Wintek, who supplies touchscreen components to Apple for the iPhone and iPod touch, just got “exposed” for “hazardous work conditions”. One of the most severe? N-hexane poisoning, which the company illegally used instead of alcohol to clean screens.
In August of 2009, 49 people were treated for N-hexane poisoning, with one dead. The BoingBoing post says that the worker died this weekend, so it seems like Wintek continued to use the same N-hexane even after they were punished from last year.
On paper, the Core i9 might not sound that exciting: It's a lot like the Core i7, except built with a 32nm fabrication process and two extra cores, for a total of six. Early benchmarks, though, say it flies. Sometimes.
The i9 doesn't extract significant advantages from its pumped core count (which brings processing thread count up to 12) in a lot of day to day tasks, so don't expect to see an increase in game performance, Windows startup speed or other single-core optimized tasks. It's when you start rendering video or doing 3D modeling—tasks that are suited to parallelization—that the i9 flexes its muscles.
Windows 7 is out today! Huzzah! But wait; if you're still rocking Windows XP, you might want to think twice before upgrading. Here are some reasons to stick with an old OS.
1. Updating will be a huge pain
You do realize that you can't just pop in the disc and install the OS, right? Coming from XP, you're going to need to backup all of your data, format your hard drive, install a clean version of Windows 7, and then start from scratch, reinstalling all of your old programs—and that's assuming Old Faithful even meets the system requirements. Sounds delightful!
2. Software investment
Five months ago, someone cobbled together a spoof video about an iPhone app that could remotely unlock and start a car. Oh, how we laughed. Now, take one guess at what Viper SmartStart, an iPhone app announced today, actually does.
It sucks that batteries are nearly bigger than the gadgets they're powering, but thanks to University of Missouri researchers and some tiny nuclear batteries, that'll one day be an issue of the past. Yeah, you read right. Tiny. Nuclear. Batteries.
The real secret behind the size of the batteries is the use of new liquid semiconductors instead of tired old solid semiconductors. That's great, because nuclear batteries aren't a new idea, nor are they terrifying and harmful according to Jae Kwon, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Missouri:
Say it's true. That I could finally be watching Hulu on a laptop with an OLED screen by next year. Companies have announced plans and showed concepts, but Samsung says we could see a commercial OLED notebook in 2010.
After introducing its X Series laptops yesterday the company told reporters that it would release an OLED notebook towards the end of 2010, perhaps in the third quarter. Lenovo has also mentioned plans to use OLED and Sony has shown a totally futuristic notebook based on OLED panels, but this is the first solid timing we have heard of.
