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.