Weekly Knowledge Dump: Tech News for 9.30.11

The Weekly Knowledge Dump is the weekly tech column that gives you the biggest news in the tech world for the past week, plus a guide to all of the interesting but non-news stories from the past week. It’s like backing up a dump truck of knowledge to your brain.

New Kindles!

Amazon announced this week that they would be selling three new models of their popular Kindle e-readers. The first model is simply called Kindle and will sell for $79. It’s basically the same as previous models, just without the keyboard. Also announced was the $99 Kindle Touch, which utilizes a touchscreen for navigation. The big news, however, is the announcement of Amazon’s $299 Kindle Fire. The Fire is basically Amazon’s answer to the iPad. It’s half Kindle e-reader and half tablet. Since it’s got the muscle of Amazon behind it, the Fire will probably sell pretty well.

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Apple to Stop Selling Boxed Software to Colleges

Many college bookstores also sell computers and software, but they won’t be selling Apple software for much longer. Apple sent out an EOL notice to college stores this week saying that they would stop sending boxed copies of many of their most popular software titles, including iLife and iWork. This is part of a larger push from Apple toward digital distribution, headlined by the Mac App Store. The one piece of popular software that you can still get a psychical copy of is Logic, Apple’s audio editing software. This is probably because the Logic software library is almost 20GB and that isn’t exactly practical to download.

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People Still Don’t Know The Onion is a FAKE News Network

You would think by now that people know The Onion is a fake news network. Yet every once in a while, people seem to report their stories as fact. On Thursday morning, Twitter erupted into a tizzy because The Onion’s Twitter account started putting out a series of Tweets with the hashtag #congresshostage to promote their fake story about Congress taking a bunch of children hostage. Twitter is great for helping to plan democratic revolutions and protests, but it’s also a great place for people to overreact to a story (just like the rest of the internet).

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Apple Announces Event for October 4th

Apple announced a news and media event for October 4th, which is next Tuesday. The event will be held at Apple’s campus in Cupertino, California and will most likely see the introduction of Apple’s next iPhone. There are also rumors swirling that Apple will kill off the iPod Classic and Shuffle, as well as word that Apple might introduce updated versions of both the iPhone and iPod Touch.

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Bonus: Interesting Dispatches from the Past Week

Here is a small selection of interesting articles that aren’t really news, but are still worth reading anyway:

• The New Kindles by John Gruber (Daring Fireball)