Two of the most critical components of live coverage are batteries and cameras, so luckily we had HyperMac’s external MacBook battery keeping us juiced, along with a Nikon D3s and primo glass from Borrowlenses for our awesome shots. [HyperMac, Borrowlenses]
As always, Apple’s posted a full video of the iPad event, so you can pretend you were right there as Steve Jobs unveiled the world’s most incredible digital photo frame. [Apple]
The reason Windows tablets have sucked is that they’ve crammed desktop interfaces onto tablets. Assumedly, the Apple tablet‘s magic is in the interface. So it’s funny that Apple’s secret tablet from over 14 years ago made the same mistake.
The Newton was still in production. But what Apple secretly pitched to select medical centers over a decade ago wasn’t a Newton. It was a 10-inch-or-so tablet, running an interface that was much, much closer to the full desktop Mac OS—Mac OS 8 at the time—modified with pen input. Though pitched to the medical market, it was a general-purpose computer that was in the advanced prototype stages. It never shipped. (Much like another ancient Apple tablet.) That’s the story, according to one of the few medical personnel who saw the monstrosity.
Imagine something like this, but not quite as swishy.
After this Mac OS tablet was apparently killed in the night, we wouldn’t hear about another tablet until after Jobs returned, talk of Inkwell in 2000—the pen input software ultimately built into OS X—with the word of a “tablet” first emerging in 2003.
Apple’s still interested in medical IT applications, actually, one place tablet PCs have actually managed to gain traction. Last year, it quietly partnered with Epic Systems, one of the major electronic medical records companies, to test software on the iPhone for accessing patient medical charts. Perhaps less than coincidentally, Apple execs have supposedly been spotted making visits with some frequency to Cedar-Sinai Medical Center in LA, to talk about a new device, and how the hospital might use it. An Apple tablet would make for one very fancy clipboard.
Book publishers’ last-minute negotiations with Apple revealed by the WSJ: Apple is pushing for bestsellers to cost $12.99 or $14.99—and some books $9.99—with Apple taking a 30 percent cut, like iPhone apps. Publishers set the ultimate price, though.
Despite the higher price to customers, selling books through Apple could actually make less money per book for publishers than through Amazon, who sells a number of bestsellers for $10 by taking a loss (paying the publisher, say, $15). Amazon’s latest scheme does look more like Apple’s, where publishers want 70 percent of the revenue, but book prices are capped at $10. And it’s the $10 pricepoint that’s the problem for publishers, both philosophically and practically: They want people to believe books are worth more than $9.99, and they want to set the prices themselves.
On a smaller note, the WSJ says that HarperCollins is trying to wedge its way into the starting up lineup tomorrow (though don’t expect to be blown away by what they show). McGraw-Hill, who was pretty gabby about the tablet earlier today, won’t be showing anything. And, like we and others, notably Peter Kafka, have said, the WSJ says most publishers are in fact still in the dark about most of the tablet’s details, from development to pricing to distribution.
Amazon vs. Apple. Should be a fun show to watch, though if it goes like music, we already know who’s going to win. I wonder if the publishing industry should be quite so keen on that. [WSJ]
It’ll all be over soon. The mystery. The anticipation. The rumors. Oh, the rumors. After the tablet is announced tomorrow, another stage in the gadget life cycle will begin. So take one last soak in every tablet rumor worth reading.
We’ll be continuously updating our ongoing rumor roundup until our liveblog actually starts tomorrow morning. And the last 24 hours is always the most exciting. Anyone catch CNBC lately? So, catch up on what’s been leaked, what’s been whispered, what’s been sneezed—you don’t wanna be behind everybody else, do you? [Apple Tablet Rumors, Photo Credit: Steve McQuillen]
It’s pretty much agreed that the magical thing about the Apple tablet, the reason it could succeed where every other has failed, is going to be the interface. The software. But what’s under the hood?
There are two arbiters of what’s inside the tablet. The software, and the battery. If it’s running an enhanced version of the iPhone OS, which seems likely, that says a lot. If you not-so-unreasonably expect 4-6 hours of usage out of this thing, it also says a lot. (Apple product rule: There’s never enough battery life.) Together, they scream mobile guts.
The last three iPhones have run on processors using the ARM architecture, like basically every other smartphone on the planet. The iPhone OS is designed to run on ARM processors, so if the tablet’s using iPhone OS, logic and Occam’s Razor says, it’s running on ARM too. But, you’re asking, how’s a chip architecture that’s used in smartphones gonna power a big ol’ tablet?
I talked to Ars Technica’s chip maven Jon Stokes about tablet silicon for a while. Even going down the ARM path, there’s a couple of ways to go about it. A persistent (and plausible) rumor is that the little chip company Apple bought, PA Semi, is finally debuting their wares in the Apple tablet. Previously, PA Semi worked on the Power architecture (remember PowerPC?), but what they excelled at, Stokes says, was creating incredibly efficient chips. So it’s possible they were put to work on a chip for the tablet using the ARM architecture, especially given ARM’s comments implying Apple’s an ARM licensee.
Another ARM possibility is a custom system on a chip using the ARM Cortex A9, which is designed for smartbooks (those weirdly nebulous things between a netbook and a laptop). It’s the heart of Nvidia’s Tegra2 wonderchip, for instance, which is itself in tablets, like the very neat Adam one we saw at CES. The Cortex A9 is multi-core, fast and power efficient, even if it’s outgunned on straight performance by Intel’s Atom. (For more on the Intel/ARM device chasm, check out this piece by Stokes.) The major “problem” with this possibility is that the Cortex A9 is vapor at the moment (much like the tablet, oho), and hasn’t shown up in anything actually shipping yet.
The other major piece of silicon to worry about is graphics. How pumped are the tablet’s graphics powers going to be? Gaming could be a huge deal, and we’ve heard EA is all over the tablet. But are the games just going to be, uh, supersized versions of iPhone games? Again, if it’s a big(ger) iPhone, Apple could license a PowerVR graphics part, like they’ve used in the iPhone 3GS, or perhaps even one from Qualcomm, who picked up AMD’s Imageon mobile graphics a year ago. Don’t expect anything crazy, like a fire-breathing GeForce 285 GTX. Like Stokes says, sticking with ARM makes sense if they’re expanding on that platform. What we could see, maybe, is a dedicated HD video decoder that’s popping up in some netbooks to handle H.264 video.
The only other real consideration, I think, is the screen. AMOLED isn’t happening. Not only would it be too expensive, no one’s actually mass producing 10-inch AMOLED panels—not enough for millions of tablets, anyway. Pixel Qi’s screen tech, as much as I love it, is too rough around the edges, even if it very conveniently comes in a 10-inch size. So! Conventional LED-backlit LCD it probably is. The resolution is probably, at minimum, 1280×720 but probably more. Why? Pixel density. A 10-inch, 1280×720 screen is roughly 138ppi, lower than the iPhone’s 163ppi or the new iMac’s 208ppi. If you’re going to seriously read on this thing, the higher the pixel density, the better.
And, uh, networking. Wi-Fi, how could it not? Supposedly, it’ll have 3G. From which carrier(s), who knows? If it’s on Verizon, it’ll probably be on AT&T, too. Everything else, like RAM and storage, I’d argue, is nearly inconsequential, at least in terms of how you’ll use it. Some gigabytes of flash-based storage that’s a multiple of 16, like 64GB or 128GB. If it multitasks, it’ll need more RAM, not less. It’ll have a headphone jack. Maybe a camera (more likely yes than no, is the latest ‘consenus’). People would like it to take an SD card, like the current MacBook Pros, but it probably won’t. Oh, here’s a real quandary: Real USB port, or iPod dock connector? We’d guess the latter. Hmmm!
The bottom line is that, for whatever specifics we might be wrong about thanks to secret hardware partnerships, it’s probably going to look a lot more like a (big) smartphone inside than hulking notebook. Just like the outside.
Already sick of hearing about the Apple tablet? Just click here to view Gizmodo, Apple tablet free. Here’s how it works.
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The Apple tablet could change everything. That’s what people are hoping for, revolution. But revolutions don’t actually happen overnight, especially if you’re talking about turning around an entire diseased, lumbering industry, like publishing.
The medium is the message, supposedly. The iPod was a flaming telegram to the music industry; the iPhone, a glowing billboard about the way we’d consume software. The Apple tablet? Possibly no less than the reinvention of the digital word. If you look very generally at the content that defined the device—or maybe vice versa—the iPod danced with music, the iPhone’s slung to apps and, as we were first in reporting a few months ago, the tablet’s bailiwick might very well be publishing.
Since then, the number of publishers—of newspapers, magazines and books—reported to be talking to Apple has exploded: NYT, Conde Nast, McGraw Hill, Oberlin, HarperCollins, the “six largest” trade publishers, and Time, among many others, are making noise about splaying their content on the tablet. A giant iPod not only for video, photos and music, but for words. That’s what they’re lining up to make ritual sacrifices for. Publishers want this, whatever it is.
I say “whatever it is,” because, for all of the talk and pomp and demos, they haven’t seen the Apple tablet. They don’t know what it’s like. They don’t know how to develop for it. As Peter Kafka’s reported, neither Conde Nast (publisher of Wired) nor Time will be ready to show anything for the tablet on Wednesday, much less a mindblowing reinvention of the magazine, because Apple’s keeping them at arm’s length. (Why? Secrecy, which matters far more than launch partners. All the leaks about the tablet have come out of third parties, like the goddamn publishers, so Apple’s not telling them much more than they are the rest of us.)
The sole exception, that we know of, is the New York Times. The Gray Lady has a team of three developers embedded in Cupertino. This makes a certain kind of sense, given the content the tablet is framing, and which publisher is currently best suited to delivering that content in a new experience.
When it comes to experimenting with the display and digestion of the digital word, the NYT has aggressively been the most innovative major publication on the web: Just look at the incredible infographics, the recently launched NYT Skimmer and the NYT Reader. Logically, they’re the print publication perhaps most able to realize the early potential of a device that’s essentially a window for displaying content. And it doesn’t hurt that Apple loves the NYT.
The tablet might just be a big iPhone, but the key word is “big.” What defines the tablet in opposition to the iPhone is the screen size, less than any kind of steroidal shot to processing muscle. A 10-inch screen will hold 10 times the screen real estate of the iPhone’s 3.5-inch display. That’s room for ten fingers to touch, navigate and manipulate, not two. Real estate for full web pages, for content apps that are so much more than news repackaged for a pocket-sized screen. The ability to really “touch what you want to learn about” is an “inflection point for navigation,” that is, the potential to truly “navigate serendipitously,” as the NYT’s media columnist David Carr put it to me.
Think of it as a more tangible version of the force that drives you from a Wikipedia page about gravity to one about the geological history of the planet Vulcan, touching and feeling your way through everything from a taxonomy for Star Wars fanboys to the Victoria’s Secret catalog.
The Wikipedia example might be particularly apt, actually. If we use iPhone history as a guide, given that the tablet is likely to be an evolution of the iPhone software and interface, it’s likely these publications will be content “apps” that will be islands unto themselves: So it might be easy to wander all over the NYT’s island via the tips of your fingers, but not so easy to float off to the WSJ’s abode. At least to start, we assume it’ll much like iPhone apps. For all of the very whizzy Minority Report wannabe demos from Sports Illustrated, we don’t know what the content apps are actually going to look like, or what they’ll be able to do on the tablet. In particular, what is it they’ll be able to do that they couldn’t do on the web right now, given how powerful the web and web applications have become over the last couple of years? (Look at everything Google’s doing, particularly in web apps.) The question, as NYU Journalism professor Mitch Stephens told me, is whether the tablet’s capabilities can “actually get the Times and Conde Nast to think beyond print?”
If you think the newspaper and magazine industry is slow, the book industry is prehistoric. As whipped into a fervor as HarperCollins and McGraw Hill may be about jumping aboard the full color Apple tablet express to carry them into a new age of print with “ebooks enhanced with video, author interviews and social-networking applications,” past the Amazon schooner, they take years to move. And they’re likely in just as in the dark as everybody else.
There’s also the macro issue that it just takes time for people to figure shit out. Think about the best, most polished iPhone apps today. Now try to remember the ones that launched a week after the App Store opened. It’s a world of difference. New media, and how people use them, aren’t figured out overnight. Or fade back to the internet circa 2006. Broadband wasn’t exactly new then, but so much of the stuff we do now, all the time—YouTube, Twitter—wasn’t around.
The apparent readiness to yoke the fortunes of the sickly publishing industry to Apple, and its tablet, oozing out of info scraps and whispers, like a publishing executive telling the NYT that, versus Amazon, “Apple has put an offer together that helps publishers and, by extension, authors,” is deeply curious. The publishing industry wants the iPod of reading, but they’ve clearly forgotten the music industry’s traumatic experience when they got theirs. Apple basically wrested control of legal digital music, and the music industry got far less than they wanted to make up for it. Hollywood, in turn, played their hand far differently, scattering bits of movies and TV shows across tons of services, so no one had any leverage, especially not Apple. (Hence, Apple’s negotiations for a subscription TV service with Disney or CBS always seem delicate at best.) I don’t know why Apple would be any more magnanimous with publishers than record labels, given the chance to be gatekeeper.
The gatekeeper matters, because it dictates the answer to publishing’s current crisis: “How we gonna get paid?” The NYT is bringing back metering to its website; book publishers weep over the fact that Amazon has decided books are worth precisely $9.99. Publishers want to control their financial destiny. Apple wants to control every element of the experience on their devices. (Apparently, they’ll get to.) I want to be able to read the NYT, WSJ, The New Yorker, Penthouse and Wired, in all of their dynamic, interactive, multitouch glory easily and cheaply. Ads might be the secret to making that possible. Ultra targeted, innovative ads designed just for the tablet. At least, in the future—Apple’s acquisition of mobile ad firm Quattro, and its CEO’s ascension to VP, have happened too recently to bear much fruit yet.
Point being, there’s a lot of stuff publishers have to figure out, from the big stuff to the little stuff. Apple hasn’t exactly sped up the process by giving them much to work with, either, but for one publisher that we know of—and maybe a couple we don’t. The tablet might change the digital word the way the iPod changed digital music. But it’ll take some time.
Thanks to Joel for that awesome render; original CC printing press image from JanGlas/Flickr
It’s enough to make some quake with faith and speak in tongues. Overheard second, third, or several hands, Steve Jobs is quoted (well, maybe paraphrased) speaking of the tablet, “This will be the most important thing I’ve ever done.” [TechCrunch]
This is the life of an Apple Genius: Computers caked in toxic waste, screaming customers, dead cats, raging homophobes, and oh yeah—getting punched in the face.
We’re protecting the identity of the Geniuses who relayed these tales of total cockbaggage with pseudonyms, since some of them might still work for Apple. If you want to see all of the stories on one page, just click here.
Now tell us, which Genius deserves some free pizza to ease their suffering, like we did for abused Genius Bar customers? (Sorry we can’t send you guys a medal, sheesh.)
Speed. Toughness. Efficiency. Silence. That’s why we want solid-state drives in our computers. But we worry about the zoom-zoom performance degrading over time, and the fact that SSDs might eventually wear out. Here’s what you need to know about ’em.
To understand what’s great about SSDs, let’s start with HDDs (you know, old-fashioned hard drives). On a basic level, a hard disk drive works thusly: Inside is a magnetized recording surface called a platter that spins around really fast, with a head that zooms across disk to read and write data—think kinda like a record player, except the head never touches the surface, ’cause that would be very, very bad. So, you can see the problem with hard drives: They’re fragile (don’t drop your computer) and they’re slow to access stuff because the head has to physically move to where the data is.
With an SSD, on the other hand, we’re talking straight silicon. What’s inside is a bunch of flash memory chips and a controller running the show. There are no moving parts, so an SSD doesn’t need to start spinning, doesn’t need to physically hunt data scattered across the drive and doesn’t make a whirrrrr. The result is that it’s crazy faster than a regular hard drive in nearly every way, so you have insanely quick boot times (an old video, but it stands), application launches, random writes and almost every other measure of drive performance (writing large files excepted). For a frame of reference, General Manager of SanDisk’s SSD group, Doron Myersdorf, says an equivalent hard drive would have to spin at almost 40,000rpm to match an SSD. And, you can drop it—at least, a little.
Typically, what you’ve inside an SSD is a bunch of NAND flash memory chips for storage—the same stuff found in memory cards and USB thumb drives—along with a small cache of DRAM, like you’d find on most current hard drives. The DRAM is also flash memory, but the difference between the two is that the storage memory is non-volatile, meaning the data it holds won’t go poof when it loses power, while the faster DRAM is volatile memory, so “poof” is exactly what happens to DRAM data when the power goes out. That’s fine because it’s the faster DRAM is just for caching things, holding them temporarily to make the whole system work faster.
So, let’s talk a bit about flash memory itself. I’ll try to keep it straightforward and not lose you, because it’s key to the benefits and problems with solid-state storage.
Flash memory is made up of a bunch of memory cells, which are made up of transistors. There are two basic kinds of memory: With single-level cell (SLC) memory, one bit of data is stored per cell. (Bits, the basic building block of information, if you recall, have two states, 0 or 1.) The SLC type is fast as hell and lasts a long time, but it is too expensive for storing the dense amounts of data you’d want in a personal computer. SLC memory is really only used for enterprise stuff, like servers, where you need it to last for 100,000 write cycles.
The solution for normal humans is multi-level cell memory. Currently, up to 4 bits can be stored per cell. “Multi-level” refers to the multiple levels of voltage in the cell used to get those extra bits in. MLC SSD drives are much cheaper than SLC but are, as I mentioned, slower, and can wear out faster than their pricier counterpart. Still, for now and going forward into the foreseeable future, all of the SSDs you could come close to owning are of the MLC variety.
Structurally, flash memory is divided into blocks, which are broken down further into pages. And now, we get into one of the major problems with flash. While data can be read and written at the individual page level, it can only be erased at the larger block level. In other words, suppose you have a 256k block and a 4k page, and you want to erase just one page worth of data, you have to erase the whole block, and then write all the rest of the data back to the block.
This is a huge problem, for one, because MLC flash memory wears out after 10,000 write cycles. Two, as the drive fills up, performance significantly degrades. (Anandtech has a pretty great illustration, amidst a massively deep dive on SSDs you should read if you’re interested at all, showing this.) That’s because without free blocks to write to, you’ve gotta go through that intensive erase and rewrite cycle, which, as you’d imagine, entails a lot of overhead. Problem numero three is that, according to SanDisk CEO Eli Harari, there’s “a brick wall” in the near future, when storage at the chip level could stop increasing in the not-too-distant future.
The thing is, you actually probably still want an SSD in your next computer, to make it run awesomer. Because where there are problems, there are sorta solutions. Remember how I mentioned up above the other major component in an SSD, besides the flash memory, is the controller? They’re a big part of what differentiates one company’s SSD from another’s. The controller is the secret sauce, as SanDisk’s Myersdorf told me. Because the game, for now, is all about managing flash better, both physically and logically. In other words, it’s about algorithms.
The first standard technique for long flash-memory life is wear leveling, which is simply not writing to the same area of the drive over and over again. Instead, the goal is to fill up the entire drive with stuff before you have to start erasing blocks, knowing that erasing and re-writing will use up precious cycles. The problem of “Write amplification”—say you have a 1MB document that ends up causing 4MB worth of writes to the drive because of the whole block and pages problem described above, where you wind up reading, erasing and re-writing a bunch of extra blocks and pages—that is being lowered, says Myersdorf, because drive management is shifting from being block-based to page-based. More granular algorithms with caching and prediction means there’s less unnecessary erasing and writing.
The biggest thing is what’s called TRIM. As you probably know, when you delete something from your computer, it isn’t instantly vaporized. Your OS basically just marks the data as “Hey it’s cool to pave over this with new stuff.” Your hard drive has no real idea you deleted anything. With the TRIM function, when you delete something, the OS actually tells the SSD, “Hey you can scrub this crap.” The SSD dumps the block to a cache, wipes the pages with the stuff you want gone, and copies the stuff you want to keep back to a new block, leaving you with clean pages for the next time you want to write something to the disk. This means better performance when you’re saving new stuff, since it handles the read-erase-rewrite dance ahead of time. Windows 7 supports TRIM, and Myersdorf says Windows 8 will be even better for solid-state storage.
As for busting through the brick wall of limited storage, the number of electrons that can reside in a cell, increasing flash memory storage at a pace faster than Moore’s Law, right now, Toshiba, who invented NAND flash, is currently the chip capacity king. The company just announced a new 64GB NAND flash module that combines 16 4GB NAND chips. This would seem to be closing in on that wall, which we don’t want them to do, because we want the dollar-to-MB ratio to keep dropping. Myersdorf is optimistic (despite his boss’s gloomy pronouncement), “There have been several walls in history of the [flash] industry—there was transition to MLC, then three bits per cell, then four—every time there is some physical wall, that physics doesn’t allow you to pass, there is always a new shift of paradigm as to how we make the next step on the performance curve.”
Okay, the big question then: When are SSDs gonna get seriously affordable? A 160GB version of one of the one of the most acclaimed SSDs, Intel’s X25, retails for $470. OCZ’s Colossus is a verifiable brick of solid-state storage, and the 1TB model has an MSRP of $2200, though it’s going for much more. By contrast, a 1TB WD old-fashioned hard drive is like a hundred bucks on a bad day. Myersdorf says it’s hard to say when the SSD’s dollar-to-byte ratio is going to go down absolutely, mostly because of supply and demand, but he did predict that a lot of “mainstream” laptops are gonna have 256GB SSDs in the next 18 months. Oh good, I’ll be due for a new laptop right around then.
Thanks to SanDisk for helping us out! Still something you wanna know? Send questions about solid states, solid snakes, or solid shakes here, with “Giz Explains” in the subject line.
Part of TiVo’s survival strategy, with miserable subscriber numbers, is to make everybody pay for DVR patents—winning Echostar was just the beginning. Microsoft, whose Mediaroom software powers AT&T’s U-Verse, said eff that, and just sued Tivo.
TiVo sued AT&T, alleging that its U-Verse IPTV service violates three of their DVR patents. Since it’s Microsoft’s software TiVo’s talking about, Microsoft asked to jump into the case on Jan. 15, and is now suing TiVo over two patents relating to a system that programmable info, and a secure method for buying video content. Basically, what’ll happen here is that Microsoft will agree to drop their suit if TiVo drops theirs, and maybe a few coins will change hands, but everybody will go home mostly unscathed. Well, probably, anyway. [Bloomberg, ZatzNotFunny]
The absolutely ridiculous contrast ratios you see on most display refer to their dynamic contrast ratio, a virtually meaningless spec. But Samsung’s F2380MX and F2370H have the world’s highest static contrast ratio for an LCD monitor.
The reason dynamic contrast ratio is meaningless is that it just measures that lightest and darkest a display is capable of producing, so it doesn’t say a whole lot. Static contrast ratio actually says something, because it’s the ratio between the lightest and darkest a display can show at the same time.
The 23-inch F2380MX and F2370H have a static contrast ratio of 3000:1 (which Samsung says equates to 150,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio). They’re Korea-only for now, but hopefully they make their way over here (and manufacturers start talking about static contrast ratio, instead of confusing people with overblown dynamic numbers). [Samsung via Slashgear]
The White House iPhone app is mostly a pretty package of feeds and photos, but the actually interesting part is that it streams live video of White House events, starting with the State of the Union address next week.
Of course, most of us will be pre-occupied with a different keynote speech on Wednesday. A mobile version of WhiteHouse.gov for other, non-iPhone phones is supposedly on the way, if you’re feeling slighted. [White House, iTunes]
Apple isn’t going to use LaLa to launch a subscription service, a “variety of insider sources” have told the founder of MP3.com. It’s exactly what we speculated: Storing your iTunes library in the cloud and access it from anywhere.
It’s a bit hard to tell where his insider sources stop and his own thoughts begin, but Robertson says that the next version of iTunes will integrate one of LaLa’s premiere features: scanning you entire music library, and letting you access the whole thing from the internet (it uploads any songs it doesn’t already have on the service), via a “personal URL using a browser-based iTunes experience,” not to mention from your iPhone.
The reason Apple didn’t just build it themselves, he says, is speed. We’ll probably see in September, like always with Apple and music events. [TechCrunch]
The hand-built Slayer espresso machine is not brandspankinew, but it is still exceedingly uncommon—fewer than 20 exist in coffee shops—and this one, residing at freshly opened RBC NYC, is the first east of Michigan. It costs $18,000.
The reason coffee nerds are hyped about the Slayer isn’t just because it’s obscenely expensive, or because of the way wood meshes with contoured metal to create a hulking, beautiful gadget, but mostly because of the way it allows a barista to easily play with pressure to do some interesting things—like start with a low pressure extraction, ramp up to full pressure, then back it down to get different textures or flavors—using the wooden paddles on top of the groupheads that adjust the mechanical valves which control water flow, which is what’s unique about the machine. (More on the Slayer and pressure here, and more of our own espresso coverage and explainers here and here.)
It’s somewhat finicky, and different from other espresso machines that RBC’s director of coffee (yes, that’s her title) said it took her two months to really master the machine. Interestingly, they’re testing out using the Slayer to do brewed coffee, to create something really different, but they’re not sure when they’re gonna offer it up. For now though, they’re pulling some of the best espresso shots in New York, at least judging by the two drinks I’ve had. [Slayer, RBC NYC, Full-Size Photos]
I’m going to need someone to prop up my Apple Tablet while I drink coffee, so we need some more interns in New York City. But this time, we’re lookin’ for a few different kinds of interns.
Four different kinds, to be precise:
Writing Intern: Your main task will be writing posts, but with a secondary focus on all the other intern duties as outlined here.
Promotion Intern: Great for people who like to talk to other people. You’ll be promoting our stories on Digg, Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. You should know how to angle stories a certain way, and be familiar with social networks as well as other major sites. When I say familiar, I mean you should read them and know what kind of stories they’re apt to post.
Research Intern: You should be good at pulling together multiple forms of information from multiple sources for our editors. This includes online and offline sources and even calling up people to arrange (and possibly conduct) interviews. Mostly, you should have a good grasp of technology and be able to locate and dissect information fast.
Copyediting Intern: English. You should know it. And you should be able to recognize when we screw up. You’ll be going through our posts as a copyeditor, fixing typos and correcting our grammar. If you’re already doing this in your spare time (for free), you’ll love this position.
All of these internship positions will still have the primary task of finding stories for us—so think of this as your secondary superpower—as outlined here. Look that over (click the link and read it first!) and see if you’re qualified.
If you think you’re suited for one of those four positions (choose one only, please), send an email to [email protected] with the subject “NY Writing Intern” or “NY Promotion Intern” or “NY Research Intern” or “NY Copyediting Intern”—whichever one fits you the best. No attachments. No. Attachments.
Remember, it’s full time, you need your own laptop, and you need to be able to get to Manhattan daily.
Good luck!
The curtain’s been dropped on much of Nvidia’s upcoming Fermi-based graphics cards, and the five-hundred-and-twelve-core GF100 looks like a behemoth, indeed. A completely overhauled architecture is all about three things: scalability, parallelism, and geometry. Oh, and ripping your eyeballs out.
Tom’s Hardware, Anandtech, HotHardware and others go pretty deep on the new architecture, which is now eminently scalable. Here’s the overall structure of the GF100, which should give you an idea of the scalability—the GF100 is made up of four graphics processing clusters (GPC), themselves composed of four streaming multiprocessors (which are made up of 32 CUDA cores and texture units) and a raster engine:
To go deeper on architecture, you’re better off reading the 10-page reports from any of the sites linked above, but bottom line, Tom’s Hardware is predicting something like double the performance of Nvidia’s current GTX 285. Anandtech also points out that Nvidia’s geometry performance only went 3x between the NV30 engine in the ancient GeForce FX 5800 and current GT200 in the GTX 280, but the Fermi-based GF100 has 8x the geometry performance of the GT200. The endgame being that ” it allows them to take the same assets from the same games as AMD and generate something that will look better. With more geometry power, NVIDIA can use tessellation and displacement mapping to generate more complex characters, objects, and scenery than AMD can at the same level of performance.”
There is a cost. Even though it’s at the 40nm process, those 3 billion transistors are going to run hot, and the GF100 maybe the hottest single-card GPU ever. It’s also not going to be cheap. At all. [Tom’s Hardware, Anandtech]
Oh lordie, you knew this was coming. AT&T’s just matched Verizon’s new unlimited talking plans, basically point by point. Unlimited talking for $70 a month, with unlimited talk + MMS for $90.
For iPhone users, there’s a new $100 all you can talk-and-download (but not text, which stays the same, running $20/month separately) plan. What’s better than Verizon, though, is that they’re apparently not bumping data rates. Because that would be f’n hilarious.
DALLAS, Jan. 15 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — AT&T* today announced new unlimited plans across all devices —including its industry-leading lineup of smartphones — to provide more value and choice for customers who want to talk, text and surf on the nation’s fastest 3G network.
“With more than twice the number of smartphone customers as our nearest competitor, we are committed to offering great value and choice for customers who want to talk, text and surf on the nation’s fastest 3G network,” said Ralph de la Vega, president and CEO, AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets. “Our new plans reflect customers’ continuing desire to do more with their phones – including talking and browsing the Web at the same time. Plus these new plans make it even more attractive to choose AT&T which already offers customers the best 3G experience and the industry’s most popular and innovative devices.”
The new plans, which will be available beginning Monday, Jan. 18, can be ordered at AT&T’s 2,200 company-owned retail stores and kiosks, through convenient online service at www.att.com, or at one of the thousands of authorized AT&T retail locations.
* Feature Phone customers may choose unlimited talk for $69.99. Family Talk customers (prices assume two lines) may choose unlimited talk for $119.99 per month. Texting plans remain unchanged at $20 for unlimited plans for individuals and $30 for Family Talk plans.
* Quick Messaging Device customers may choose unlimited talk and text for $89.99 per month. Quick Messaging Device customers with Family Talk plans may choose unlimited talk and text for $149.99 per month (for two lines). These prices include a required minimum of $20 per month for individual plans and $30 per month for Family Talk plans in texting and/or Web browsing plans for new and upgrading customers.
* All smartphone customers, including iPhone customers, may now buy unlimited voice and data for $99.99. For smartphone customers with Family Talk plans (prices assume 2 smartphones), unlimited voice and data is now available for $179.99. Texting plans remain unchanged at $20 for unlimited plans for individuals, $30 for Family Talk Plans.Beginning Monday, existing AT&T customers can change to any of the new plans without penalty or contract extension with the online account management tool at www.att.com/wireless.
AT&T customers enjoy the ability to talk and browse the Web at the same time on AT&T’s 3G network, the nation’s fastest, which covers more than 230 million people across the nation.
For customers who do not choose an unlimited voice plan, AT&T offers Rollover, which lets customers keep the minutes they don’t use. In addition, AT&T offers A-List, which offers unlimited calling to up to 10 domestic phone numbers.
For the complete array of AT&T offerings, visit www.att.com.
[Yahoo]
Corsair’s Dominator GTX 2333MHz is the fastest RAM you can buy that’s