Thursday, October 27, 2016

MOMA acquires original set of emoji

No comments:
Emojis are now being displayed in the Museum of Modern Art, this is how it all began in 1999
, by Milen Y

The first emoji was created in 1998 or 1999 by Japanese designer Shigetaka Kurita, who was at the time working on a mobile internet platform, called i-mode, at Japanese carrier NTT. Kurita was inspired by the way weather forecasts and street signs used simple, but universally recognizable, symbols to convey meaning, and decided to adopt this approach for his project. The first set of emoji was comprised of just 176 pictograms, each with resolution of 12 x 12 pixels, and was aimed to differentiate i-mode's messaging features from other such services.

A fascinating bit of history. Many different news outlets have written different stories about this event, each telling something else interesting about the history of emoji:

Enjoy.

Wednesday, October 26, 2016

MacRumors: Microsoft Announces Surface Book i7, Desktop PC 'Surface Studio,' and Windows 10 Creators Update

No comments:
Microsoft Announces Surface Book i7, Desktop PC 'Surface Studio,' and Windows 10 Creators Update
Wednesday October 26, 2016 9:48 am PDT by Mitchel Broussard

At its media event today in New York City, Microsoft announced a new update coming to Windows 10 devices that's focused on creativity and productivity tools, as well as two major new pieces of hardware: the Surface Book i7 and Surface Studio. The Surface Book is the second generation of last year's original model, while the Surface Studio is the company's all new, all-in-one desktop PC that's aimed at the high-end, enterprise market with a starting price of $2,999.

Nice systems. (And unlike Samsung's latest offerings, these are distinct Microsoft designs and are not knock-offs of what other companies are shipping.)

I especially like their large Surface Studio. The idea of being able to quickly fold a desktop-style workstation into a flat drafting-board-like surface for pen-based interaction is great. I've seen concepts like this, but I think this is the first time the concept will ship in an commercial product. And I love the concept of the Surface Dial - hopefully we'll see some great apps that can take advantage of this device.

AppleInsider: Samsung's cylindrical ArtPC Pulse computer apes design of Apple's Mac Pro

No comments:
Samsung's cylindrical ArtPC Pulse computer apes design of Apple's Mac Pro
By Mike Wuerthele Monday, October 10, 2016, 03:25 pm PT (06:25 pm ET)

Samsung, in conjunction with Harman Kardon, has quietly revealed the new cylindrical consumer-grade ArtPC Pulse line powered by the sixth generation Skylake processor, which has already begun to draw many comparisons to Apple's 2013 Mac Pro design.
...
A configuration with a dual-core 2.7 GHz Kaby Lake i5 processor, 256GB of NVMe storage, 8GB of RAM is up for pre-order at Amazon for $1199.99.

Gee, can't Samsung sell anything that's not a copy of some other company's product? Nobody in the world was shipping or even talking about a small-black-cylinder form factor before Apple released the 2013 Mac Pro and now Samsung ships one. And don't get me started on their iPhone clones. Don't they have any product designers capable of original thought?

Friday, October 07, 2016

Backblaze: What SMART Stats Tell Us About Hard Drives

No comments:
What SMART Stats Tell Us About Hard Drives
October 6th, 2016

What if a hard drive could tell you it was going to fail before it actually did? Is that possible? Each day Backblaze records the SMART stats that are reported by the 67,814 hard drives we have spinning in our Sacramento data center. SMART stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology and is a monitoring system included in hard drives that reports on various attributes of the state of a given drive.

While we’ve looked at SMART stats before, this time we’ll dig into the SMART stats we use in determining drive failure and we’ll also look at a few other stats we find interesting.

This is a really interesting article about some parts of SMART and how the statistics may be used to heuristically predict drive failure.