I recently saw some footage of how Disney made their film Mars Need Moms. It showed Seth Green in a skintight suit with dots all over his face and small balls in certain places on his body.

Too bad Mars Needs Moms was such a flop, but Disney is working with Carnegie Mellon to create a new system of motion capture. It works by placing cameras all around the actors, which enables them to give a virtual performance from anywhere.

Normally, actors have to be in rooms with greenscreens, so the backgrounds can be put in later. This new method takes about 24 cameras to create this effect, and it is a great timesaver. For example, if you want a scene where someone does some physical motion, this new mo-cap system can get all the data, and the director can tweak it later.

Unfortunately, this process is costly. Eventually the director has to ask him or herself if it is just easy to do all of this animation in the computer, and to heck with proper motion capture. That, or just film a live-action movie with several takes of the same scene in action.

I guess it is just a matter of time before someone comes up with something like this in an inexpensive way and can change cinema as we know it. In all honesty, I’m sort of upset at some of the motion capture that has come out today by Robert Zemeckis, and I would love to see any improvement in this area.

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Steve Jobs, technologist and tastemaker of modern digital culture, described himself as a captain of product design, inspiring his teams of workers, as he once said, to go "beyond what anyone thought possible" and to do "some great work, really great work that will go down in history." 

And he did, time and again. Jobs did not make the technology himself; he led the teams that did, prodding, cajoling and inspiring. His track record as a business team leader is unique - as Apple's Macintosh, iPod, iPhone and iPad testify. In two stints at Apple, he made computers into coveted consumer goods and transformed not only product categories, like music players and cellphones, but also entire industries, like music and mobile communications. 

Jobs even failed well. NeXT, a computer company he founded during his years in exile from Apple, was never a commercial success. But it was a technology pioneer. The World Wide Web was created on a NeXT computer, and NeXT software is the core of Apple's operating systems today. 

Part of Jobs' legacy will be the lessons learned by those who worked closely with him over the years. Here are just a few: 

DO WHATEVER IT TAKES TO DELIGHT CUSTOMERS 

Six weeks before the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, Jobs ordered a crucial design change. Until then, the planning for supplies, manufacturing and engineering had been based on the assumption that the smartphone's face would be plastic, recalls Tony Fadell, a former Apple executive who led iPod and iPhone development from 2001 to 2009. Plastic is less fragile than glass, and easier to make. 

But the plastic touch screen had a drawback. It was prone to developing scratches. Those scratches, Jobs insisted, would irritate users and be seen as a design flaw.