It seems artificial intelligence is gaining some serious momentum.
NYTimes: In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column

“WISCONSIN appears to be in the driver’s seat en route to a win, as it leads 51-10 after the third quarter. Wisconsin added to its lead when Russell Wilson found Jacob Pedersen for an eight-yard touchdown to make the score 44-3 … . “

Those words began a news brief written within 60 seconds of the end of the third quarter of the Wisconsin-U.N.L.V. football game earlier this month. They may not seem like much — but they were written by a computer.

And over at IBM Watson is offering medical advice to doctors:

IBM has inked a deal with health insurer WellPoint that will let the latter use the technology behind “Jeopardy”-playing computer Watson to suggest patient diagnoses and treatments.

IBM claims the Watson technology can process about 200 million pages of content in less than three seconds, which no doubt makes the system intriguing when it comes to reviewing various medical literature. The WellPoint system will display excerpts that identify the data sources behind the particular suggestions the Watson technology offers up, the Journal reports.

Where are we headed?

Harvard Business Review: You Can’t Analyze Your Way to Growth
Roger Martin on why analysis sucks:

The fundamental reason is that analysis of data is all about the past. Data analysis crunches the past and extrapolates it into the future. And the past does not include opportunities that exist but have not yet happened. So, analysis conspicuously excludes ways to serve customers that have not been tried or imagined or ways to turn non-customers into customers.

Why not focus on appreciation:

If instead, the core tool is not analysis but rather appreciation –deep appreciation of the consumer’s life — what makes it hard or easy; what makes her (in this category) happy or sad — there is the opportunity to imagine possibilities that do not exist.

For instance, suppose your consumers have to clean floors. It’s easy enough to appreciate that mopping a floor is a fairly miserable task. Think about what it involves: getting out and filling a bucket, dragging the bucket around and repeatedly jamming the mop in and out of it, and then dumping out and cleaning the bucket. If you appreciate your floor-cleaning customers, you’ll be looking to help them avoid having to go through this experience every time they have to clean a floor — because not every floor will need such a heavy-duty approach. It was out of this appreciation-triggered insight that the electrostatic Swiffer anti-mop was born and produced massive top-line growth, approaching $1 billion in sales in a decade.

This why analysts are completely useless gamblers. Betting on what could be based on the past. Analysis has no room for the curve ball that is innovation. Innovations are what come out of appreciation. Henry Ford said if he had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.
Analysis can only imagine faster horses, they can never imagine cars.
via Clayton Christensen

(possible?) Banksy piece on Spring Street near Mercer, NYC.

A new feature at Scouting NY, called ‘New York, You’ve Changed’:

“New York, You’ve Changed” is a new Scouting NY site feature in which the New York depicted in movies is compared with the city of today. This is not the usual list of shooting locations and addresses to visit next time you tour the city. Instead, this is a full shot-by-shot dissection to see what New York once was and what it has become, for better or worse. I’ve tried to recreate the angles and framing as best as possible, and have presented the shots (more or less) in the order they appear in the film.

Awesomeness.
via Michael Surtees

Back in June, Andy Baio of Waxy.org shared his tale of being sued over the pixel art album cover for Kind of Bloop.
Long story short, everything is a remix.
If you’re a creator like me, you already know this.
In the spirit of remixing and stealing, I’ve come across some beautiful Mona Lisas:

via fubiz

via kottke

via Le Container

How’s that world-ruling going these days, Nokia?
*I originally posted this cover on 22 Oct 2009. Funny how even back then this cover was ridiculous.

So Ben Brooks imagines an alternate universe for Microsoft:

What if Microsoft bought HP’s PC division to start producing their own hardware: the higher quality PC?

So you’re imaging Microsoft turning into Apple.

Microsoft has begun building Microsoft stores, they would have a nice, existing, retail presence. They have deals with all major retailers. They likely have more brand trust than any current PC maker.

Ok, sure. I agree these retail stores could come in handy if they ever figured out how to make money from them.

In this scenario Microsoft wouldn’t become another me-too PC maker — they would be setting the standard. The standard for: price, quality, design, and speed.

Quality, design, speed. Microsoft. Right.

This is not out of the realm of possibility — though it would be a risky move.

That’s exactly what this scenario is – out of the realm of possibility. What Mister Brooks is proposing implies a complete change in business strategy for Microsoft. Microsoft started with the mission statement: “a computer on every desk and in every home”. From day one they’ve always been about quantity over quality.
Maybe I’m wrong. I’d love to be proven so. Windows Phone was so refreshing when it came out and I was genuinely excited to see another strong contender enter the mobile OS arena, but then they started showing their plans for Windows 8, where some aspects would be in a traditional-Windows UI and other aspects would be in their new Metro UI. Nope. Still the same old Microsoft. Trying to be everything to everyone. Decent at some things, great at nothing.
This is also the company who recently got all excited about their revamped Windows Explorer.

This post by Nick Farina (via Daring Fireball) was a huge eye-opener for me on Android. He breaks down all the differences between Android and iOS, from dev environment to debugging to UI design tools, but the section on Animation was what slapped me in the face.
How Android deals with interactions (emphasis added):

If you pressed the Down key, you would expect the “Homepage” entry to be selected instead of “Go to.” So you press the Down key. This causes an “invalidate,” meaning, “please repaint the screen.” So the screen is cleared, then:

• The OS redraws the status bar at the top
• The WebView redraws the Google.com website
• The Menu draws its translucent black background and border
• All the menu text is drawn
• The blue gradient highlight is drawn over “Homepage.”

This all happens very quickly, and you only ever see the final result, so it looks like just a few pixels have changed, but in fact the whole screen must be reconsidered and redrawn.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because this is the basic method used in GDI, the rendering system introduced with Microsoft Windows 1.0. That sounds damning, but really most GUIs operated this way.

Wow.
Let’s see how iOS handles things:

When you’re using an iPhone, you’re playing a hardware-accelerated 3D game. You know, the kind of 3D where everything is made out of hundreds of little triangles.

When you flick through your list of friends in the Contacts app, you’re causing those triangles to move around. And there’s a “camera,” just like a 3D shooter, but the camera is fixed above the Contacts app’s virtual surface and so it appears 2D.

Which is a long way of saying that everything on iOS is drawn using OpenGL. This is why animation on iOS is so hopelessly fast. You may have noticed that -drawRect is not called for each frame of an animation. It’s called once, then you draw your lines and circles and text onto an OpenGL surface (which you didn’t even realize), then Core Animation moves these surfaces around like pulling on the strings of a marionette. All the final compositing for each frame is done in hardware by the GPU.

So when things just never feel quite as smooth as on iOS, there’s a reason. I wonder how much of this is relevant to webOS? Based on the chugginess of the UI in my few weeks of testing the TouchPad, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was.
As Nick mentions, Android began pre-iPhone. Horace Dediu of Asymco argues Google created Android as a defensive move to protect their existing revenue streams. They weren’t thinking about the future. The opposite was the case for Apple, they created the iPhone (and iOS) to create a new revenue stream. It was yet another chance to define what the future of mobile computing should look like.

via CarScoop

On the 12th of August, the IBM PC turned 30 (via). I remember when my father bought our family an IBM PC when it came out that year. My father told my mother and me this was the future. My mother was skeptical about the $3,000 machine.

I remember him spending entire weekends transferring and backing up data to 5-and-quarter-inch floppy disks. Single-density disks only stored 160K, double density, a whopping 360K.

Before you shut down the computer, you had to park the head. My father couldn’t stress this enough to me. I could ruin the hard drive if I didn’t do it. The thought of not parking the head terrified me. There was no Windows Operating System. The screen was black with green characters. Everything was performed at the command line. If you’ve ever seen DOS on the Windows machine or the Terminal on an Apple, this was the entire experience on the first IBM.

In the early days the only game my father played was Microsoft Flight Simulator. This was after he bought a CGA display. It had 16 colors. I used to always ask him to fly by the Empire State Building and between the Twin Towers. I thought the graphics were amazing. In order to play games you had to either run them off of floppy disks or install them on your hard drive. I remember having to navigate directories in DOS, trying to find “FLIGHTSIM/Install.exe”. If I ran a game off of a floppy I had to navigate to the A Drive (the internal hard drive was the C Drive).

During high school I figured out how to type in phrases in DOS through the SoundBlaster card in order to prank call my friends with the computer’s robot voice.

Typing “cd ..” navigated you up a directory from where you were. The F1 key was always “Help”.

Control-Alt-Delete rebooted the computer without needing confirmation. It was fun doing this key command on the computers in Sears at the Rockaway Mall.

The printer we got with the PC sounded like a gatling gun when it printed. It just printed text. No graphics. No colors.

These early, crude days with the first PC gave me a big head start with understanding computers and helped shape me into the designer I am today. It has informed everything I’ve done from print design to web design to iOS design. I understood not just how something should look but how it worked behind the scenes. This didn’t mean I didn’t get frustrated when computers didn’t do what I wanted them to do, but it gave me the patience to know how to troubleshoot them.

It didn’t just make me a great driver, but a good mechnic as well.

AppleInsider: Acer suffers first-ever quarterly loss, predicts iPad ‘fever’ will recede

Acer Chairman J.T. Wang chalked up his company’s poor second-quarter performance as a “correction period,” according to Reuters. His company has seen numerous struggles since the launch of Apple’s iPad, which has cut into the sales of low-cost, low-power netbooks.

Wang reportedly added that he expects the “fever” for tablets to recede, and for consumers to regain interest in traditional style notebooks. Though he did not mention the iPad by name, Apple’s touchscreen device has dominated the tablet market since it first went on sale in 2010.

Keep telling yourself that.
Reminds me of that Newsweek article from 1995 declaring the Internet a passing fad too.

NYTimes: Sell Big or Die Fast

These days, big technology companies — particularly those in the hypercompetitive smartphone and tablet industries — are starting to resemble Hollywood film studios. Every release needs to be a blockbuster, and the only measure of success is the opening-weekend gross. There is little to no room for the sleeper indie hit that builds good word of mouth to become a solid performer over time.

This is unfortunate. As I’ve mentioned before, HP’s TouchPad has had a lot of potential and could very well have been one of those ‘sleeper’ hits. A cult favorite, if you will.
As I mentioned in my mini-review, there’s a lot to like with TouchPad, even though it’s not on par with the iPad. But all the bugs and missed details are clearly fixable.
Remember all the shit the iPhone was missing in the early days? Multi-tasking, video recording, front-facing camera, MMS, third party app development, GPS. Remember how they took baby steps each month of each year for the last 4 years releasing updates to address all the bugs and deficiencies?
As John Gruber said, once leadership changed at HP, the TouchPad had no chance of surviving.

9to5Mac: Apple ranks #1 in retail sales per square foot among U.S. retailers
Apple is in first place with $5,626 per square foot.
Tiffany’s? Second place with $2,974 and a set of sterling silver steak knives.

Ars Technica: HP to follow IBM, ditch its PC business

Hewlett-Packard is scheduled to hold its third quarter earnings call later this afternoon, but if a report from Bloomberg is to believed, dollars will be the least interesting topic of the call. Bloomberg is saying that multiple sources are indicating that HP will spin off its PC business to focus on enterprise services. As part of that change in focus, it will be acquiring the Cambridge, UK-based data analysis company Autonomy for about $10 billion, a healthy premium over the company’s current market cap.

What was all that bullshit Steve Jobs was spewing last year about post-PC era and PC’s becoming trucks?
Man Steve, you’re crazy.
I like you, but you’re crazy.