- Neil Young has a new album coming out (apparently recorded in only three days). The first single? “It’s called “Impeach the President,” so there can be little question what it is about.”
- Continuing the music news, Bruce Springsteen is working on an album of Pete Seeger covers.
- So seriously, why aren’t more people freaking out over plans to go nuclear over Iran? (via rb via im)
- Inexplicable spam: why on Earth would I ever open a message with the subject “Keep Your Loan Officers BUSY 24 Hours A DAY!” For that matter, why would I ever want loan officers to actually be busy 24 hours a day, subjecting them to sleep deprivation?
- When the money people are saying that software patents are a bad idea…
- “Origami” demo at news conference bombs. The Origami project is an interesting one; it’s Microsoft’s latest attempt to build a keyboardless computer (think Tablet PC but without the keyboard). The repeated attempts to build a computer without a keyboard (e.g. Newton) and the subsequent repeated failures (they’ve only been successful in the PDA market, and quite frankly, the PDA market is being very rapidly eaten by the cellphone market) seem to tell me the following: 1) There is a market for these devices; 2) that market is smaller than you think it is; 3) as a general rule, keyboardless interfaces are great for some things but suck for others; and 4) building a keyboardless interface that doesn’t suck is really, really, really hard.
- John Gruber on why Windows is the New Classic.
RE: keyboardless computers and PDAs - not only is the gap between cell phones and PDAs closing rapidly, but it's also worth noting that the most popular PDA/phone combos are all adding mini-keyboards to them... my treo, for instance, wouldn't be half as useful without the keyboard.
I think until flat-screen touchscreens are cheap enough and high enough resolution (both in terms of visual resolution and tactile resolution) and support multiple simultaneous inputs, while making it more sturdy and up to the heavy useage it'd require, it's a waste of time. When you can use your entire screen as an input device, and type with both hands and drag things around and do it in real time without lag for hours every day (ala the "Star Trek computer"), well, then it'll work. Of course, at that point, you're not keyboardless - you're just making the keyboard virtual.
Of course, that point ain't all that far off nowadays... but it's still a few years away, and without the hardware component, Origami or any other initiative is doomed.
(Reading that article is amusing, though - they obviously just weren't prepared. Running on battery power? The presenters don't even know how to use the box? That's just inexcusable, and one thing Jobs at least knew how to do - I've read a lot about his presentation prep, and while he's an asshole, he's a thorough asshole.)