For me, and this is a humble opinion, so much technology is crap. Filing the gap between phones and/or netbooks and computers? What a great marketing concept but what a waste of time.

Also, let me share with you something I read on the http://www.independent.co.uk/:

The Foxconn factory in the southern Chinese boom town of Shenzhen is so vast that walking around its outer perimeter takes two hours. Its workers turn out components that are supplied to big Western electronics brands including Nokia, Hewlett-Packard and Dell. And it is here that most of the parts for Apple’s iPhone, and the much-awaited iPad, which goes on sale in the UK this week, are manufactured.

Yesterday, Li Hai, a 19-year-old employee of the firm, jumped from the top of the building in Shenzhen to his death. It brought the number of suspected suicides at the factory this year to 10. There have been another two attempted suicides.

All of the deaths have been of youngsters between 18 and 25 years old. Li Hai had only been working at the plant for 42 days. The incidents have prompted intense soul-searching in China, about conditions in its factories and the social cost of breakneck economic development.

Here you go and yes, we can all excuse our selves saying that, they have chosen the job, they decided to finish their lifes… whatever. The truth is that we don’t really know what happened to the minds of those youngsters and in which circumstances they had to work… Maybe they were forced to work for their families survival, we don’t know. The only thing that matters is that we had iPad right in time, isn’t that true mr Steve Jobs?

In 1984, Apple next launched the Macintosh. Its debut was announced by the now famous $1.5 million television commercial “1984″. It was directed by Ridley Scott, aired during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII on January 22, 1984 and is now considered a watershed event for Apple’s success and a “masterpiece”.

Mr Steve Jobs, you are not different from IBM.

The open source dynamic scripting language PHP is widely deployed across the Web, powering countless Web sites (including the Internet.com network). Now Facebook is aiming to change the game with today’s release of a major new PHP effort called HipHop.

With HipHop, Facebook is providing a new runtime that is intended to improve PHP use in large-scale deployments. The HipHop effort, which also includes a new Web server, has already been in use by Facebook for the past six months, though the project is just being made public today.

Facebook developers say the HipHop effort isn’t an attempt to fork the PHP community, but rather, a move to help PHP scale.

“There are two different pieces to keep in mind, one is the PHP language itself, then there is the runtime that actually goes and interprets the language and runs it,” David Recordon, Facebook’s senior open programs manager, told InternetNews.com. “What we’ve done is we’ve implemented the PHP 5.2 language with a few features removed. Our plan is to keep the language the same, but what we’ve changed is the underlying runtime and the process of going and transforming the source code into C++ and then compiling it and pushing out the compiled binary.”

Facebook said the results of using HipHop have been dramatic. CPU usage on Facebook servers has dropped by an average of 50 percent as the HipHop PHP engine reduced the load on Facebook’s infrastructure.

The results have proven to be compelling enough that Facebook now uses HipHop to deliver more than 90 percent of its production server traffic.

HipHop isn’t just a new code transformation tool, either. The overall effort also includes a new Web server to deploy PHP as well. Typically, in open source deployments, PHP is served with Apache Web servers.

“In general, Apache is a great Web server, but when we were looking at how we get the next half percent or percent of performance, we didn’t need all the features that Apache offers,” Recordon said. He added, however, that he hopes an open source project will one day emerge around making HipHop work with Apache Web servers.

The idea of optimizing the PHP runtime is not a new one, with multiple solutions in the market today including eAccelerator and commercial PHP products from Zend. Zend is one of the lead commercial sponsors behind PHP.

“HipHop looks like an interesting project,” Zend CEO Andi Gutmans told InternetNews.com. “We have been briefed by Facebook but will certainly take a closer look now. There have been other such projects but most have been targeting managed runtimes such as Java and .NET with various degrees of success. We welcome any innovation that will help PHP extend its leadership position in Web application development.”

Gutmans added that, as is the case with all runtimes, it is important to continue innovating and the PHP runtime has continued to evolve over the years.

“I think it is important to continue to fold in new ideas and innovations into the community-based runtime and it’ll be interesting to learn what HipHop concepts could be relevant to the existing PHP community,” Gutmans said.

With some PHP runtime optimization solutions, the optimization is often a simple matter of a module load and a line change in the php.ini configuration file.

It’s not quite that easy with HipHop.

“This is not an extension to PHP — this is pretty different,” Recordon said. “Right now, the process is once you build and compile HipHop, it comes with a tool that will go through the transformation process and output the binary, and that’s what you actually use to run it.”

With HipHop, Facebook said its aim is not to split the PHP community but rather to help grow it. According to Recordon, HipHop will help to solidify PHP’s position as a great language for doing Web site development.

“There is definitely the piece in there that HipHop is designed for larger PHP deployments and not necessarily for individuals hosting their own blog or small Web site,” Recordon said. “The proof of the effect of HipHop will be over the next year as we start to make deployment tools easier, and as we start to build a successful community around it and start working with others on its future development and solving problems for companies beyond just Facebook.”

IPad is called, weighs just 680 grams, and is thin, only 13,4 mm. This is the newest member of the Apple that was released yesterday. Steve Jobs, CEO of the firm, on its annual event in San Francisco released its new device to thousands of expectant people. And that, along with the iPhone, which was introduced three years ago, has become one of the biggest releases of the company, preceded as usual by numerous rumors that echoed on the Internet.

The new device has been born to close the ‘gap’ between smartphones and netbooks. Can navigate the web, send emails, view photos and videos, listen to music and reading e-books (the firm opened a store of electronic books, iBookstore, coinciding with the availability date of the iPad in March). But in addition, Apple has designed a new version of iWork, productivity suite of applications for desktop computers own specifically designed for multi-touch for the new iPad. With Pages, Keynote and Numbers The user can create formatted documents, presentations with animations and transitions, and spreadsheets with statistical graphs, functions and formulas.

In general, includes 12 new applications developed especially for the iPad and, according to Apple, it works with virtually all of the more than 140,000 applications available on the App Store, including those already purchased by the user for the iPhone or iPod Touch.

The user will see all these applications on a 9.7 inch screen and LED backlight, which includes winning IPS technology for crisp and clear, with a viewing angle of 178 degrees. All applications will work in both portrait or landscape, changing automatically and dynamically between views when the user rotates the iPad in any direction. In addition, applications will run on the chip itself A4 Apple.

For connectivity, the new device will offer two versions: one with comnicación Wi-Fi 802.11n, and the other with Wi-Fi and 3G, which supports speeds up to 7.2 Mbps on HSDPA networks.

Finally, adding that the company has launched a new software development kit (Software Development Kit or SDK) for developers to create applications designed to take advantage of the capabilities of the iPad.

Prices

Although the iPad will be available worldwide beginning in March, only been realized prices for the U.S., which depend on the storage device and wireless connection type you wish:

- The U.S. MSRP is $ 499 for the 16GB model,
- Cost $ 599 for 32 GB model,
- And $ 699 the 64 GB model

IPad models with Wi-Fi + 3G will be available in April in the U.S. and certain countries. U.S. Retail pricing be:
- $ 629 for 16 GB model,
- $ 729 for 32 GB model,
- And $ 829 the 64 GB model

Which one is best?

A huge amount of PHP programmers started to join this discussion writing their personal PHP Framework tastes, providing me with a huge list of Frameworks I would like to share with you. I don’t say that one is best that another, as one of the members said, there is no ‘best PHP MVC Framework, is whatever suits you best on your project goals’.

• CodeIgniter
• Yii
• CakePHP
• Zend
• Symfony
• PHPDevShell
• Prado
• Akelos
• ZooP
• QPHP
• ezComponents

I know the list could be much bigger, if you know more PHP Frameworks to add to this list, please comment and I will update it.

Europa Press News

The Federal Office of Information Security from Germany, warned Internet users to find an alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (Firefox, Chrome, Safari) ‘to ensure their security’, after Microsoft recognized that their browser failed in the recents attacks to Google’s sytems.

However, according BBC Channel, Microsoft rejected the advice of the Federal Office, saying that the risk to their users was low and by improving the security settings in Internet Explorer would solve the problems.

Nevertheless, German authorities said that even improving its security settings would make IE completely safe for Internet navigation. Microsoft spokesman in Germany, Thomas Baumgaertner, said the attacks were carried against Google by “highly motivated people, with very specific purposes”.

There was a time when I was completely in love with Internet Explorer -I was a begginer web programmer, eleven years a go, but for some reason, that beloved browser, which I constantly used for my Web applications to internal LAN users became a full nightmare on the real WWWorld. I truly don’t understand why the hell is needed so many browsers on the net, why the engine is not made ‘standard’ and then companies offering browsers differ for the added options (themes, plugins, etc…). That could be a dream, one single CSS, JS, HTML engine, just to make the life of the programmer ‘easier’.

I am glad of this new, I am sick of the constant effort of companies to get the ‘monopol’ of something, sick of the confussion and sick of the nightmares that every designer has to go in order to make a great site.

Hope we all follow that campaign. I, in my new project, will include the TOO COOL FOR INTERNET EXPLORER stick. Guys of Microsoft, please open your eyes… get real, stop creating silly tools in order to get onto the market fast and then try to fix your mistakes with patches and updates.

Too Cool for Internet Explorer

The jQuery programmers not happy with a new release has also created a new  jQuery API site. Check what they have done on their API site here.

John Resig will announce 1.4 release details tomorrow but meanwhile, you can download it and see for yourself.

• Download jQuery 1.4 from Google CDN
• Download jQuery 1.4 from Official jQuery website

Also, if you want to learn more about what is new in jQuery 1.4 then you might find the following resources useful:

1. 14 Days of jQuery
2. Official jQuery Blog
3. jQuery 1.4 Cheatsheet
4. jQuery on Tweeter

Check what is new or changed on this new release here.

Happy birthday jQuery! Thanks for the good work!