A while back I blogged about a joint Microsoft/HP project to produce a tablet computer/reader/whatall, which would be named the Courier. Well, it’s not to be. HP and MS have announced to their respective staffs that the Courier will die aborning. The exact reasons are unclear. Neither partner wants to be seem as the one pulling the trigger, but there are stories that HP was not satisfied with the Windows OS as a useful system for the gizmo. But, that could be bushwah. Maybe HP just got cold feet or simply changed its corporate mind, especially after having gobbled up Palm, in a move that puzzled some. The Courier had an interesting design profile, opening like a book with two independently operating working spaces. Anyway, it’s over.

Slate RIP

Well, your correspondent got his mitts on the Thing That Will Change Everything, for a few minutes anyway. With trembling fingers, I clasped the marvelous machine and reverently brought it to my lap. What device could compare with this? The printing press, the machine gun, the light bulb?….OK, that’s enough sarcasm. I will tell you what I thought. It’s rather nice. But, and here it comes, I didn’t find it easy to use. The person who let me try it said that the instructions were rather minimal…I guess it’s sort of a ‘problem based learning’ proposition. If you want to learn how to use, that’s your problem. There are instructions, but it’s not easy to find them and finding them requires a certain level of familiarity with the gadget, which, if you have it, makes the search for a user’s manual pointless. The graphics are very impressive. The design is sleek and minimalist…maybe too much so. Swiping to change screens requires just the right touch. Too light, and nothing happens; too heavy and nothing happens either. You need to sort of hover, in contact, but not too much. On those screens that require text entry of some kind, touching the query line brings up a QWERTY keyboard at the base, and you can use it to enter the terms. You can pick portrait or landscape, or swing between the two as you move the machine, on a kind of gimbals. Winnie the Pooh was the only book loaded onto this copy, so it wasn’t much of a test. But, for all that, the text was presented very crisply and the color of the illustrations came over well: not too washed out and not too bright or harsh. Admittedly, Winnie is not much of a test for the Ipad as a reader, but the text on some other services was easy to read. I noticed an app for downloading e-books from Amazon, so they’re ready. I was a bit surprised at the weight of the gadget. It’s not heavy as in heavy, but it’s not light either and I think you would know it if you were lugging it around all day. I freely admit that these observations are entered in scatter-shot fashion, without benefit of systematic testing, and pretty much as I can remember them. On balance, I think Apple has done a good job with the gizmo, but done a much, much better job with the PR and hype. I won’t be buying one, but I still have Roman numerals on the face of my watch and write with a fountain pen. I may be condemned to technological Gehenna. It just seemed a good idea to write about this, after all the talk and hoopla over it.

The Corcoran Gallery in Washington is a very nice place to visit. It focuses on American art, broadly defined. Currently, the Gallery is showcasing the work of Eadweard Muybridge. Let me explain. Muybridge was the man who brought the techniques of motion picture photography to the matter of analyzing human and animal locomotion. He did a lot of other things besides that, especially in photographing scenes from the American West, which, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, was still a pretty remote place as far as most Americans were concerned. The scenery was spectacular, especially when compared to, oh, say, Ohio or Louisiana and people couldn’t get enough of it. Muybridge was English by birth but came to the States to ‘make his fortune’ as saying goes. He was, in my view, a little bit of a weird duck. He fooled around with his name…originally Muggeridge, and its spelling before settling on the Welsh-ified version he’s known by. He also had a severe head injury from a carriage accident, which may have helped him beat a murder rap. He shot his wife’s lover, but was acquitted. Diminished responsibility? The show at the Corcoran covers the man’s life and career quite thoroughly. What sets him apart though is his work with animal locomotion. How does a cat move, or a horse? Forget that, what about a man? What actually happens? What leg goes first? It was pretty tough to figure that out, because there was no real way to slow down the process of moving limbs to the point at which we could see the events. Motion picture photography made this possible and Muybridge was one of the first to use the method in the analysis of human and animal gait. He photographed animals, men and women, clothed and in the nude, simply walking, or running, or doing chores, often against a gridded background. It was real pioneer work. There is a full-length biography of him by Rebecca Solnit and his name and work pop up in histories of photography. If you are planning to be in DC for anything, take some time to visit the Corcoran and see the show.

Motion

Also in this morning’s Times is a story elaborating on the much publicized hacker or cracker attacks on Google, which we covered in these lines. The paper got hold of somebody speaking without attribution because s/he is afraid of getting canned for letting the secret out. According to the article, one of the attacks led right into the heart of Google’s password manager, a system referred to as GAIA. If true, this is very bad news, for a couple of reasons. One is the fact that the breach started with Googler answering a text message in China, just one. Another is the possibility that the attackers left some kind of malware behind. Finally, the hacker may just have gotten lucky and stumbled upon some vulnerabilities that Google doesn’t or at least didn’t know about. The G’s people say the hacker(s) were’nt inside very long and didn’t do any damage or leave anything. But, who’s to say? Since GAIA is supposed to be a really big deal for password security, the fact that it was penetrated, and apparently so easily, is, at the very least, cause for some reflection, shall we say. Google hasn’t said boo about all this, and some guys at Mountain View probably had their morning cofffee and bagel with cream cheese spoiled rather seriously. A lot of phone calls, and some worried customers, no?

GAIA