The Luxo Blog has a fuzzy video of an old John Lasseter animation about a lamp store coming to life. It's rough but shows much of Lasseter's genius. This in many ways is a draft of the living-lamp antics portrayed in the classic short Luxo Jr which together with Dire Straits' Money for Nothing video got me hooked on computer graphics.

Adobe has officially released Flash 9 (formerly 8.5) and there isn't a bundled toolbar in sight (spoke too soon, the Yahoo! toolbar "offer" is still there for IE users). Its biggest new feature is undoubtedly the addition of ActionScript 3 support which changes pretty much everything for Flash developers (in a good way). Find out more here.

It's official, Robert "Easing Equations for Flash" Penner is joining the Flash development team at Adobe. Should be good news for all animators out there who were worried about new Flash features mostly focusing on application development. Mike Downey doesn't say much more but does drop one of those dreaded hype bombs:

I can't tell you specifically what he's working on, but I assure you that it will be one of the most exciting new features in the history of Flash.

Thank you Mike. Now, every other post in the community is going to be someone speculating over what that "most exciting new feature in the hisory of Flash" is...

This could change everything... Rumour has it that Nintendo might be release Wii devkits for under $2k. This would mean a ludicrously low cost of entry for developers who wish to create games for Nintendo's next machine.

Nintendo President Satoru Iwata along with the Board of Directors answered many questions at a corporate management policy briefing held last week which revealed that the price of the Wii development kits would now cost as low as $1,732. Iwata expects to increase funding for research and development to prepare for launch.

Brilliant.

I can't believe it! This HP ad is nearly as cool as an Apple ad. What the hell is going on here? A bit too "full of one's self" for my liking but overal it does work. (Thanks Dimitri)

Business 2.0's "10 People Who Don't Matter" should accurately be called "10 People Who Used to Matter More But Right This Moment Aren't as Hot". Great to see that the whole "put you up to tear you down" thing isn't reserved for tabloids. Feel particularily sorry to see the likes of Rob Malda on the list. Slashdot's readership www.slashdot.org">is growing and while it has been overtaken by Digg's this doesn't negate its authority. Meh.

The world's second richest man has decided to give away 85% of Berkshire Hathaway stock, or approximately $37 billion at today's value, to charity. Most of Warren Buffett's contribution will go towards the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation which will now have to resize its operations. Berkshire Hathaway stock could rise making his entire contribution over the years far greater but even as it stands today this is the single largest donation in history. The BBC claims that this could technically mean that the Gates Foundation would have access to four times the operating capital of the United Nations.

There have never been fortunes like the ones we see today so it's heartening that these could also lead to the largest, most powerful philantropic movements we've ever seen. Stay tuned.

After all the hoohah over the Yahoo! Toolbar being bundled into the Flash installation it seems that Adobe has switched to offering the Google Toolbar instead. Google is apparently parting with a "significant" amount for he honour. I'm not a big fan of bundling. I'm not a big fan of what Adobe has done with Adobe Reader (Acrobat). While switching from Yahoo! to Google isn't actually bad in any way the story has rekindled dormant worries as to how Adobe will manage Flash in the future. Interestingly, Yahoo! is a far bigger consumer of Flash technology than the AJAX-friendly Google is. I believe it was actually one of Macromedia's largest Flash IDE license owners. Wonder if that will change anything.

Somewhat off-topic is the fact that the current Adobe site uses the basic design of the old Macromedia site which had been redirected to Adobe.com -- I always thought the basic structure and design of the Macromedia site was leagues ahead of Adobe's but I'm also slightly dissapointed that they didn't decide to go for something completely new.

Chris Houchens (Shotgun Marketing Blog) posts about not posting.

I don't subscribe to the philosophy that mandates you have 8 posts a day, check your technorati ranking every hour, and do nothing but blog and go to conferences (or "un"conferences) with other bloggers.

Neither do I. Possibly because I'm lazy. Chris also links to a brilliant post by Mack Collier on blogger-reality vs, well, reality.

I think we bloggers sometimes lose sight of the fact that while something might be big-time in the blogosphere, that doesn't mean that the majority of America cares, or worse yet, even knows what we are talking about.

This kind of ties in with my Scoble/Gates leaving post. The blogosphere has a tendency of blowing itself out of proportions. While it is changing facets of business, marketing, etc... blogging is, to many people out of the sphere, a passtime for frustrated writers.

Speaking of conferences (or un-conferences), bloggers flock to them because it's the blogosphere masked as the real world. A real world where A-listers can fix any problem by "blogging about it", people look familiar because you've seen them on Flickr and everyone checks their RSS subscriptions hourly on sticker-riddled MacBooks.

Maybe it's not only Ballmer's kids who need to be banned from using Google. The Inquirer reports that as many as 80% of all Microsoft employees could be using Google... from work. In contrast, "all Google users and 64 percent of Yahoo staff use their company search engines". I wonder how many MSFT employees use iPods. (Thanks George)