According to Korea’s Maeil Business Newspaper, Apple’s next iPhone is due to be launched sometime in the next three months, and will boast a 4.6-inch display. [Reuters] More »
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The New iPhone Will Have a 4.6 Inch Screen, Out In Q2 [Rumor]
All the talk these days is of the new iPad and its magical screen. Apple isn’t the only one who can do that, you know. In fact, most display makers are looking forward to post-HD resolutions as one of the big selling points of the next generation of displays. Other tablets are already approaching iPad levels of pixel density and it would be foolish of the likes of Google and Microsoft not to be planning for it.
Fortunately, Microsoft is well aware of the trend and has plans in place for dealing with displays with pixel-dense displays (or “Retina” to the vulgar).
The specifics are laid out with no quarter given to laymen in this post at Building Windows 8. The gist is that they have analyzed the expected range of display sizes and resolutions, and have identified a sort of “Goldilocks Zone” for the three general classes of resolutions: standard, HD, and quad-XGA (2560×1440). Inside this zone, text and UI elements aren’t blown up too cartoonish proportions or shrunk down to a size that’s frustrating to touch.
In the first case, buttons and text will be shown with no scaling. In the second case, they’ll be 140% normal size (i.e. elements 100 pixels wide will become 140), and in the third, 180%. 50 and 100 percent increases apparently were not convenient to the Windows 8 team, though whether they decided on these numbers because of, say, certain sub-pixel scaling methods, or because 50 and 100 were too big, it is not known.
The alternative is a resolution-independent continual resize that would render every button and character the same size regardless of the size or resolution of the display. Unfortunately, the infrastructure is simply not in place for that: the way text is stored and rendered, the size and restrictions of web content, and much more prevent this more advanced solution. It’s on the way, but for now these scaling milestones will have to do.
The author of the post, Microsoft UX team member David Washington, admits that high-density screens make many familiar UI elements, such as pulldown menus and small close boxes, “increasingly burdensome.” A new ecosystem of gestures and visual elements will succeed them, presumably — Metro, for instance.
Lastly, Windows 8 thoughtfully includes native support for the SVG filetype as a development asset, so you can build good-looking scaling into your app more easily than with multiple or high-resolution bitmap images. How easy it will actually be to build for what is certain to be an incredibly diverse hardware ecosystem, we’ll soon find out.
The iPad (which gets a mention in the post as well) currently has the best screen on the market, but that’s an advantage that likely won’t last out the year. Whether Windows 8 and its apps will utilize equally well the promise of high pixel-density screens is yet to be determined, but it’s good to see the future of personal displays and devices being planned for and executed on by the majors.
Continue reading YouTube wants to make your crummy video slightly less crummy
YouTube wants to make your crummy video slightly less crummy originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 21 Mar 2012 15:35:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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YouTube wants to make your crummy video slightly less crummy
Yeah, an optical drive. You know, for folks who still appreciate the passing fads of life. Bitterness aside, Commodore is following up its retro-fabulous C64x with a new small-form-factor PC, the Amiga Mini. While not much of a looker, this box houses a potent 3.5GHz Core i7-2700k CPU, 16GB of DDR3 memory, NVIDIA’s GeForce GT 430 (1GB), a WiFi radio and a 1TB HDD that can be swapped out for a 300GB or 600GB solid state drive. There’s a slot-loading Blu-ray drive by default, internal space for a pair of 2.5-inch drives and a predictable Amiga logo burned right onto the front panel. Unfortunately, the well-specced base model tips the pricing scales at $2,495, but that does include a copy of its Commodore OS Vision. The company’s also revealing the C64x Supreme, the new VIC mini and a more powerful VIC-Slim keyboard computer (which now includes an HDMI output), all detailed in the presser past the break.
Gallery: Commodore Amiga Mini press photos
Continue reading Commodore Amiga Mini PC revealed: Core i7, 16GB of RAM and a Blu-ray drive
Commodore Amiga Mini PC revealed: Core i7, 16GB of RAM and a Blu-ray drive originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 21 Mar 2012 16:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Commodore Amiga Mini PC revealed: Core i7, 16GB of RAM and a Blu-ray drive
The Wolverines may have concocted the “most intense” laser in the universe back in ’08, but it’s a group of grinners at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, California that can now lay claim to firing the planet’s first two-megajoule ultraviolet laser. Earlier this week, a 1.875-megajoule shot was fired into the target chamber, but it broke the two-dot-oh barrier after passing through the final focusing lens. Reportedly, this matters for more than just bragging rights, as scientists have long since sought to get past ‘ignition’ in order to “coax fusion energy from a tiny frozen fuel pellet.” If we had to guess, we’d say both Nerf and Mattel are somehow trying to commercialize this thing prior to the holidays. (And yeah, we hope they’re successful.)
World’s first two-megajoule ultraviolet laser fired in California: no, you can’t buy one originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 21 Mar 2012 17:13:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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World’s first two-megajoule ultraviolet laser fired in California: no, you can’t buy one
Update: After we ran this story, we received word that the order we reported on has been vacated by Judge Schumacher. Ars Technica talked to Kubs Lalchandani, an attorney at the law firm of Lalchandani Simon, which represents defendants in copyright troll cases and has been involved in this case. He told Ars late on Wednesday that the order we reported on had been drafted by one of the defendants in the case. Because Judge Schumacher mistakenly believed that the order had been agreed to by both sides in the case, he signed off on it without (apparently) reading it carefully. When Schumacher discovered his mistake, he vacated the order. Original story appears below.
John Steele is one of the nation’s most prolific copyright trolls. Last year, an Illinois federal judge wrote that Steele had “abused the litigation system in more than one way.” Apparently undeterred by the thumping he received in Illinois federal courts, Steele has joined a new firm and shifted his litigation campaign to Florida state courts.
State courts don’t have jurisdiction over copyright law, but this fact didn’t deter Steele and his compatriots, who tried to use an obscure provision of Florida law called a “pure bill of discovery” to obtain subscriber information without actually filing a copyright lawsuit. As Princeton copyright scholar Bart Huffman explained last year, this ancient provision of Florida law wasn’t intended to be used this way, and the firm was forced to make a number of creative arguments to justify its request.
Florida Judge Marc Schumacher wasn’t impressed by the firm’s legal gymnastics. The phrase “copyright troll” appears in the second paragraph of Judge Schumacher’s decision, and things go downhill for Steele from there.
“The federal courts have shown extreme hostility to these suits, identifying them as fishing expeditions that improperly join numerous defendants, as failing to meet federal pleading standards, and as being used to extort settlements from defendants who are neither subject to the courts’ personal jurisdiction nor guilty of copyright infringement,” Schumacher wrote.
The plaintiffs had filed a a lawsuit against hundreds of anonymous “Does.” One of them, number 376, had responded to the lawsuit. Rather than trying to refute this defendant’s arguments, Steele’s firm asked the judge to dismiss Doe 376 from the case, while continuing the case against others who had not tried to defend themselves.
But obviously, Doe 376’s arguments applied to the other defendants in the case as well. So rather than dismiss just one defendant, the judge considered the arguments Doe 376 had raised and found them persuasive. He ruled that state courts do not have jurisdiction over the case (since copyright is a federal matter) and that Florida’s bill of discovery cannot be used to obtain information from a non-defendant such as the Does’ ISPs. The lawsuit was dismissed with prejudice.
The strong language in Schumacher’s decision reflects a growing awareness among judges of the abusive potential of copyright troll lawsuits. One footnote listing past cases in which judges dismissed copyright troll cases was more than half a page long. As lawyers try increasingly outlandish legal tactics to squeeze money out of supposed file-sharers, they’re likely to face an increasingly skeptical bench.
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Copyright troll smacked down again after fleeing to Florida (updated)
It’s like a hi-tech sneezeguard at a salad bar
A certain famous industrial designer once told me I’d be absolutely amazed if I could see some of the things he’d seen inside Microsoft’s skunkworks. I pushed him for specifics, but alas, the design DNA was NDA’d. But this project here just might be one of those things.
Right now we all use computers the same way: Moving from the back of your desk to the front, you’ve got the screen first, then your hands on the keyboard or mouse, and then your head taking it all in. Now imagine swapping the order so that back-to-front we have your hands first, then the screen, then your head.
Researchers Jinha Lee and Cati Boulanger of the Microsoft Applied Sciences Group have developed a prototype called the See-Through 3D Desktop where the user reaches behind the screen to interact with objects in virtual 3D space. Check it out:
Here’s another vid showing a different demo of the same technology. You can skip ahead to 1:00 for the action:
See the original article here:
Microsoft’s Wicked See-Through 3D Display
The official design for the disc-art on the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo DVD makes the disc appear to be a pirate copy, designed to mimic a blank, home-burned disc with the movie’s title handwritten in black marker on it.
Dragon Tattoo Has Unique DVD Design
(via Hack the Planet)
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Sony pirates itself with “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” disc
New submitter CanHasDIY writes “Tired of waiting for the Pip-Boy or Omni-Tool to be invented? Never fear! Nokia is developing the basic technology needed to make your dreams a reality: haptic-feedback tattoos. According to the patent application, Nokia is proposing ‘a material attachable to skin, the material capable of detecting a magnetic field and transferring a perceivable stimulus to the skin, wherein the perceivable stimulus relates to the magnetic field.’ Basically, the process is the same as for normal tattooing; the difference is in the ferromagnetic ink. Kind of brings new meaning to the term ’embedded device,’ doesn’t it?”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Fifteen months and 10,000 American sales later, Nissan is preparing a 2013 overhaul of its Leaf EV. What green and fresh bounties can we expect? Leather seats, a “darker” interior and more efficient heater, which could let the EV go up to 20-25 miles further in cold-weather conditions. Sounds minor to our comfortably warm ears, and there’s no specific mention of inductive charging (depicted above) either. On the other hand, the 2012 model already hiked up prices and Nissan probably has to stick closely to the current $35,000 bracket or risk being run down by another all-electric, all-emotional hatchback that’s also due next year.
Nissan Leaf to get minor range boost, prove Moore’s Law doesn’t apply to EVs originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 21 Mar 2012 11:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Nissan Leaf to get minor range boost, prove Moore’s Law doesn’t apply to EVs