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Regardless of how you feel about the newly announced iPad, it’s probably going to do a few things very well. But will it be the reading device we’ve all been waiting for? Steve Jobs pushed the iBook store in the keynote, and discussed how the Kindle pioneered ebooks. Jobs then said Apple would “stand on [Amazon’s] shoulders”. Can it work?

The obvious benefit of the iPad is that it has a color screen. There will be more options for text size, search, and even font choices. Magazines and newspapers will look nice, but reading an old fashioned book may not benefit much. The Kindle and other eReaders have a 16 level eInk display meant to be easy to read. The screen on the iPad, being a conventional LCD, may not be quite so easy on the eyes.

Content wise, the iPad may be in good shape. Out of the gate it will have content from Penguin, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, Harper Collins and Hachette. It will also support the open ePub format, which is more than we can say for Amazon. This means the iPad will have access to Google Books. The Nook has ePub support also, so it’s not a total win for Apple.

Price is certainly of concern. The iPad is clocking in at $499 for the 16GB version sans 3G. That’s quite a bit more than the Kindle and Nook at $260. To get data on the go, you need to purchase an AT&T data plan for the (more expensive) iPad, whereas the Kindle and Nook come with free wireless. Granted, the iPad does much more than eBooks, but buying it primarily as a reading device may be a questionable move.

Check out this much more exhaustive rundown at MacLife.

Regardless of how you feel about the newly announced iPad, it’s probably going to do a few things very well. But will it be the reading device we’ve all been waiting for? Steve Jobs pushed the iBook store in the keynote, and discussed how the Kindle pioneered ebooks. Jobs then said Apple would “stand on [Amazon’s] shoulders”. Can it work?

The obvious benefit of the iPad is that it has a color screen. There will be more options for text size, search, and even font choices. Magazines and newspapers will look nice, but reading an old fashioned book may not benefit much. The Kindle and other eReaders have a 16 level eInk display meant to be easy to read. The screen on the iPad, being a conventional LCD, may not be quite so easy on the eyes.

Content wise, the iPad may be in good shape. Out of the gate it will have content from Penguin, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, Harper Collins and Hachette. It will also support the open ePub format, which is more than we can say for Amazon. This means the iPad will have access to Google Books. The Nook has ePub support also, so it’s not a total win for Apple.

Price is certainly of concern. The iPad is clocking in at $499 for the 16GB version sans 3G. That’s quite a bit more than the Kindle and Nook at $260. To get data on the go, you need to purchase an AT&T data plan for the (more expensive) iPad, whereas the Kindle and Nook come with free wireless. Granted, the iPad does much more than eBooks, but buying it primarily as a reading device may be a questionable move.

Check out this much more exhaustive rundown at MacLife.

Netflix spinoff Roku has been doing quite well as of late. Roku has sold over 500,000 of their streaming boxes, which steam content from the likes of Netflix, Pandora, TwiT.tv, and Revision3. With revenue doubling last year to $75 million, Roku is looking to expand, and may be planning an IPO.

If Roku is able to raise the expected $30 million, their next step could be to kill your cable. Roku is currently recruiting content providers to create channels. They hope to be able to offer 100 channels of on-demand programming this year. “We’re not far away from the time when you’ll be able to get the same kinds of channels that any cable operator can offer,” said Roku CEO Anthony Wood.

Would this sort of service get you to drop your cable?

The FCC has formally issued their draft net neutrality rules, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is calling foul. The document contains language covering so-called “reasonable network management”. According to the EFF, this creates a loophole that would allow ISPs to block BitTorrent.

The net neutrality debate really took off when in 2007, Comcast began blocking BitTorrent connections. Eventually the FCC forced them to stop, but Comcast is still appealing the decision. This copyright loophole in the draft could be used by content producers to encourage ISPs to enforce copyright law. In fact, the EFF claims the exact behavior that got Comcast in hot water, and kicked off the debate could be perfectly acceptable under the proposed regulations.

It may not be feasible for the FCC to be intimately involved in every aspect of an ISP’s network management. What’s the solution? Can they just require protocol agnostic management?

We can all start to breathe again! Apple has finally made their long awaited, highly anticipated, rumor generating product announcement. And it’s the “iPad”. Now we can move past criticizing Apple for what it might be making, and move on to criticizing Apple for what it did make.

But let’s not be so quick in our criticism. Sure, Apple fanboys will be all over the iPad, heaping it with great praise, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that Apple got it wrong. In fact, there looks to be a lot to like in Apple’s new, little bundle of joy. It’s of reasonable size, sporting a 9.7-inch touchscreen, is a half-an-inch thick, and weights a modest 1.5 pounds. It works on the same software as the iPhone and iPod Touch–both of which have curried favor with users, and which makes the iPad immediately useable. (Developers are going to like this as well, because it won’t require much adjustment, and broadens the market potential of their products.)  And it runs on an Apple designed chip, the 1GHz A4 processor, which not only provides punch, but conserves battery life.

Better yet, Apple is offering the iPad at different price-points, rather than in a take-it-or-leave-it bundle (like the Kindle). Configurations will be either Wi-Fi or Wi-Fi/3G, and offer different storage capacities: 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB. Price for the entry-level iPad is $499, while the top-of-the-line will cost $829.

And Apple looks to have learned some lessons from the iPhone. Data services will be provided by AT&T, on a pre-paid basis. The price for a 250MB data allowance will be $14.99 a month, while unlimited use will cost $29.99 per month. Unlike the iPhone, the iPad will have a swappable GSM micro SIM card, so iPad users can easily switch carriers.

In the announcement, Apple wanted to defuse expectations a bit. The iPad isn’t going to be the ‘device of the century’ that some had speculated. Rather, Steve Jobs made it clear the iPad was a niche product, good for web surfing, email, viewing photos, listening to music, watching videos, playing games, or reading eBooks. (A big brother of the iPod Touch, if you will.) If you want something more, says Jobs, by a computer.

If there’s more you want to know please join our cousins at MacLife for the iPad feeding frenzy.

Having trouble overclocking your Nvidia-based graphics card? If so, you may want to give the company’s just-released GeForce 196.34 beta drivers a whirl. According to Nvidia, the latest releas fixes a bug with v196.21 that prohibited GPU overclocking, so you should be good to go.

Other than the overclocking fix, the beta driver doesn’t appear to bring anything else new to the table, or at least Nvidia hasn’t listed any other improvements. But for those of you who decided to skip the previous driver update (196.21) because of the overclocking bug, other new features relevant to both packages include:

• SLI and multi-GPU support for “many top new gaming titles,” including Avatar Demo, Dirt 2, Mass Effect 2, and others.
• Upgrades PhysX System Software to version 9.09.1112.
• A ton of bug fixes.
• Users without U.S. English operating systems can select their language and download the International driver from here.

The beta driver works with GeForce 6, 7, 8, 9, 100, and 200-series desktop GPUs, as well as Nvidia’s Ion graphics.

Driver Download

We can all start to breathe again! Apple has finally made their long awaited, highly anticipated, rumor generating product announcement. And it’s the “iPad”. Now we can move past criticizing Apple for what it might be making, and move on to criticizing Apple for what it did make.

But let’s not be so quick in our criticism. Sure, Apple fanboys will be all over the iPad, heaping it with great praise, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that Apple got it wrong. In fact, there looks to be a lot to like in Apple’s new, little bundle of joy. It’s of reasonable size, sporting a 9.7-inch touchscreen, is a half-an-inch thick, and weights a modest 1.5 pounds. It works on the same software as the iPhone and iPod Touch–both of which have curried favor with users, and which makes the iPad immediately useable. (Developers are going to like this as well, because it won’t require much adjustment, and broadens the market potential of their products.)  And it runs on an Apple designed chip, the 1GHz A4 processor, which not only provides punch, but conserves battery life.

Better yet, Apple is offering the iPad at different price-points, rather than in a take-it-or-leave-it bundle (like the Kindle). Configurations will be either Wi-Fi or Wi-Fi/3G, and offer different storage capacities: 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB. Price for the entry-level iPad is $499, while the top-of-the-line will cost $829.

And Apple looks to have learned some lessons from the iPhone. Data services will be provided by AT&T, on a pre-paid basis. The price for a 250MB data allowance will be $14.99 a month, while unlimited use will cost $29.99 per month. Unlike the iPhone, the iPad will have a swappable GSM micro SIM card, so iPad users can easily switch carriers.

In the announcement, Apple wanted to defuse expectations a bit. The iPad isn’t going to be the ‘device of the century’ that some had speculated. Rather, Steve Jobs made it clear the iPad was a niche product, good for web surfing, email, viewing photos, listening to music, watching videos, playing games, or reading eBooks. (A big brother of the iPod Touch, if you will.) If you want something more, says Jobs, by a computer.

If there’s more you want to know please join our cousins at MacLife for the iPad feeding frenzy.

Twitter looks to be taking a new approach to Internet censorship. Rather than thump its chest and make big talk, like Google has done recently with China, Twitter is looking into technologies that will allow it to circumvent the censoring of Tweets. If they build a fence, Twitter seems to be saying, we won’t make them take it down, but rather will find a way around it.

Twitter co-founder Evan Williams didn’t mince words: “The most productive way to fight that is not by trying to engage China and other governments whose very being is against what we are about.” Williams is optimistic that “there are technological ways around these barriers.”

Twitter’s being closed-lipped about the actual details, for obvious reasons. Williams only suggested that Twitter’s general efforts were “interesting hacks.” No mention was made as to when and how Twitter would start its censorship counterattack.

Lite-On’s iHAS424 is the first 24x DVD burner we’ve tested so far, and sadly, the experience doesn’t sell us on the speed bump. Currently, DVD+R media is capped at 16x speeds, but drive makers will nevertheless tweak their hardware to exceed that limit. Often such “over-speeding” techniques are restricted to higher-quality, name-brand media to ensure reliability—in Lite-On’s case that means DVD+R discs bearing the Taiyo Yuden brand. With anything else, you’re stuck at regular-ol’ 16x.

This was the caliber of performance we experienced in our tests, since we always use Verbatim media (manufactured by Mitsubishi) to evaluate optical drives. The iHAS424 filled a single-layer DVD+R disc in 5:53 (min:sec), with an average write speed of 11.66x. That’s more than a minute slower than Samsung’s SH-S223 22x drive (4:46), which happens to be tuned for Verbatim media, but not necessarily other brands (the upshot is that speed claims above 16x only apply to specific types of media). In DVD+R reads, the Lite-On and Samsung drives were more simpatico, with times of 4:56 and 4:55, respectively.

Google has been quietly working a Social Search experiment for the past year. Google’s interest is in making search results more personal by providing relevant web content from friends and online contacts. The experiment seems to be going well, as Google has just announced the availability of Social Search to all, in beta form.

Google hopes, besides you making more use of its search engine, that the Social Search will offer greater confidence in search results. Rather than rely on the “kindness of strangers”, you can get feedback from people you know and trust. You’re doing it now on Facebook and Twitter, so why not do it on Google as well?

For Social Search to work in a meaningful way, you’re going to have to disclose more of yourself to Google. Google says creating/updating your Google profile is a first step. There you can add links to your other public online social services. Google allows options for managing your Social Search network, including adding and deleting members.

Social Search is being rolled out for all signed-in users. Google says it may take a few days before you see the change.