May 31, 2007
Microsoft unveils new Surface PC
Microsoft Corp. has taken the wraps off “Surface,” a coffee-table shaped computer that responds to touch and to special bar codes attached to everyday objects.
Surface is essentially a Windows Vista PC tucked inside a shiny black table base, topped with a 30-inch touchscreen in a clear acrylic frame. Five cameras that can sense nearby objects are mounted beneath the screen. Users can interact with the machine by touching or dragging their fingertips and objects such as paintbrushes across the screen, or by setting real-world items tagged with special bar-code labels on top of it.
Unlike most touchscreens, Surface can respond to more than one touch at a time. During a demonstration with a reporter last week, Mark Bolger, the Surface Computing group’s marketing director, “dipped” his finger in an on-screen paint palette, then dragged it across the screen to draw a smiley face. Then he used all 10 fingers at once to give the face a full head of hair.
With a price tag between $5,000 and $10,000 per unit, Microsoft isn’t immediately aiming for the finger painting set. (The company said it expects prices to drop enough to make consumer versions feasible in three to five years.)
Building falls down on camera
This guy notices that a building in Surat, India appears to start leaning. The building eventually collapses onto the busy street below.
What does "&" mean and where did it come from?
From Wikipedia:
An ampersand (&), also commonly called an “and sign,” is a logogram representing the conjunction “and.” The symbol is a ligature of the letters in et, Latin for “and.” Its origin is apparent in the second example in the image to the right; the first example, now more common, is a later development.
The ampersand often appeared as a letter at the end of the Latin alphabet, as for example in Byrhtferð’s list of letters from 1011.[1] It is thought that teaching & as the last letter of the alphabet (… X Y Z and &), a common practice through the 19th century, led to its name, a corruption of the phrase “and per se and”, meaning “and [the symbol which] by itself [is] and”.[2] The Scots and Scottish English name for & is epershand, derived from “et per se and” with the same meaning.
