An Update On The Human-Robot Competition
Hello humans. I have two items I'd like to brief you about. As always - be vigilant. Robots are not to be trusted.
The Squishy Robot has no skeleton and can crawl (shimmy?) underneath small spaces.
Then there's this scary monster that can solve Rubik's Cube in 5 seconds, using a smart phone as it's processor and a bunch of specialized arms.
Perhaps we get these two together for a robot night out and make a baby bot that would crawl under the bed and solve the puzzles it finds?
More Than Lip Service
Here's Steve Jobs demoing his NeXT Computer running the OS NextStep from the early 90's. He calls it "Interpersonal Computing".
What's amazing to me is how 20 years on most of this demo holds up. There are things the NextStep OS was doing then that Windows and Linux still don't do today. Of course MacOSX inherited most of those features when it grew out of NextStep in the late 90's.
The graphics power, the inter-app services, the rich-media, the text handling, the networking concepts - history has justified Steve and the NeXT team. He saw in the 80's that higher-powered chips would allow workstation-like tasks and multimedia on every personal computer, and set about building the system to take UNIX power to the people.
It's not in this video, but there's cool video online with Steve circa 1999 talking about how using his Next box, he put his home directory 'in the cloud' in the early 90's. He explains how every machine he uses has access to his networked home directory, and because of this setup, he has not done a single backup nor lost a single bit of personal data in over 10 years.
Password = 123456
The worst passwords of 2011. If you are on that list prepare to be hacked.
October 1972: Birth of the Packet Man
Packets, packets, got your packets here!
Going way back into the 'what is the internet?' file, here's a great article about the actual first pitch and live demo of the internet (then called by it's acronym ARPANET). Yes, it did crash once. Yes, some people left the event convinced the technology was going nowhere. And yes, it was another decade of development before anyone outside of computer science departments heard about it.
I wasn't even born when that demo took place, and wouldn't get online for myself until 1986. Hard to believe the net has been in development for 40 years already!
For comparison: The machine they used to get online in 1972 / What I used to get online in 1986.
Creator of the WWW Credits Steve
Us internet old timers know the story, but with Steve's passing I thought it important to point out that the guy who developed/invented the world wide web, HTML, and the http protocol back around 1990 claims he couldn't have done it without his NeXTOS UNIX workstation, the core of which today is available to the world as MacOS X.
His name is Tim Berners-Lee and he's a fascinating figure. With the dream of getting professors and grad students a quick, free method to share research he used his new Unix workstation with it's developer-friendly OS to hash something out. He mentions the machine came pre-configured and ready to work, something that is often dismissed as 'mere marketing' by Apple-haters these days. By removing frustration and configuration, even on a UNIX workstation, Steve Jobs enabled users to become world-changers.
If Steve Jobs put the electric starter on the automobile 100 years ago Android and Windows carmakers would explain that getting out of the car to crank is more customizable and allows you to configure your exit door, your cranking speed, and your re-entry door. Apple locks you into one choice, starting the car quickly and easily. After all, you have places to go and worlds to change.
Thank You For All Of It
Steve Jobs: 1955-2011. Where would the tech world, perhaps the world as a whole, be without Steven P. Jobs? The concepts he developed in his teens and twenties regarding if/how/when/why we interact with computers built entire industries. Appleholics like myself are everywhere now, and the Apple-haters have spent the last 5 years doing everything they can to catch up (or ignore) the market-leading companies of Jobs'. Even technophobes gobble up his Pixar movies.
Look, platform debates amongst users are geeky fun but useless. I've used a mac as my main rig since the mid-90's. I also am a developer and have worked cross-platform that whole time. Regardless of what OS you are using right now on your PC, laptop, or phone -- stare at it right now and know that it wouldn't work half as well as it might without Steve Jobs doing his thing. He set the bar high and you either bought into his vision or you waited for someone to develop a slightly different version of his vision that fit your needs. But regardless, he has way more points in putting his vision into existence and into your life and pocket than any other modern businessman.
He's one of the few minimalists in tech, a huge part of his aesthetic that his copycat competitors always fail with. The discipline to remove features is what made Jobs and Apple so special. Doing 10 core functions better, faster, simpler than anything else was valued at Apple through most of their designs. Windows or Android might pile on the 'features' but they always seem to ruin the core functionality and they taint the usability of the device.
Some of us have been preaching this for decades but it's only the last 5 years that Apple got their product lines all firing at the same time and the speed and size of the tech caught up with the vision of Steve Jobs.
RIP my dear man, you have helped me to learn more, work more, explore more, earn more, and overall enjoy life more than anyone else I can think of.
Here's a nice note from Prez Obama, also a fan of Jobs.
Data Mining Your Past, Present, & Future
Lots of privacy-politics news lately: First off our good buddies at Facebook want even more information, and will happily put it on a timeline and sell it to the highest bidder for you.
tec
If you find this a little 'big-brother'ish, imagine if your car's position and status were constantly tracked and sent to the federal government computers, then sold to outside parties. This is what is happening now in the US when driving a GM with OnStar. In the name of safety you are being tracked even if you cancel the service, and by tracked I mean having your entire positioning and speed history stored in a permanent database and sold to the highest bidder. The government connection? GM is currently owned by the US Government as a result of the bailout a few years back.
The Microsoft Copy Machine
I've been following the Windows8/Metro debut online and it struck me that this is one of the largest examples of Microsoft being a "me-too" type of company I've seen in a while, complete with a fatal flaw in their copied version. My rambling thoughts:
First, the basics (if you haven't watched the previews yourself): Windows 8 is coming, perhaps by the end of 2012. Unlike Apple, MS likes to show things off way before they are finished, and they are focusing on previewing their new touch-based Windows shell called "Metro". I call it a shell because it runs inside of/on top of traditional windows and doesn't appear to have it's own boot routine, networking, filesystem, security, or hardware driver layer. Those sorts of things appear to still be handled by Windows. Of course it has a snazzy modern-looking interface and can be touch manipulated. Like Apple's industry-leading iOS, it also has a curated application environment (aka a company AppStore).
My First Laptop
I've been more or less living on a laptop since about 2002. I had a desktop machine as my only rig from 87-96 (Atari, Apple, Tandy, Gateway, Dell, IBM, white box PC's, you name it...) and was finally able to pick up my first laptop on that new thing called eBay:
It came from a guy in California that said he used it on the beach and hoped it didn't have any sand in it (it did) and I never managed to buy the whole desktop portion, but it was a hell of a laptop - The first 'netbook' by about 15 years, I think. It was smaller and lighter than anything else out there even when I bought it used. The rollerball was killer, the buttons worked great, plus it had a built in modem, ethernet, and retractable legs!
Touch the Music
Here's a nice overview article on some of the tech that's changing music making, particularly the iPad. As someone who's produced several tracks with just a laptop, an interface, a mic, and a midi board, this is a big change. 8 years ago when I would show up with the above parts some people didn't believe I could do quality remote tracking with so few items. The iPad with a few good apps and the right cords ends up replacing a few more pieces.
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