This will make a big, big difference in my next ticket purchasing decision.
Wonderful. Now when head office sends us overseas on investigative assignments, we won’t even be able to relax during the plane ride. Just kidding, we don’t have a head office. Or any kind of office. Or enough money to buy plane tickets.
Let’s be honest with ourselves, residents of DC: We’re kind of jerks to one another when the power’s out in our homes and we have to go to coffee shops just to charge our laptops and cell phones. (It’s understandable, just sort of weirdly cutthroat.) I’ve personally seen this dynamic at half a dozen places today, including a Barnes & Noble full of people laying on the floor trying to keep their laptops charged while their power was out. It doesn’t have to be like this though. Want to make friends today? Bring a power strip with you to Panera. (photo by edkohler) — Ernie @ SFB
We wrote this a few months ago due to another power outage, but this seems pretty relevant today — especially for those in NYC trying to latch onto some form of wifi.
Hey, Tumblr nerds! Ever feel like you were doing too much waiting and not enough scrolling? Too much heartache waiting for a YouTube video to (finally) load? You might want to consider a new laptop to give your Tumblr the attention it needs. Whether a top-of-line Retina MacBook Pro is your best option or a budget-minded Toshiba Satellite C Series, you have options. Maybe next time you have Google Chrome loaded with a dozen tabs and a copy of Photoshop at the ready, things won’t feel slow. Curious? Scroll through the photoset above.
That’s astronaut John Creighton with Bill’s invention. In 1982, Bill Moggridge developed the industrial design for one of the first computers with the closeable notebook shape that’s common on most portable computers today. Moggridge’s client, GRiD Systems Corporation, was so ahead of the game that they actually owned the patent for the clamshell-style laptop. “In terms of the industrial design of the enclosure, Moggridge was instrumental in proposing that,” said Alex Bochannek of the Computer History Museum. “He came up with that particular form factor.” Being first meant it was extremely expensive, though — at the time of its release in 1982, it cost $8,150 — but it found a home with the U.S. government, particularly NASA. Moggridge’s career didn’t end there, however — he was one of the co-founders of IDEO, an international design company that’s still going strong to this day. Moggridge was 69. (photo via NASA)
Let’s be honest with ourselves, residents of DC: We’re kind of jerks to one another when the power’s out in our homes and we have to go to coffee shops just to charge our laptops and cell phones. (It’s understandable, just sort of weirdly cutthroat.) I’ve personally seen this dynamic at half a dozen places today, including a Barnes & Noble full of people laying on the floor trying to keep their laptops charged while their power was out. It doesn’t have to be like this though. Want to make friends today? Bring a power strip with you to Panera. (photo by edkohler) — Ernie @ SFB
Bob Stein, who worked at Encyclopedia Britannica as well as Atari during its glory days, worked with Alan Kay, along with Disney animator Glenn Keane, on a series of illustrations back in 1982 showing off his idea for an “Intelligent Encyclopedia,” one which can tell you about earthquakes, stocks, and history, all within the palm of your hand. Laptops didn’t look like this for nearly a decade, and the ideas behind the encyclopedia eventually showed up on Wikipedia two decades later. But, really, what Atari was working on was essentially an iPad with a keyboard. “The most interesting thing for me today about these images is that although we foresaw that people would be accessing information wirelessly (notice the little antenna on the device in the “tide pool” image),” Stein notes, “we completely missed the most important aspect of the network — that it was going to connect people to other people.” Stein’s ideas aren’t a total loss — the guy did essentially invent the multimedia CD-ROM and co-founded The Criterion Collection — but just think if he actually implemented this idea.
» We were generally supportive of the 2009 stimulus package, but aspects of it are starting to seem a bit questionable, to say the least. Case in point: 2,200 students and staff in the town of Owensboro, Kentucky will soon be enjoying a free Macbook Air, courtesy of the Recovery and Reinvestment Act. While we’re all for providing students with the technical competency needed to compete in the 21st-century global economy, you don’t really need to give everyone a Macbook Air to do that. The cheapest Air is $999; if we assume, for the sake of argument, that Apple gave Owensboro a 50% bulk discount, that’s still over a million dollars of federal money being spent so kids can have free laptops. Opponents of “wasteful government spending,” your Exhibit A is right here.
» Wow, that would certainly change things: Could you imagine a kit-and-kaboodle deal like that, how it’d tear apart the hardware-centric power structure of the PC industry? This is the kind of method social media companies use to go after a growing demographic — but not generally hardware-makers. If Google’s deal is true, that’s $240 a year for a laptop which essentially works as a loss leader for Google. It’d also be an entryway into the business industry for the company, which could hand out dumbbooks like Google’s for super-cheap.
Sure, we’re all salivating over the new iPad 2 today, but in case you’re a Winboi in need of saliva-worthy exploits, check out this laptop right here. See that giant lump on the back of it? No, it’s not a Windows tumor, Macbois. Actually, it’s a device that tracks your eyesight so you can surf the Web without having to screw with a mouse. Reports suggest this eye-tracking device is very accurate (even if you’re wearing glasses), though it has to be calibrated for each user. There’s also a currently-unsightly camera below the display, though if given some time, it could go away. Would you use your eyes to Web-surf, or would you blink? And what happens if you’re a pirate? source
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#@#$%!.tumblr.com
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Admit it. They’re MacBook Pros. Of course you want to have sex with these machines. That said – the changes in the new MBP lineup appear to be under the hood rather than cosmetic in nature, with a way faster processor and graphics card, a much nicer camera, and something called ThunderBolt, a potential USB replacement that Apple says is 12 times faster than Firewire and 20 times faster than the ubiquitous port technology. It makes our current unibody Mac seem like a piece of crap we picked up from the scrap heap two years ago. source
If nothing else, Apple’s updated MacBook Air models are easy on the eyes. So we’re just going to link you to Boing Boing, which has some very sexy photos of these new computers. It’s like reading an issue of Penthouse (RIP Bob Guccione), except with computers. source
Macbook Air porn: Don’t look too hard kid, you might go blind
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