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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

As far as userspace, Metro looks far better than past MS offerings, but it is still playing catch up. Their guy actually had to explain to the developers why using the same font, font weight, and alignment makes apps look better (it's 1983 again). He actually got applause when telling them they can use the whole screen for their app. Basic UI animations, scoffed at in OSX 10 years ago by these same Windows programmers, will be considered essential practice in Metro to make your app 'not look like crap'. I guess he just called all past and present Windows software crap, haha!

This is a classic case of copying an industry leader with a 'me-too' mentality. On the surface Metro has most of what iOS has, just renamed and changed slightly. It looks nothing like iOS at first glance (although the apps will look similar) so Microsoft will ignore iOS, embrace it's core fundamentals, then claim they did the 'serious R&D' to make this a 'serious' product. iOS 5 is shipping next month to 90+ million devices, and should make this Win8 preview (shipping 12+ months from now with no comparable hardware currently in existence) show how late to this game MS is.

This isn't to say they won't be successful, at least by their own standards. With Google around it's now a 3 horse race, and MS owns all sorts of advantages with their other products (XBox, Back Office, SQL Server, Office, Outlook, dev tools, vertical market devs). Their installed base and distribution network is literally everywhere. But they are no longer the big dog in either size or profit, and in mobile their market share is smaller than the worst days of the mac. If MS got 20% share of Tablets with Metro by 2014 they'd be besides themselves. That's their game though, slow and safe, full of screwups along the way. It has been that way for 30+ years.

While similar at first glance, where Metro and iOS differ is critical. Apple and Microsoft draw the fundamental user model completely different. iOS is essentially an executable sandbox that runs on the OSX kernel with many OS-type tools available within. It's an pseudo-OS optimized for battery life, touch, and mobilily. Apple makes all of this available to devs through modern Libraries and API's available in OSX to the iOS programmer. The app is compiled into iOS code and delivered to the devices through the app store model. The iOS devices themselves can boot into iOS but cannot load the full OSX. Apps need completely separate code for the PC (OSX) version and the mobile device (iPad/iPhone/iTouch/AppleTV).

Microsoft sees three classes of devices (much like Apple): phones, tablets, and PC's. Microsoft also plans on having two interfaces to cover these classes, just like Apple. But Microsoft puts Tablets with the PC category, which to me is a fatal error in their design because it removes mobility as a focus. Mobility is the key and MS can't or won't focus on it.

If your CPU is plugged in and sitting under a desk (and was designed for it) the low-level software that is the OS should know that it has no limits on it's physical resources (power in/heat out, data entry helpers, and ports/slots for add ons). Laptops add all sorts of management of this but they are still running full featured CPU's, giving us battery life of only about an hour more per charge and more heat than laptops 15 years ago! Very slow progress I'd say, since the desktop OS, apps, and content have gotten bigger and more complex along the way.

However, if your CPU was designed to be battery powered and mobile, the OS has to be on board with that mission for maximum performance. Code intended for desktop-usage need not be carried around and executed on mobile devices. Ever wonder why a portable battery powered iPad2 with 10% charge can play movies, games & GarageBand as fast as a quad core 2ghz desktop? Because the OS, all the way down to the steel, has been designed to run on that kind of box. Unplug from the wall and that desktop would need a car battery to work in the backyard, and still be louder, heavier, and far less modern feeling than a touch tablet.

So by trying to make a tablet a full PC, Microsoft is shooting the whole idea in the head. If a tablet was just a PC we would have keyboardless PC's running touch interfaces everywhere by now. PC's have been out for 30+ years after all. But we all realize that a real PC needs a keyboard, pointing device, sturdy table, chair, and an outlet to get real work done. I don't see that changing in a long time.

The tablet's needs are different: UI speed, battery life, no heat, and long standby. These are all things that Microsoft is ignoring in their debut, and should keep them well behind the iPad (and the MacBook Air) in the marketplace for the next few years.

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!

Besides remote recording, if I had a few more clients on my schedule I'd basically hand them an iPad when they showed up for the session. Not to self-produce but for all the other paperwork and prep that goes into a session behind the scenes:

Imagine a client showing up for a session and getting their iPad. First they fill out the forms - (credits, contracts) and it goes right into a database. Then they type up the official lyrics and key changes into the iPad (and into the db). Then there's tuning, warmups, and session logging that can take place on the iPad. Of course they also have a web browser, email, iTunes, facebook, and other tools the artist might need while prepping.

When the session starts, the silent running iPad can be turned into a lyric teleprompter or sheet music, even tab. If the artist doesn't need any of that, a producer can be jotting notes on takes or filming the session to post online.

All good, and an iPad would get plenty of use at my studio without even trying to record audio. But it's nice to know there's crazy people like the Damon Albarne to do a whole major label LP on that thing!