an investigation with the help of expert computer forensic investigators to determine if any card data had been stolen from our computers.
To date, the investigators have found no evidence that card information has been stolen from Monoprice's computer network. As a precaution to ensure that our customers' information is not at risk, we have taken our website offline temporarily while we and our investigators complete the audit of our computer network.
We want to ensure that there is no security vulnerability in any part of our computer network system. We notified local and federal law enforcement agencies, our credit card processing business partners, and all credit card companies that some of our customers reported concerns regarding their card information to us.
We also advised these entities that we are working with outside security specialists to determine if there was breach of our computer system. We will post additional information when it is available. We regret any inconvenience that our investigation and the temporary suspension of the Monoprice website may have caused you. Thank you so much for your great support.
Until this issue is resolved, we recommend keeping a closer eye than usual on your credit card statement. [Monoprice via Facebook—Thanks, Richard!]
The premise of Tweet Defense is simple: The more you tweet and the more Twitter followers you gain, the stronger your tower defenses will be. Clever, though hopefully RT bonuses will come in the future. $1. [iTunes via Kotaku]
From the new BBC program Wonders of The Solar System, this clip of a solar eclipse over Varanasi is something you really must watch. The view sure beats staring through a pinhole reflection in a cardboard box. [BBC]
If the terrorists could vote, they'd vote for Candidate X—this argument is America's greatest rhetorical treasure. So let's apply it to smartphones, right now! I've got a picture of a high-level terrorist with an iPhone and everything! Updated
The man pictured here is the recently captured Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, Mullah Abdul Salaam Zaeef, who is world famous for precisely the kind of stuff that you don't want to be famous for. Infamous, even!
Update: Apparently the magazine misindentifies the man in the photo. That's actually Mullah Abdul Salaam Zaeef, a former Taliban official's who's been spotted with his iPhone before. (Thanks, Ray!)
Anyway, what I'm trying to say is, next time you find yourself in an endless online flamewar about smartphones representing the side of Android or WebOS or Windows Mobile or BlackBerry, it is totally fine to call your opponent a terrorist. [Jeune Afrique—Thanks, Benjamin!]
This is the gear that gets our troops excited. Microflown Technologies' tiny sensor listens for the sounds of war by measuring particles in the air. Then it reports what weapon made the sound and where that sound originated.
The sensor uses a technology, developed by Microflown, called acoustic vector sensing. AVS heats two 200-nanometer wide platinum strips to 200 degrees Celsius and measures how passing air particles cool them down. From those cooling patterns, Microflown's proprietary software can determine not only what the sound is but also where it came from.
There are other technologies that can do the same type of thing, but they all have their own unique disadvantages: radar-based solutions are traceable; others require the deployment of large apparatuses, and some need multiple sensors to triangulate sounds.
Microflown's matchstick almost seems too good to be true, but several nations' armies—including the Netherlands, Germany, India, Poland, and Australia—are currently testing out the tech and seeing what they hear. [DVICE]
What started as a routine traffic stop ended with a Colorado teen doing hard time. The offense? Not returning a "House of Flying Daggers" DVD to his local library. Come on, Colorado. You're better than that.
Apparently young Aaron Henson, an impressionable lad all of 19 years old, fell in with the wrong DVD-borrowing crowd sometime last year. Henson packed up the flick for a move, forgot that he had it, and ended up with a warrant for his arrest:
The city said it sent an overdue notice and bill, neither of which were returned.
The city then sent a summons, which was returned.
Then, the city sent a new court date order, it was not returned. And when Aaron failed to appear for the second court date, the city issued a warrant.
Why all the fuss? Because apparently the municipality of Littleton, CO values the DVD of a 2004 release at $31.45, and any "theft" over $30 gets prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Also of note: Littleton, CO has apparently never heard of Amazon.
Anyhow, the whole mess get straightened out after Henson's family forked over a $200 fine for the DVD, $200 to remove the car from the impound lot, and $60 in court fees. And while Littleton has acknowledged its mistake and the mayor swears it won't happen again, the arrest is still on Aaron's record.
Just so long as no one got hurt, I suppose, except for the integrity of our judicial system. [The Denver Channel via Consumerist]
Jalopnik's gathered up the flying car covers from Popular Science's complete archives and come out with a brief 77-year history of our flying car fantasies, which shift from cautious to optimistic depending on the tone of the decade. [Jalopnik]
Here's the story: I'm in love with the Wacom Intuos 4 Wireless tablet. Free from cables, it's the best graphics tablet experience I've ever had.
The Wacom Intuos 4 was quite a leap from the Intuos 3. It doubled the pressure sensitive levels, and it added multifunction Touch Ring trackpad, on-screen radial menus, and eight user-definable buttons with OLED tags—called ExpressKeys—in a thin, ultralight 2.2-pound package. The Wacom Intuos 4 Wireless has all those characteristics, and they work equally as well over the Bluetooth connection.
With a sightly smaller working surface than the Medium model—8 x 5 inches versus the 8.8 x 5.5 inches of the cable-bound model—the wireless tablet is a pure joy to use. The 2048 levels of pressure sensitiveness, requiring only 1 gram of pressure to start painting vs the 10 grams of the previous version, offer the best real drawing simulation of any of the tablets I've ever tried. It feels like the real thing, with the slightest touch transferred to the screen as if it was real media. The brushstrokes are as smooth and precise as the real thing, and the tablet never misses a single beat, no matter how fast I try to move its very comfortable stylus—which comes with different tips for different surface feedback.
This performance is not only good for digital painting. It is perfect to retouch in Photoshop, allowing you to mask or clone with absolute precision, down to the last pixel, without having to vary the size of the brush. It makes everyday brush tasks so easy it makes me giddy when I'm using it.
But plenty of other tablet features also help dramatically in the daily workflow, allowing you to circumvent the keyboard almost completely.
Take the multifunction Touch Ring, a circular trackpad that allows you to perform four different, user-definable functions, like zoom: Circling my finger in one direction would zoom in. Doing so in the opposite direction will zoom out. The second function will cycle through layers, the third will change the brush size—although sadly this doesn't work in Photoshop—and the fourth rotates the canvas to face the physical orientation of your tablet. To switch to the next function, you click in the middle button. An LED will change and your monitor will display an elegant transparent dialog that fades in and out briefly, but long enough to identify the new trackpad function.
The eight user-definable ExpressKeys are located in a perfect position: Four above and four below the Touch Ring. Each is labeled with a completely customizable OLED display, much like the Optimus Maximum keyboard, but presented in a starkly contrasting black and white. (The display looks so good that, at first glance, you're sure the buttons are permanent, backlit cutouts.) Like the Touch Ring, you can define the functions for these buttons using the Wacom control panel. The labels will change according to your preference.
Another favorite feature of mine—which I've been jonesing for since I stopped using Alias PowerAnimator and Maya—are the radial menus. These are just software-based and can also be found on the Cintiq line, but they are great timesavers. Pop-up radial menus are easier to use than regular pop-up list menus (both for mouse and tablet operation). They are also user-defined, and give you eight functions at a time, which can also be sub-menus.
However, the best thing is that all these features can be application dependent, something that was possible with previous Wacom tablets, but not with this level of detail and finesse. In Photoshop, for example, my radial menus are tailored to fit my most used program features. The result is that I touch the keyboard very rarely, if at all.
All these cool features and exceptional performance, however, are shared with the existing, cheaper, cabled Intuos 4. The question here is: How good is the performance of the Intuos 4 Wireless over the Bluetooth connection? And what about the battery life?
Response is just as fast and just as good. The Wacom Intuos 4 Wireless works just like the USB-based Intuos 4.
As for the lithium ion battery, it charges quickly via USB. The tablet puts itself to sleep when it detects no signal and, as a result, you can use the tablet for a day, heavily, without recharging it at all. (Or just keep it around without worrying about losing power.) The advantage of USB recharging is that you can be using it while connected to the computer, with the cable itself as the connection (the Bluetooth goes off when the tablet is connected physically).
My only little gripe with the wireless component of the tablet is that, on occasion, it will take a few seconds to reconnect when you turn it on. This happened when the computer wakes up first, so I suspect is an issue with Bluetooth getting silly after the Mac wakes up. 99% of the times is instantaneous, however.
If you have a Wacom Intuos 4 you can probably skip this upgrade. That is, unless you are itching to have the freedom of movement of the Bluetooth connection. That's the joy of this tablet: You can move around freely with it. It adapts to your position, not the other way around. You don't depend on your table. You can lay back on your chair, and lose yourself in hours of photo retouching or illustration.
Given the nature of its custom menus, any user can take advantage of the Intuos 4 for every program. You can be using it constantly, instead of a mouse. If you just want to use it for graphic applications, however, another advantage is that you can put it away easily, without having to disconnect it or struggle with cables.
This tablet could only be bettered if they made it into a wireless display. Like the iPad, but connected to the computer so I can use Photoshop on my bed, the sofa or outside on the terrace (the Bluetooth signal gets there, I tried). Like the Cintiq 12 I tried, but with the same response, weight, and form factor.
If you have an Intuos 3 or any other display-less Wacom tablet, get the Intuos 4 Wireless. Even though it doesn't come with a mouse—like the regular Intuos 4 Medium—it's absolutely worth its $399 price tag (just $30 more than the USB-based Intuos 4's list price).
Amazing performance with 2048 levels of pressure and only 1 gram of minimum pressure
Touch Ring and ExpressKeys customizable controls avoids touching the keyboard
Slightly pricier than Intuos 4 Medium, and it doesn't come with the mouse
A couple of times it took the Intuos 4 a few seconds to reconnect after being asleep, although this is probably related to the computer coming out of sleep as well
