Author: Duncan Geere
Intel announces 'Jasper Forest' chip
Intel has just announced a new chip based on its Nehalem-EP architecture called “Jasper Forest”. It’s aimed at storage products and embedded applications and the I/O hub has been integrated right onto the chip.
Jasper Forest is named after a petrified forest in Arizona, pictured above. Intel often names its chips after geographical locations, with Nehalem named after an Oregon-based tribe of American indians.
(via Macworld UK)
SHINY VIDEO PREVIEW: Nokia E75
Although I was told in no uncertain terms that I’m not allowed to label this a ‘review’, I really liked the Nokia E75. Its QWERTY keyboard complements the keypad nicely.
Shame the screen’s a little on the small side, but you can’t have everything, I suppose. If you’re a prolific text communicator, then you’ll find a lot to like here. If you’re more into your multimedia, then it might be worth sitting tight till the N97, which isn’t far off now. Check out my full thoughts in the video above.
Google adds colour filter to image search
Google’s always tweaking its products, and the latest tweak is to Image Search. It’s added the option to filter search results by colour – offering you 12 options for which hue you’d like to dominate your results – red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, purple, pink, white, grey, black and brown.
The update is still filtering out to data centres worldwide, but in the meantime you can use the filter manually by typing something along the lines of “http://images.google.com/images?q=bird&imgcolor=red” in the URL box. The tech comes from Google’s acquisition of Neven Vision, so expect to see a few more updates like this in the near future.
(via Google Operating System)
Ctrl-alt-delete cushions, for a geekier sofa
God I want these. Being male, I’m not normally one for cushions on a sofa (they just get in the way of my reclining) but these have completely and utterly changed my mind.
They’re 12″ across – about the size of a pizza – and made of light grey and black felt. They’re machine washable, and will cost you $60, plus $15 shipping. That’s £50 or so, total. Only three sets left though, at the time of writing, so be quick!
Etsy (via Swiss-miss)
Elan isssues multi-touch patent infringement lawsuit against Apple
Apple, who’s lately been telling anyone that’ll listen about how many multi-touch patents it has, must be smarting a little today following the news that it’s on the receiving end of a lawsuit from Elan Microelectronics.
The company, who make the keypads used in Eee PCs, claims infringement on two patents and is seeking an injunction on the sales of the MacBook, iPhone, and iPod Touch. They’re unlikely to get it, but given that they’ve already won a similar injunction on Synaptics on one of the two patents, there’s every chance that Apple might be forced to settle.
(via Engadget)
Digging in Spotify's cache – can you get MP3s out of it?
Since Spotify arrived on the digital music scene last October, people have been flabbergasted by how fast it works. How could it possibly be able to search and index millions of files and then deliver you the music stream quicker than searching your own MP3 collection? The answer is three-fold. A peer-to-peer infrastructure, fantastic coding, and a massive cache.
The cache is the most interesting bit. By default, the program uses up to 10% of your hard drive for storing the music that it downloads. You can have a poke around in it by going to C:UsersUSERNAMEAppDataLocalSpotifyStorage on Vista, or the equivalent directory for other operating systems.
The files residing within are the music that plays when you double-click a track name in the software. Stuff you play gets saved to this directory, so that when you play it in the future, there’s a local copy and it can find it faster. So can you pull out the tracks in a usable form to copy to your MP3 player?
The short answer is yes. The slightly longer answer is yes, with a lot of difficulty and if you don’t mind breaking the law. For most people, it’ll be beyond them – you’ll need to use source code provided by dodgy open-source client Despotify, and you’ll need to have a Premium account – because Despotify doesn’t work with free ones.
In reality, it’s not worth the bother. You’ll eventually end up with a 160kbps OGG file. That’s fine for streaming but when you convert it to MP3 to put on your MP3 player you’ll lose even more quality. Even if you’re not an audiophile you’ll be able to hear the difference.
Simply put, if you’re intent on breaking the law then in reality it’s much easier to go to The Pirate Bay and get the tracks you want there. But why bother? As actually-quite-useful piss-take website Spotibay illustates, if people have fast access to music in a user-friendly way, then they won’t bother with piracy.
Where that argument falls down is mobile access – even though Spotify’s rolling out the mobile clients, what happens when you go out of coverage, on the tube or in rural areas?Then you’re screwed, right? Well, if hints on the company’s support forum are followed-through, then maybe not.
A post on the support forum requesting that the company provide cache-only playback for offline conditions met with a surprisingly positive response with the company, stating:
“An offline play mode is a feature we’re looking at implementing at some point in the future. I think any feature we develop would likely have the option for the user to decide what is available for offline play.”
If that functionality is extended to mobile, and there seems no reason to believe that it wouldn’t be, then that could have massive positive implications for mobile clients – pick the albums that you want while in a Wi-Fi area and then while on the tube or even when you just have a 3G connection you can still enjoy music, as well as streaming when available.
Samsung launches "Solid Extreme" handset
Rugged phones are a quite specialised market and even if their biggest markets are builders and extreme sports enthusiasts, there’s still a competition for features that mirrors the main phone market.
The Solid Extreme is Samsung’s first entry into that market, and it’s a pretty good one too. There’s your regular temperature insulation, dust and water resistance and protection from drops of up to 2m.
On top of that, there’s a torch, extra-loud speaker, noise cancellation features, and glove-friendly keypad. Spec-wise, there’s a 1.3-megapixel camera, MP3 and video player, FM radio, Bluetooth, microSD support and Li-ion battery. It weighs just 103g.
The handset will launch in red and black from April, and will be available on Vodafone and O2.
Samsung Mobile
MP3 pricing war erupts between Apple and Amazon
Today, Apple finally implements the variable pricing that has been promised since label renegotiations in January, but the company must be seething a little that Amazon grabbed all the headlines yesterday with an offer featuring chart-topping MP3s for just 30p.
The deal, featuring artists like Lady Gaga, Kings of Leon, Coldplay and La Roux, will tempt yet more consumers over to Amazon’s DRM-free, easy-to-understand platform from the bloated iTunes ecosystem.
But the funny thing here is that we’re not really talking about music fans. We’re talking about mums and dads, people who buy the occasional track but don’t really keep up with much new music or go to gigs.
The kind of people who buy albums in Tesco, not independent record shops. They’re the people that the record labels successfully marketed CDs to in the 90s, but who are now switching to casual gaming and television since music is so omnipresent in everyday life. They simply don’t need to buy it any more.
Amazon’s strategy seems two-fold. Firstly it wants to steal customers off iTunes – that much is clear by the timing of yesterday’s announcement. It also wants to grow the digital download market, though, by marketing MP3s at people buying CDs, books and DVDs from the site.
Ultimately the whole thing is futile, though, as the general public follows the early adopters from ownership of MP3s to access to vast streaming libraries. Already, pretty much everyone who’s interested in listening to music on their computer has tried Spotify.
Personally speaking, my music listening within the last couple of years has already shifted entirely from my MP3 collection to Spotify and Last.fm. The only time I go back is to listen to obscurer stuff that Spotify doesn’t have, and even then I sometimes don’t bother – I just listen to something Spotify *does* have.
At Christmas, I showed Spotify to my Dad. I’ve never seen him so enthralled by a bit of software – he spent a solid four hours playing with it. Whenever I show it to people are resolutely not early adopters they’re amazed by it too.
That’s why I’m so sure that the pricing war doesn’t matter. As soon as the general public properly discovers Spotify, and when Spotify sorts out its mobile clients, then they won’t need Amazon, iTunes or anyone else. They’ll be converts to “access”, and they won’t go back.
Court rules against family driven out of town due to MySpace rant
Cynthia Moreno will be careful about what she puts on the internet in future. Her family has just lost a lawsuit against their local newspaper after they were driven out of their hometown following a minor rant on MySpace by the daughter.
Cynthia, originally from Coalinga, California, had just visited her family and returned to the University of California at Berkeley. She composed a short blog entry on her MySpace page, titled “Ode to Coalinga”, which began “the older I get, the more I realize how much I despise Coalinga”. It detailed her frustrations with her hometown and made a bunch of negative comments.
She probably amused a few of her top eight with it, some of whom were likely from Coalinga themselves. One person who wasn’t amused, though, was the principal of Coalinga High School, who spotted it and sent it to Pamela Pond – the editor of the local newspaper, the Coalinga Record.
Pond considered this a submission, for some reason, and printed it on the letters page of the paper. The community was incensed. Cynthia’s parents, David and Maria, and her younger sister Araceli, claim that they received death threats and gun shots were fired at their home. Her father’s business, which had been going strong for 20 years, was forced to close because it lost so much money. The family had to move out of town.
The Morenos filed a lawsuit against the principal of the school, the newspaper and its publishers, as well as the local school district. They alleged invasion of privacy and infliction of emotional distress. On 2nd April, however, the judge ruled against them, stating that:
“Cynthia’s affirmative act made her article available to any person with a computer and, thus, opened it to the public eye. Under these circumstances, no reasonable person would have had an expectation of privacy regarding the published material.”
The judge did rule, however, that their complaint of emotional distress should go before a jury. The family contend that the principal didn’t have permission to submit the blog post to the paper, so it’ll be interesting to see whether a jury agrees.
In the meantime, what do you think? It seems clear that a silly blog post shouldn’t have to force a family to move out of a town. Who’s in the wrong – the girl? the principal? the newspaper editor? Maybe just the population of the town for overreacting? Let us know your opinion on Twitter – message us at @techdigest.
(via Law.com)
Three new RIM devices leaked
No photos on this one, I’m afraid, but info on three new RIM devices has leaked over at BGR. There’s Onyx, Driftwood and Magnum, which all sound like luxury sofas. Here are the specs:
BlackBerry Onyx
- GSM/GPRS/EDGE/UMTS device
- GPS
- Camera
- Wi-Fi (no UMA support)
- QWERTY keyboard
- 480×360 resolution screen
BlackBerry Driftwood
- GSM/GPRS/EDGE/UMTS device
- GPS
- Camera
- Wi-Fi with UMA
- QWERTY keyboard
BlackBerry Magnum
- GSM/GPRS/EDGE/UMTS device
- GPS
- Camera
- Wi-Fi (no UMA support)
- QWERTY keyboard
- 480×360 resolution screen
Not a world of difference between them, is there? Ah well. I should stress that this is an American rumour, so there’s no guarantee that we’ll see all this stuff over here, but then RIM generally doesn’t have a lot of difference between countries, so there’s every chance that Onyx, Magnum and Driftwood will show up on the shores of Blighty.
(via BGR)
