Last month Wired started a new blog, Wired Reread, wherein they look back at ads and articles in old issues. Some, like the beauty above, are pure gold. Ah, MiniDisc. I remember my friend’s older brother had a MiniDisc player. I thought he was so hip to the new technologies.
In the future no matter where you are, the nearest phone will be close at hand. Miniature. Wireless. Small enough to wear on your wrist. Yet powerful enough to reach anyone. Anywhere in the world. The strap-on telephone. The company that will bring it to you is AT&T.
Got most of that right. I’m a little uncomfortable with the “strap-on” part, though.
And will we ever be able to thank Motorola enough for loosing us from the shackles of fax stacks? Imagine, you would be swimming in those half-glossy curled sheets right now. The horror.
This demonstration in an OU physics course was intended to teach students not to bring laptops to class. The real takeaway? This would feel so freaking good:
no review of the bloated eric clapton shilling for t-mobile. oh look, its buddy guy calling, i wonder if any other irrelevant people will call.
Wouldn’t want to disappoint, Eddie, and indeed I’m pleased to take a moment for this ad.
Bloated is right. And I’ll tell you what really grosses me out about this commercial: seeing Clapton-of-today’s puffy mane-framed face while hearing his voice say “I get off on.” Ew. There’s really an age at which one shouldn’t be allowed to say stuff like “get off” anymore. Whatever it is, he’s past it. As a consumer, I wouldn’t want to think of Eric Clapton getting off every time I get a call from a fading Blues musician. Doesn’t help none that the phone is called MyTouch. [shudder]
And while we’re on the subject of mobile endorsements by once-desirable celebrities succumbed to severe edema…
So where did all those minutes go, dough boy? Are they lost forever, along with all those offers for projects that aren’t humiliating? To wit:
I guess it’s official: The Internet has killed formality. Today we add another awesome resignation to the annals of unprofessionalism, and watch executive dignity go the way of the Full Sentence. In the wake of an Oracle takeover, Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz tweeted his way out the front door:
The technopundits spent months (years) hot under the collar waiting for the dawn of the iPad. And now that it’s here it’s caused a dizzying deluge of excitement commingled with bewildered disappointment and acrid bemusement. I’m gonna go ahead and jump on that last one. Never been a big Kool Aid drinker.
So, here’s a phrase I never thought I’d say: Hitler was on the money. Behold.
Adolf makes a great point I forgot to bring up in my earlier post: No Flash support. No Flash support?! How’s ol’ Jobsie going to make an essentially dedicated web-surfing device that doesn’t support Flash? It’s baffling.
And on a related note, a pretty nice little graphic of Apple product evolution: (source unknown)
Don’t you love the way SJ’s peeking out from behind his soon-to-be-released iSorry?
OK, OK. I cave. I have to talk about the iPad. I get it. On my failure to address last week’s most impactful appearance of an important public figure, I’ve not much to say. iPad? My bad. And I reckon this will make me a heretic among my tech brethren (a heretech?), but I pretty much don’t give a hoot. In a word: yawn.
It’ll be interesting to see how the technology is adopted and its release marks a crucial starting point for a new wave of netbook-obliterating, better-than-e-reader devices, but I don’t see an iPhone-esque groundswell/sea change (choose your geometaphor) happening just yet. It’s way better for reading than a Kindle, they say (I haven’t had a hands on), but it’s not like we’re all toting those puppies around. Otherwise, it seems like an oversized iPhone. An oversized iPhone that doesn’t take pictures. Or, you know, make calls. Yet still has a pricey 3G plan with famously spotty service to go along with it.
And as for other sad similarities, how the hell did they let this thing out of the box without multitasking functionality? You know how you can’t play music with the Pandora app on your iPhone while look something up on Google? You won’t be able to do that on the iPad either. Truly idiotic. Hey, check out this cool little ‘puter — it does one thing at a time!
Surely we’ll be revisiting the long-heralded tablet, and in the meantime I’d be remiss if I didn’t jump on the wagon and bring you MadTV’s prescient iPod/iPad spoof circa 2006:
Logic leads to advancements, which in turn dictate logic. Why call someone when you can Facebook them? Why scan the street for an address when you can check the location on your iPhone? You could pick up a book on a subject of interest, but instead you’ll search for a few sufficient snippets online. Could you plan a trip without Orbitz or Kayak or Google Maps?
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote “Self-Reliance” in 1841, praising the strength of the individual, the value of unadulterated opinion, and revealing the folly of blind following. In it Emerson provides a poignant vision of technology’s subtle and subversive shifting of priorities and perceptions. More than a century and a half later it is still a vital reminder that whatever our tools and acquired facilities, we must rely, ultimately, on ourselves.
This passage may as well have been written today, about the Internet and cell phones. The message hasn’t lost a bit of relevance — OK, maybe a bit; Kiwis are, today, largely clothed, I reckon:
Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given something is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts. What a contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the naked New Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear, a mat and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare the health of the two men and you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal strength. If the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage with a broad-axe and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send the white to his grave.
The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance-office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber whether we have not lost by refinements some energy, by a Christianity, entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue.
We kneel at the altar of information on atrophied legs. Occasionally it would behoove us to get up and walk around.
Consumers using webcams with face recognition and digicams with blink-alert have found themselves the victims of racial profiling. Or targeted ignoring-slash-teasing, as it were. Reports Time:
Wang, a Taiwanese-American strategy consultant who goes by the Web handle “jozjozjoz,” thought it was funny that the camera had difficulties figuring out when her family had their eyes open. So she posted a photo [above] of the blink warning on her blog under the title, “Racist Camera! No, I did not blink… I’m just Asian!” The post was picked up by Gizmodo and Boing Boing, and prompted at least one commenter to note, “You would think that Nikon, being a Japanese company, would have designed this with Asian eyes in mind.”
…
The principle behind face detection is relatively simple, even if the math involved can be complex. Most people have two eyes, eyebrows, a nose and lips – and an algorithm can be trained to look for those common features, or more specifically, their shadows. (For instance, when you take a normal image and heighten the contrast, eye sockets can look like two dark circles.) But even if face detection seems pretty straightforward, the execution isn’t always smooth.
Indeed, just last month, a white employee at an RV dealership in Texas posted a YouTube video showing a black co-worker trying to get the built-in webcam on an HP Pavilion laptop to detect his face and track his movements. The camera zoomed in on the white employee and panned to follow her, but whenever the black employee came into the frame, the webcam stopped dead in its tracks. “I think my blackness is interfering with the computer’s ability to follow me,” the black employee jokingly concludes in the video. “Hewlett-Packard computers are racist.”
Here’s that video. It’s pretty hilarious. Desi seems like a funny guy:
According to Time, “HP’s lead social-media strategist Tony Welch wrote on a company blog within a week of the video’s posting….The post linked to instructions on adjusting the camera settings, something both Consumer Reports and Laptop Magazine tested successfully in Web videos they put online.”
So that’s the easy answer right there. Don’t change the algorithms or the hardware, just add a step to the set-up process:
Please select the ethnicity of the people you most often photograph/record:
Caucasian (glarey, wide-eyed)
Asian (squinty)
Black (shadowy, evasive)
Hispanic (kinda like a mix between Asian and Black)
And don’t pull any of that I-hang-out-with-people-of-all-colors shit. Do you want your pictures to come out well, or don’t you? Problem solved.
While we’re on the subject of kids… Dispatch from a 4th grade science class at the elite Ramaz School in New York City.
Teacher: What are some important things we couldn’t do without opposable thumbs?
Student: Texting!
The ortho Jewish school is tentative on the subject of evolution, but surely regardless of how we got these useful digits it was all part of Hashem’s master plan. And God said unto Abraham, “Text me after sundown.”
Click for a graphic time capsule of 40-odd years of videogaming. Who’da thought when Megaman came out talking about the far-off year 20xx we’d actually ever get here?
Last month Wired started a new blog, Wired Reread, wherein they look back at ads and articles in old issues. Some, like the beauty above, are pure gold. Ah, MiniDisc. I remember my friend’s older brother had a MiniDisc player. I thought he was so hip to the new technologies.
OK, OK. I cave. I have to talk about the iPad. I get it. On my failure to address last week’s most impactful appearance of an important public figure, I’ve not much to say. iPad? My bad. And I reckon this will make me a heretic among my tech brethren (a heretech?), but I pretty much don’t give a hoot. In a word: yawn.
