The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks

Set in the 1920s in North Carolina, The Notebook tells a story of young love. Noah and Allie fall for each other one summer, but they come from different worlds where their love is forbidden.

After a 14-year separation, Allie sees the newspaper ad of a young man with a house for sale. She decides to visit him, not knowing why he returned. Noah is shocked but pleased by her visit and welcomes her into his house. After they spend a couple days together, their feelings emerge and they must make some difficult decisions.

Author Nicholas Sparks focuses on the themes of love and choices. As Noah tries to regain what he and Allie once had, she struggles with telling him she’s engaged. But she begins to realize that her feelings for Noah never died.

When her trip ends, Allie must decide whom she loves. “Can you really leave without looking back?” Noah asks. “I don’t know. Probably not,” she replies. With tears running down her face she finally chooses.

The style of The Notebook is similar to Lurlene McDaniel’s books: both use detail that makes you imagine everything as if you were there. Sparks focuses on characters’ thoughts and feelings, unlike McDaniel, who uses more dialogue.

The Notebook is a classic tale of love lost and regained after many years, and is a truly romantic and touching story. This is an amazing book that captures your attention and keeps you guessing what will happen next. You will never want to put it down.

Apple’s new MacBook Pro is the greatest, and perhaps final, version of the personal computer.

If Apple weren’t so orderly, disciplined, and predictably well run, you could almost call it schizophrenic. On the one hand, it’s the world’s most successful mobile technology company—the firm that sparked the smartphone and tablet boom, and the only one that’s reaping any significant profits from these new devices. Apple, more than any other company, is banking on what it calls the “post-PC” era, an age in which we get most of our stuff done on small, Internet-connected portable machines, not the hulking desktops and notebooks that now clutter our lives. Note that at its developer conference on Monday, most of Apple’s innovations were reserved for its mobile operating system. While it did announce several new features for a new version of the Mac OS, many of them—as Wired’s Steven Levy points out—were imports first invented for Apple’s phones and tablets.

But it’s too simple to say that Apple is giving up on PCs. Look at its amazing new laptop, which—clunkily and confusingly—is called the MacBook Pro with Retina display. That name suggests the new machine is closely related to Apple’s current line of MacBook Pros, which are stylish but pedestrian, old-fashioned laptops. The Retina MacBook’s real sire is actually the MacBook Air, the tiny machine that the company first launched in 2008. Over the last four years, Apple has transformed the MacBook Air from an expensive and underpowered novelty line into the best group of notebooks on the market. The Air—and now the similarly thin and light and flash-storage-having Retina MacBook Pro—represents the future of personal computing, while the standard MacBook Pro and the other computers in its class feel like pre-post-PC machines, devices that are hopelessly stuck in the past.

And that’s what I mean by schizophrenic: At the same time that it is killing the PC, Apple keeps extending the life of the personal computer with notebooks like the Air. That the same company is doing both these things is quite strange and spectacular—imagine if, in addition to building the Model-T, Henry Ford was also working on a way to breed faster, less smelly horses.

Apple isn’t really at war with itself, because in many ways the Air is a complement to the iPad, not its enemy. Well, that’s the case today, anyway. At some point the two machines will have to collide—either the Air or the iPad will win out, or we’ll see some novel combination of the two. Whatever happens, this much is clear now: If the once mighty personal computer is to have any future, the MacBook Air is its last best hope.

I first dove into the Air in 2010, when Apple released the 11-inch model for $999, a price I found irresistible. When Apple updated its Airs with faster processors last year, I traded in my 11-inch model for the 13-inch. I found both to be exceptional machines, the best portable computers I’d ever used. The Air does everything I can do on a standard laptop, but it has the size, weight, and battery life that’s more in line with a tablet. It’s also quieter than a standard laptop—it doesn’t have any spinning drives, and its temperature fan only kicks in when I watch too many Flash videos. While both the 11-inch and 13-inch models have slower processors than MacBook Pros, the machines feel surprisingly zippy, and are more than powerful enough for most everyday uses. On Monday, Apple updated the processors in its Air lineup once again, and it also reduced the price of its 13-inch model by $100. That machine now sells for $1,199, while the 11-inch Air still goes for $999.

At these prices, the Air is unbeatable. There are lots of computers that are cheaper than the Air—including several thin and light “ultrabook” laptops that PC manufacturers have released to mimic the Air—but they lack the quality and responsiveness of Apple’s machine. The cheap Windows ultrabooks I’ve tried have been blighted with poor trackpads, bad battery life, and glitches (for instance, a failure to respond quickly after being placed in standby mode). There are some well-reviewed ultrabooks on the market (like the Asus Zenbook), but these generally go for around the same price as Apple’s Air, and they’re still not as good as the Air.

Meanwhile, machines that are more expensive than the Air don’t make much sense. This is especially true of Apple’s non-Retina MacBook Pros, which start at $1,199 for the 13-inch model and $1,799 for the 15-inch. These machines seem to offer better specs than the Air—they have faster processors, optical drives, and more storage space—but I suspect that for most people, those specs aren’t worth the extra weight. Many people worry about the Air’s limited storage space compared with hard-drive based laptops, but I don’t think you’ll have many problems. If you separate your data from your computer using external storage—put all your photos, music, and video on a backup drive and on services like Dropbox—you really don’t need many hundreds of gigabytes of onboard storage these days.

If you study the success of the Air, and the efforts of PC makers to clone it, it seems obvious that over the next few years, every new laptop will have its thin and light frame. Apple has made clear that the new Retina MacBook Pro is the future of the MacBook Pro line; look for that model to get cheaper over time, and soon—if not next year, then certainly in 2014—it will replace the hard-drive-based MacBook Pro.*

The mystery is what will happen to Apple’s laptop line as it picks up more and more features that we associate with the iPad. Like Apple’s tablet, the new MacBook has a Retina display, and it boasts seven hours of battery life, which is closing in on the iPad’s 10-hour mark. At some point Apple’s laptops will add touchscreens, too—touch will be too widely embedded in the computing culture for laptops not to have it. At the same time, the iPad will get faster and faster, in time matching the power of today’s laptops. And all the while, the Mac OS will keep picking up more and more features that Apple first showed off on its mobile OS.

What happens when these trends collide? In three years’ time, what will be the difference between a $499 iPad and a $999 MacBook? Will they be essentially the same machine, except that one will come with a keyboard and one won’t? The same question applies to Windows PCs, too, as Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8 is meant to enable the convergence of tablet and desktop operating systems. Will there soon be no difference between Windows tablets and Windows laptops, either?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. But the dynamics sure are strange and fascinating to behold. Thanks to Apple, laptop computers have never been better. And, also thanks to Apple, laptops have never been more clearly destined for obsolescence. Let’s just enjoy it while it lasts. After all, a faster, less smelly horse would have been pretty awesome, no?

Correction, June 13, 2012: This article originally stated that the new model of the MacBook Pro will replace the hard-drive-based version “if not next year, then certainly in 2013.” It should have read “if not next year, then certainly in 2014.” (Return to the corrected sentence.)

By Farhad Manjoo

 

New processor designs boost graphics to speed up Windows

New processors from AMD and Intel will provide the horsepower for next generation desktop applications, that could previously only run on specialist workstations.

Integrated chips used to be the poor cousins of dedicated systems. PC manufacturers offered low-cost PC hardware – with integrated sound and video chips – that were lower cost than machines equipped with dedicated audio and video hardware.

But these integrated devices balanced cost with performance, and it was the performance that often suffered as a result of design compromises.

The industry has moved on and the integrated chip design, now called System on a Chip (SoC), is set to provide processing, graphics and multimedia in the next generation of PC and hybrid PC/tablet devices.

Intel's approach is called IntelHD, which offers built in graphics, although its performance is inferior to dedicated graphics processors (GPU) according to industry benchmarks.

The company did attempt to develop its own GPU, code-named Larrabee, but this project has been dropped. However, the latest Atom SoC design, the z2760, which will power the new Dell, Fujitsu, HP Asus and Acer Windows 8 Pro tablets, uses the Imagination PowerVR graphics core chip to improve graphics.

In its market trends report for electronic equipment published in July 2012, analyst Gartner noted that graphics processing units (GPUs), digital signal processors (DSPs) and other specialised cores will take centre stage in future SoC designs.

“The importance of multimedia content to a broad variety of electronic equipment makes the ability to manage the presentation of the content critical. For most processor architectures, this is now handled by a graphics processing core that manages the resolution and the quality of the images rendered.”

Integrating the GPU onto a SoC design will enhance the performance in future application processor units, according to Gartner.

This is exactly what AMD has been developing since it acquired graphics card maker ATI, in 2006.

“We put a GPU right beside a CPU core," says Adam Kozak, AMD client desktop product marketing manager. "We are implementing AES encryption (256-bit), up to four processor cores,and HT7000 graphics, all on a single chip.”

According to Kozak, graphics processing is the chipmaker's strongest area. He says the design philosophy of the company is to concentrate on developing high-performance chips at a low cost.

The latest so-called APU chip provides 4.2GHz on the CPU, 8GHz on the GPU, which, according to AMD's data, is capable of delivering 736 GFlops.

But does a PC need all this processing power, just to run Windows 8?

Kozak believes so. Microsoft is using its DirectX graphics interfaces to speed-up rendering of the Windows 8 user interface and Office 12 also makes use of graphics acceleration. He says that in Windows 8, the AMD processor can display three monitors from a single chip, without the need for additional graphics cards.

As Computer Weekly has previously reported, there is growing interest in using the powerful GPU in a PC to run supercomputer-like applications. In fact, graphics card maker Nvidia has developed Cuda (Compute Unified Device Architecture), an architecture for running computationally intensive applications on the multiple cores in its high-performance graphics card family.

But Cuda is proprietary to Nvidia. Kozak says the new Microsoft  DirectCompute programming platform will enable application developers to target the CPU and the GPU in standard way, not just on Nvidia GPUs. This will mean applications can take advantage of the raw processing power available on the high performance GPU core that now resides in the AMD SoC designs.

As an alternative to Microsoft DirectCompute, applications can also use the OpenCL programming interfaces, which effectively does the same thing. Image-processing applications like Adobe Photoshop use OpenCL to boost performance of computationally intensive graphics rendering tasks. Kozak says the OpenCL architecture can also be used in more mainstream applications, like Winzip, for speeding up the compression and decompression of zip files.

ViewPoint 3D is a start-up taking advantage of the new SoC designs from AMD to power large multimedia displays with three-dimensional presentation graphics. Technical director, Robin Colclough says: “We have built a complete application in C++ to create 3D presentation with dynamic lighting and 3D effects. You can import PowerPoint slides and convert them to 3D.”

Einstein’s brain lives on in new iPad app

CHICAGO — While Albert Einstein’s genius isn’t included, an exclusive iPad application launched this week promises to make detailed images of his brain more accessible to scientists than ever before.

The application will allow researchers and novices to peer into the eccentric Nobel winner’s brain as if they were looking through a microscope. A medical museum under development in Chicago obtained funding to scan and digitize nearly 350 fragile and priceless slides made from slices of Einstein’s brain after his death in 1955.

“I can’t wait to find out what they’ll discover,” said Steve Landers, a consultant for the National Museum of Health and Medicine Chicago who designed the app. “I’d like to think Einstein would have been excited.”

After Einstein died, a pathologist named Thomas Harvey performed an autopsy, removing his brain in hopes that future researchers could discover the secrets behind his genius.

Harvey gave samples to researchers and collaborated on a 1999 study published in the Lancet. That study showed a region of Einstein’s brain — the parietal lobe — was 15 per cent wider than normal. The parietal lobe is important to the understanding of math, language and spatial relationships.

The new iPad app may allow researchers to dig even deeper by looking for brain regions where the neurons are more densely connected than normal, said Dr. Phillip Epstein, a Chicago-area neuroscientist and consultant for the museum.

But because the tissue was preserved before modern imaging technology, it may be difficult for scientists to figure out exactly where in Einstein’s brain each slide originated. Although the new app organizes the slides into general brain regions, it doesn’t map them with precision to an anatomical model.

“They didn’t have MRI. We don’t have a three-dimensional model of the brain of Einstein, so we don’t know where the samples were taken from,” said researcher Jacopo Annese of the Brain Observatory at the University of California, San Diego. What’s more, the slides on the app represent only a fraction of the entire brain, Annese said.

Annese has preserved and digitized another famous brain, that of Henry Molaison, who died in 2008 after living for decades with profound amnesia. Known as “H.M.” in scientific studies, Molaison participated during his life in research that revealed new insights on learning and memory.

A searchable website with images of more than 2,400 slides of Molaison’s entire brain will be available to the public in December, Annese said.

“There will be another Einstein and we’ll do it like H.M.,” Annese predicted. For now, he said, it’s exciting that the Einstein brain tissue has been preserved digitally before the slides deteriorate or become damaged.

Some may question whether Einstein would have wanted images of his remains sold to non-scientists for $9.99.

“There’s been a lot of debate over what Einstein’s intentions were,” museum board member Jim Paglia said. “We know he didn’t want a circus made of his remains. But he understood the value to research and science to study his brain, and we think we’ve addressed that in a respectful manner.”

Paglia said the app could “inspire a whole new generation of neuroscientists.”

Proceeds from sales will go to the U.S. Department of Defence’s National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver Spring, Maryland, and to the Chicago satellite museum, which is set to open in 2015 with interactive exhibits and the museum’s digital collections.