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McGraw-Hill CEO Confirms Apple Tablet With iPhone-Style OS
McGraw-Hill CEO Spills Details On iPhone OS-Based Apple Tablet
Will The Tablet Finally Be Steve Jobs' "Computer For the Rest of Us"
Browser Speed Tests: Firefox 3.6, Chrome 4, Opera 10.5, and Extensions
Best Email Client: Gmail
The All-in-One Bedroom Office
Raising A Stink Over Ink - Inkjet Ink That Is
ExpressCard SSD in MacBook Pro
Unsanity Plans to Bring Haxies, APE to Snow Leopard
Record Mac Sales Culminate Five Years of Growth
What Would Life Be Like Without Windows?
Apple Tablet Wins Open Source Appceleration
Apple's Tablet Won't Save Big Dumb Media
Jon Stewart Fans the Flames of the Apple/Microsoft War by Provoking Bill Gates
LED to Surpass CCFL in Large-Area TFT LCD Backlights in 2011
McGraw-Hill CEO Confirms Apple Tablet With iPhone-Style OS
Gizmodo reports:
Well, this had to happen eventually: someone from an Apple tablet partner - McGraw-Hill's Harold McGraw III - has confirmed the tablet's coming tomorrow, that it'll run an iPhone-style OS, that it's "terrific", and that he'll probably never work with Apple again.
For the full report visit here:
http://gizmodo.com/5457588/
McGraw-Hill CEO Spills Details On iPhone OS-Based Apple Tablet
AppleInsider Staff reports:
Appearing on financial network CNBC Tuesday afternoon, the CEO of publisher McGraw-Hill confirmed that Apple will announce its tablet Wednesday, and that the device will run the iPhone mobile operating system.
For the full report visit here:
http://tinyurl.com/yd38br2
Will The Tablet Finally Be Steve Jobs' "Computer For the Rest of Us"
Cult of Mac's Leander Kahney comments on Farhad Manjoo's Slate piece explaining why he hopes Apple's tablet will be like a toaster.
Farhad is of a virtually 180° opposite philosophy to that of your humble editor in hoping, (presumably now rejoicing) that the tablet will have an iPhone-like operating system offering a restricted, locked down, computing experience like the iPhone, eliminating all the complexity of using and maintaining a traditional personal computer.
Different strokes, I guess.
Kahney thinks Farhad has highlighted the most important feature of the tablet, that it won't be designed for nerds, as traditional PCs and even Macs are, but rather for ordinary consumers with no interest whatsoever in learning how to use a computer.
Fair enough, but even "ordinary consumers" from time to tome will want to do some actual productivity-related work on their machines. Will the tablet be up to the task?
Kahney notes that Steve Jobs' ambition dating back to Apple // days was always to make computers computers "for the rest of us," and the table could be the realization of that vision.
For the full commentary visit here:
http://tinyurl.com/yer3xjy
Browser Speed Tests: Firefox 3.6, Chrome 4, Opera 10.5, and Extensions
Lifehacker reports:
Firefox 3.6 is out, Chrome's stable version got a big upgrade, and Opera 10.5 is inching toward release. It's a great time for us to break out the timer, process manager, and code tracker for some up-to-date browser speed tests.
Lifehacker added some interesting nuances to this comparo, notable timing the human experience of clicking to start a browser and waiting for it to reach a (locally saved) home page, both "cold" (right after boot-up) and "warm" (after running at least once already), and having it load nine tabs at once, using a millisecond, keyboard-activated timer app from Rob Keir.
Categories tested include:
Boot-up and warm loading; Winner: Opera 10.01 and 10.5 Pre-Alpha
Tab Loading; Winner: Chrome
JavaScript; Winner: Opera 10.5 Pre-Alpha
DOM/CSS; Winner: Chrome
Memory use, no extensions; Winner: Firefox 3.6
Memory use with extensions; Winner: Firefox 3.6
Overall, Chrome and Opera 10.5 Pre-Alpha tied for winner of the speedstakes, which confirms your editor's gut impressions using those browsers, with Safari and Opera 10.01 bringing up the rear.
Note that these were Windows versons of the browsers, and Mac OS X results might have been somewht different.
For the full report visit here:
http://tinyurl.com/y98rhdm
Best Email Client: Gmail
Also from Lifehacker, that asked readers to share their picks of favorite email client, and Gmail cleaned up taking nearly 50% of the vote -- the only web-based client that garnered enough vote to be included. Distant runner-up was Thunderbird (19%), followed by Microsoft's client Outlook (15%), Apple Mail (11%) and Postbox (1%).
Also very interesting, and pretty much mirroring my own use, although I alternate between Thunderbird and its Eudora 8 beta clone, which can be done seamlessly since they both use the same support, settings and archives files.
It also looks like plenty of Mac users like OS X Mail a whole lot better than your editor does.
For the full report visit here:
http://lifehacker.com/5457495/best-email-client-gmail
The All-in-One Bedroom Office
Still with Lifehacker, finessing a computer workstation in constrained space without creating chaotic messiness (you should see my office; no -- scratch that!) is no mean feat, but the author of this article, "Stingray072," has achieved that objective masterfully, and on a college budget, living in a small, single-room New York City apartment with various spaces carefully laid out for sleeping, relaxing, studying and working, and storing all his stuff. He's done and amazing job, making it aesthetically pleasing as well as comfortable and practical, and also managed to keep all those cables pretty much out of sight.
You can check it out at:
http://lifehacker.com/5457470/the-all+in+one-bedroom-office
Raising A Stink Over Ink - Inkjet Ink That Is
McClatchy Newspapers' Steve Everly observes that the cost of ink for your computer's printer can rival the cost of caviar and you can't even price-shop accurately because thecompanies that make the cartridges refuse to tell you how much ink they contain, but that consumer advocates have been agitating for more disclosure of information, setting up a showdown between regulators and cartridge manufacturers over how the cartridges are labeled.
Let's hear it for the consumer advocates. Inkjet cartridges are probably the biggest ripoff in the IT sector, although I've found a third-party supplier of reasonably-priced replacement cartridges for my Canon printer from whom I've received excellent service and meriting a plug:
http://www.blankdvdmedia.com/
For the full report visit here:
http://www.kentucky.com/101/story/1109970.html
ExpressCard SSD in MacBook Pro
LogicalVue's Paul Lefebvre says he's always looking for ways to get more speed out of his MacBook Pro, and recently installed a FileMate SolidGo 48GB ExpressCard Ultra SSD from TigerDirect ($140) although unfortunately, it appears that TigerDirect is now out of stock.
Anyway, Paul says he's very pleased with the SolidGo's performance, which he describes as "amazingly fast," with apps starting in just one bounce, the system booting incredibly fast and overall everything just seeming "snappier," but the case does feel a lot hotter.
Paul contends that SSDs are the future of storage and if you have a MacBook Pro with an ExpressCard slot, getting an ExpressCard SSD is a low-cost way to get in on the fun -- a lot easier than installing an expensive 2.5 SSD as a replacement for the internal hard drive.
You can check it out at:
http://www.logicalvue.com/blog/2010/01/expresscard-ssd-in-macbook-pro/
Unsanity Plans to Bring Haxies, APE to Snow Leopard
Macworld.com's Nicholas Bonsack reports:
Hey, remember Unsanity? That developer became famous - perhaps even infamous - for introducing haxies, software that injected code into other Mac OS X apps through Unsanity's own Application Enhancer, also known as APE, plus neat little tweaks like WindowShade X (which your editor simply can't abide living without) and another that completely reskins OS X's Aqua user interface from top to bottom, however Apple is not amused and announced that it will ignore every crash log submitted on a Mac with Application Enhancer installed.
Note also that haxies simply do not work at all in Snow Leopard, which has left haxie lovers, [including this writer, Ed.], stuck using earlier versions of Mac OS X until Unsanity figures out a new way to inject code into its haxies, but Unsanity has now announced that it has plans to port specific haxies to Snow Leopard and take advantage of new technologies like Core Animation, at the expense of backward compatibility with Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5.
For the full report visit here:
http://tinyurl.com/ya4tcx9
Record Mac Sales Culminate Five Years of Growth
Low End Mac's Dan Knight says:
Apple did it again, announcing record sales and profits for the holiday quarter, and Apple is on track to become a $50 billion company in 2010.
As others have already noted, the largest portion of Apple's income comes from Macintosh computer sales, not iPods or iPhones. It's interesting to look at how Macintosh sales have grown over the past dozen years.
You can check it out at:
http://lowendmac.com/musings/10mm/record-mac-sales.html
What Would Life Be Like Without Windows?
InfoWorld's Randall C. Kennedy says that to listen to the free open source software crowd, the demise of Windows - and by extension, Microsoft's hegemony over the PC universe - would signal a kind of rebirth for information technology. Software would finally be free of the corporate shackles that have stifled innovation and dragged down the best and brightest among us.
Such thinking is naïve, at best, Kennedy opines. Rather than freeing IT, the demise of Microsoft would plunge the industry into an apocalyptic tailspin of biblical proportions, causing today's computing landscape to tear itself apart at the seams, with application and device compatibility and interoperability devolving into a kind of Wild West chaos...
For more information, visit:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/187703/what_would_life_be_like_without_windows.html
Apple Tablet Wins Open Source Appceleration
The Register's Cade Metz reports:
Appcelerator - the Silicon Valley outfit whose open source Titanium platform lets you build desktop and mobile apps with web-happy development tools - has announced that the platform will soon generate native runtimes for "the new Apple tablet."
For more information, visit:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/26/appcelerator_titanium_embraces_apple_tablet/
Apple's Tablet Won't Save Big Dumb Media
The Register's Andrew Orlowski says:
It's the most interesting thing about any new Apple device: the childish and idiotic inflated expectations that precede it. But you'll have noticed that even by the standards of idiocy set by Big Media, the professionals have excelled themselves this time with iTablet speculation.
The reason is that they don't just want one to play with, fanbois or gadget fans. This time, they fully expect Apple to save their jobs.....
....That isn't rational: it's a faith-based view of the world, with technology as the religion.
Apple, like Google, has become a religion for media people.
For the full commentary visit here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/26/big_media_tablet_fail/
Jon Stewart Fans the Flames of the Apple/Microsoft War by Provoking Bill Gates
Gizmodo reports:
Bill Gates is about the most mild-mannered and genuinely nice, um, unbelievably rich head of a multinational monolithic corporation that you could imagine. So why is Jon Stewart antagonizing him with anti-Zune and pro-iPhone barbs? Oh, right. Because it's funny.
For the full report visit here:
http://tinyurl.com/ykyzoan
LED to Surpass CCFL in Large-Area TFT LCD Backlights in 2011
The LED backlight unit market has rapidly emerged in the TFT LCD industry, and momentum for this segment is expected to continue over the next five years. In the latest DisplaySearch Quarterly LED Backlight Report ( http://www.displaysearch.com/cps/rde/xchg/displaysearch/hs.xsl/quarterly_led_backlight_report.asp ), the company reports that LED backlight units will surpass CCFL/EEFL backlights in large-area TFT LCD panels in 2011, and achieve 74% penetration in 2013. Large-area LED backlight demand for all applications will grow from 114 million units in 2009 to 770 million units in 2015.
"Without a doubt, LED backlights will be the dominant light source in all applications in 2011—representing a significant business and technology evolution for the entire backlight and panel supply chain," noted Kevin Kwak ( http://www.displaysearch.com/cps/rde/xchg/displaysearch/hs.xsl/analysts_kkwak.asp ), DisplaySearch Director of LED Backlight Unit Research.
DisplaySearch forecasts the shipment of LED backlight units for LCD TVs to grow from 36.5 million units (a 20% penetration rate) in 2010 to 184.9 million units (a 72% penetration rate) in 2015. "In order for LCD TVs with LED backlight units to gain market share, they must provide attractive performance and cost competitiveness simultaneously," Kwak added. "Three main components will play a role in reducing costs: LED chips, light guide plates and dual brightness enhancement films."
Cost and performance remain bottlenecks for panel manufacturers for LED backlight units for monitor panels. Despite this, the Energy Star 5.0 specification will drive growth for this segment. In particular, LCD manufacturers are mass-producing 18.5"W-24"W LCD monitor panels with LED backlight units. DisplaySearch predicts that
The notebook PC segment has the highest LED backlight unit penetration rate, as the power-saving benefit justifies the cost premium compared to CCFL BLU. Meanwhile, the prices for side-view, high-intensity (1,900-2,200 mcd) white LEDs continues to fall. As a result, LED backlights will have an 84% share of notebook PC shipments in 2010 and will be close to 95% in 2011.
The DisplaySearch Quarterly LED Backlight Report ( http://www.displaysearch.com/cps/rde/xchg/displaysearch/hs.xsl/quarterly_led_backlight_report.asp ) covers backlight unit capacity, backlight unit value chain, backlight unit cost structure by size, backlight unit shipment forecast by technology, CCFL capacity, CCFL supply chain, CCFL shipment and demand forecast, and LED technology introduction with its application in backlight unit. The report also provides an analysis of large-area LED backlight unit cost structure and cost trends for notebooks, monitors and LCD TVs and an extensive overview of LED backlight TVs.
For more information on the DisplaySearch Quarterly LED Backlight Report, visit:
http://tinyurl.com/y8purjj
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