“Confessions of an Apple Store Employee” and other links…
Popular Mechanics: “Sometimes the company can feel like a cult. Like, they give us all this little paper pamphlet, and it says things like—and I’m paraphrasing here—‘Apple is our soul, our people are our soul.’ Or ‘We aim to provide technological greatness.’ And there was this one training session in which they started telling us how to work on our personality, and separating people into those with an external focus and an internal focus. It was just weird.”
“India’s most expensive movie [Endhiran] yields most astonishingly violent and demented action-scene in cinematic history”
Cory Doctorow: “Killer robots, a seeming infinitude of them, outnumbered only by the endless cannon-fodder Indian soldiers, each with his own machinegun. There are many like it, but this one is his. And it will soon be the killer robots. They will form into enormous, improbable geometrical solids, and they will improvise with those guns to create enormous whirling ballistic buzz-saws of death, except when they're forming up into huge, stylized cobras and such. And there are lorries filled with gas bottles, daring kamikaze missile-firing choppers (each more doomed than the last), and, of course, a software worm with the power to overcome them. Or does it?”
“CES 2011: Kitara synth-guitar”
Rob Beschizza: “Unlike keytars, which remain keyboards, or MIDI guitars, which are ‘too temperamental,’ his Kitara keeps the frets but replaces the strings with an 8-inch multi-touch display. Inside is a polyphonic synthesizer, with 100 default sounds and 6 effect, each of which can be assigned to different ‘strings.’”
“Epson introduces two high-volume business inkjets”
Sarah Meyer: “The B-310N uses four individual high-capacity cartridges that Epson estimates can print 3,000 (black) to 3,500 (color) pages before exhaustion with an ink cost as low as six cents per color page. Additional features include: print speeds up to 19 pages per minute (ppm) in black and 18 ppm in color, a monthly duty cycle of 10,000 pages, print resolution up to 5760 x 1440 dpi, and 32 MB of memory standard.”