Shake: Price Decrease but with a catch...

Apple has dropped the price of Shake their compositing software from: $2999(US) to $499(US)! And it's now, with v4.1 a Universal version. But what's the catch, "Apple is stopping development on this particular product while it develops its next-generation compositing program. From what I can deduce, Shake finally got to a point where it was time for a ground-up rewrite. In addition, the program’s interface is decidedly non-Mac-like; it shares nothing at all with other pro apps such as Final Cut Pro." - Franklin McMahon. Edit Review: Apple Shake 4.1.

The pace of technological change in computers has slowed down tremendously. Don’t think so?

"The pace of technological change in computers has slowed down tremendously. Don’t think so? Stop and think about it. As I write this sentence in early 2006, there are people, lots of people, still running Windows NT 4.0 domain controllers because they still haven’t gone to Active Directory. Windows NT 4.0 was released in 1996, ten years ago as I write this in 2006. Heck, you may know someone still using Windows 95! That would be like someone running Windows 3.1 in the year 2000, or, to choose amore ancient example, MS-DOS 3.3 in 1992—examples that would have been practically impossible to find in those days. While I personally wouldn’t want to have to live in 95-land, I can understand why people do—it still gets the job done. They can surf the Web, get email, play a lot of games. That would, again, not be a possibility in the past: someone using Windows 3.1 in the year 2000 would find that virtually not a single application on the shelf would run on 3.1. But computing is tending to plateau these days, as hardware vendors are hitting limits in at least two ways. First, Intel has said that it’s not possible to create a Pentium chip faster than 3.8 GHz and, second, hard drive vendors claim that they’ve nearly hit the wall on data density." - Mark Minasi ("Mastering Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Upgrade Edition for SP1 and R2")

Messages in Water

Here's another interesting use of something we use everyday. Messages on water:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2LUz2WVcek

Multi-Touch

Another video demonstrating the future of multi-touch screens/software.

3D Facial Extrapolation

Want to morph someone's expression - have a look at this video. It's currently a research project from Prof. Dr. Volker Blanz. VERY COOL!!!

State of the Computer Book Market, Q406

For those interested in the state of computer books, O'Reilly has published some interesting data.

Viagra & Aids

I've always thought society doesn't concentrate on the important problems. Take for example Aids. How long has this been with us now? And during this time what have we solved? Well turns out one of the things 'we' went about solving is erectile-dysfunction. Now, not having any personal experience with this I can indeed imagine how this might be a problem. Solution: Viagra! But now let's look at what we, as a society have done. We discovered a solution for a 'minor' problem but in making such a solution we not only ignored a real problem [Aids] but we have now made it worse. Clearly more people are going to have sex and extrapolating from this we can imagine more people will get Aids. So here we are, we have a really terrible disease, do [basically] nothing about it, in the mean time we take some other [trivial problem BY comparison] and solve that. Not only wasting resourses but also causing even more issues for the first problem. And now an American Aids group is suing Phizer over this. I can't imagine them winning but there is still a point to be made here. The real solution? Concentrate on the real problems of the day.