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An unlocked iPhone 4S is supposed to 'officially' come out in November but it looks like we don't have to wait that long. [
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iCloud isn't totally off the ground yet, but the new Find My Friends app is already available in the iTunes Store.
Find My Friends is Apple's new location service that lets you continuously share your location instead of checking in. You can also set aside specific blocks of time to share.
The rest of Apple's software goodie bag, including iCloud, iOS 5, and OS X Lion 10.7.2, is expected to drop early this afternoon. But if you already have iOS 5, you can get ahead of the curve and start stalking your friends and family like animals in real time right now. [iTunes via 9to5mac]
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The Galaxy S II came out pretty recently, but Samsung no care—at least if this blurry, "leaked" slide's correct. Phandroid says what we've got here is a bona fide internal image of the next best Android for 2012.
Is it true? Maybe. Is it fake? Maybe. But the rumorific image claims a swell 2 gigs of RAM, a 1.8 GHz dual-core processor, 12 megapixel, and a big ol' 4.6-inch AMOLED screen. Given the specs of the last Galaxy S, this rumored III isn't that far fetched—rather, it just looks like a reasonable incremental push forward. Then again, it can be unwise to put stock in pictures that are almost too blurry to read. But true or false, the '12 phone season isn't that far off—we'll know one way or another soon. [Phandroid via SlashGear]
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Pandas. Zoos want them, other bears want to be them (maybe?). But are they really worth all the trouble? Let's fight about it:
The panda bear, above all, is a survivor of the keenest degree. You might deride it for its sloth, for its listlessness, for its struggle to spread its seed. But what you call laziness, I single out as a sign of a fighter. The panda bear is slow, the panda bear falters—but the panda bear has defeated every obstacle thrown in its way by that Queen Bitch Mother Nature. It has survived in spite of its own genome. Let us consider the following:
• 99% of the panda's diet is bamboo, yes. It's extremely low in nutrients. But the bear's guts are built to process meat—it's a carnivore, at its foundation. But through millions of years evolutionary battling and environmental change, its found itself inhabiting bamboo-rich regions. What'd it do—give up on eating and perish? No. It just ate the fucking bamboo—up to 40 pounds of it every single day—and shut up about it. Would humans do the same? No, we'd complain that there weren't enough GroupOn deals for bamboo.
• Pandas are fucking adorable. They look like humans wearing bear suits—WHICH IS REALLY, REALLY CUTE. They have sharp teeth, but choose to use them only for peaceful purposes.
• They're a boon for the perennially tense US/Chinese relations—sharing pandas between our countries shows that we have more in common that we'd ever imagine. Namely, a love for pandas and a concern for their wellbeing.
• They're a boon for the local economy for Washington DC, our nation's capital, my hometown, and a city with unsung fiscal problems due to shoddy congressional policy.
• They're really cute. Scientists don't even know why they have black spots! C'mon!
Pandas are victims of their own tenacity. Where other species have been eliminated by the slow, dark hand of natural selection, the panda has stood up and said "O, ye forces of the cosmos—unhand me. I stand on my paws a Free Bear, unburdened by my genome. Behold my bamboo chomps and despair." Evolutionary excellence. The unbridled determination to live another day. To eat another shoot. The lethargic king of all furred beasts. -SB
I just want to get this straight right off the bat: I really don't hate pandas.* I just love nature. And nature has made it clear in no uncertain terms that pandas need to die. Now.
Here are the valid reasons for humanity's continued propping up of Ailuropoda melanoleuca:
• They are kind of cute.
And here are the reasons we should let them die out the way sweet Gaia intended:
• Female pandas can expect a solid 16 years of fertility, but they only ovulate once a year, and can only handle one set of offspring every two years. There's no clearer recipe for extinction. Even their ovaries are lazy!
• It's cool, though, because they won't have sex. That's the most popular charge leveled against pandas, and for good reason! They have no libido, no interest in repopulating the species. They'd rather sit and chew, chew and sit, even when there's panda porn shoved in their faces (which is a real thing that actually happened).
• Not only do pandas not procreate, they have fake pregnancies, presumably to get zookeepers off their backs about having all that free casual sex.
• When they do bother having sex, it's generally with family members. That's right: the one kind of sex pandas can't get enough of is incest.
• And when they manage to have babies? It's usually twins. One of whom is raised to be a good panda adult, the other of whom is left to die. Seriously. They almost always actively let one of their children die.
• Pandas are technically carnivores, but they chose to subsist almost entirely (we're talking 99% of intake) on bamboo, which is terribly difficult for them to digest. But they still spend 16 hours a day eating it. That's like if you decided to chew on styrofoam for 90% of your waking hours.
• There are accredited professional animal people out there who feel the same way! BBC wildlife expert Chris Packham recently—and rightly—noted that "giant pandas should be allowed to die out." Expert opinion! Expert British opinion!
• We fetishize them to an unhealthy degree. Do you know how much this Banquete Chair made of panda stuffed animals costs? $75,000. Gross. Pointless. Pandas.
• We spend millions—seriously, millions!—of dollars every single year propping up a species that has no discernible will to survive. Money which could go towards other, more ambitious species. Like homo sapiens! Or emu or whatever. Anything but these these giant depressive raccoons.
And so on. This is not an animal that wants to survive. This is the overstuffed, lobotomized Hamburgler of the animal kingdom, desperate to go lazy into that good night. And we simply won't let them.
Look, I'm not saying let's go kill some pandas, or let's kick them out of our zoos. I'm saying let's stop interfering with them, even if it's just for a little bit. Let's spend our conservation energies on species that actually give dodo about being conserved.
*Okay maybe I do hate pandas a little. A lot. I hate pandas a lot and so should you. -BB
Photo: Life
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I hate the term fanboy. It's a pejorative meant to denigrate someone's opinion. A conversation-ender. After applying it to someone, really there's nothing left to say. But seeing the reaction to Windows 8, I get why people use it.
Very many people who have never used the new early prototype Windows tablet have been shitting all over it like a public toilet, largely sight unseen. Much of that has centered around the fan.
Yeah, the fan blows. It's annoying. We get it! I'm with you.
But the Metro interface in Windows 8 is amazing. It's certainly advanced the field of gesture-based computing. The pen-based handwriting recognition just plain works. The ability to run two apps at once in snap state is spectacular. (I can't wait to use MLB At Bat while web-browsing, for example.) Metro apps are also ridiculously easy to develop and, thanks to the built-in Windows Store, easy to sell. There's a very low bar to entry to make and distribute great-looking gesture-based apps that accomplish all kinds of tasks. They're are going to be loads of them, doing very interesting things, produced by people who have never before made an app. It's profound.
If you're not intrigued by Windows 8 and Metro, if you can't recognize that it's a big leap forward, if you're not excited about what it means for you, personally then you don't really care about technology; you care about brands. You care about platforms. You care about politics. You're a fanboy.
Look, we all lean certain ways. I have my own set of preferences. I tend to vote for Democrats and buy Apple products. But that's because they tend to support my priorities, not vice-versa. If the Democrats suddenly turned their backs on science, or Apple began pushing out products with buggy cluttered interfaces, I'd look elsewhere. I don't really get those who treat brands like sports teams, offering blind allegiance over self-interest. That's just zealotry. God bless that file system; my platform, right or wrong.
The older I get the less I trust anyone who puts party or platform over the advancement of society.
This Apple Taliban's focus on the fan misses a huge point about Windows 8: It will trickle-down everywhere, and in little ways and large ones, it will make your Apple products better. Ultimately, Windows 8 will improve the Mac OS, and iOS, and hell yes, even the iPad.
Right now the iPad is the only game in town. Want a tablet? You should buy an iPad. No kidding. No exaggeration. Other tablet computers would be great if the iPad didn't exist. But it does. And as a result I would never in good faith tell anyone making a purchasing decision that they should buy anything else.
And before you berate me, know that I own an Android tablet and have used others. But I also own three iPads. They're better. They have more apps, a more responsive interface; they just plain work. We use them constantly. I'm not even sure where the Android tablet is. I think it might be in a drawer somewhere. I used to keep it in the shitter to read books on its Kindle app, not wanting to sully my iPad. But then the battery died and quite frankly it wasn't worth my time to find the charger and now I've lost the tablet too. I don't miss it.
I make this point not to attack Android, but to point out that the iPad doesn't really have any competition. Competition is good. It makes everyone work harder and do better. Windows 8 is going to be competitive. And if you care enough about technology to be platform agnostic, you know that's a good thing.
Improvements on one platform drive improvements on others. Typically (yes this is true, Windows zealots) Apple is leading the charge when it comes to interface technology. But not always. And as much as the Apple Taliban loves to point out every Mac OS feature and icon that eventually shows up in Windows (and in fairness many do) Apple is more than willing to borrow features from other platforms. The mouse and the graphical user interface were ripped off from Xerox, for example. More recently, the way notifications work in iOS 5 are very liberally borrowed from Android. I'm going to be amazed if, down the line, iOS doesn't borrow some features from Metro.
Look, the fan is noisy and it runs nearly constantly. But as Microsoft relentlessly explained, this is a developer preview running on sub-optimal hardware. The Samsung tablet that previewed at BUILD will never hit the market with Windows 8. Yet people keep bringing it up, again and again, as reason enough to dismiss the whole show. Apple would never show something like that, they argue.
And they're right. Kind of. Apple would never trust you enough to let you hold something unreleased like that in your hands for evaluative purposes. But it shows off early previews of things all the time. And quite often it trots something out onstage that just doesn't work. If you've never seen Jobs have a minor fit onstage when something doesn't work, you've missed some of his most entertaining moments.
Forget the fan. Focus on the interface. Metro is a fantastic way to get things done. Microsoft has fundamentally started over. It's built something ridiculously great. Now, whether or not it will get its act (and technology) together enough to ship Windows 8 and Metro on an ARM-based tablet that won't need a fan before Apple leapfrogs it is another question.
But for now, based purely on what it's shown, Windows 8—and especially Metro—is fantastic. It feels like the future. And you can bet those Windows 8 developer builds are being installed and evaluated on machines all over Infinite Loop. Because while those outside of Apple may be blind to how great Metro is, those inside are not. Apple gets that it can learn from Microsoft (yes, Microsoft!) even if the Apple Taliban does not.
Look, I'm with you. I love Apple products. They're great! But Windows 8? I'm a fan, baby. I'm a really big fan. And I'm noisy.
You can keep up with Mat Honan, the author of this post, on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+.Chris Madden is a New York-based illustrator and designer. You can see his work here, follow him on Facebook and Twitter
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Old sea walls, water-filled dams and other man-made obstacles to Hurricane Irene's wrath have failed along the East River, and parts of the city are now flooded. Do not do as the reporters do in this footage. Stay inside! [AP]
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