our class spent today at the chicago tribune building, talking to the folks of Red Eye (the chicagoan version of express, for you d.c. folks), chicagotribune.com, and tribune interactive. everyone there was lovely and smart, of course, but what was really great was seeing the inside of this gorgeous building. even better was the office space for tribune interactive, which was in the basement, where the printing presses used to be!!1!! i found that really cool, for some reason. it's very sleek and modern and loft-like down there - not your typical basement office. certainly a space where i wouldn't mind working. apparently it's won all sorts of awards. check it out.

i should also mention that we got to check out the printing plant of the daily herald last week, and for all i think of print papers, that is one impressive piece of machinery. check out some images of the press (not the DH's; a german company, i believe) here. though the daily herald is the third largest paper in illinois, it's still what many consider a suburban paper, but its printing presses are some of the newest and most sophisticated in the country. they also have scary machine forklift type robots that load the enormous 20-ton rolls of paper and i almost got run over by one. or, like, it came within 20 feet of me.

printing presses. i know! exciting! alright, more voyeurism - you can check out the pretty faces of some of my classmates here.

Let's nip this in the bud right now: just because an electronic device has two different embedded circuit packages in it does not make it "dual core". I'm going to find it pretty irritating (admittedly, for no good reason) if "dual core!" stickers start getting slapped on every new consumer gadget. In this case it's a particularly bad example: having a digital/analog converter outside the general-purpose processor is completely normal and unremarkable. If you were building an mp3 player out of off-the-shelf components (that weren't specifically designed as integrated solutions for building mp3 players), you'd end up with a separate DAC quite naturally — it's not exactly a premium feature. And you'd really be a dope to call such a solution "dual core".

But if you insist on it, you might as well call the iPod sextuple core. Check it out: it's got a genuinely dual core ARM processor, a DAC, a firewire controller, an LCD controller and (not listed on that page) I believe the video on newer models is handled on a separate IC. What does all this mean? Nothing, other than that — surprise! — electronic devices aren't magic boxes. They have pieces inside of them. Unless you know what they are, counting them won't tell you very much about which gizmo to buy. I suggest sticking with the traditional "shiniest" heuristic.