Released in 1984 with the Mac, it is fondly remembered not only by those who used it, but also by computer scientists for numerous first-of-a-kind innovations. Those who spend a lot of time using Adobe Photoshop constantly use such features as the lasso tool for selecting non-rectangular shapes, and the paint bucket for filling closed areas with a pattern, and later, color. Both first appeared in MacPaint. The program was unique at the time for its ability to create graphics that could then be used in other applications.
MacPaint was part of the original Macintosh launch back in 1984 and was featured prominently in its advertising. The screenshot above was from an 18 page advertising brochure that was circulated with Time and Newsweek in December, 1983. The ad introduced the concept of using a mouse to click on the screen, and MacPaint was featured as an example application utilize the windows/mouse interface.
The MacPaint source code is now available and clocks in at 5,822 lines of Pascal and 3,583 lines of 68000 assembly. Apple’s early QuickDraw library was also released as 17,101 lines of 68000 assembly.
Robert Harrison uses a digital camera, a GPS device, some duct tape and a balloon to take some fantastic pictures of the Earth, in what he calls “The Icarus Project”.
(He) used a collection of cheap parts costing £500 to create a balloon-mounted camera that can travel up to 21.7 miles (35km) above the surface of the Earth. The result is a series of pictures taken from a height that only a rocket or weather balloon can reach. Mr Harrison, an IT director from Highburton, West Yorkshire, has launched 12 high-altitude balloons (HABs) since 2008.
After a few successful launches he was contacted by NASA, who was rather impressed by his photographs.
“A guy phoned up who worked for Nasa who was interested in how we took the pictures,” Mr Harrison told The Times. “He wanted to know how the hell we did it. He thought we used a rocket. They said it would have cost them millions of dollars.”
Adobe Photoshop project manager John Nack pointed to a new demo video posted by a member of his team showing off an impressive new feature in Photoshop known as “content-aware fill”. The feature utilizes complex mathematical algorithms to analyze digital images and assist users in filling in areas of complex scenes where undesired content has been removed.
The video shows a number of applications for the feature, from simple tweaks such as removing extraneous trash from an image of a park scene to far more complex tasks such as generating realistic looking desert landscapes and cloud formations.
While Adobe has been careful to specify only that the technology is set for inclusion in “a future version” of Photoshop, we have been told to expect it to make an appearance in the next version scheduled for introduction as part of Creative Suite 5 on April 12th.
In 1995, Clifford Stoll, PhD wrote an article for Newsweek about the rise of the internet. According to Stoll, this technology was a bunch of crazy hype and would never catch on. It seems like he was 100% wrong about every point he made. It’s fun to read through and see how the scenarios he thinks will never exist are now apart of everyday life.
Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obsolete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.
Chances are that you, and everyone you know, uses Google at least once a day. Everyone in my life, from my 9-year old niece to the 81-year old grandmother, uses Google. However, it’s no surprise that most user’s think of the worlds most famous search engine as magic. The simple text bar and “Google Search” button are a lot smarter then most people think. Stephen Levy got an inside look at Google’s search algorithm and wrote up his experience in a fascinating Wired feature.
There are some beautifully complex subtleties that you never think about. Take the synonym system, for example:
Google’s synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy. The problem was fixed in late 2002 by a breakthrough based on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories about how words are defined by context. As Google crawled and archived billions of documents and Web pages, it analyzed what words were close to each other. “Hot dog” would be found in searches that also contained “bread” and “mustard” and “baseball games” — not poached pooches. That helped the algorithm understand what “hot dog” — and millions of other terms — meant. “Today, if you type ‘Gandhi bio,’ we know that bio means biography,” Singhal says. “And if you type ‘bio warfare,’ it means biological.”
The full article covers everything from the start, through the present, and how they’re using an internal demo fair called CSI (Crazy Search Ideas) to step into the future. Find out just how smart Google is and how is it constantly becoming smarter.
NASA’s Spirit rover landed on Mars in 2004. After its planned 90-day mission, the rover kept on working for six years. Last May, it wound up getting stuck in some soft soil and could no longer rove. Despite the setback, it continued analyzing the Martian environment. On January 26, 2010, after several months attempting to free the rover, NASA decided to to put the rover into hibernation mode.
I never thought about it this way.. What a sad way to start a Friday.
“This shows Google’s remarkable power as a source of data on a range of human behaviors, emotions, and opinions. It gives us insights into what people might care the most about concerning a given topic. When people search a particular political leader, what are their main concerns? What are people secretly guilty about? For better or for worse, Google’s obsession with collecting and refining data has given us a window into each other’s fascinating and telling curiosities.”
The Universe isn’t that big, right? The American Museum of Natural History just released this beautiful six and a half minute journey to the deepest reaches of the known universe and back. The video starts near snowy Mt. Everest and pulls out and away from Earth to the rest of what we know is out there, with great imagery and distance markers along the way. Pack a small suitcase and get ready for an amazing voyage.
Anyone who knows me knows that one of my biggest goals is to work for Pixar Animation Studios; A goal I’m working towards every day. Here is a little peak inside the studios to see what their employees get to deal with every day. Starting Monday, I will be working double time on achieving this goal!
MIT has launched a new $5 million, 5-year project to build intelligent machines. To do it, the scientists are revisiting the fifty year history of the Artificial Intelligence field, including the shortfalls that led to the stigmas surrounding it, to find the threads that are still worth exploring. The star-studded roster of researchers includes AI pioneer Marvin Minsky, synthetic neurobiologist Ed Boyden, Neil “Things That Think” Gershenfeld, and David Dalrymple, who started grad school at MIT when he was just 14-years-old. Minsky is even proposing a new Turing test for machine intelligence: can the computer read, understand, and explain a children’s book?
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Chances are that you, and everyone you know, uses Google at least once a day. Everyone in my life, from my 9-year old niece to the 81-year old grandmother, uses Google. However, it’s no surprise that most user’s think of the worlds most famous search engine as magic. The simple text bar and “Google Search” button are a lot smarter then most people think. Stephen Levy got an inside look at Google’s search algorithm and wrote up his experience in a fascinating Wired feature.
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