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The Playmobil Apple Store is a preschool geek’s dream toy! It features the Genius Bar, kid’s corner, sales floor, and a conference room -and comes with over 60 accessories! And get this -you can slip your iPhone in place behind Steve Jobs and animate his presentation! The Playmobil Apple Store is a new item introduced today at ThinkGeek. Link
While Apple mastermind Steve Jobs is on a medical leave of absence, designer Charis Tsevis has created a tribute to the man behind iEverything. Check out this stunning portrait of Jobs, composed of a collage of his many creations.
The collage features all the products Jobs was credited as having a hand in—from the revolutionary (iPod and iPhone) to the less-than-inspiring (Apple TV and eMac).
With Jobs currently on indefinite medical leave, Fast Co Design calls Tsevis’ effort the “ultimate get well soon gesture”.
Link via Fast Co Design
Susan Kare, a San Francisco-based computer iconographer who has “designed thousands of software icons that have become familiar to anyone who uses a computer”, has now made her famous classic Macintosh icons available as prints for all the Apple fans out there.
Link – via switched and technabob
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Natania of Geeks Are Sexy is a decades-long Mac user … but recently she came to the dark side. Here’s how a Mac lover turned against Apple:
Price me out. My MacBook can’t hold its weight anymore. A new MacBook starts at about $1,000. Other laptops, however, with far better specs, running Windows or Linux, can be purchased for half that much. So, with the Mac, what I’m really paying for is the logo and the shiny factor, not the performance factor. And since I’m doing a lot of graphic design these days, not to mention gaming (which will be addressed below), specs are a lot more important than they used to be. There’s a point where you examine the specs of the machines side by side and really have to ask yourself how much the Apple software is worth. Because that’s where the price tag is.
[...]
Make it difficult for the gimpier geeks. I’ve got carpal tunnel. I can’t use a normal keyboard. Typing on the MacBook is a special kind of torture for me, so I have to buy ergonomic in order to avoid the pain. Does Apple have a version of their delightful aluminum keyboard with a gentle, ergonomic curve to it? Nope. And the newest Magic Mouse… don’t get me started on the kind of pain involved using that (seriously, did they try to make it painful? Is this some strange torture device?).
In the bootleg markets of Shanghai, you can purchase an ePad, a iRobot, or an iPhono. You can even get an MP5 player! But I was really impressed by this guitar peripheral for the Wü game console. See these and more in a gallery of good at Classy Hands. Link -Thanks, Lee!
Oh, this should be good. Apple has had a good and long run wow-ing the public with their hip iPhones and iPads in their oh-so-sleek Apple stores in malls, and Microsoft isn’t going to take it anymore: the boys of Redmond are opening up their own store (bigger, in fact) in the Mall of America, directly in front of the Apple store.
Techi’s got the story (and the video clip):
I can see it now: Apple’s ‘Geniuses’ folding their arms and glaring across the hallway at Microsoft’s … ‘Experts’, or whatever they end up calling their employees (do they already have a name?), who glare back in kind. What I’d really like to see, though, is all sorts of Spy Vs. Spy shenanigans happening between the stores. If life were only like that.
What do you think the Microsofters that work there should be called? I propose Best Servicepeople On Demand. T-Shirt from the NeatoShop for the best entry (write down what you want along with your comment, otherwise you forfeit the prize, mmkay?). Have fun!
Update 10/29/10 – Fishbowl wins with “Paperclip,” but forfeited the prize.
You would think today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss would be easy -if you’re an Apple fan. Test your Apple knowledge with ten questions about the history of the company and its products. It’s not easy -I’ve used nothing but Apple computers for twenty-five years and I only scored 40%! I bet everyone who beats that score will leave a comment about it. Link
Etsy seller apjam made this clever albeit unauthorized Homer Simpsons sticker for your Apple iPhone.
The next time your iPhone G4 drops a call, don’t blame Antennagate – it’s probably Homer nom nom nomming the connection.
Nerd Approved has the larger pic: Link or go to apjam’s Etsy shop
We’ve posted about book recommendations for sci-fi fans, and light summer reading … but what about books for geeks?
Geeks Are Sexy blog has got this one covered in Patrick Biz’ post about the 10 Must-Read Books for Geeks. The two part series began with a bang:
iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It
If you want to understand how the Apple fairy tale began in the seventies, then iWoz is a must read. This is the personal story of Steve Wozniak, inventor of the Apple computer. This book explains the long process that led Wozniak to create the first affordable computer, how he met Steve Jobs, and how they founded the Apple empire. This easy-to-read book reveals a captivating story aimed at everyone interested by the debut of personal computing.
Got an iPad? You’re a selfish elite! Criticize Apple? Then you’re an independent geek.
That’s the conclusion of a new study of the psychological profile of iPad owners and iPad critics:
Consumer research firm MyType conducted the study, in which opinions of 20,000 people were analyzed between March and May. The firm’s conclusion was that iPad owners tend to be wealthy, sophisticated, highly educated and disproportionately interested in business and finance, while they scored terribly in the areas of altruism and kindness. In other words, “selfish elites.”
They are six times more likely to be “wealthy, well-educated, power-hungry, over-achieving, sophisticated, unkind and non-altruistic 30-50 year olds,” MyType’s Tim Koelkebeck told Wired.com.
96 percent those most likely to criticize the iPad, on the other hand, don’t even own one, although as geeks, they were slightly more likely to do so than the average population — and far more likely to have an opinion about the device one way or the other (updated). This group tends to be “self-directed young people who look down on conformity and are interested in videogames, computers, electronics, science and the internet,” said Koelkebeck.
The undying devotion of fanboys to Apple is nothing new, but researchers have reframed Apple’s relationship to its consumers/fans into something else: religion.
There are scholars who study Apple’s consumers as religious devotees. Consumer behavior specialists Russell Belk of York University and Gulnur Tumbat of San Francisco State, even put together a framework for assessing Apple’s mystical mythology. The company
was built on four key myths, they argued.Here are the four narratives, as summarized by media scholar Texas A&M’s Heidi Campbell, who distilled their work for her May paper "How the iPhone became divine":
- a creation myth highlighting the counter-cultural origin and emergence of the Apple Mac as a transformative moment;
– a hero myth presenting the Mac and its founder Jobs as saving its users from the corporate domination of the PC world;
– a satanic myth that presents Bill Gates as the enemy of Mac loyalists;
– and, finally, a resurrection myth of Jobs returning to save the failing company…
This guy dropped some food on his iPad and came up with the idea of the iDish. Nothing revolutionary; he’s just using his iPad as a dish, often with some appetizing food or fancy dishes displayed on the screen to make the meal look better. However, I got more and more tickled as his photographs just kept coming. The poor fellow had to buy sushi at 50% off because it was about to expire -probably because all his money went for an iPad! Link -via Metafilter
You know what they say -when you find a look that works, stick with it. However, if you look back far enough, you’ll see that he’s tried other styles as well. Link -via J-Walk Blog
What if, instead of buying an Apple computer or iPhone back when they were released, you used the money to buy Apple stock? How would you have made out?
Kyle Conroy, a student at UC Berkeley was wondering just that and figured out just how tech stocks and tech gadgets compare as investments.
If you had bought an Apple Power Book G3 250, it was originally priced at $5,700. And today in stock value, that would actually be $330,000.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by timcanny.
So someone leaves a phone on a bar, someone else picks it up and plays with it, and the next thing you know Gizmodo is taking it apart and declaring that this disguised iPhone is a test model of the not-yet-released iPhone 4G. The blog then outlined all the phone’s new features. Apple is taking the accidental leak very seriously.
In a blog post on Monday detailing how it obtained the phone, Gizmodo said it was left by an iPhone software engineer at Gourmet Haus Staudt, a German specialty store and beer garden in Redwood City.
The person who found the phone peddled it to Gizmodo, which bought it for $5,000, Nick Denton, chief executive of Gawker Media, which owns Gizmodo, said by instant message.
His company’s sites have had a longstanding practice of paying for scoops, and the windfall was tangible. Traffic spiked on Monday, and at midday more than one million visitors stopped by the site in one hour to see pictures of the coveted gadget.
By late in the day, reports began to surface on the Internet that Apple’s chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, had called Gizmodo to get the device back. Mr. Denton declined to comment, saying any conversation between Mr. Jobs and Gizmodo would most likely have been off the record.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by tylerthevideoguy.
Fruit Jackets – $9.95 ea ($27.95 for the trio) at the NeatoShop
Eating fruits every day is healthy, but the trip to the office can be downright dangerous for your fruit. So to help save your apples, bananas, and pears from bumps and bruises, you need this: Fruit Jacket, a form-fitting neoprene "jacket" for fruits! (Bonus: it also protescts your fruit’s modesty!)
Silly? Absolutely! Useful? Perhaps – but if it gets you (or your loved ones) to eat their serving of fruit a day, then I’m sure it’s worth it!
Links: Apple Fruit Jacket, Banana Fruit Jacket, Pear Fruit Jacket | All Three at the NeatoShop
BTW, we’ve added a lot of new and neat items to the NeatoShop. Please take a look
Why serve a cheese ball when you can serve Steve Jobs’ head on a platter? Ken carved this from mozzarella cheese for his iPad launch party! See the process in pictures at The Cook’s Den, with recipes for the other foods served with the Apple “head cheese” (strangely, I see no apples, but you’ll find iPad Thai). Link
Of course, it was only a matter of time before someone would do a remake of the popular “I’m on a horse” Old Spice Manmercial that was covered here at Neatorama a couple of weeks ago. This first(?) one has an Apple theme. I’m sure more clips will follow.
Link [YouTube] – via iPhonefeber
When the Apple store on Fifth Avenue in New York had a broken step in their glass spiral staircase replaced, Mark Burstiner asked for, and received the old step from the repair crew. Over a year later, he put it up for sale on eBay. Then he was contacted by a VP from Seele, the staircase manufacturer. The VP told him Apple was very unhappy and asked him to pull the auction. Burstiner stopped the auction, but then the Seele representative called him again and demanded that he return the step!
What this sounds like to me is Seele trying to save face because Apple is furious that they were irresponsible enough to relinquish ownership of the tread. Though it may be embarrassing for both corporations, it may simply be a lesson learned at a high price. Let me put it this way: If you caught a foul ball at a World Series game, got it signed by a player, received a high five from the security guard on the way out of the stadium, and went home, that ball is now yours, right? It started as one entity?s property, and through a series of consensual transactions, it ended up in your hands. Now, let?s say a year and a half later, the player who signed it is huge, and you decide to put it up for auction. If the MLB reached out to you and said, “Hey! No way, buddy. That was OURS. Hand it over!” Guess what? That wouldn’t fly.
Burstiner put the step back up on eBay. No doubt publicity about the case brought more bids to the auction, which is at $6,300 at the time of this post. Link to story. Link to auction.
Josh and Ting Li of New York City got married on Valentine’s Day inside an Apple Store, in honor of the company that makes their favorite products:
The pair, who met in the Apple store, had their priest dressed as Steve Jobs, the company’s chief executive, read their vows from their iPhones, while the rings were tied to a ribbon wrapped around a first generation iPod.
Part of their vows included a passage from the Apple CEO that said: “You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down.”
Mrs Ling, dressed in a strapless wedding dress, had her vows written on a card that said “I love you more than this” followed by a picture of an iPhone.
As they say, “an apple a day keeps the doctor away.” With this calendar, you get an apple every day of the month and it helps you keep up with the days as well. The Serviceplan advertising agency of Munich, Germany created the apple calendar for AOK health insurance. Every month, fill it with 28, 30, or 31 apples and adjust the numbered calendar behind the transparent tube. Then eat one apple each day and see the calendar advance. Too bad the calendars aren’t for sale, but you may see them in AOK branch offices. Link -via bookofjoe
Can’t decide what kind of pie to serve after Thanksgiving dinner? Make them all in one pie pan! Cakespy at Serious Eats experimented with pecan, apple, and pumpkin pie recipes to make this triple threat. The best results came from the pie divided into sections, as seen in the picture. The recipes are included. Link -via Unique Daily
An Australian computer hacker named Ashley Towns has created a virus that … rickrolls jailbroken iPhones:
The Australian programmer who claims to have created the world’s first Apple iPhone virus as a prank has told Computerworld he does not regret writing it.
The worm, ‘Ikee’ changes iPhone owners’ wallpaper and replaces it with a photo of ‘80s pop star Rick Astley and the message “ikee is never going to give you up”.
Twenty-one-year-old Wollongong resident Ashley Towns, said he created the virus out of curiosity and boredom.
“I had just formatted my iPhone and it told me to set the password in bold, big letters and I wondered how many people have actually done that," Towns said.
“So I ran a scan on my [Optus] 3G network and there was 26 phones running the service that’s vulnerable, and out of that 26, 25 hadn’t changed their passwords.”
Carl Sagan with a model of the Viking Lander. Photo via Wikipedia
I miss Carl Sagan. Sagan's enthusiasm for science and his knack for translating difficult scientific concepts into simple explanations that many can understand, made him a popular figure. He was an ambassador for science, if you will, as he had inspired many people to study science (yours truly included).
Today would've been his 75th birthday, so in honor of the great astronomer, scientist and author, Neatorama presents 10 Neat Facts About Carl Sagan:
When Carl was five years old, he wondered about the stars: what were they? Unsatisfied with the answers he got from his friends and from adults he knew, Carl went to the library and asked for a book about stars. The librarian handed him ... a book on celebrities! In Keay Davidson's Carl Sagan: A Life, Carl explained how his fascination with the cosmos began:
I gave it back to her and said, "This wasn't the kind of stars I had in mind." She thought this was hilarious, which humiliated me further. She then went and got the right kind of book. I took it—a simple kid's book. I sat down on a little chair—a pint-sized chair—and turned the pages until I came to the answer.
And the answer was stunning. It was that the Sun was a star but really close. The stars were suns, but so far away they were just little points of light.... And while I didn't know the [inverse] square law of light propagation or anything like that, still, it was clear to me that you would have to move that Sun enormously far away, further away than Brooklyn [for the stars to appears as dots of light]....
The scale of the universe suddenly opened up to me. [It was] kind of a religious experience. [There] was a magnificence to it, a grandeur, a scale which has never left me. Never ever left me.
In
1994, Apple chose the internal codename "Carl Sagan" for its
PowerMac 7100. Though it was meant as an homage to Carl (and an in-joke
that the computer would make Apple "billions and billions" of
dollars), they also used the codenames "Piltdown Man" and "Cold
Fusion" for the Power Mac 6100 and 8100, respectively. When Carl
found out that he was being put alongside scientific hoaxes, he sued Apple.
Though Apple won the suit, the codename was changed to BHA (Butt Head
Astronomer) ... which prompted yet another lawsuit from the p.o.'d astronomer!
Apple won again, but their lawyers demanded the engineers change the codename
one more time, which they did. The PowerMac 7100 was known by its final
codename LAW, which stood for "Lawyers Are Wimps."
In 1969, Carl Sagan wrote under the Pseudonym "Mr. X" about the virtues of cannabis. Harvard Medical School Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry Lester Grinspoon has the article in his website Marijuana Uses:
It all began about ten years ago. I had reached a considerably more relaxed period in my life - a time when I had come to feel that there was more to living than science, a time of awakening of my social consciousness and amiability, a time when I was open to new experiences. I had become friendly with a group of people who occasionally smoked cannabis, irregularly, but with evident pleasure. Initially I was unwilling to partake, but the apparent euphoria that cannabis produced and the fact that there was no physiological addiction to the plant eventually persuaded me to try. My initial experiences were entirely disappointing; there was no effect at all, and I began to entertain a variety of hypotheses about cannabis being a placebo which worked by expectation and hyperventilation rather than by chemistry. After about five or six unsuccessful attempts, however, it happened. I was lying on my back in a friend's living room idly examining the pattern of shadows on the ceiling cast by a potted plant (not cannabis!). I suddenly realized that I was examining an intricately detailed miniature Volkswagen, distinctly outlined by the shadows. I was very skeptical at this perception, and tried to find inconsistencies between Volkswagens and what I viewed on the ceiling. But it was all there, down to hubcaps, license plate, chrome, and even the small handle used for opening the trunk. When I closed my eyes, I was stunned to find that there was a movie going on the inside of my eyelids. Flash . . . a simple country scene with red farmhouse, a blue sky, white clouds, yellow path meandering over green hills to the horizon. . . Flash . . .
Anyone who has ever worked in a university or an academic institution would know this, but most people assume that because science relies on logic and careful reasoning, scientists would behave in a clinical and dispassionate way. Nothing is farther from the truth.
Carl's popularity had backfired on him not once but twice. In 1967, he was denied tenure at Harvard because his colleagues bristled at "what they perceived as self-aggrandizement and pandering to the public."
In 1992, Carl was again disappointed when his application for membership at the prestigious National Academy of Sciences was denied. Ironically, he received the Public Welfare Medal, the highest award of the Academy for "distinguished contributions in the application of science to the public welfare."
In both instances, Carl persevered and succeeded to overcome setbacks resulting from the politics of science.
Carl Sagan actually never used the term "billions and billions." His exact words on the series Cosmos were "billions upon billions" (which, for all practical purpose, is pretty much the same thing).
So how did "billions and billions" came to be? We can blame Johnny Carson:
Carl was a good sport - his final book, titled Billions
& Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium
A sagan is defined as at least 4 billion (the smallest amount in "billions" is two billion, so "billions and billions" equal 4 billion). It is estimated that the Milky Way galaxy has 100 sagan (400,000,000,000) stars.
Previously on Neatorama: Fun and Unusual Units of Measurements
Many people know that Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecrafts carry metal plaques that carry a message from mankind. But not many know that it was Carl Sagan, together with Frank Drake (yes, the man who came up with the Drake Equation that attempts to estimate the number of alien civilization in our galaxy), that designed the plaque. The controversial artwork, which featured a nude man and woman, was drawn by Sagan's then-wife Linda Salzman Sagan.
After the Pioneer Program, NASA put a Golden Record aboard the two Voyager spacecrafts, which included a greeting "Hello from the children of planet Earth." That was recorded by then six-year-old Nick Sagan, Carl's son.
Nick Sagan grew up to become a novelist and screenwriter. He wrote an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise titled "Terra Prime," which included a CGI of Carl Sagan Memorial Station plaque on Mars.
Image via Memory
Alpha, the Star Trek Wiki
The plaque above is fictional - but the Carl Sagan Memorial Station is real. It's the formal name of the NASA Mars Pathfinder lander, which delivered the Sojourner rover that explored the Red Planet.
Just in case a unit of measurement and a memorial station on Mars aren't enough, Carl had another thing named after him: a small asteroid in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter was named the 2709 Sagan.
In 1996, not long before his death, Carl Sagan was interviewed by Charlie Rose, in which he discussed the rise of pseudoscience in the United States. He looked gaunt in the interview, but as you can see, he remained as sharp as ever:
This has been on Neatorama before, but it's so good that we just have to feature it again for those of you who might've missed it. Behold, Carl Sagan's A Glorious Dawn auto-tuned:
__________
I'll be the first to acknowledge that this is a woefully inadequate post about one of the most brilliant scientists who ever lived. We didn't talk about Cosmos (because it's so popular, I opted for the more obscure Sagan trivia), his books and Pulitzer Prize, Carl Sagan Day and so on. If you have a Sagan story, please share it in the comments.
Photo: woodtec
Because you can’t out-tech the sleek iPod and iPhone, it’s much better to go low-tech when showcasing Apple’s coveted gadgets. Behold, the log dock by Woodtec:
Again from Woodtec, the dual iPhone/iPod docking log takes the single log dock and adds room for another device. Now you can charge your iPhone and iPod simultaneously via a single length of tree limb. Unsurprisingly, as there’s more wood and an extra connection, the dual dock comes in at a higher price but for something so unique, $119.00 is surely money well spent.
Zoombits got more on wooden iPhone accessories: Link – Thanks Dave!
Every geek knows that "A" is for Apple, but I bet not many know that Apple had a "third founder" who gave up his stake for $800 (it would've been worth at least $17 billion today). Or that Cisco was named for San Francisco. Or that Twitter used to be called twttr? Let's take a stroll through the A to Z of computing trivia, Neatorama style!
If you think that Apple was founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, think again: there was a "third founder" of Apple. In 1976, Ronald Wayne gave up his 10% stake of the fledgling company for $800 because he was worried that the company would fold and that he would be liable for debts incurred by the other partners (at the time Apple wasn't a corporation yet). Of course Apple became the big company, and Wayne's stake could've been worth as much as $17 billion today.
Originally, Research in Motion wanted its wireless messaging device to have the word "e-mail" in its name. When RIM hired Lexicon Branding to do a little research, they found out that people associate "e-mail" with work and therefore can raise blood pressure. Someone said that the buttons look like small berries, so they decided to name it BlackBerry.
Evolution of Cisco logo, by Design Maven via Speak
Up
Cisco System was named after the city San Francisco (the founders of the company worked for Stanford University, which is just a couple of town over). Indeed, first Cisco System's logo was the Golden Gate Bridge. (See also: Evolution of Tech Logos)
Ben Curtis, in his very first
Dell commercial
In 2003, after three years of playing the Dell Dude, actor Ben Curtis was arrested while attempting to buy a bag of marijuana. People immediately parodied his tag line "Dude, you're getting a Dell" to "Dude, you're getting a cell." Though charges were dropped, Dell canceled the Dell Dude commercials. Curtis was working as a waiter in 2007 but he's making a come back with a (supposedly) upcoming play "Dude! I'm Going to Hell"
In 1977, the US Postal Service recognized that email would pose a serious challenge to its monopoly on delivering mail. At first, it wanted to ban emails (like it did mails delivered by underground pneumatic tubes), but the FCC objected and the Postal Rate Commission refused. So it created an experimental email service called E-COM ("Electronic Computer-Originated Mail"). The idea was simple: You send the emails, which the post office would then print out and deliver as physical letters at the price of 26¢ each (it was said that it actually cost the USPS $5 to deliver the message). Oh, and the service was one-way. If something went wrong, you'd get an error message delivered two days later ... in form of a letter! Needless to say, E-COM failed.
John Backus, the inventor of FORTRAN programming language, said this about his invention: "Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 (an early computer), writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs."
When Paul Buchheit started the Gmail project at Google, he named it "Project Caribou" after a Dilbert cartoon strip.
HP could've easily have been PH. In 1939, when Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard formed HP in a Palo Alto garage, they flipped a coin to decide the name of the company. Packard actually won the toss, but decided to name it Hewlett-Packard instead of Packard-Hewlett.
In 1999, Al Gore was asked by Wolf Blitzer what distinguished him from other contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, and he famously said: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." Gore was immediately ridiculed for claiming to have invented the Internet. Not to be outdone, Dan Quayle said "If Al Gore invented the Internet, I invented spell check."
JPEG stands for the Joint Photographic Experts Group, who created the method of compression for photo images. Like all image processing algo, JPEG was tested on the standard test image of "Lenna", a cropped photo of a 1972 Playboy magazine centerfold Lena Soderberg.
Knuth reward check, photo via Upto11.net
Legendary computer scientist Donald Knuth offers to pay a reward of $2.56 for the first finder of errors in his books. Why $2.56? Because 256 pennies is one hexadecimal dollar, which is sort of a joke that only a programmer can appreciate. But that's okay since that's Knuth's target audience anyhow. Indeed, Knuth reward checks are "among computerdom's most prized trophies," according to MIT's Technology Review. If the name Don Knuth sounds familiar, that's because we've featured his Potrzebie System of Weights and Measure before on Neatorama. (see also: Fun and Unusual Units of Measurements)
At first, Linus Torvalds wanted to name his new operating system Freax, a portmanteau of "freak," "free," and "x" (for Unix). A co-worker thought that it was a horrible name and renamed it Linux without telling him.
In 1996, Monty Widenius and David Axmark created MySQL, a relational database management system that would later become one of the most widely used software in the world, powering many of the web's largest sites (WordPress, Neatorama's blogging engine, uses it). What most people don't know is that the "My" in MySQL doesn't refer to "me" - it's actually the name of Monty's daughter My.
The
term newbie or noob, originally thought to be from British
public-school and military slang "new boy," was first spotted
in the Usenet newsgroup talk.bizarre as an insult to a clueless newcomer.
(N
is for Newbie Onesies/Kids T-Shirt at the Neatorama Shop)
In 1977, Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates were working on a CIA-funded project codenamed Oracle (because the CIA believed that it would give them answers to all questions). The project failed, but Larry and friends took the idea and used it to create a company that would later become the Oracle Corporation.
The most common passwords in the world are:
1. password
2. 123456
3. qwerty
4. abc123
5. letmein
6. monkey
7. myspace1
8. password1
9. link182
10. (your first name)
And you thought you were clever to do a derivative of Blink-182 as your password!
The keyboard you're using now is most likely set in a QWERTY layout (named for the first 6 characters of the top row of letters). This layout was invented by Christopher Sholes in 1874 because people were typing too fast on typewriters back then, thus causing the machine to jam. Sholes did frequency analysis on letter-pairs and separated pairs of letters that tend to cause mechanical jams when typed in quick successions like TH. Sholes' new layout was designed to slow down typists (technically, he aimed to improve typing speed by reducing jams - and indeed, that's exactly what happened.)
ROT13: Jung qbrf Whyvhf Pnrfne unir nalguvat gb qb jvgu zbqrea qnl Vagrearg? Pnrfne vairagrq n fvzcyr rapelcgvba zrgubq gung orpnzr dhvgr cbchyne va Hfrarg arjftebhcf nf n zrna gb uvqr fcbvyref, chapuyvarf naq chmmyr fbyhgvbaf. Gur vqrn vf fvzcyr: ercynpr n cvrpr bs grkg jvgu yrggref 13 cynprf shegure nybat va gur nycunorg ("ebgngr ol 13 cynprf" be EBG13). Gur travhf bs gur zrgubq vf gung orpnhfr gurer ner 26 yrggref va gur Ratyvfu nycunorg, gur fnzr rapelcgvba zrgubq jvyy qrpelcg n ebgngrq grkg!
Before Digg, there was Slashdot. The technology-related news website was so huge that getting linked from it meant a massive increase of traffic that would cripple smaller web servers. Webmasters call this the Slashdot effect, which is the granddaddy of similar terms Digg effect, Farked, or Drudged.
The very first Twitter message was sent by its co-creator Jack Dorsey on March 21, 2006: "just setting up my twttr." That's not a typo - twttr was the original codename for the project (inspired by Flickr). At least twttr was better than one of the first names they were considering for it: twitch.
I'm including USB (Universal Serial Bus) here so I can play this awesome "Intel Star" commercial starring Ajay Bhatt, the co-inventor of the USB. Watch it and weep:
Before the World Wide Web, there was Gopher (note: it's gopher://, not http:// - you'd need Firefox to see it) and Veronica was its search engine. Why Veronica? It's because the first search engine of the Internet, a tool that indexes FTP archives, is called Archie. Officially, Veronica is an acronym for "Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computer Archives."
Call it user-generated content, Bubble 2.0, millionth-word in the English language or whatever you want, but know this: Web 2.0 is trademarked by CMP Media (who partnered with O'Reilly in producing the Web 2.0 conference) in 2004. In 2006, they sent a cease-and-desist nastygram to the Irish non-profit organization IT@Cork for using the word in the name of their conference and sparked a kerfuffle over the ownership of "Web 2.0"
What's the company that invented the personal computer, graphical user interface, the computer mouse, but didn't bother to market them because it couldn't see their commercial potentials? Yep, Xerox. In 1979, Steve Jobs of Apple visited Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and saw the Xerox Alto workstation. Several years later, Jobs brought the Apple Macintosh to market.
When YouTube was sold to Google for $1.7 billion, the spotlight was on Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. But did you know that there was a third YouTube founder? That's right: Jawed Karim left the company to become a graduate student at Stanford University. He did, however, fare better than Ronald Wayne - Jawed got about $64 million worth in stock. Jawed also uploaded the very first video on YouTube on April 23, 2005:
If you own a PC in the late 80s/early 90s, then you're savvy about the ZIP file format. Back then, disk space was at a premium (a regular 3-1/2" HD floppy disk can only hold 1.44 MB worth of data) so compression was a big thing. In 1986, Phil Katz created PKZIP (Yep, PK is his initials) and released it as a shareware. He chose the name "zip" to imply that his software was faster than other compression formats available at the time. Sadly, Phil, the alcoholic computer genius, died alone in a cheap hotel cradling an empty bottle of peppermint schnapps.
Ken Morrish of Colaton Raleigh, Devon, England picked a bizarre Red Delicious apple off his tree. It looks as if someone stuck together half of a green apple and half of a red apple, but these colors are natural.
John Breach, chairman of the British Independent Fruit Growers Association, said: ‘I’ve never seen this happen before to a Golden Delicious. It is extremely rare. It is an extreme mutation.
‘There has been the occasional case of this type reported. If there was a whole branch of apples with the same colouring then fruit experts would get even more excited.’
Jim Arbury, fruit superintendent at RHS Garden Wisley in Surrey, said it was probably the ‘result of a random genetic mutation’.
‘This is known as a chimera where one of the first two cells has developed differently giving rise to one half of the apple being different,’ he said.
Morrish is keeping the apple in his refrigerator because so many people want to see it. Link -via J-Walk Blog
(image credit: Archant Devon)
A cool Steve Job portrait was made with common Apple fonts. The artist, Dylan Roscover explains:
This is a typeface-driven design based on the “Here’s to the crazy ones” ad campaign from Apple in the 90s, using Motter Tektura, Apple Garamond, Myriad, Univers, Gill Sans, and Volkswagen AG Rounded, fonts present in Apple branding and products.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by talsiach.
Apple is crowing about how its iTunes App Store is about to hit its one billionth download today, but it has also quietly reached another milestone earlier this year: its first Trojan horse program.
Until recently, the big target always was Microsoft Windows, and Apple computers were protected by "relative obscurity," [Kevin Haley, a director of security response at Symantec] said.
But blogs are buzzing this week about what two Symantec researchers have called the first harmful computer program to strike specifically at Mac.
This Trojan horse program, dubbed the "iBotnet," has infected only a few thousand Mac machines, but it represents a step in the evolution of malicious computer software, Haley said.
The iBotnet is a sign that harmful programs are moving toward Mac, said Paul Henry, a forensics and security analyst at Lumension Security in Arizona.
Remember the kerfuffle when Re/Max tried to block the trademark registration of rival real estate company Rehava? Well, they’re not the only company that knows how to play hardball.
Consider Apple (yes, that Apple, fellow fanboys), whose lawyers are pursuing the "Pod" trademarks:
What’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but if its name ended in "pod," it might attract the ire of Apple’s shark-like legal team.
Apple’s obsession with the blockbuster success of its iPod has driven the corporation to chase down many companies attempting to use the media player’s three-letter suffix in their product or business names. Names that have come under fire include MyPodder, TightPod, PodShow, and even Podium. On Monday, Sector Labs, a small business whose Video Pod trademark has been blocked by Apple, took legal action to fight back.
"It appears that Apple is not only trying to put an iPod in everybody’s hands and white earbuds in everyone’s ears but to control the use of our language and most particularly the word ‘Pod,’" Sector Labs’ lawyers wrote in a 239-page response to Apple’s trademark opposition, which has blocked Video Pod’s development. "If we are not careful, in Apple’s quest for dominance, they will soon attempt to take over the words ‘Phone’ and ‘Tunes’ — let us hope they do not attempt a coup over the exclusive rights to the letter ‘i’."
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