I still think the eyes are a little off on Emily, but at least it doesn't recoil in horror as much as Beowulf or Polar Express. They used a video of an actor and then mapped those actions onto a CG model, but they also claim they won't be able to make them realistic until 2020.

via Times Online

I think WACOM's pen technology is some pretty interesting stuff; about a year ago, I set about constructing my own Cintiq using whatever was available to the average consumer. In doing so, I learned a lot about how a WACOM tablet works, and what can interfere with the reception of the pen. While I never completed construction of my own Cintiq, I did play around with the WACOM Intuous on a Powerbook for a short time after seeing a video of someone who had crammed a WACOM Graphire inside a 800mhz Titanium Powerbook.

I had started this project in January of 2007, and lazily worked on it until stopping in October, when the announcement of the Cintiq 12WX was made in the UK.

A few months ago, I purchased a WACOM Cintiq 12WX Pen Display. After using it for a few hours, it became very clear to me that even if I had managed to hack the hardware together to make a Cintiq, the software would still be lacking in the functionality that the Cintiq provides (such as a way to calibrate the pen to the screen, and quickly tabbing between screens).

Lenovo has produced a Thinkpad that has a WACOM tablet built in. Rather than using the WACOM Penabled technology that most Tablet PCs use, they are instead making it a traditional WACOM tablet, meaning that right next to the trackpad is a larger pad for the WACOM pen to draw on. The Lenovo W700 has a rather interesting looking wristrest:

The Lenovo W700 features a 17" display, a 512MB or 1GB graphics card, Pantone Color Sensor, and a Core 2 Duo T9400 (2.53GHz 1066MHz 6MBL2) with 2 GB of RAM (expandable up to 8GB) for $2900 -- this is a serious machine aimed at graphics professionals, but I have serious reservations over the actual use of the built-in WACOM tablet. While most artists I know use WACOM tablets, most of them use nothing smaller than a 6x8 pad, and the Thinkpad's is a small 120mm x 80mm (4.73 x 3.15 inches), which is smaller than their smallest tablet available, the old 4x3 (147.6mm x 92.3mm) , which limits the W700's WACOM use to little more than a novelty. Also, notice that there are no extra ExpressKeys for customization, nor any TouchStrips which normally are on the professional-level Intuous models of their WACOM Tablets. Considering the size of the laptop, Lenovo would have better off with a WACOM board that fit under the screen of the laptop, making it a Cintiq-type tablet. For $99, one can purchase a small WACOM Bamboo Fun which is larger than the built-in pad, and includes a mouse in addition to the pen and tablet at a cost less than the cost of the W700's upgrade to the Wacom Tablet. The additional $51, of course is in convenience; you never have to carry a Tablet with your laptop, and the pen is stowed away Nintendo DS style in the base of the computer.

Readers of this blog will know that I hate Best Buy with a passion; I think their business practices are downright shady, and their customer service non-existent, so it pains me to find out that Best Buy will be a third party retailer of the iPhone 3G. For Apple, this is a major win for them; AT&T and Apple Stores already do their share of selling through inventory of iPhone 3G very quickly, but Best Buy is everywhere, and I suspect the iPhone 3G will perform just as well at Best Buy.

Of course, I think Best Buy will be the only place that you can get an extended warranty for your iPhone 3G that isn't Applecare. If anything, having one more location to sell iPhone 3Gs may actually help quicken the queues at the Apple and AT&T stores.

Matt Kirkland takes apart your favorite robotic toys to reveal the robotic exo skeleton that lies beneath with before and after photos. Viewer discretion is advised.

This evening, I upgraded the Movable Type installation to 4.1, attempting to fix some bugs that I had with the previous version. In the installation of Movable Type 4.1, the Dashboard widget which once worked, was broken, and spat out the following error:

Movable Type was unable to locate your 'mt-static' directory. Please configure the 'StaticFilePath' configuration setting in your mt-config.cgi file, and create a writable 'support' directory underneath your 'mt-static' directory.

After growing increasingly frustrated at the error, I took some time to troubleshoot the problem. It turns out that if you set the StaticWebPath variable in the mt-config.cgi, setting the StaticFilePath variable becomes unnecessary, so I just commented it out, and everything happily works again.

I'm still running into a problem where the "export entries" function doesn't fully export my entries -- it stops at about 1200 entries.

Yesterday we had Amazon buying out Audible, this morning we've got earnings reports from Google and a bid for Yahoo from Microsoft.

Google earnings are only 17 percent this quarter, making this the first quarter that Google earnings did not exceed 25 percent. As a result, the stock took a tumble of 8 percent, coincidentally, the same amount they missed analyst expectations by.

Microsoft, in the meantime has decided that if you can't beat the competition, you can try to buy them out. With a purchase price of 44.6 billion dollars, a number well over its book value of about 10 billion dollars. As a result, Yahoo stock is up 48 percent, bringing the market cap of Yahoo! to about 37 billion. Google, of course is number one in search engine traffic at 65%, Yahoo is number two at a respectable 21 percent, while MSN ranks at third with 7 percent. In November of 2007, Microsoft made a bold statement that they aimed to be in the top two in search; while I originally thought they would do it through efforts in engineering and better advertising of their search engine, it looks like Microsoft is throwing money at the problem in a different way.

Microsoft has been one of those companies that came late to the internet party; they didn't realize how important it would be, and ended up spending a lot of time and money on it trying to catch up to the rest of the pack. One of their first internet-related purchases was the code to Mosaic, which they used to create the first versions of Internet Explorer. Another was the purchase of WebTV, a television set-up box which allowed users to surf the web on the television. The potential of buying Yahoo! would boost Microsoft's web presence greatly; not just in search, but in many other service areas as well. Yahoo! owns Flickr, del.icio.us, upcoming.org, and 46% of Alibaba (one of China's biggest search sites) among other acquisitions not branded by the Yahoo! label.

I've always found some of Yahoo's services superior to Google's -- namely Flickr over Picasa, and My Yahoo! over iGoogle, but rarely do I find any webapp of Microsoft's even remotely useful. With share prices of Yahoo! skyrocketing over this news, I'm pretty certain a refusal of this buyout bid would not go over well with shareholders.

If you haven't heard already, the online retailer Amazon has purchased at a price of $11.50 per share, roughly equating to a $300 million dollar purchase price for Audible's assets, including 80,000 audio programs. Their reason for purchase, obviously enough is their investment on the Kindle e-book reader. On the market these days are three devices people primarily use for audio books: car CD players, iPods and computers. Amazon aims to make the Kindle the iPod for books, so this acquisition was a necessary one for Amazon.

Audible is one of the providers of exclusive audio content to Apple's iTunes store, as well as a provider to Amazon. In the battle for provider of downloadable content, Apple and Amazon are at odds with one another. While it would be a stupid decision for Amazon to discontinue Audible's partnership with Apple, it is a possible for Amazon to do so if they find it advantageous. All of which all begs the question: why didn't Apple buyout Audible? Audible's revenue stream coming from sales through Apple's iTunes store is around 25-30%, and with over a billion in cash reserves at Apple, $300 million seems to be a small price to pay for continued access to Audible content. The problem is not their content, but rather their profitability; Audible has lost money since its inception, a trend that is slowly turning around (their earnings per share last year was a mere negative 4 cents, and their estimated earnings per share for the current quarter is a whopping 2 cents).

Jobs has gone on record to say that people don't read anymore. Part of this statement might come from the news bit about the average American reading one book per year, but I think as audiobooks are a portion of the content being sold on iTunes, Jobs has some numbers on the the amount being sold by Apple of audio books, and my guess is those numbers are very small in comparison to the 4 billion songs sold on iTunes.

Part of the problem likely stems from the fact that online audiobooks are priced with variation much more than any other downloadable content on both Amazon or iTunes; a movie can be downloaded for 9.99, a song can be downloaded for 99 cents, and an audiobook can cost anywhere from 95 cents to 49.99. At those prices, most would likely rather purchase the paper and binding version of the book. Amazon's prices for downloadable audiobooks aren't much different from Apple's, most download books averaged within a few dollars of Apple's prices. The variance in price, as well as the somewhat limited selection (example: Harry Potter 6 can be found as an audio download on iTunes, but not on Amazon, and costs $49.99, while Harry Potter 7, the best-selling book of last year is not available at all).

If Amazon wants the Kindle to succeed, the content from Audible is a necessary to their future success; to Apple, audiobooks are nice to have, but not as necessary as the music is what dominates their iTunes store, and with prices as they are presently, it is unlikely that downloads of books in either e-book or audio form will ever overtake sales of physical books anytime soon.

Four years ago, President Bush decided to give NASA a billion dollars in funding over the next five years to get the United States to return to the Moon by 2020. The first step in all of this is to create a rocket to take the astronauts there, so it's up to a new generation of engineers to create these machines to send people to the Moon. Their new rockets are called Ares, and they've got just one little flaw: the rocket could shake violently during the first few minutes of flight, possibly destroying the entire vehicle.

I find it interesting that 30 years ago, we were able to build rockets with 60s/70s era parts that were durable enough to withstand launch, yet with modern technology, blasting-off may as well be blasting apart.

Battlestar Galactica: Season Three is available for pre-order on Amazon. Priced at 59.79, you only save a whopping 19 cents on this 6 disc set, leading me to wonder why Amazon's prices on DVDs have been so high lately -- is it because they're trying to keep the price of Unbox episodes (30.25 for the entire season) competitive with the DVD releases? With such a small discount for the DVD, it really feels like Amazon wants to encourage us to buy our DVDs elsewhere -- Costco perhaps?

Every January, the Consumer Electronics Show sweeps through Las Vegas showing off objects of lust for gadget lovers for the year ahead. Last year MacWorld and CES ran concurrently, which resulted in the iPhone pretty much stealing the spotlight away from CES. This year, CES is running a week in advance of MacWorld, and so far, there have been some interesting items of note to appear:

Thin is In

It seems that many electronics manufacturers were showing off new televisions this week, with several manufacturers revealing ultra thin plasma and LCD televisions. The thinnest being Pioneer's 51 inch plasma Project KURO, at a mere 9mm (0.35 inches) thick and weighing a scant 40 pounds. They're claiming an infinite contrast ratio, as it is capable of getting pixels to emit no light.

In the old days of CES, video game systems and game software used to showcase here. I think people were having too much fun playing videogames and pretty much ignoring the other vendors, so they made the videogame industry start their own version of CES, called E3. E3 grew until it imploded on itself, creating the lame version of E3 at the Santa Monica Hangars, and the extra lame "E for All Expo".

The New York Times is saying that the CES is still too diluted with products:

Now, electronics makers and industry analysts say the show has become so loud, sprawling and preoccupied with technical esoterica that for many companies, it is as much a place to get lost as to get discovered.

The runaway hits of the last year were products not introduced at CES. The Nintendo Wii (introduced at E3) and the iPhone (introduced at MacWorld). New York Times brings up a good point -- the CES is so packed with product announcements that they drown each other out, which was the reason why a lot of videogame companies felt that E3 was no longer useful. In the old days if you wanted to see what was out there in the world of consumer electronics, you'd read an electronics magazine or maybe you'd head out to your electronics retailer and get some brochures, maybe even a product catalog. Today, I think the internet has changed that landscape drastically. Consumers can find out all the relevant details of a product by surfing the manufacturer's website. The things coming out of CES these days are more of the same of what you can already buy at your retailer -- newer cellphones, newer tvs, newer computers -- but anything that's truly innovative gets announced outside of CES, and I think a bigger part of it is that for consumers to get it, it needs to be explained to them, maybe even experienced by them so they can figure out how this new device can fit into their lives.

NYT asks whether the show could produce a new hit product, and the senior VP of Industry Relations had this to say: "It could be the Sony Rolly robot. It-s a small media player that rolls around like a robot."

A rolling media player? Why in the world would I ever want that? If I don't even want it, try convincing the rest of America that a rolling media player is the killer product of 2008. Robots, in general don't do well in the United States -- a lifetime of science fiction movies, where robots are as capable, or even more capable than their human masters, has all wanting positronic androids, rather than these highly advanced single purpose machines. I think actually, the announcement that will have the most impact on the consumer electronics industry for the next year has already been made: the decision by Warner Bros. to throw their support Blu-ray's way. With Blu-ray being the winner, all those sitting on the fence about purchasing Hi-definition equipment can finally buy a Blu-ray player.