Law enforcement officials in California have intensified their efforts to locate triple-homicide suspect Shane Franklin Miller. Miller is believed to be hiding in the dense, foggy redwood forest region of Humbolt County in northern California. The region is so difficult to navigate that is has long been dubbed “the lost coast.”

Miller, 45, of Shingletown, California, is suspected of murdering his wife and two daughters. The bodies of Sandy (age 34), Shelby (age 8), and Shasta (age 5) were found at 7:45 pm Tuesday. The three were shot multiple times.

Miller, who grew up in Humbolt County and knows the wooded region quite well, appears to have made the 200-mile drive from Shingletown to Petrolia, where his truck was found, sometime after the shooting.

Law enforcement officials have begun searching the region in a strategic manner for Miller, whom they regard as armed and extremely dangerous. Officials say that hiding in the rugged terrain – where parts of Jurassic Park were filmed – could be all too easy. They believe that Miller could be making for a cabin, or could simply be hiding out in the bush somewhere.

This is not Miller’s first run-in with law enforcement, though it is his most severe. In 1996 he was convicted of felony marijuana cultivation. In 2002 he was caught growing marijuana again and served three years and ten months in prison for cultivation, and for possession of a firearm by a felon.

A round-up of funny, interesting and strange stories on the Internet this week:

Hyperbole and a Half’s Allie Brosh is back after a two-year hiatus, with part 2 of an illustrated account of overcoming depression. Dark and delightful. [Hyperbole and a Half]

Stephen Hawking: Questioning the universe

Even world-famous scientists have tiffs. Obviously this bet between Stephen Hawking and Neil Turok means they are just like us. [Mail & Guardian]

A Spanish foundation uses lenticular printing to show a different anti-abuse ad to people depending on their height, to convey a secret message to abused children when walking with their abusers. [Gizmodo]

Julian Baggini, on why Kierkegaard is still awesome and relevant. [Aeon] Watch his TEDx talk »

Neil Turok makes his TED Prize wish

Researchers observe that theta brainwaves are predictors for the ability to overcome ingrained Pavlovian biases, which could help in treating conditions like addiction and obsessive-compulsive disorder. [Sci Tech Daily]

Neurohumanities: Breakthrough cross-disciplinary approach, or reductionist field? In other words: Does “how your brain is firing … tell you if something is ironic, metaphorical or meaningful”? The jury is still out. [The Nation]

A redditor projected a circle (ish) on a map of the world and observed some astonishing facts. [io9]

Benoit Mandelbrot: Fractals and the art of roughness
Jim Holt reviews a new memoir about Benoît Mandelbrot, the mathematics legend who coined the word “fractal.” A story of truly infinite beauty. [NYRB] Watch Mandelbrot’s talk from 2010 on roughness »

Our friends at Science Studio, dedicated to collecting the best science video and audio on the interwebs, have launched a preview edition of their site. [Science Studio]

A lovely visualization of the number of meteorites with eyewitnesses in proportion to those recorded. [Bolid.es]

The Cicadapocalypse is nigh as billions of cicadas return to New York for the first time in 17 years. [Gothamist]

From docks to desktop gadgets, the Start menu to the Start screen, there are many ways to launch applications on your PC. But most of these are quite bulky, giving you a new interface to explore, and perhaps tying up valuable screen real estate.

If you’re looking for something simpler, then, more lightweight, then you might be interested in a new Firefox add-on called Easy Access.

Install the extension and you’ll see an icon appear to the right of the Firefox status bar. Clicking this reveals a drop-down menu with some default entries – Notepad, Paint, Calculator, My Computer, Switch Profile – and selecting any of these will launch that program.

There’s a “Manage Your Own Easy Access” option which allows you to add further programs of your own (you’re able to specify the program name, and, optionally, any command line switches).

And you can also add any or all of these program icons to the Easy Access bar, which should ensure you’re able to launch any of them with a single click.

As launchers go, Easy Access isn’t exactly sophisticated. There’s no folder or other mechanism for grouping your programs, for instance. You can’t reorder them. There’s no way to provide a custom icon, or any similar more advanced customisations. We didn’t even see an option to remove the default menu entries.

Still, if you almost always have a Firefox window open then Easy Access does do exactly what its name suggests, giving you simple one-click access to any extra tools or applications you need, and if that sounds interesting then we’d recommend you give it a closer look.

Photo Credit: Liv friis-larsen/Shutterstock

As the season draws to a close for most TV shows, the time has come once again to see which shows will continue another year and which are on the chopping block. This can be a very nerve wracking time for fans of many borderline shows (not to mention the cast and crew and production staff). While some shows are a lock for renewal, many eye their ratings numbers warily, and wonder if they’ll be around another year.

Well, ABC has announced which of their shows won’t be coming back next year. Five programs got the ax this year. Topping the list is Happy Endings, which has had difficulties find an audience despite solid reviews from critics. In addition, the network has chosen not to renew thriller Red Widow, How to Live with Your Parents for the Rest of Your Life, crime drama Body of Proof with Dana Delaney, and sitcom Malibu Country staring Reba McIntire.

On the bright side, ABC’s most popular shows will be coming back next year. Fans of shows like Castle, Grey’s Anatomy, Modern Family, Once Upon A Time, Suburgatory, Revenge, and more can rest easy knowing their favorite shows will be around for at least one more year.

As computer sales overall have dropped sharply in recent years, Apple has put most of its attention on the source of its growth: mobile products. And its main focus on chips has transitioned to the kind that go inside its smartphones and tablets. Apple has spent a lot of time and money optimizing iPhone and iPad chips for speed and battery life. It still makes computers, but the focus is mostly on laptops, and making them fast, but also optimizing for weight, display quality and battery life. Meanwhile the company has let its workhorse, the Mac Pro, lapse.

With what most perceived as a minor update in 2012, the Mac Pro had gone two years prior to that before receiving a meaningful upgrade. Still, Apple has a loyal following among Mac users looking for power. Apple CEO Tim Cook stated last year that Apple is working on “something great” in reference to the Mac Pro, and we’re still waiting for that.

While things are not quite what they used to be, the company does still have a shot at impressing its seemingly forgotten Mac Pro customers by putting the power back into its Macs.

It was not too long ago when part of the Mac versus PC debate took place in the lab with a series of benchmark tests. Try to find such a comparison since Apple switched from IBM’s PowerPC chipset to Intel; you will be hard pressed to do so. When Apple first introduced the PowerMac G5 we witnessed the worlds first 64-bit desktop computer.  Those days are long gone, as Apple has apparently elected to step out of the computer chip speed race.

To see how big of a gap we are talking about, we must first look to see how much faster today’s PCs are when compared to the Mac.

Benchmarking the current gap between Macs and PCs

Comparing Macs to Macs – If you look at Primate Labs, a long standing provider of benchmarking software on the Mac, you can see how each of Apple’s computers stack up against each other. Looking only at this list, one would think that Apple’s older lineup of Mac Pros is still doing quite well being situated at the top of the GeekBench’s performance list. That is until you look outside of Apple’s product line and see how the Intel Xeon X5675 chip that powers the top performing Mac Pro compares to other Intel chips.

Intel chipset benchmarks scores – One such benchmark to look at when comparing Intel chip performance is the PassMark CPU Mark. Using EveryMac.com as a guide to figure out what Intel chips are used in each of Apple’s Macs, you will find that the chips being used in today’s Macs are not among the fastest currently available. With a CPU Mark of just 9,382 for the fastest chip available in the Mac Pro, and a score of 9,461 for the fastest iMac chip, Apple comes in at roughly two-thirds the performance of the top rated Intel chip scoring 14,969.  Keep in mind that this top performing chip is Intel’s Xeon E5-4650 with a street price around $4,000, for just the chip.

Intel PassMark CPU Mark Scores

A fair comparison to PCs – Looking at the chips used in last years round up of top performing PCs from both PC World and PC Magazine, the Falcon Northwest Mach V and the Maingear Shift Super Stock both used Intel’s Core i7-3960X processor.  Since then, each PC company now offers an updated configuration with the slightly faster Intel Core i7-3970X. It is also worth noting that the newer i7-3970X is currently available in Dell’s own Alienware line of desktop computers. Each of these new systems sell at prices comparable to Mac Pros. With a CPU Mark score of 12,976, the i7-3970X is still faster than the CPUs used inside of Apple’s top performing Mac’s.

And that’s just the current state of where Macs and PCs in the CPU performance race. The GPU race doesn’t look any better for Apple.  What may surprise many is that Apple does in fact support the latest drivers for many of the fastest GPUs on the market in each updated release of OS X.  It is just not an option when you build your own Mac in Apple’s online store.  You have to look elsewhere to get one added to your Mac after you buy it.

Why Apple should design its own Mac chips

Apple has two options to consider when it comes to increasing the performance of its Macs.  A short-term tactical play where it catches up with the PC by continuing to make modest upgrades to its existing lineup of Macs, or a long-term strategic play to surpass the competition by boldly stepping away from the component-based chip market all together.

Matching the competition – The first option is to simply match the fastest PCs in performance by updating the chips being used inside Apple’s Mac lineup.  This tactic of adamantly keeping pace with Intel’s release schedule has been employed by Apple in the past and every other computer vendor to keep making their machines performing slightly faster each year.  So long as Apple continues to use off-the-shelf chips from the likes of Intel, AMD, Nvidia and ATI, Macs will never again be faster than PCs since everyone uses the same exact chips.

Surpassing the competition – The other option open for Apple is to follow the same path that it has taken with its mobile chips. That is to optimize the chip specific to Apple’s own software and hardware design specifications.  Adding to this strategy, by continuing the complete adoption of Thunderbolt technology, Apple will likely be among the first to adopt Intel’s new Falcon Ridge Thunderbolt controller later this year.  And finally with the advent of integrated SSD technology directly on a logic board rather than conforming to a more modular SATA design standard, the design of desktop powerhouse systems should start to change dramatically. Breaking from the modular design that has dominated the top performing computer market for decades now, a radical new design that maximizes the potential of all of these advances in technology is in order.

Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller Benchmarking the A5 and A6 Processors

Apple is not only not losing the laptop and desktop speed race versus the PC at the moment, it appears that it’s not even interested in competing in it. Apple’s own marketing shows how its newer hardware is only faster than its older hardware; as old Macs race against new Macs, PCs have meanwhile moved ahead in a race all their own.  If Apple truly does want to get back out in front of the PC market, and produce a lineup of Macs or even one Mac that outpaces the fastest PCs available, it will have to leave the off-the-shelf chips behind and show the world how to best take advantage of all of the changes we have seen in technology over the last few years.

Taking a chip design and making it your own is not something that just any company can do.  Apple has proven that they can do it with ARM-based chips on its mobile platform.  The question remains if Apple can successfully pull off the same feat with a chip design that places them in the forefront of desktop processor speed.

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• New challenges for the IT organization
• The new IT manager, part 1

Despite the almost laughable nature of the Scroogled campaign, Microsoft continues to push it. The company slams Gmail, but that is not enough. Jake Zborowski, senior product manager for Microsoft Office, releases not one, but two blog posts that attack Google Docs. Both are accompanied by ads — low resolution videos that view like someone pulled them from the cutting-room floor.

“Converting Office files into Google Apps is a gamble” Zborowski claims in one post. “Why take the gamble on converting your Office files to Google Docs when you can use Microsoft Office and the Microsoft Office Web Apps to create, share and edit your Office files with your content intact”, he explains. A new casino-themed ad accompanies the post and features B-list celebrities Rob Schneider and Pete Rose.

Rose tells viewers that Google Docs is too big a gamble even for him, while Schneider portrays what resembles a comedic used-car salesman, only transferred to the casino floor. Perhaps this is the only work these two can find these days?

In a second post Zborowski asks us to “see what happens to team productivity when you choose a productivity suite that has deficiencies”. This is followed by a second ad featuring a basketball game between Office and Google Docs. You can probably guess the outcome of this competition.

Neither video does a single thing to tell us what Office can do, but instead only focuses on the Google Docs attack. Microsoft serves little more than a political-style mud-slinging campaign. Perhaps if the company really is looking to convert users of the Google platform it may wish to focus on explaining what makes Office the better solution instead of concentrating its efforts on attacks and ad budget on has-been celebrities. Or do the A-list celebs all use Google Docs?

Worse, as my colleague Joe Wilcox pointed out this morning, Microsoft did not even produce the videos in HD, you get 360p with these little gems. What does that tell you?

I was weeding through my Steam friends list the other night, looking to remove some of the people that I never see online or playing games anymore. As I scrolled through, I noticed that there were several folks on my list that hadn’t signed on for one-hundred days or more. By default, Steam starts itself upon boot, with the option to automatically log yourself in as well.

It made me wonder why these people that I had played with every day or two hadn’t so much as even started up the program in such a long time. After all, I don’t just send or accept friend requests on a whim. I’ve only ever add people that I’ve played with a multitude of times and have spoken to directly via voice-chat or text in-game on a regular basis.

With my curiosity piqued, I started checking their profile pages to see if I could find some clues. Many of them were just the same as they were when I had added them as friends, with no useful information as to why they were MIA. One profile had a lone comment from another user simply asking: “Where’d you go, man?”

I wasn’t alone in this search. Finally, I came to the one person on my list that had been offline the longest. His profile always had quite a few random comments, but the most recent ones took me by surprise. They were from users that bore the same clan tag in their nicknames that he did, and they said things such as: “I miss playing with you” and “Rest in Peace, buddy”. Last Online: 266 days ago.

I had heard through mutual friends that something had happened with this particular fellow many months back, but information was vague at best. After all, we don’t usually delve into our personal lives while trying to stay alive and capture control points. I thought nothing of it at the time, really.

Then, just like that, I discover that this nameless person that I had talked to and played with countless evenings passed away nearly a year ago without a word. Someone I had spent hours upon hours laughing and having fun with was gone in an instant, and he wasn’t coming back.

I imagine the last thing that we said to each other over voice-chat was probably “good games, later fellas” or “I’m out, see you guys tomorrow”. I have no idea who he really was or even his real name, but I felt a sudden sadness wash over me while I sat there staring at his community profile page. Not like the generic empathy you feel when you see that some random person dies on the local news, but a sadness like losing a family member that you really enjoyed the company of, but didn’t get to see very often.

Some people probably think it’s silly considering someone you’ve never met in-person to be a best friend, and I think those people are missing out on something truly special. I’ve played in the same online community for several years now, on the same set of servers, and generally with the same group of people for the majority of that time.

I’ve added them to my Facebook, put a name and a face to their nicknames, and become good “real” friends with them. I consider everyone on my list a good friend, even if I don’t know their names, what they look like, or even what they do for a living.

Regardless, finding out about something bad happening to any of them is genuinely disheartening. The depth and intimacy that these online camaraderies can achieve over time is really something else.

In the end, I suppose that the point of my rambling here is to simply say that life is something that we take for granted sometimes. You or anyone you know, be they in-person or just online, can be here one second and then gone the next without a trace. It’s because of this that I tend to live every day like it might be my last, because who knows, maybe it will be. I try not to worry too much about the future, death, and whatever else; I just enjoy the ride.

Most of all, I look forward to seeing those little notifications that a friend has started playing a game to pop up on my desktop, because I greatly value any and all of the time I get to spend with them. And as for the fellow on my list that won’t be coming back online again? I’ll keep him on there. I’ll keep him on there forever, because even if he’s not around anymore, we’ll always be friends.

Photo Credit: Galyna Andrushko/Shutterstock

IT Specialist by day, devout gamer by night, Don Straight grew up with a Commodore 64 in one hand and an Atari 2600 joystick in the other and hasn’t let go of either one since. When not buried under piles of broken computers or attempting to climb the mountain of videogames in his backlog, he can be found under the hood of any ailing vehicle or cruising the countryside on his motorcycle. It’s a rough life, but someone has to do it.

Itching to get Cyanogenmod installed on your new HTC One? You won’t have to wait too much longer. According to a Google Plus post, Cyanogenmod’s GitHub site has repos set up for the One, and nightlies should begin building for the AT&T and Sprint version of the device “relatively soon.” They’ve updated the CM Wiki with pages for the HTC One to offer a little support and info for when the nightlies do begin building. We’ll be sure to let you know as soon as they’re available.

source: Google Plus

Come comment on this article: Cyanogenmod 10.1 nightlies slated to hit the HTC One relatively soon

Logon Screen Rotator is a simple application built specifically to help users change the original screen loaded by Windows when booting up.

This image is also displayed when locking the computer, so you don’t get to see it only when rebooting the system.

The application is free of charge and it does not require too much effort from the… (read more)

I know the following won’t change the outlook for most readers today – but I always feel like building leads to building. Zayo reports…

Zayo Group today announced the expansion of its Tier 1 internet protocol (IP) backbone in the Minneapolis market. With this expansion, Zayo can provide extended IP services in Minneapolis, now offering up to 10Gbps at both the company’s IP PoPs and at end customer locations. The upgraded network will deliver high quality, high capacity internet service to enterprise and wholesale customers. Zayo’s IP expansion leverages Minneapolis’ extensive metro fiber assets, consisting of more than 1,300 route miles and more than 615 on net buildings.

Unfortunately the flip side to the news is that this widens the gap between the served (often in metro areas) and the un- and underserved markets in rural areas.

Security and privacy are two huge issues with smartphones, and anything connected to the internet, really. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Google unveiled a five-year plan towards increased device security on Wednesday. This roadmap has Google breaking away from its traditional user sign-in process on devices, and instead replaces with an extremely secure, once-per-device-log-in. By replacing traditional passwords with complex authentication codes, a device can register itself with Google and keep the owner of an account from having to repeatedly sign in to their Google account multiple times.

Group product manager at Google, Eric Sachs, said it will definitely be more complex, but it will only be a once-per-device action. He said ”We don’t mind making it painful for users to sign into their device if they only have to do it once.” He goes on to say Google doesn’t mind making the process difficult on end users if it means better security long-term.

One of the first changes Google has outline will be the mandatory use of two-factor authentication for log-ins, which most sites only offer as an option. Small things like that are a bit of a headache at first, but there’s no arguing that they’re more secure. Besides, Google deals with a ton of private information every second,  so it’s great to see them take more steps towards keeping that information secure.

source: ZDNet

Come comment on this article: Google shows five-year roadmap towards stronger device authentication

Are you ready to pay for YouTube? Earlier this week, YouTube launched paid subscriptions in cooperation with a few select partners, resulting in a total of 53 subscription channels that can be accessed for as little as $0.99 per month. The move had been rumored for at least two years, and it’s just the beginning of a much more ambitious strategy that will eventually give every qualifying publisher a self-serve option to launch a channel subscription.

There may admittedly not be an easy answer to the above question, given the nature of YouTube’s subscription model. The site isn’t charging users for an all-access package, but isinstead turning individual channels into paid subscriptions. Some of them will likely fail, while others may well succeed. But you can learn some lessons from YouTube’s past to get a sense of how this paid future will play out.

To succeed on YouTube, you need to understand YouTube

It’s especially worth looking at YouTube’s other ambitious monetization plan — the site’s premium channels, which received sizeable advances from Google to produce higher-quality content in late 2011. YouTube’s initial lineup included a lot of A-list celebrities and big-name media brands. Madonna, Tony Hawk, Ashton Kutcher, Reuters and Lionsgate all were part of the initial lineup. They were joined by genuine YouTube-born celebrities like Phil DeFranco and Cenk Uygur, who launched new channels with additional content as part of the content push.

Guess who succeeded? Here’s a hint: DeFranco’s SourceFed channel clocked more than 345 million views to date. Reuters TV, on the other hand, only got 11 million views. Many of the outside media brands simply didn’t know how to talk to YouTube’s audience, and as a result failed to get enough traction on the platform. That’s why quite a few of them didn’t make the cut to get additional funding when YouTube renewed its commitment in November. Only 30 to 40 percent of the original channel lineup was part of a second round.

That’s a lesson that may be true for paid subscriptions on YouTube as well. Brands and personalities who already have a dedicated fan base on the platform will have little trouble asking them for $2 or $3 a month, provided that they come up with an interesting value proposition. Outside brands that want to use YouTube as an additional platform to sell their content may have a much harder time — which is why it was so surprising that the first slate of subscription channels largely consists of outsiders.

Sure, there’s a market for some of them. But in many cases, that market may not be on YouTube. A sales pitch like “discovering movies you’ve never heard of is part of the fun,” as used by the $5-a-month channel BigStar Movies, may just not fly with YouTube users when the site also hosts tons of movies we’ve never heard of for free.

People do pay for niche content, if it’s done right

The contrarian argument to this is that there is a proven market for niche content, and there’s no reason that this couldn’t extend to YouTube. In fact, the site already has a subscription success story: Long before YouTube announced its subscription plans, it started offering a subscription package for Indian cricket games in cooperation with Willow.tv.

It’s part of Willow’s online subscription service, which is available on a variety of platforms, with Google doing the billing for users subscribing on YouTube. And Willow.tv seems to be doing really well, because it delivers content unavailable elsewhere.

Other niche players have shown that people are willing to open their wallets as well: Two months ago, Crunchyroll announced that it now has 200,000 paying subscribers for its Anime-focused video service. There’s no reason this kind of content wouldn’t work on YouTube as well.

And people may not just want to pay because of scarcity: Sesame Street videos are widely available online, including on PBS Kids, Sesamestreet.org, YouTube, Netflix and Hulu. But especially on YouTube, it’s often just one click from a cute Elmo video to one of someone setting an Elmo doll on fire. Giving parents an option to access full-length-episodes, and keeping kids glued to the official Sesame Workshop channel, may get quite a few of them to pay a few bucks a month.

It’s not whether YouTube succeeds, but who about who succeeds on YouTube

In a way, if YouTube can succeed with its subscriptions seems almost to be the wrong question to ask. It’s more about who can succeed with subscriptions on YouTube – and I suspect that we are going to see many failures and quite a few success stories.

And if you ask me, my money is on Cenk and Elmo.

Image courtesy of Flickr user  sushi♥ina.

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Matt Farah and the guys from TUNED are back for another season of wild rides on Youtube’s DRIVE Network. For the season opener Matt ventures down to BBi Autosport to grab owner Joey Seely’s naturally aspirated 1985 Porsche 911 Carrera. With the lightest rotating assembly around, a wet-weight of just 2,100 lbs and 276 hp, this car promises to be one of the nastiest Porsche 911′s you’re ever likely to see.

Source: Youtube.com/DRIVE

Cameron Russell: Looks aren't everything. Believe me, I'm a model. Cameron Russell wants to have a discussion about the way that we, as a society, perceive beauty. Media representations of women, she says, are replete with racist and sexist representations, encouraging women to live up to a standard that is both oppressive and unattainable. Russell’s profession offers an insider’s perspective on the topic – after all, she has been modeling for over a decade.

Her candid talk from TEDxMidAtlantic led to this edition of TED Weekends on the Huffington Post. Below, find essays to start the discussion on our perceptions of beauty.

Cameron Russell: Beauty Is in the Lies of the Beholder

Women are not crazy for wanting to have a discussion about body image. And the conversation isn’t as superficial as the one Dove keeps encouraging us to have. It is a conversation about sexism and racism. It is a conversation about the real reason we try to shrink our waists and whiten our teeth (and sometimes even our skin). Most of the time we don’t do those things to make ourselves happy, we do them for someone else. I think we should start talking about that.

The easiest place to see discrimination is our incomes. Modeling is one of the few professions where women actually out-earn men. And across all jobs, studies have found that more attractive women earn more. A woman’s value is too often skin-deep. In 2004 a study found that resumes with very African-American-sounding names were 50 percent less likely to get called for an initial interview. And racial bias in salaries is overwhelming. While white women make an average of 78 cents for every man’s dollar, for African-American women that number drops to 62 cents, and for Hispanic women to 54 cents. Read the full essay

Donna Highfill: Beauty and Biblical Plagues

There is nothing like a biblical plague landing on your face to make you question the importance of physical appearance. I was 24 years old when I noticed a massive knot on my face that caused my left eye to close slightly. I was sure that something horrible had bitten me and was equally sure that some topical cream and an antibiotic would cure it. But when my normally personality-less dermatologist sat down beside me, put his hand on my arm and said, “You are so young and pretty. I am so sorry,” I knew I was wrong on both counts.

At the time the plague descended, I was a trainer for a mid-sized bank, which called for me to present in front of people on a regular basis. I was also getting married soon… that special time in a girl’s life when you prepare for that walk down the runway that church folks call an aisle.

Sparing the more vivid details of cystic acne, I will tell you that it is a cruel skin disease that can ravage the skin with huge, painful cysts. See? Biblical plague stuff. Fortunately, mine hit only one place on my body. Unfortunately, that place was my face. Read the full essay

It’s the week before the annual Google I/O developer event so predictions and expectations are in full force. April saw reports of an updated Nexus 7 tablet and now analysts are chiming in with similar predictions. KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo suggests that 1920 x 1080 isn’t a high enough resolution for a new Nexus 7: Look for 1920 x 1200 on the small slate.

I think it’s a very safe bet that we will see a refreshed Nexus and it will indeed have a high-resolution display. And I agree with Kuo that Google will likely move from an Nvidia Tegra 3 chip to a newer Qualcomm Snapdragon as well, although there’s an off-chance that Nvidia’s Tegra 4 is used. But I have two concerns.

One is the price. Today the Nexus 7 starts at an attractive $199 for the base Wi-Fi model. I can’t see Google pricing a base Nexus 7 with 1080p (or better) display at under $249. Between the screen, processor and (likely) additional RAM, a new Nexus 7 could even cost upwards of $299 to start. And that brings up my second concern: Apps.

If a newer Nexus 7 starts at $299, that price is very close to the iPad mini’s $329 cost. Yes, the Nexus would have the much better screen — at least for now — but iOS apps often offer a better experience because they’re specifically made for tablet screens. While there has been some progress with Android tablet apps, I still find many titles aren’t optimized for larger screens or higher-resolution displays. Regardless, I’m looking forward to seeing what Google announces next week in regards to Android tablets.

It’s possible that Google could also bring its Android @Home initiative back to the forefront. My colleague, Janko Roettgers shared some thoughts on the connected home platform Google announced two years ago: We really haven’t heard much since then, but Janko found information that points to official news:

“Android @Home is far from dead. Android enthusiasts recently found traces of Android @Home in the Android 4.2.2 update. And some casual searches on LinkedIn reveal that the company isn’t just maintaining the team, but actively hiring and adding people to the fold. There are industrial designers and software engineers “working on Android@Home cloud services,” managers who’ve been working on “Nexus Q and other fun things to come” and numerous other people listing Android@ Home as their current area of work. A bunch of them have actually been hired in 2013.”

We’ll find later next week if Janko is right. I also expect Google to finally introduce its “X Phone” initiative with Motorola.  A new handset sailed through FCC testing, notes PhoneScoop, that’s Motorola-branded and appears similar to leaked X Phone images from a few weeks ago on 9to5Google.

Little is known about the device or even if Motorola had the product in the pipeline prior to Google buying the company. If the phone does debut at Google I/O, I wouldn’t expect it to take the place of Google’s Nexus phone line. Instead, it would likely complement the Nexus, mainly because the Nexus devices are targeted at developers and heavy-duty enthusiasts.

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The dense cabling inside DC11, the new Equinix data center in Ashburn, Virginia, which opened this week. (Photo: Equinix)

For your weekend reading, here’s a recap of five noteworthy stories that appeared on Data Center Knowledge this past week.

Open Compute Will Begin Building Network Switches – In a move that will likely accelerate the shakeup in the networking sector, the Open Compute Project said this week that it will expand its “open source hardware” initiative to include network switches. The announcement is the largest step yet in extending the open source hardware movement to networking, a sector which has been dominated by a handful of large vendors offering routers and switches managed by proprietary software.

Twitter Plans Major Data Center Expansion – Twitter has begun a major expansion of its data center infrastructure, adding space on both coasts in anticipation of huge growth for the microblogging service. Industry sources say Twitter is leasing a huge chunk of additional space in Sacramento, where it will expand its presence at the RagingWire data center campus.

Equinix Unveils New ‘Crown Jewel’ for Ashburn Campus – Equinix keeps growing in northern Virginia, expanding the largest Internet exchange in North America with the largest facility yet on an already immense campus. The new DC11 facility will support growing network traffic in Ashburn, which shows no signs of slowing as the integral East Coast network hub.

Iron Mountain is Taking the Data Center Underground – After several years of quietly developing space in its massive underground facility in Pennsylvania, Iron Mountain is entering the data center business in a bigger way. The company has announced plans to build and lease data centers, offering both colocation services and wholesale suites to enterprise and government customers.

Telx CEO Eric Shepcaro Passes Away – Eric Shepcaro, the Chief Executive Officer of Telx, passed away Saturday after an illness. Shepcaro led the company through a period of tremendous growth, during which it became a national provider of interconnection and colocation services, with operations in major Internet gateways in markets around the U.S.

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Editor’s note: Derek Andersen is the founder of Startup Grind, a 40-city community bringing the global startup world together while educating, inspiring, and connecting entrepreneurs.

I remember when the press first hit about Nest Labs, the guys behind the iPod/iPhone were taking on thermostats everywhere! A collective “huh?” went through the tech industry. It felt like the tech version of the Avengers got together to build an office park, not save the world. After sitting down with Nest co-founder Matt Rogers at Google For Entrepreneurs‘ office a few weeks ago, I learned the backstory and vision of a company on a mission to build one of the world’s only great hardware/software companies in the world.

There are hard workers, there are really hard workers, and then there are the Matt Rogers of the world. If you think you work hard, please read/watch our entire interview then reevaluate. He had a quick start with his first Mac product interactions being at age three. As a child growing up in Gainesville Florida, when asked what he wanted to be someday, Matt would respond “I want to work at Apple.” At 16 he was building robots and entering them into competitions with his classmates. As a sophomore at Carnegie Mellon, he agreed to basically do anything (anything was help draw bones in CAD for a robotics hand project) to get a chance to work with with the robotics lab. His Junior year he applied via Monster.com, and pestered employees until he got accepted for an internship at Apple. That summer he took on the worst grunt work project imaginable (he rewrote all the software for manufacturing for iPod), and had three months for what he described as a “one year project.”  7-days a week, 20-hour days, and “basically not sleeping.” How did it pay off? As an intern Apple awarded him a cash bonus, what VP of iPod at the time and eventual Nest co-founder Tony Fadell said was something, “He had never done before.”

Apple

After school he returned to Apple and spent the next few years working on the firmware for iPod nano and iPod classic. After his first weekend back at Apple, and spending Saturday and Sunday getting moved in and buying furniture, his manager approached him saying, “Where have you been?” Matt responded, “I went to buy furniture.” He replied, “You should have been here.” He responded, “Oh. I didn’t even know!” Matt said that this, ”Set the pace for how iPod would be for the next five years.”

In December 2005, Matt and a small team started working on the first iPhone concepts in a project called “Purple.” At the time no one in the company knew what was going on, not even some of their own managers. They built the initial prototype in four months. It wasn’t good enough so they started again.  That second version was the one Steve Jobs would unveil on stage at MacWorld in January 2007. Four weeks previous to that, 25-members of the team went to China hand-building from scratch each of the first 200-devices to be shown at MacWorld. The team was divided into day shift and night shift to hit the deadlines, working through Christmas and returning after New Year’s Day.

The Founding of Nest

After shipping the iPhone, Matt led work on Nano, Shuffle, and parts of the iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV projects. By late 2009 he had hired 40-people and managed teams building these products, all in his mid-late twenties. That fall he had a two hour lunch with Tony Fadell, his former boss at Apple who had left in 2008. Matt told Tony he wanted to start a company. “What do you want to do?” Tony replied. “I want to build a smart home company.” Tony’s response? “You’re an idiot. No one wants to buy a smart home, they’re for geeks.” But it turned out Tony was already building a smart home in Tahoe, with solar panels, geothermal heat pumps, and more. Tony honed in and focused on a single idea. “Why don’t you just build me a thermostat?” Matt replied, “Why not? We could build an iPod?” Tony responded, “We’ll do it in six months.”

Tony and Matt have what appears to be the ideal co-founder relationship, stemming back from his early internship days at Apple. “We think very much alike, to the point where we complete each other’s sentences. I don’t know if I would be able to do it without him.”

But was this the idea to risk a promising future at Apple on? Matt had elevated from intern to Senior Manager in just a few short years. “The more we dug, the more we realized, this is a company we must go start. We could save 10% of energy, solve an epic problem, no innovation, multibillion dollar market. Why would we not do this?”

Matt quit his job in Spring 2010, rented a garage in Palo Alto, and started cranking in secret. Matt would visit with old colleagues and say “Hey will you quit your job? Will you come work (for free) with us on a new project I can’t tell you about?” The first ten hires worked for free for six months before finally raising money in October 2010. They bootstrapped with money from Tony and some from Matt. “We were all working basically severn days a week, twelve hours a day, it was crazy. Not everyone was living in the office – people have families, so they’d go home for dinner and then come back. It was craziness.” Everyone worked on Thanksgiving only taking a few hours off. Matt claims no one got divorced over the extreme conditions adding that “all the wives are happy now.”

Still no one knew that Tony was even involved. “In the early days when we were fully stealth. “We had no website, no LinkedIn, we had nothing. Zero outbound communication. I wouldn’t even tell people that (Tony was involved). For all they knew, I was the only founder. To get people in the door the first time meant I did a lot of lunches, a lot of coffees to get people excited. I wouldn’t tell people on the first date – I’d show a little leg, but I wouldn’t go all the way.”

So here is Nest, in stealth, building an incredibly difficult hardware/software product, with limited funding, but still managing to assemble a killer engineering team, in the midst of a talent war with Facebook, LinkedIn, Groupon, and Twitter exploding all around. “It was a mixture of my old team at Apple, my old professor from CMU and a few folks from Tony’s early days at General Magic twenty years earlier. One guy was a VP at Twitter, one was running Microsoft User Experience. Unlike most startup teams the average age of our team was about 40. I think I was the youngest.”

A year after raising a Series A from Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, Lightspeed, Shasta, and others, they shipped their first product. This spring Nest was widely rumored to have raised $80MM at an $800MM valuation and shipping 50,000 thermostats each month. This company that was in a garage in 2010 is now +200 employees, and selling products in Lowe’s, Apple Stores, Best Buy, and about half their inventory is sold online. The company is not without controversy, having been sued by Honeywell for patient infringement, and as one friend in the home automation industry recently told me, “Everyone is watching Nest.” They also recently acquired venture backed energy dashboard MyEnergy.

Building HARD-ware

Nest launched their first product a year after raising Series A, 18-months after their inception, with 75-employees and having spent $10MM. “That’s with a team of extremely senior guys who have all done this a dozen times before. The difference between doing it a dozen times before at Apple, Samsung or Google and doing it on your own, is that there’s no backup. At Apple we worked on the project for a year, got it ready and hand it over to the operations team to go scale and shoot to the moon with. We all had roles we played at previous companies and that all went out the window at Startup Land. You have an HR hat, facilities hat, janitor hat, doesn’t matter, you have do it.”

Is it any surprise that there are so few hardware startups the Valley? Or that most entrepreneurs choose an app or a website over a hardware device? Entrepreneurship is hard enough not to have to layer in these complications. Matt adds, “I don’t believe I could build Nest if Tony and I didn’t have all that experience at Apple. It’s really hard to pull off fully integrated consumer electronic devices. It’s also really expensive to build a consumer electronic product. You have to build prototypes but you have to build tools. You have to get a manufacturing line set up. You have to front inventory costs. It’s crazy expensive.”

When our interview finished a few weeks ago, I walked Matt out to his car. It was 9pm, and he was cheerfully headed back to work for yet another late night at Nest. After hearing about the culture and work ethic at Nest, his attitude simply reminded me of how he described working a holiday a few years previously. ”That’s what it takes,” he casually said. And if you really want to change the world I couldn’t agree more.

President Obama discusses the housing market, and urges Congress to confirm Mel Watt to lead the Federal Housing Finance Agency and take action to give every responsible homeowner the chance to refinance and save money on their mortgage.

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