Technology Blog

Chicago police officer Darren Pedota is at the center of a lawsuit filed by a diabetic man who was Tasered 11 times over the course of a minute while suffering from a diabetic seizure.

This isn’t the first time an officer has found himself in a similar situation, although in many of those cases the police appeared to be unaware of the patients condition, and mistook the involuntary movements as an act of aggression. In this case however, Pedota was one of the cops called in with the EMT. The police were asked to help the paramedics move the patient off the floor when an involuntary movement of the arm struck one of the assisting individuals. That’s when Pedota sprung into “action.”

As you might expect, the man suffered injuries from the attack and has responded by suing the crap out of the department for battery, excessive force, and failure to intervene. Hope he wins. [Courthouse News via Fark]

Amazon was almost founded on an Indian reservation, so it’d be immune to taxes. Fifteen years later, it’s still outmaneuvering sales taxes so we don’t have pay them either.

With free shipping if you’re patient and no sales tax in most states, Amazon can undercut almost anybody by at least 5 percent—I know it’s why I buy a ton of stuff from Amazon. The problem Best Buy—and every other brick & mortar store—has is that if you have a physical presence in a state, you have to to collect sales taxes. (Theoretically, we’re supposed to calculate the taxes on stuff we buy online, and send it to the state ourselves.) Knowing not charging sales tax is a huge competitive advantage, Amazon studiously avoids them.

For instance, the entire reason it was founded in Washington, not California, was so it didn’t have to charge CA residents sales taxes. And it only charges sales tax in 6 states (like Kansas) despite having some kind of presence in 14 of them, by putting portions of its business under wholly owned subsidiaries so it doesn’t have to collect tax for them. In NY, it’s still fighting the “Amazon tax” bill forcing it to collect tax in NY.

What’s funny is that Netflix actually does charge sales tax—its discs count as a physical presence in every state, which seems utterly perverse—but rolls it into the general cost of your subscription. Given that Amazon is a $20 billion-a-year internet monolith and state governments could sure use the cash, they’ll wake up to the whole internet thing eventually, so enjoy that 5 percent freebie while it lasts. [NYT]

Intel’s announcing superfast and incredibly efficient new notebook processors in a few days. They’re the biggest jump in notebook hardware since the Core 2 Duo. But we might not see them in MacBooks for a while.

Here’s the story: Starting with the unibody MacBook Pros in Oct. 2008, Apple dumped Intel’s own chipset and integrated graphics for Nvidia’s GeForce 9400M as a combined GPU/chipset, since it wildly outperforms the Intel’s integrated garbage, which had hampered previous MacBooks. Since the 9400M is in basically every Mac now, there’s a baseline of graphics performance across every Mac—nothing has crappier graphics than the 9400M. Important, because the OpenCL tech in Snow Leopard leverages your graphics card for extra processing power.

Since Oct. 2008, Intel’s introduced its blazing fast Core i7 and i5 processors, which use the Nehalem microarchitecture. The problem is that Nvidia can’t make compatible chipsets for it. Intel claims that Nvidia’s license to make chipsets for its processors doesn’t apply to any current or future processor with an integrated memory controller, which all Nehalem and Westmere—the 32nm die shrink of Nehalem—processors do. Nvidia sued and is pulling out of chipsets entirely, at least at the desktop level. (Intel’s also cut them off at the Atom level, making what the Ion 2 will look like something of a mystery as well.)

Which produces a question: What are the next set of MacBook guts going to be? The Arrandale Core i5 mobile processors Intel is expected to announce at CES don’t just have integrated memory controllers, they have integrated graphics, built right onto the die, too. If the MacBooks were upgraded to off-the-shelf Arrandale processors, it can’t, on the face of it, use an Nvidia chipset or more to the point, Nvidia’s superior integrated graphics. Intel’s integrated graphics still suck. So there are a couple of possibilities from here, it looks like.

• Possibility 1: Some kind of discrete or separate graphics cards for all MacBook Pros. Pre-unibody MacBook Pros, and even the 12-inch PowerBook G4, had discrete graphics cards only. The problem is that it’s more expensive, and that now-famed 6-8 hour battery life would take a hit. It’s how the latest iMac got away with using a Core i7 on with an Intel chipset, though.

Or maybe Apple will put discrete graphics cards in every MacBook Pro, but use Intel integrated graphics as a battery-saving fallback. Which is sort of the way all but the low-end MacBook Pros work now, with both integrated and discrete graphics. (Though the Nvidia integrated graphics are good enough to be the default option on current MacBooks.) It would rock the boat the least.

• Possibility 2: Suffer the crappier graphics on lower end models. A problem, given that any machine using Intel integrated graphics would result in worse graphics performance than the current MacBook or MacBook Pros. Which sounds counterproductive, given Apple’s obvious bet on graphics cards for processing juice with OpenCL.

• Possibility 3: A customized set of hardware of some kind from Intel, either on the processor or chipset level that would let the next MacBooks match the power consumption and graphics capabilities of current models. It wouldn’t be unprecedented: Apple asked for and received essentially custom chips from Intel before, for the MacBook Air. (Though Intel later let everybody else play ball with other chips meant for really skinny laptops.)

• Possibility 4: Apple’s gonna wait on something else before upgrading from Core 2 Duos. Will people have to wait longer for blazing new silicon in MacBooks than in PC notebooks? Sometimes they do, yes, but sometimes Apple gets Intel’s latest first—Nehalem Xeons in Mac Pros, and the ultramobile chip in the MacBook Air.

Something else to consider is that for the first time in a long time, if Apple wants to push new guts soon, it could switch to ATI graphics (which it’s using in the iMac) for notebooks because of delays in Nvidia’s Fermi architecture that push their truly new graphics cards out until Spring 2010. ATI’s got a solid 4 months where it’s got the newest graphics silicon around.

Whatever happens, it’s a mystery for now. Which is kind of a fascinating point, actually, given that Macs run on PC guts now, yet it’s still trying to do something different on the hardware level.

My plan to continue exchanging yellow-screened iMacs until the end of time has been thwarted, but I’m not giving up. Read on for the revised plan.

First, a little background. Yesterday, I posted about my second yellow-tinted iMac. And I made this threat:

I basically mail back review products for a living, and the joy of this new toy has long been spoiled. So I’m going to do my damndest to bankrupt Apple with return shipping. I will send back these iMacs as many times as it takes for them to build one correctly. And every single time that they screw it up, I’m going to air their dirty laundry here. Feel free to read it or don’t. It’s my opinion that Apple’s cyclical production issues can’t be swept under the rug any longer.

Shortly thereafter, a mid-level Apple representative who’d been handling my claim called (in alleged response to an email I’d sent before my post, not the post itself). I was informed that the company would not issue me another exchange straight from the factory. I’d, instead, need to get the iMac repaired at an Apple Store, lest I “want to waste the time and have to do this all over again.” That’s right, she basically admitted that everything coming off the line would be inflicted with the same disease.

I attempted calling technical support on my own for a second time to facilitate a true iMac exchange. After giving the technician my case number, they went off the line for about 5 minutes. And when they came back, my exchange was blocked again. This technician added that, following an exchange, “It’s quite likely the issue will continue to happen…and that we’ll become stuck in an endless loop.”

Maybe she meant “infinite loop.”

Call me paranoid, but I believe it to be true: Yesterday, after posting my threat, Apple tracked down my non-Gizmodo email I used to purchase the iMac and flagged my account to block exchanges. Either way, my hands are completely tied. Luckily, yours are not.

If my conspiracy thesis is correct, we’ve hit a nerve with Apple. So I’m only going to increase my efforts with your help until they publicize and/or fix the yellow LCD issue. Here’s what I could use from you:

Anyone out there who’s in the process of exchanging an iMac for one without a jaundiced screen and receives a replacement January 1st or after, email submissionsATgizmodo.com to let us know if the issue has been resolved. New purchases that turn out to be yellow are great as well. Please be sure to:

1. Use the subject “Yellow iMac“
2. Take photos of this screen test (just make sure to lock that white balance!)
3. Include details like the ship date and how many iMacs you’ve exchanged so far

Every week, assuming your participation, I will post an update on the problem. And let me make this point abundantly clear to any Apple corporate folk (because I know you’re reading): If your company is still selling multi-thousand dollar computers with yellow screens in 52 weeks, I will be pointing it out in 52 weeks.

This problem will not go away, not until it’s fixed. And I implore other sites, technology-based or not, to help me publicize the issue. No, this isn’t the first time Apple has sold the public broken products, but maybe, just maybe, it could be the last.

Now having said all that, if Apple can come forward and openly admit the mistake while providing an adequate solution to their customers, I’ll laud them as an example as to how companies can take an unforeseen manufacturing issue and make things right.

As for the fate of my iMac, I’m between returning it out of sheer disgust and attempting the repair for sake of our little narrative (plus, you know, I really would like one that works in spite of all this trouble). We’ll see.

According to a legit-looking leak, HP is releasing 14 and 17-inch versions of their Envy laptops. And from what we can tell, even the 17-inch Envy will exclude an integrated optical drive. And if that’s the case, I have no issue, since it’d be better to use that space to squeeze in a larger battery anyway. The 15’s stock battery life was horrid. [HP Fansite via Engadget]