What I learned while buying my daughter iPhone 4S. I missed out on the big iPhone 4S launch here in San Diego, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise -- as the anachronism goes. There was chaos this morning in BetaNews manor, so I ground my teeth, cursed often and kept my fingers pounding the Lenovo ThinkPad T420s keyboard. I wouldn't have gone to buy iPhone 4S but to take photos before the store doors opened at 8 a.m. My sixth sense sniffed opportunity -- that the line outside Apple Store Fashion Valley would be nowhere near as big for iPhone 4S as it was for v4. I was right. It wasn't, I later learned. Grumble, grumble. My daughter texted soon after going to school. No Sell Out I arrived to see a sparse line of perhaps 20 people, which suggested the store still had phones to sell.
“Sprint today reported its best ever day of sales in retail, web and telesales for a device family in Sprint history with the launch of iPhone 4S and iPhone 4", Fared Adib, Sprint product chief, says in a statement. AppleCare+ But that's now. Jail Sentence for Pirate Bay Co-Founder Made Final. The Stockholm District Court sentence against Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm was finalized today after he failed to appear at the Court of Appeal. Svartholm, also known as Anakata online, did not appear at the appeal trial last year because he was hospitalized in Cambodia and later went missing. The Court of Appeal has now decided to finalize the initial verdict of one year jail time and a fine of $1.1 million. November last year, the Swedish Appeal Court found three people behind The Pirate Bay guilty of contributory copyright infringement offenses.
The trio were handed prison sentences and ordered to pay millions of dollars in damages. One of the defendants in the original trial, Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm, was not included in the verdict because he was absent from the court hearings due to medical circumstances. The Court of Appeal decided to schedule a separate hearing for him to take place at a later date. This verdict stands and can no longer be appealed. Ex-AMD Engineer Explains Bulldozer Fiasco: Lack of Fine Tuning. Performance that Advanced Micro Devices' eight-core processor demonstrated in real-world applications is far from impressive as the chip barely outperforms competing quad-core central processing units from Intel.
The reason why performance of the long-awaited Bulldozer was below expectations is not only because it was late, but because AMD had adopted design techniques that did not allow it tweak performance, according to an ex-AMD engineer. Cliff A. Maier, an AMD engineer who left the company several years ago, the chip designer decided to abandon practice of hand-crafting various performance-critical parts of its chips and rely completely on automatic tools. While usage of tools that automatically implement certain technologies into silicon speeds up the design process, they cannot ensure maximum performance and efficiency. Automated Design = 20% Bigger, 20% Slower A wafer with AMD Orochi dies used for AMD Opteron "Interlagos"/"Valencia and AMD FX "Zambezi" microprocessors The Result? Just Win, Baby. The biggest challenge I faced as a tech blogger was a simple one: motivation.
By that, I don’t mean that it was hard to write — it never was. But towards the end, it was getting hard to get excited to write on a daily basis. I needed to be driven. That’s when I’m at my best. Tech blogging is a game. Most of those still doing it probably won’t admit it, but it is. Now, there are several ways to play this game. The game had to keep changing because I kept winning and had to level up. That’s not to say I didn’t take my job seriously. But in the end, there are really only three games that matter: pageviews, scoops, and Techmeme. Pageviews is a funny one because as I alluded to, there are a number of ways to cheat this game. The truth is that by the time I got to TechCrunch, it was already a very large site. Scoops are a much tougher game. The problem there became my relationships outside of the job. Techmeme is the most fascinating game. Those legs will heal. Actually, who am I kidding? Dennis Ritchie: The Shoulders Steve Jobs Stood On | Wired Enterprise.
Dennis Ritchie (standing) and Ken Thompson at a PDP-11 in 1972. (Photo: Courtesy of Bell Labs) The tributes to Dennis Ritchie won’t match the river of praise that spilled out over the web after the death of Steve Jobs. But they should. And then some. “When Steve Jobs died last week, there was a huge outcry, and that was very moving and justified.
On Wednesday evening, with a post to Google+, Pike announced that Ritchie had died at his home in New Jersey over the weekend after a long illness, and though the response from hardcore techies was immense, the collective eulogy from the web at large doesn’t quite do justice to Ritchie’s sweeping influence on the modern world. “Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX,” Pike tells Wired. “It’s really hard to overstate how much of the modern information economy is built on the work Dennis did.” From B to C Dennis Ritchie built C because he and Ken Thompson needed a better way to build UNIX. Apple, Microsoft, and Beyond. Microsoft works to win desktop users over to the Start screen.
The most striking, in-your-face, and noticeable part of Windows 8 is its new Metro user interface, and in particular, its Start screen. The Start screen is a replacement for the Start menu that has been a feature of Windows for the last 16 years. The Start screen is touch-friendly, fullscreen, and filled with live, active tiles. It couldn't look much more different from the Start menu. Microsoft is well aware of this, and has begun tweaking the Start screen in response to user feedback. The new Start screen is definitely a big shock, and many PC users were deeply concerned that it represented a substantial step backwards. Listening to feedback Nonetheless, Microsoft has been listening to the concerns and criticisms about the Start screen raised by mouse users, and a blog post by the company describes some of the ways the criticism has been taken on board. A few points stand out as particularly significant.
The information density will also be improved. Clarity of vision. First steps Towards MMS support. A fall sweep. We aspire to build great products that really change people’s lives, products they use two or three times a day. To succeed you need real focus and thought—thought about what you work on and, just as important, what you don’t work on. It’s why we recently decided to shut down some products, and turn others into features of existing products.
Here’s the latest update on what’s happening: Code Search, which was designed to help people search for open source code all over the web, will be shut down along with the Code Search API on January 15, 2012. In a few weeks we’ll shut down Google Buzz and the Buzz API, and focus instead on Google+. Changing the world takes focus on the future, and honesty about the past. Google Axes More Services: Jaiku, Buzz, Code Search & More. Smartphone and tablet owners multitask while watching TV, survey finds. Apparently, even TV won't keep people from their smartphones and tablet computers, a new study found. According to a Nielsen Co. survey, about 40% of smartphone and tablet owners in the U.S. multitask on the devices daily while watching TV, compared with only 14% of people with e-readers like the Kindle or Nook (no book, it seems, is more interesting than the tube). About two-thirds of both male and female respondents admitted to checking email, the most common activity occupying people's time besides the TV.
But much of the other attention devoted to hand-held devices broke down along gender lines: almost half the women browsed social networking sites during programming and commercial breaks, while only about a third of men did. However, 44% of gents checked sports, compared with only 17% of women. Finally, tablet owners are marginally more engrossed in their devices than smartphones owners. Android phones more desired than iPhone or BlackBerry, survey says -- Shan Li. Amazon's Kindle Fire Browser Raises Privacy Questions.
Tony Bates Weighs in on Microsoft’s Acquisition of Skype - The Official Microsoft Blog – News and Perspectives from Microsoft. I am delighted to announce the deal with Microsoft has formally closed, and Skype is now a division of Microsoft. This represents a huge leap forward in Skype’s mission to be the communications choice for a billion people every day. Joining forces with Microsoft is the best way to accelerate this mission and capitalize on our position at the intersection of social, mobile and video communications. Simply put, we want to transform communications. We will do this by building the best products in the world that allow all of us to do things together whenever we’re apart and by creating teams who work faster and smarter across the globe building those world-class products.
Microsoft is committed to the ubiquity of the Skype experience – communication across every device and every platform will remain a primary focus. Opening Day: The iPhone 4S. 8:46 a.m. | Updated Adding observation from San Francisco. 12:43 p.m. | Updated Added updates from the New York flagship store and reactions from analysts. Despite an initial lackluster response, excitement has been building for the release of Apple’s newest iPhone, the 4S. On Friday, it officially goes on sale to the public. Despite disappointment that the form of the iPhone 4S is identical to the previous iteration, each of the wireless carriers, AT&T, Sprint and Verizon, have sold out of online orders for the phone, indicating higher than expected demand. Apple said that those orders topped 1 million during the first 24 hours the phone was available — beating the previous single-day online order record held by the iPhone 4.
Gene Munster, an analyst with Piper Jaffray, said in a research note that he estimates as many as 2.5 million iPhones will be sold this weekend. San Francisco One reason might be that strategic shoppers stood in line outside nearby Verizon, Sprint and AT&T stores. Mr. Apple already spent $750 million on the iCloud building alone?
CEO Tim Cook confirmed at the iPhone 4S unveiling shipments of 250 million iOS devices since the original iPhone went on sale in the summer of 2007. The iPhone 4S, the latest and greatest new model, has marked a shift in focus from hardware to software and online services. Siri, the iPhone 4S’s intelligent personal assistant advertised as its killer feature, requires significant computing power on the phone, but it also taps the power of the cloud. And with iOS 5 and iCloud now out of the gate, Apple’s commitment to cloud computing will be put to the test as millions upon millions of users scramble to back up their devices and sync their data with iCloud.
The bitterness of the MobileMe fiasco still fresh, Apple planned well ahead for today and – hopefully – into the future. Looking at Apple’s Property, Plant and Equipment costs in their quarterly statements, Asmyco’s Horace Dediu found out the company has already poured about $750 million into the North Carolina facility. iPhone 4S Camera Made by Sony « iFixit Blog. Chipworks definitely has some fancy equipment inside their labs. They took apart one of their iPhone 4S units this morning (using our teardown for guidance, of course) and tossed the 8MP camera directly under an infrared microscope to find out the manufacturer.
The infrared microscope allowed them to look through the whole structure down to the base layer. They saw die markings several layers below the surface. So what did they see? S O N Y. The pictures below are of the Sony designation inside the camera. Note that the camera itself is significantly smaller than a dime. "Sony" spelled out nice and clearly X-ray cross-section of the 8MP Sony camera You can read more info on the camera discovery straight from the horse’s mouth, or check out more awesome hi-res images of the iPhone 4S innards on our teardown. Comments Off No comments yet. Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.