A couple of weeks ago, the Gmail team released a cool new feature in Gmail Labs called Sneak Peak. It lets you take a sneak peak at your e-mail without actually opening it. Cool stuff! I’ve already enabled it in my Gmail.
Saw this graphic on Tech Crunch, but apparently, it was created by mulaz.
http://www.mulaz.org/spam/2010/01/31/ipad-name-fail-photoshop-win/#
Pretty hilarious.
Edit: OK, my bad. Mulaz just reposted an image he found on 4chan. (See the comments below.)
My dad loves biking. For his birthday and Christmas, he usually requests a hike, or a bike ride with his family. And now Google is happy to help him out because Google does bike trails. From the Google Maps “More” menu, it’s possible to pull up a bike paths overlay.
You can also plan a point-to-point trip by bike, and it will route you on the most bike friendly path.
It looks like there is some information on Bakersfield where my parents live. But it is a tad sparse. I’ll bet they add more information as time goes on.
There is, however, a plethora of information for the Bay Area, particularlythe South Bay where I live. Maybe I’ll have to dust off my bike and get out and ride, especially since the weather is getting better.
Yesterday, I wrote a brief post expressing my incredulity at the name of Apple’s latest product: iPad. Brad Stone of the New York Times seems to agree with me. Stone wrote an article about the iPad in the Technology section today. Apparently, the name of the product is causing a lot of buzz.
The first sentence of the second paragraph sums it up:
Many women are saying the name evokes awkward associations with feminine hygiene products.
But perhaps there’s a bright side to this story. Fujitsu, STMicroelectronics, and MagTek all have products with the trademarked name of “iPad.” If they decide to put up a fight with Apple over their apparent trademark infringement, Apple may be forced to give it up.
A similar situation happened a few years ago between Apple and Cisco over the “iPhone” name. By the time Apple released their iPhone, Cisco had already registered iPhone as a trademark. A brief fight ensued, with Cisco ultimately agreeing to let Apple use the name. There were some vagaries around a future partnership, but I never heard anything further about it.
In this case, it might behoove Apple to let Fujitsu, STMicroelectronics, or MagTek win any battle they choose to fight over the iPad name. Then they could “lose” the rights to that name, and go with a much better name like “iSlate”.
Steve, if you or someone in your company is reading this, I highly recommend you leave the “menstrual” name to those guys and choose something that’s more provocative than it is evocative. And it might even be a good idea to find a guy like Michael Cronan to help you out in the future.
Of all the names Steve Jobs could have come up with to describe Apple’s newest product, he and his marketing team chose “iPad.” Are you freakin’ kidding me? Of all the other cool names floating out there: iTablet, iTab, iSlate, etc. the number one winner was iPad? What’s next, iTampon?
As my boss pointed out today, “that sounds strangely menstrual.” He further went on to joke:
I think I’m going to start a web site that will help people get the most out of their iPad. It will help them to get maximum usage from their iPad. I think I’ll call it Max iPad.
Anyone care to guess the domain name for such a site?
Steve, I know you were sick and needed a liver transplant because you nearly died. But seriously, if that’s the best you can do post-op, it might have been a better idea to leave the naming up to Phil.
Update: According to Twitter, Apple didn’t even have to release an iTampon in order for their current product to be castigated as such.
Apple’s expected to unveil a new device today. The consensus seems to be that it will be some form of tablet computer: iTablet, iSlate, etc. There’s nothing new on the Apple home page this morning, but I’m sure it will be updated later today:
This post isn’t very timely, as it pertains to the summer 09 release of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, but I still thought it was an interesting read. It details the incredible depth of detail ILM had to create when working on the movie’s visual effects. Here’s a short rundown of their numbers:
ILM’s render farm has 5700 core processors, the newest of which are dual processor and quad cores (eight cores per blade), with up to 32 GB of memory per blade. In addition, the render farm can access the 2000 core processors in the artists’ workstations, which ups the total core processors to 7700. As for data storage, the studio’s data center currently has 500 TB online. Transformers 2 sucked up 154 TB, more than seven times the 20 TB needed for 2007’s Transformers.
Give it a few more years, and I’m sure these numbers will be insignificant, but right now, numbers like this are pretty much unfathomable to me.
I thought Peter Belanger wrote a pretty interesting article on what it takes to produce a cover for Macworld magazine.
If this is what they do to an iPod, I can only imagine what they do to the cover models on other magazines.
Enjoy!
Play the classic game pong with your browser window…literally:
http://stewdio.org/pong/
HT: Andrew Wu
My Droid updated itself this morning with a copy of Android 2.0.1. Verizon has some documentation (pdf) about the update, but frankly, I can hardly tell the difference. The two differences I noticed are that the unlock screen looks a bit different, and the way I answer phone calls has changed in a very slight manner. That’s about it.
But I must say that I’m glad to see Google, Motorola, and Verizon working quickly to update the software on this phone. I’ve had it all of two weeks, and already they’ve seen fit to update it for me. I can only hope that Android 2.1 isn’t withheld from us Droid users.