posts

Gearlog:

Janis Krums, a tourist in New York City from Sarasota, Florida, took a picture with his iPhone of the US Air flight 1549 crash in the Hudson River this afternoon. Krums, who posted the picture on his Twitter account, @jkrums, was speaking live as a witness on MSNBC within minutes of capturing the image.

Without a doubt, the iPhone (and other smartphones) have increased the speed news travels and is reported. The question for journalists (and their audiences) is: Are first-hand accounts like this actually “news.” My answer is no, but people like Janis Krums are increasingly vital in tipping off the news media of breaking events.

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IDG:

Intel’s fourth-quarter profit plunged 90 percent from a year earlier, as the chip maker battled a worsening economy and recorded a steep loss from investments.

The company recorded net profit of $234 million for the quarter ended Dec. 27, compared to $2.27 billion in last year’s fourth quarter. The net profit also fell short of the $257.22 million consensus expectation from analysts polled by Thomson Reuters.

The results included a loss of $1.1 billion from equity investments and interest, primarily due to a billion-dollar reduction in the value of Intel’s investments in Clearwire, the company said.

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CNN, on the man filling Steve Jobs’ shoes for now:

Cook’s stamina is the stuff of legend at Apple. He often begins e-mailing the executives who work for him at 4:30 a.m.; worldwide conference calls can take place at any time of day. For years, Cook held a standing Sunday night staff meeting by telephone in order to prepare for yet more meetings on Monday morning.

[…]

As long as Jobs stays healthy, Cook won’t need to worry about personal visibility. He can just keep doing his thing, grinding away offstage. But if he does get tapped for the CEO job someday, Apple may not suffer from acute Stevelessness as much as the world seems to think.

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As the whole Internet reported today:

In order to take myself out of the limelight and focus on my health, and to allow everyone at Apple to focus on delivering extraordinary products, I have decided to take a medical leave of absence until the end of June.

I have asked Tim Cook to be responsible for Apple’s day to day operations, and I know he and the rest of the executive management team will do a great job. As CEO, I plan to remain involved in major strategic decisions while I am out. Our board of directors fully supports this plan.

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I love when a big company announces their product to be dead - years after the market has declared it so and moved on. Today, the retro/now-officially retro technology is the LaserDisc. Gizmodo:

Pioneer had continued to build players long after the format had been declared dead, largely because of the large LD collections that many Japanese customers had built during the years that the format’s popularity soared (comparitively) in that country.

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This takes the headache out of running the nightly WebKit build as my main browser on my Macs. It also makes the customer Automator script I wrote a few months back useless.

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The New York Times hit the nail on the head:

When designing Windows Vista, Microsoft put a lot of effort into taking advantage of sophisticated computer hardware, with fancy graphics on the surface and lots of new processing tricks inside. Microsoft says this positioned the operating system for the future, despite the complaining of many users who grumble that Vista has bogged down their computers with unneeded frills and incompatibilities.

While there is some more high-powered glitz coming in Windows 7, the real challenge for Microsoft isn’t the latest multi-core superchip, but making the operating system work well, and affordably, on stripped-down PCs, netbooks and other small devices.

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Google isn’t taking the latest estimates over it’s power consumption lightly. Today, Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President of Operations at Google posted this on the company’s blog:

In terms of greenhouse gases, one Google search is equivalent to about 0.2 grams of CO2. The current EU standard for tailpipe emissions calls for 140 grams of CO2 per kilometer driven, but most cars don’t reach that level yet. Thus, the average car driven for one kilometer (0.6 miles for those in the U.S.) produces as many greenhouse gases as a thousand Google searches.

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Engadget is good at it: “iPhone nano now rumored for June, Unicorn delayed again until September.”

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Microsoft has announced Songsmith, a Windows app that creates music based on what you sing into a microphone. Honestly, it sounds pretty cool, and it’s not something Apple’s Garageband can do (that I know of), but the implementation is down right sad. The interface makes my eyes bleed, but the ad is even worse:

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Wired, on what sets the Palm Pre apart:

The iPhone’s apps are great and a big part of the phone’s appeal. But have you ever tried to listen to Pandora while you’re checking Gmail? Can’t do it. The iPhone’s limitation on running multiple apps is a serious drawback. The HTC G1 improves on that with the notifications drawer, but it’s an insufficient solution because it’s still too hard to see what’s currently running. The Palm Pre solves that problem. It treats applications as “cards” and makes it easy to flip through the deck of cards, view them at once and shuffle them. The apps are live even when minimized, and you don’t lose your place even if you move to a different one or move to a new one.

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The Times Online:

Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea, according to new research.

While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2 Boiling a kettle generates about 15g. “Google operates huge data centres around the world that consume a great deal of power,” said Alex Wissner-Gross, a Harvard University physicist whose research on the environmental impact of computing is due out soon. “A Google search has a definite environmental impact.”

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