Honestly, this song is catchy as hell. The kid looks like a bit of a tool singing at the Apple Store on 5th Ave in NYC, but he isn't the only vlogger to use the store as a recording studio.
The "one-and-only" source for news and future reading for technology.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Microsoft opening café in Paris to build excitement for Windows 7
You know what the French love? Cafés. They love them so much, apparently, that Microsoft has decided to open one in the heart of Paris to drum up excitement about Windows 7. The Windows café will serve coffee and pastries (it is a café, after all), and will also have Microsoft products -- such as the Xbox -- on hand for customers to play with, but it won't actually sell any Microsoft wares. The shop, which is currently being built at 47 Boulevard Sebastopol, will be open from October 22nd onward, so if you're in the area you should check it out before it's gone for good -- we hear it'll only be there for a few short weeks. Finally, a reason to go to Paris!
Rumor: New, Thinner iMacs Rolling Off Factory Lines, Maybe With Blu-ray and Mystery Features
New iMacs aren't just coming soon, they've been rolling out for two weeks,according to AppleInsider. They're thinner and look more like the LED Cinema Display, with mystery features that make them the "most versatile ever."
One of those features might be Blu-ray (uh, finally), and another might something "related to audio." AppleInsider says they'll be extending the "capabilities of at least one technology introduced on the Mac platform as recently as last fall," which to us means either an LED display, or the unibody build. (Or hey, maybe it's a super Mini DisplayPort.)
Whatever's new, we wouldn't be surprised for the new iMacs to follow the overall Apple trend of packing in more features for less money than before, like the recent MacBook Pro revisions. Supposedly, the announcement will come any time between next week and mid-October, depending on when marketing feels like it.
Courier: First Details of Microsoft's Secret Tablet
It feels like the whole world is holding its breath for the Apple tablet. But maybe we've all been dreaming about the wrong device. This is Courier, Microsoft's astonishing take on the tablet.
Courier is a real device, and we've heard that it's in the "late prototype" stage of development. It's not a tablet, it's a booklet. The dual 7-inch (or so) screens are multitouch, and designed for writing, flicking and drawing with a stylus, in addition to fingers. They're connected by a hinge that holds a single iPhone-esque home button. Statuses, like wireless signal and battery life, are displayed along the rim of one of the screens. On the back cover is a camera, and it might charge through an inductive pad, like the Palm Touchstone charging dock for Pre.
Until recently, it was a skunkworks project deep inside Microsoft, only known to the few engineers and executives working on it—Microsoft's brightest, like Entertainment & Devices tech chief and user-experience wizard J. Allard, who's spearheading the project. Currently, Courier appears to be at a stage where Microsoft is developing the user experience and showing design concepts to outside agencies.
Microsoft has a history of collaborating with other firms, especially in the E&D division: Zune and Xbox have both gone through similar design processes. (And plans for the Microsoft Store leaked through a third-party agency were confirmed as genuine prototype layouts and concepts.) This video is branded Pioneer Studios, a Microsoft division within E&D that specializes in this kind of work, working with another agency that's a long-time Microsoft collaborator on confidential projects.
The Courier user experience presented here is almost the exact opposite of what everyone expects the Apple tablet to be, a kung fu eagle claw to Apple's tiger style. It's complex: Two screens, a mashup of a pen-dominated interface with several types of multitouch finger gestures, and multiple graphically complex themes, modes and applications. (Our favorite UI bit? The hinge doubles as a "pocket" to hold items you want move from one page to another.) Microsoft's tablet heritage is digital ink-oriented, and this interface, while unlike anything we've seen before, clearly draws from that, its work with the Surface touch computer and even the Zune HD.
The Pink Phone Pictures Microsoft Doesn't Want You To See Yet
Project Pink is Microsoft's secret new phone, their first major phone play since the iPhone. Here are the first pictures of Pink phones, Turtle and Pure.
These phones are going to be made by Sharp, who'll get to share branding with Microsoft. Sharp produced the Sidekick hardware for Danger, who was bought by Microsoft two years ago. Pink will be primarily aimed at the same market as the Sidekick, and the branding and identity for it is highly developed, pointing toward a later stage in the development cycle.
The prior relationship between Danger and Sharp is the only reason we can think of why Microsoft stuck with Sharp for the new phones, and perhaps why they look so much like remixed Sidekicks. The youth bent is somewhat surprising, if Pink is going to be their big consumer phone play, building off the expertise of Danger and members of the Zune team.
The hardware design has a definite younger feeling: Turtle looks like a chunky child's version of a Palm Pre, while Pure seems like a standard slider, and both are clearly plastic, with an overall sense of roundedness, thanks to lots of soft angles and circular keys.
It's been reported elsewhere that Pink phones will include Zune services, and haveits own app store, making it as close to the Zune phone as we may get. We'll see if it's close enough in the coming months, though these are the only facts our source will let us safely publish for now.
Monday, September 21, 2009
ARM attacks Atom with 2GHz A9; can servers be far behind?
Intel hasn't been shy about its plans to challenge ARM in the low-power embedded space, and the world's largest chipmaker is gearing up for the debut of the 32nm process that will enable it to reach new levels of x86 power efficiency. But ARM isn't sitting still, and the British IP company took a major step last week in bringing the fight back to Intel by boosting its Cortex A9 processor up into Atom territory. One of the engineers behind Amazon Web Services is even eyeing the part as potential datacenter web server material.
On Wednesday, ARM announced the availability of IP for a 2GHz dual-core A9 processor on TSMC's 40nm process, which the company claims will offer massively more performance than Atom within a smaller power envelope. You'll recall that Cortex A9 is an out-of-order processor, so, unlike the in-order Atom, the A9 should have much better performance per clock on standard integer code. So while some of ARM's claims about the performance delta between its 2GHz A9 and Atom may be overblown, the part at 40nm should therefore be more than competitive with a 32nm Atom in performance per watt.
Unfortunately for ARM's netbook ambitions, Linux is the only netbook OS that matters that runs on ARM, and the jury's still out on whether it can really take on Windows 7. As for Windows on ARM, it just ain't gonna happen, ever. (Same for Mac OS X on ARM... and please read that previous link before writing in to inform me that the ARM-based iPhone runs Mac OS X, or that WinMo runs on ARM.) Given that even the most insanely power-efficient, Atom-smashing 2GHz ARM netbook product is going to be relegated to whatever netbook niche Linux can carve out for it, it's worth asking what sort of future there is for such a high-powered ARM part.
One idea would be servers, believe it or not.
An ARM-based web server
The idea of building cheap but capable web servers from ARM parts has been enthusiastically floated by James Hamilton, a Vice President and Distinguished Engineer on the Amazon Web Services team. In a postearlier this month, Hamilton enthused about the idea of using a multicore, cache-coherent ARM SoC to do low-cost, power-efficient web hosting.
"The ARM is a clear win on work done per dollar and work done per joule for some workloads," Hamilton concludes. "If a 4-core, cache coherent version was available with a reasonable memory controller, we would have a very nice server processor with record breaking power consumption numbers."
Clearly, Wednesday's 2GHz A9 announcement was right up his alley, so he followed up with a post on the part suggesting that it may be what he's looking for. The post features a nice benchmark graph that he got from ARM, showing the 2GHz A9 doubling the performance of a 1.6GHz Atom N270 at EEMBC Coremark.
Those numbers are impressive, but before we talk performance, let's talk price.
Physicalization and Intel's margins
What Hamilton is essentially endorsing is "physicalization," an approach to server design that packs multiple, cheap, low-power systems into a single rack space. The name is a play on "virtualization," because instead of having one large, expensive system running multiple virtual machines, you use a fistful of small, cheap physical machines. The end effect of both is multiple OS instances packed into one rack space.
If you're thinking that physicalization is an odd use of Moore's Law, you're right. The only thing that makes the technique feasible from a performance per dollar perspective is the fact that Intel charges a fat premium for its higher-end server chips. Avoiding that premium is the sole reason that anyone would even consider using board-level integration (i.e., multiple chips and physicalization) instead of die-level integration (i.e., one Xeon and multiple VMs).
But given Intel's markup, and given a robust ARM ecosystem that keeps ARM prices relatively low, physicalization with something like a 2GHz A9 could well deliver more Linux OS instances per dollar than a regular Xeon-based server.
For performance and performance/watt, there's more than just the core
If we grant Hamilton that ARM may turn out to be a cheaper way to pack OS instances of acceptable performance into a datacenter (at least until Intel lowers prices in response), it still doesn't necessarily follow (contra comments I see at Hamilton's blog and elsewhere) that ARM could just pack four or eight A9 cores onto a die, crank up the clockspeed, and slay Intel's Nehalem or AMD's Shanghai in performance/watt at a given absolute performance level. This is because performance/watt numbers are much higher for low-performance processors than they are for high-performance processors (GPUs excepted).
David Kanter at RealWorldTech has recently posted a great article comparing a number of CPUs and GPUs in performance/watt and performance/mm2 (die area). Atom is literally off the charts in performance/watt, besting Nehalem by some 3X. This isn't because Intel sprinkles magical performance/watt pixie dust on Atom—it's because high performance/watt ratios for individual chips are much easier to achieve at Atom-scale than at Xeon-scale, owing to the much larger amount of system-related complexity and overhead that goes with the Xeon's much higher level of integration and performance. As is the case with everything from dinosaurs to automobiles, it just costs more to be bigger and badder, and one of those costs is net energy efficiency.
It's also the case that for raw performance, interconnects and system architecture issues matter a great deal, and they matter more the more cores and other types of resources (like high-bandwidth I/O interfaces) you try to cram onto one die. The minute you put four or eight of any kind of core onto a single die and try to wire it all together with the best cache hierarchy and the optimal mix of I/O and memory bandwidth, then all of the sudden you're trying to solve a much harder problem than you are with a simple dual- or quad-core embedded chip. You're also playing a high-stakes game where one or design mistakes could blow the whole configuration, and you're playing it on Intel's and AMD's home turf.
In the end, the era of cache-coherent multicore is fundamentally different than the single-core era that preceded it, because in that earlier, simpler era core-specific factors like microarchitecture and clockspeed were all that mattered. But nowadays, system design and microarchitecture relate to midrange and high-end multicore processor performance somewhat like oxygen and fuel relate to a flame's heat output—you need both of these elements tuned to give the desired result.
My ultimate point is that any four-core ARM desktop or server processor that shoots at a similar absolute performance target as a four-core Nehalem processor will either look pretty much like a four-core Nehalem, or it won't hit the target. It will also have relatively similar performance/watt characteristics, and will end up competing with Intel and AMD on fab muscle.
[Via ArsTechnica]
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Galactic Truth Surfaces as President Obama Finally Reveals Himself as Jedi Master
Today is a Great Day in America's history: President Obama has revealed himself as a Jedi Master, playing with a lightsaber while making sounds like *swisssssh* and *swoooosh* with his mouth. The Star Wars Kid has been vindicated, at last.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Apple tablet rumors strike back: 9.6-inch with HSDPA and P.A. Semi processor coming February 2010?
[Via TabletAge; thanks, Philip]
Friday, September 11, 2009
Gizmodo's iPod Nano 5G Review
The newest iPod Nano is incontrovertibly a step up from last year's model, crammed with new features including a video camera. But can the Nano stay the same cool little player while simultaneously invading the Flip-cam market?
This new Nano—the 5th generation—comes in the same 8GB/16GB sizes as the last one (and the one before that, actually), though it costs more. You'll pay $150 and $180 respectively, up from $130 and $150. But at least the $20-to-$30 bump can be traced to actual additional benefits.
Body
The new Nano has the same body as the 4th generation, but there are definite changes afoot. The screen takes a bump from 2 inches to 2.2 inches—a jump that may sound tiny but is surprisingly substantial. If you're used to the old 2-inch screen you'll definitely notice and appreciate the extra space for navigation. The resolution goes from 240x320 to the oddball 240x376. Though wider when viewed lengthwise, the new screen still isn't 16x9; even widescreen videos will be slightly letterboxed due to the unconventional size. Aside from the added real estate, it's also noticeably brighter and sharper than the previous model. It may still be too small to watch a two-hour movie on, but it's a pleasure to use for everything else, including shorter video clips.
Unfortunately, that larger screen comes with a caveat: The click wheel is even smaller than earlier Nanos. If you found the previous Nano's click wheel slightly thinner and harder to hit than you prefer, this will be even worse. If you had no problems before, then the slight decrease in size shouldn't affect you much. I personally found it too small, and my thumb sometimes hit the area around the controls instead of the control itself. This is especially true when the Nano is docked.
The paint job is also a little different, with a much shinier and brighter appearance than the previous generation's comparatively subdued matte finish. Oddly enough, it actually feels slightly lighter than the last model, though no less solid—this is an extremely durable player. It doesn't bend under pressure from any angle and a nerve-wracking fall onto a hardwood floor had no adverse effects. However, I found that sharp metal objects like keys will leave scratches, while the previous matte Nano showed no scratches under similar abuse.
Features
Did I mention Apple crammed a bunch of new features into the iPod Nano 5G? And that the most notable—and most thoroughly leaked—is a video camera? Here's the rundown:
Video Camera
The big selling point of this Nano is that the video camera theoretically puts it in a position to compete with the Flip, Creative's ">Vado, and Kodak's Zi6 and Zi8. Steve Jobs said so himself. But is it true? Well, yes—and no.
Like the Flip-class cameras, there's no optical zoom, and it can't take still shots (very few of these new camcorders can). Also, there's no on-device editing, just the option to delete what you shot. It too has video output, but only if you buy the right cable.
But the Nano is limited to VGA resolution—640x480—far less than that of current HD pocket cams which hover in the same sub-$180 price range. Casual videos meant for YouTube may not need more than VGA, and Apple sort of makes up for it by adding creative video filters, similar to those found in iChat and Photo Booth. These aren't just for fun, they tend to cover up the limitations of the video itself. On the other hand, if you're shooting your baby's first steps, or anything meaningful, no matter how short, you might end up regretting that you didn't shoot in HD.
That being said, it's a remarkably high-quality camera, as good as standard-def pocket cams like the Flip Mino (which I used in the comparisons below).
When you hold the Nano, you discover that the lens is placed in an awkward location—the lower right corner of the device's back. You can rotate it and the accelerometer will adjust, so it can actually be held in any way you choose, but the natural motion is to turn it 90 degrees counterclockwise (so the screen is on the left and the click wheel on the right), which leaves your fingers right in the lens's way. You get used to it, though. It's annoying but not a dealbreaker.
In video-camera mode, you can bring up those creative filters—cyborg, security camera, film grain, tunnel vision and more—by holding down the center button. They fit right in with the idea of the Nano as a quick-and-dirty camcorder: You wouldn't want your serious short film to have a red, pulsing cyborg filter, but it's really fun for 30-second clips. Speaking of which, the only limit on video length seems to be the remaining memory in the Nano itself.
Here are a couple comparison clips. This first is low-light, notoriously difficult for any budget camcorder to capture.
The Flip is far better here: You can actually make out the features of my kitchen with some certainty, and while it's blurry it's still watchable.
The Nano's low-light video is pretty much pitch black until I hit a patch of light, and it's extremely jerky. I should add that the kitchen wasn't really that dark, but it looks like that tiny sensor is just no good for situations with less light.
This pair of clips is to demonstrate macro. The Nano is actually a little better than the Flip here, with a sharper closeup picture, although color reproduction is a little more accurate on the Flip. Still, closeup shots are difficult and I'm really impressed with the Nano's clarity here. Here's the Flip
And here's the Nano.
This last series is what most people will likely use the Nano's camera for: Shooting with a decent amount of light, natural or artificial. It's not quite as good here as the Flip—notice the tearing in the video as I pan, and again, color reproduction is a little darker and muddier than the actual object. But given that the Nano's camera is a tiny little lens crammed into an already-tiny music and video player that you may be intent on buying anyway, I'm really pleased and a little surprised at how well it performs.
This is the Flip:
And this is the Nano:
The microphone does a pretty good job at picking up sound. Speech is totally audible and it's sensitive enough to pick up a fairly quiet conversation 10 feet away. Wind shear can get really noisy, unfortunately, but unless it's incredibly windy it shouldn't be much of a problem.
So is the Nano better than a standard-def Flip? No, it's not: Besides poor low-light performance, the straight video quality is slightly inferior and there are no features like digital zoom (which some people like). This is a PMP with a camera, not a camera that plays music. But should Flip be worried? Absolutely. If you have a Flip already, you may not be swayed to purchase the Nano because of its video, but if you buy the Nano, you don't really need a Flip—and Apple's going to sell boatloads of these Nanos for reasons other than video camera anyway. Speaking of which...
FM Radio
Defiantly coming dead last to the FM radio party, Apple finally bestowed an iPod with a real FM radio, not some costly optional accessory. Why did Apple cave? Every single other mp3 player since about 2001 has had this. Your guess is as good as mine. The addition was announced without fanfare or explanation at the Nano's unveiling, and the tuner itself doesn't bring any new features like HD Radio, but it does come in with a suite of features proving, at least, that this wasn't an afterthought.
The radio gets excellent reception, though you have to use your headphones—not just Apple's white earbuds; I used my Shures—as the antenna. There's support for RDS data (station name and song title). That song title data can be used to tag favorite songs so that you can, well, buy them later on iTunes. The coolest radio feature is "Live Pause." You can pause a program for up to 15 minutes, and it caches it to memory. It's really nice addition, and you can even fast forward through the cached content, though you can't truly record and save radio. (That would mean instant RIAA lawsuit.)
Built-In Speaker
That's right, there's a teeny little speaker on the bottom of the new Nano. It's not particularly loud or high quality, but it's damn impressive that Apple could cram it into such a thin player. It's definitely audible in quiet rooms, although you'd probably want to use it for spoken word or video rather than music, as songs tend to get washed out and distorted. Still, I have a feeling I'll take advantage of the speaker even more than the video camera—there was one on the Samsung P3 and it proved extremely useful for those times when you want to share a quick video, or don't feel like plugging in earbuds.
Pedometer
It works, mostly, though it's not a substitute for Nike+. I tested five sets of exactly ten steps, and it registered the correct amount twice, but it also registered nine steps twice and thirteen steps once. It'll probably even out for longer walks, but you will never get perfect accuracy. It's still kind of fun, though: Turns out my nearest coffee shop is only 278 steps away from my bedroom, and I burned 14 calories getting there.
Voice Recorder
Using the built-in mic, you can record little voice memos. Sound quality is okay, but very limited by distance. I tested from different distances and found that while about one foot away from the mic, talking at a normal conversational volume (as in an interview or quick voice memo situation), sound quality was very audible and clear. From five feet back at the same volume, it was still clear but soft enough that the volume had to be upped quite a bit. From ten feet back it was still clear but only after I plugged it into my stereo and cranked the volume. When recording very loud music from a bit of a distance (sorry, neighbors!), the volume was fine but the recording came out way too distorted to be worth listening to. It looks like the recorder would be a good tool for memos or lectures, but forget about recording concerts with the Nano.
The Verdict
The iPod Nano is the best-selling mp3 player of all time, and this new model should keep that record alive. It's still an incredibly small and thin player with intuitive navigation and popular software, priced competitively. The new features are really nice—the video camera is good in a pinch, enough to supplant standard-def pocket cams—and the bigger, brighter screen makes navigating through the added options.
The video camera is a major feature addition, but this Nano is still an incremental upgrade. Apple hasn't changed the capacity or price in years—does it really not make sense to release a 32GB version? The 8GB version, only $30 cheaper than the 16GB, seems undesirable and outdated. But at this point what else could Apple add to the Nano? I'm just surprised everything they have added actually fits.
The iPod Touch and other full-featured touchscreen players like the Zune HD and Sony X-Series are the big attention-grabbers these days, and the Nano will surely be left behind as dedicated media players yield to convergence. The steady price and capacity of the Nano and the dropping price and skyrocketing capacity and functionality of the Touch signals the sea change better than anything: Soon the Touch will be top seller, and the Nano will slip into being a niche product for people who really prefer small form factors. There is much speculation that the Nano got the video camera—and the Touch did not—in order to slow this inevitable decline.
So the big question: Should you buy the Nano? Yes, if you want an easy-to-use, slick, full-featured and small PMP. Especially yes if you're also considering a cheap pocket camcorder. If you've got last year's Nano and you have an interest in decent video quality, better to spend the money on a Kodak Zi8 (or the newly discounted Zi6). Or just wait for the iPod Touch to get a camera—now that's an upgrade. The camera alone isn't worth $150 or $180 if you've already got every other feature—maybe that's the reason Jobs himself said it was "free."
Retains stylish and durable form factor, with bigger and better screen
Camera is surprisingly good and really fun
Price is very tempting considering camera addition
Design, battery life and UI are unchanged, but still good
Capped at 16GB capacity
[Via Gizmodo]
Thursday, September 10, 2009
NASA Creates Anti-Gravity Field, Makes Lab Rats Levitate
NASA scientists have created an anti-gravity field that works at room temperature, which is a big Where's My Back to the Future Skateboard breakthrough. The only problem is that it only works on mice. Mice high as kites, in fact.
Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have created a superconducting magnet that generates enough energy to lift small animals off the floor. The magnet pushes the water inside the animals up, making them fly. The amazing fact is that it works at room temperature—not the ultra-cooled down environments typical of these magnets—and it's large enough to make rodents to levitate.
The mice were high in more than one way, though. According to researcher Yuanming Liu, the "first mouse actually kicked around and started to spin, and without friction, it could spin faster and faster, and we think that made it even more disoriented." So they gave a mild sedative to the next mouse, who was happy to float.
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