Briefly: Green Apples, Dell Goes Ubuntu, Finals…
As I’ve hinted elsewhere, it is indeed dreaded finals week at Georgia Tech but rather than leave you high and dry while I am consumed by computer science PowerPoints, I’ll point you to what I’ve been reading this week.
Apple published an article titled “A Greener Apple” where they detail their plans to remove toxic chemicals from their new products. The article includes the noteworthy mention of migrating to LED backlit LCD displays in desktops and laptops.
To eliminate mercury in our displays, we need to transition from fluorescent lamps to light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to illuminate the displays. Fortunately, all iPod displays already use LEDs for illumination, and therefore contain no mercury. We plan to introduce our first Macs with LED backlight technology in 2007. Our ability to completely eliminate fluorescent lamps in all of our displays depends on how fast the LCD industry can transition to LED backlighting for larger displays.
Hopefully that rumored 12-inch MacBook Pro will feature LED backlight technology as well.
Yesterday and the early bits of this morning will go down in infamy as Digg Revolt07, or HD-DVD Night. I don’t think I need to explain what happen, but in case you’re wondering check out the hundreds of links on the ‘meme.
Business 2.0 magazine should have heeded their own advice this month when the entire June issue of the popular magazine disappeared. Ouch. Why not have every editor be responsible for their own pages and have them back up on thumbdrives, S3 and wherever else they can stick files?
And one fine day, sorry night, (April 23 to be precise) the magazine’s editorial system crashed, nullifying the work done for the June issue. The backup server failed to back up.
Dell will be shipping “consumer-focused” desktop and mobile systems at the end of May, installed with Ubuntu Linux. Dell first began acknowledging open-source customers in January, but it’s definitely good to see them go mainstream.
And some recently del.icio.us’d links of mine:
Southern Fried Tech - New community highlighting tech and new media content in the Southern US.
Getting Rich with PHP5 - Rasmus Lerdorf (PHP founder, Yahoo! employee) put together some excellent slides for OSCON 2006.
A bunch of presentations on scaling websites: twitter, Flickr, Bloglines, Vox and more. - Interesting slides for web app coders.
The “Getting Rich With PHP5″ talk is great, albeit a bit misleading in its title. Rasmus built a little demo app that does nothing very slowly and then works through lots of ways to increase the speed. From simple things like consolidating include files to APC caching and database connection tuning, its really great. Plus the whole thing was driven by using http_load, one of my favorite tools to play with.
Particularly for me, I enjoyed the slide about grabbing map tiles with the geocoding API - I didn’t know that was possible. That’ll come in very handy in my web app, if I ever find time to work on it more.
Man I’m still kind of confused why Digg did a 360 in there whole decision to change their mind and go ahead and post it on their blog.
I mean they initially complied and took down all articles / comments, doesn’t that pretty much take away any legal leg they had to stand on?
Ash, I was thinking the same thing. Slashdot, for example, has always maintained that they have no editorial control over user-submitted comments. The only comment that I remember being removed from Slashdot was the scientology description, and it was not done lightly.
I think Digg is gunna get screwed on this one, they’ve painted themselves into a corner.
Ahh, there are so many links to read. So, what happened with Digg and HD-DVD?
It’s a little misleading, the way you describe Apple’s publishing. Makes it sound like Apple is “just getting it out there”, when they were actually directly trying to rebuff points in a Greenpeace campaign that hit them.
Hey, hope you did well on your finals, just saw that you goto Georgia Tech. I am currently a 4th year MSE major here. Very nice blog and it provided yet another distraction from studying for me.
-Matt
P.S. Is there anyway I might be able to get some help/ideas/tutorials from you for my blog and a website I want to run for the Thrashers.