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Announcement: Launch Softly, But Carry a Big Geek

10:00 AM, December 15, 2008 | Comments (2)
Welcome to the debut of our newest consumer tech blog, "American Geek." My name is N'Gai Croal, and I'm a senior writer for technology here at Newsweek who also pens the monthly "American Geek" column in our print edition. When my editors asked me to...

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Posted Friday, December 19, 2008 12:36 PM

Hello World: American Geek's Roundup for December 19th, 2008

N'Gai Croal
  • FLAT: "Sales Growth of Flat-Panel TVs Is Expected to Slow" is the headline of Eric A. Taub's New York Times story on what's happening to the centerpiece of any worthwhile man cave. The story quotes DisplaySearch senior vice president as saying "There was an unnaturally high growth in sales due to the transition to digital TV and the replacement of picture tube TVs....You would expect a reversion to the mean, but this is beyond that."
  • BOOHOO: The layoffs at super-portal Yahoo! have to results both tense and funny. Tense, according to a blog post Valleywag's Owen Thomas, are comments made to Yahoo! founder Jerry Yang during the company's Southern California holiday party (sample remark: "You laid off my husband in February, we just had a baby, I got laid off on Wednesday. Now you at least can put a face with some of the people you put out on the street.") What about funny? That would be this YouTube video here.
  • FLASH: Traditional hard drive manufacturers can't rest on their laurels, because solid state drives (SSDs) are breathing down their necks. Ars Technica's Jon Stokes writes that Sun and Micron have found a way to increase the lifespan of Flash memory-based drives. But that's not all. "The other big SSD news today is Toshiba's announcement of a half-terabyte (512GB) SSD, the price of which hasn't been revealed. The new drive has a maximum sequential read speed of 240 [megabytes per second] and a max sequential write speed of 200 [megabytes per second], making it plenty fast, especially relative to its 2.5-inch magnetic competition." Which means quieter computers that consume less power. Nice.
  • 3-D: Stereoscopic imaging for laptops and iPhone is what Wazabee is showing off at MacWorld 2009. Engadget's Darren Murph posted about the company's 3DeeShell, an "autostereoscopic overlay for the MacBook Air and other 13.3-inch notebooks," and 3DeeFlector, "a special protective skin with an integrated removable lens that can display 3D content on the Apple iPhone." Perhaps 3-D pictures of that not-going-to-be-keynoting Steve Jobs will help ease attendees' pain.
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