From AMD's upcoming chip roadmaps we know the Phenom II is due out early next year, and it's AMD's second 45nm chip, but in a recent show and tell session AMD demonstrated the "overhead" built into the chip by overclocking one to a crazy 5GHz. It did take a special CO2 sublimation cooling unit that carries the danger of suffocating you if you use it in a small room, but what the hey. With a liquid nitrogen cooling system the chip was easily pushed way over 5 gigs. You may think "yeah, I could overclock anything with that stuff!" but it should be noted that with fairly normal high-end air-cooling the chips could get up to 4GHz. It'll be interesting to watch AMD's battle with Intel's i7 play out. [PCPerspective]

The balance, the precision aiming. The man: Woz takes a piss on his Segway. If this is Photoshopped (or the world's most convincing Woz lookalike), there truly is no God. [Macenstein]

The new iPhone 2.2 is here and we've been playing with it all night and morning. Like Apple says in their documentation, the stability and performance seems to have improved, but the spotlight falls on the new and improved Maps application, which has been polished up thanks to its public transportation and walking directions, as well as the smooth, fast Street View, and many other interface details. There are a lot of unexpected new features—no, no cut and paste—and fixes as well, and we've tried them all here:

Enhancements to Maps

• Public transport and walking mode: The most impressive part, at least for a public transport user like me, is the new public transport and walking directions mode. They work as you can expect, without many glitches. This mode has all the information you need, at least here in New York, and it showed me the fastest way to get from my house to Gawker offices (cleverly avoiding the damn 6, which is always arriving late for me).

Not only it showed the route clearly, with nice new icons, but it also gave something unexpected: subway timetables. As you can see in the gallery, it tells you what's the departure time for the next Manhattan-bound L train, telling you how many minutes you have to get there on time. It can also calculate the total time of your trip, which is always useful.

• Street view: It works great. You can't access street view by clicking on any place in the map, but the way Apple has implemented it kinda makes sense. When you do a search (or drop a pin) an new little guy icon will appear in the address pop-up. You just have to click on it and the map will zoom and smoothly change into Street View mode, rotating the display to the left automatically. From there you can navigate easily, using one finger to look around the panorama and clicking on the overlaid arrows to navigate. It works hot-butter-over-pancakes smooth. We'd like to be able to access the mode by just finding our current location and switching it on though.

• Other new features: When you drop a pin, it displays the exact address of the location. You can also share any location via email very easily, just by clicking on the location itself and hitting a Share this location button. It's a quick cut and paste substitute (of course, no cut and paste yet).

iTunes and App Store

• Podcasts over the air: As far as we can tell, they work flawlessly for both audio and video. I accessed the new feature and I was downloading podcasts in no time. Unfortunately, the artificially-imposed 3G network 10MB limit is easy to reach for video content, such as the TED Talks that download fine over Wi-Fi. One good thing: It leaves the podcasts in a queue so the next time you get into a Wi-Fi hot spot, they will download automagically.

• App store reorganization: The UI has been sightly reorganized and polished. The categories, for example, now display bigger and with icons. As I speculated in our iPhone 2.2 rumor round-up, the icons shown seem to show the top free application.

Fixes

• Improved stability and performance in Safari: In my informal testing, it feels a bit faster to me, especially on Javascript heavy web sites.

• Resolved isolated issues with scheduled email: Wasn't able to test this one, as I don't use scheduled checking to save on battery life.

• Improving wide HTML email display: If you have ever ran into this problem, you know it's extremely annoying. When somebody sends you an HTML styled email, sometimes it displays very long lines and tiny text. I received a mail like that the other day from my sister and went immediately to try it. Unfortunately, the fix hasn't worked for me on that one, but it did work in another email I got from a company. Weird.

• Decreased in call set-up an call drops: Too soon to tell.

• Improved sound quality on Voicemail messages: I saw this yesterday so I went and tried them in 2.1. Indeed, there were pops and hisses. After the update I tried under 2.2 and yes, they do have better sound quality.

Other little additions

• Clicking the home button while you are in the home screen takes you to the first page of the home, which is very welcome, as that's where I store my main applications and I have several pages of additional apps and page links.

• Safari: They have streamlined the interface for address and search, like we already saw in previous leaks.

• Preference to turn auto-correction on and off: This is a welcome addition for me, because quite frankly, no matter what Jason says, my iPhone corrects fuck with duck every single time. So duck auto-correction for a little while. I'm going to ducking see if it affects my ducking speed or not.

Verdict: It works fairly well, feels smooth, and the new features are a must have—especially the new Maps application. Ducking good. Go get it now.

Here's a story nobody likes to see. 19-year-old Abraham K. Biggs overdosed on pills on a live webcam stream before hundreds of people on Wednesday night, all while commenters on Justin.tv and bodybuilding.com encouraged him, apparently thinking it was some kind of joke. He lay passed out on his webcam for hours until he appeared to stop breathing, at which point the people watching realized it was no joke.

Sadly, this isn't the first time something like this has happened. Followers of internet lore are surely familiar with Brandon "I told u I was hardcore" Vedas, who overdosed on drugs live on a webcam after having given his personal information out to the viewers in case something went wrong. All were too afraid to get in trouble to call the authorities.

There's definitely something about being on the internet that makes you feel cut off from and not responsible for the people you're dealing with (see: YouTube commenters), but when you're watching a real, live human on video doing something obviously damaging to themselves, it's completely inexcusable to do nothing. And to egg them on, well, that's something those people will have to deal with on their own. A sad story all around. [NewTeeVee]

A few days back, I showed you the new touch interface for Media Center PCs running Windows 7, and though I had to pull the video, I promised a walkthrough of proposed Windows 7 Media Center features. I say "proposed" because, like everything else about Windows 7, this is all alpha and subject to change. But these features are very cool, and really should be included. One more thing: These screens were projected on a wall in a well-lit room, so they look horrible, but anyone familiar with Media Center (and Microsoft has shipped like 100 million of them, so that should be plenty of ya) will have a good idea of the pleasantness to come. Or you can just drink in the following prose descriptions:

• Shows appear dissolved behind menus - When you're watching something and want to pull up a menu to add a new show or browse the channel guide, or even go into another area of the Media Center, the current show stays on, not as a picture-in-picture, but tastefully dissolved into the background.

• Chronological turbo scroll for channel guide - When you're looking at the channel guide, but want to go from Tuesday to Sunday in a hurry, you just hold down the arrow button on the remote, and the days start to whip by. Listings become a blur, but the days of the week, and the portions of the day, appear floating over the listings to give you an idea of when to stop.

• Live thumbnail forward and rewind - During HD video playback, you might want to jump around. Grab the time marker and drag it forward or back, and as you do, you see a miniature version of the show playing backwards or forwards at the same speed.

• Launch TV from Start menu - Media Center can occupy a pole position in the Start menu, and when you hover over the MC logo, a list of recently recorded shows pops up, along with other frequently used MC features.

• Floating Media Center gadget - Not only can you access shows from the Start menu, you can browse MC features from the desktop with the gadget. I am not clear whether or not you'll get to have actual video playing in it, but for people who need MC at their fingertips, this appears to be a nice, subtle execution.

• Alphabetical turbo scroll for music - The chronological turbo scroll on the channel guide is cool, but this one will come in more handy for me: As you scroll through the countless artists in your music collection, the names become a blur but your location in the alphabet is denoted by two letters, probably so that those longer letters like J, M, R and S can be broken up better.

• Drifting cover art grid - When you're playing a song, the album art for that track appears with some basic metadata, and all the cover art for every other track you own materializes and drifts in the background. The primary cover art jumps from side to side and top to bottom, so that everything is in constant, fluid motion.

• Scattered photos picture show - As you're playing music, you can opt for a photo show that essentially reaches into a folder, grabs a handful of shots, scatters them evenly around the page, and then zooms in on one at a time. A nice touch: In the wide angle, all the photos look like desaturated black-and-whites, but as each shot gets its own screen time, it magically becomes full color.

• Copy remote content - If you are browsing multiple libraries or Media Center PCs and come across a show you like, you can watch it or save it for later by hitting "make a copy." As long as there's no broadcast flag or some other DRM, the vid will flow over to your local HDD so you can watch it when you've left the network.

• Virtual channels without TV tuner - One of the new Media Center's central concerns is the new popularity of internet-based video, not just YouTube clips but whole TV episodes like those shown on Hulu. DVR functionality is key to making the most of an MC, but at launch there will be loads of virtual channels with shows you can watch just as easily. Microsoft demoed a special MSNBC channel that had clips and full shows; it's of course feasible for them to build similar channels for third-party web video services too. [Windows 7 on Giz]