Linus Torvalds, seeing the 2560×1600 $400 Google tablet is arguing for increasing the resolution available on laptop displays. While he seems to overlook the two options available from Apple (just wipe and install Linux?), he’s echoing the feeling that’s been around for the last 5+ years of computer display stagnation.
Having lived with “retina” displays from Apple on my phone and tablet, I completely agree. I would love to have retina-quality terminals while working.
Google announced a 10 inch, 2560×1600 tablet. I’m loving these high resolution displays (retina, to Apple), and can’t wait until they move to affordable laptops and desktops. More info at Ars Technica.
Last week the iPhone 5, iOS 6, and Borderlands 2 were released. They’re all incremental improvements over their previous versions, and all things which I’ve been happily using for the last few days.
First up, the iPhone 5:
It’s lighter, quicker, and has a larger screen than my iPhone 4. I skipped the 4S, so the speed improvement is going to feel larger to me than a 4S user. I didn’t think my 4 was slow, until using the 5 for a few minutes.
Steam announced, and released (in Steam Beta), their 10 foot interface to make it nicer to use Steam and play games on a home entertainment system.
This makes me want to hook up a PC to my TV again, something I didn’t think I’d want to do after XBMC was ported to the Apple TV. It won’t be my main PC, as I need that to have a keyboard, a mouse, and a surface to use them on.
Amazon came out with new Kindles last week. The most exciting, to me, is the Kindle Paperwhite, although I can’t justify purchasing one while I own an iPad.
Other exciting stuff happening soon:
Sept. 12: Apple announcements Sept. 18: Borderlands 2 unknown: Steam on Linux unknown: Valve hardware unknown: stable XMBC on tiny android hardware
My Logitech Harmony 900 remote stopped working. The screen was blank, even after multiple times of removing the battery to restart it. A quick Google search and I learned I could boot the remote into safe mode, and plug it into a computer, in order to restore the firmware.
That process fixed the problem, and I’m happy I don’t have to purchase a new programmable remote, but I’m not happy that I am going to have to periodically perform tech support duties on my remote control.
Amazon announced an inexpensive backup service aimed at replacing long term tape storage for small companies. It’s also going to be great for people like me, who setup their own local backup system, but need to rely on a third party for offsite backups.
Offsite backups, 100GB for $1/month, sound great. The downsides are that recoveries are slow and cost extra, but with my existing local backup, I hope to never need to recover from Glacier.
XMBC announced this week that they are working with Ouya. This comes shortly after their announcement that they’re going to release their software for the Android, so it’s not surprising. However, it’s great news in that XBMC is now working with at least two hardware companies to bring their software to tiny, low powered, inexpensive media center devices.
I’m running XBMC on a jailbroken Apple TV 2, and while it works great, there are many rough edges.
I wasn’t expecting to see so many Apple Magic Trackpads.
Below, you can see the home office setups for a number of staffers and contributors, along with short descriptions of what they’ve got running.
viaArs Technica
Valve posted that early work in L4D2 shows the game performing better on Linux than Windows 7. It’s not a stretch to think that every serious gamer will install a Linux partition to play games that perform better on Linux.
After this work, Left 4 Dead 2 is running at 315 FPS on Linux. That the Linux version runs faster than the Windows version (270.6) seems a little counter-intuitive, given the greater amount of time we have spent on the Windows version.
Western Digital released a line of drives for home NAS devices, which appear are also going to work great in home servers. There’s a review up at StorageReview.com.
Ivy Bridge runs hotter, but for the casual overclocker, this might not matter. The Tech Report has initial samples of the chip at 4.4 GHz, on air cooling, and without needing to increase chip voltages.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Intel said the shrink to the 22nm process node leads to higher temperatures due to increased thermal density, adding that “users may observe higher operating temperatures when overclocking”.
via The Inquirer
Benchmarks are out for Ivy Bridge, Intel’s new processor family. The Tech Report summarizes the changes in one sentence:
This new CPU is an incremental refinement of Sandy Bridge; its benefits are a slight jump in performance and a somewhat larger reduction in power consumption.
Phoronix breaks the news (again) that Steam is coming to Linux. This time, they have proof, in the form of photos taken at Valve. This is great news, Steam and its associated games are important enough to be the difference between many users choosing Linux over Windows. For me, it means getting rid of the second OS on my desktop, which has only Steam, Google Chrome, and games installed.