DEATH TO APPS: Apps for your phone are awesome. You can play awesome games, act as an external monitor, have it take dictation, save files to the cloud, buy books and music … so great. Shame it's all gonna end. We posted a story about an MIT Technolgy Review article, discussing web apps that will download to your device the moment you open then, allowing you offline access, whether they're news, games, email or some other utility. They pointed out Angry Birds for Chrome as an example. They even noted that Steve Jobs said in 2008 that the iPhone would have plenty of apps "available through the browser." They then pointed at the groundbreaking Newton device of another example where Steve was ahead of the curve … sucking up to get a job, much? Former Google engineer Brian Kennish said, "One word: distribution. There are 2 billion web users versus 50 million iOS users." Hard to argue with numbers like that. No need to ditch all of your apps today, nor bemoan the dollars you've already sent to Android or iOS developers, but the gold rush days might be over. Just look to the horizon, and see which way the wind is blowing.
[Source: Komplicated]
IMPERIAL ENTANGLEMENTS: Earlier this year, a man started a proposal to build a real, working AT-AT … for America! He even started a Kickstarter page for the project. Of course, George Lucas' legal ninjas cut down his idea like rows of wheat before a $500 per hour katana, but there's something they didn't consider: that the AT-AT has already been realized! DVICE and Gizmodo posted this week about a joint project between General Electric and the Army from — wait for it — the 1960s to build a four-legged human operated robot walker that could kick jeeps out of the way. They called it a "walking truck" or "cybernetic anthropomorphous machine," and was for rough terrain on 11-foot long hydraulic lever-controlled legs, moving at 35 miles per hour. You're wondering why these things weren't walking up hillsides in Afghanistan, scaring the heck outta the Taliban? "the strain of thinking about which leg to move next exhausted the operator after about 15 minutes." they had crappy, huge computers back then — my phone here has more hard drive space than every computer in the US in 1965 — so they had to do it manually. Only one of these monsters was ever made, and it's now at the US Army Transportation Museum at Fort Eustis. What's that you say? Why doesn't some enterprising Army engineer whip up a new one out of salvaged Buicks and slap an iPad 2 in as a brain? You tell me, America. Why *isn't* that happening? The Kickstarter guy wants to know too! Besides, it's not like Boston Dynamics LS3 — the Legged Squad Support System or "the big dog" wasn't approved by a congress that complained about NPR and Planned Parenthood. Oh, sorry, adding here that it was. right.
[Source: AT-AT For America, DVICE and Gizmodo]
SCOTT BERNARD WOULD BE PROUD: Finally, and I know some of our chatroom viewers will know why this excites us, a group of Japanese hobbyists — ah, those whimsical Japanese — spent three years making this: an exact replica of a Robotech Cyclone motorcycle. Now, admittedly, this doesn't join up with body armor to make a giant mecha suit you can wear into battle — it just drives. Still. IT'S A FREAKIN' ROBOTECH MOTORCYCLE IN REAL LIFE! How cool is that? Dibs on the hover tank. That'll make taking Mooch to school way better.
[Source: DVICE]
