Seagate throttles up to 6 Gbps throughput, with some help from AMD
At the Everything Channel Xchange Conference in New Orleans today, Seagate and AMD are delivering the world's first public demo of 6 gigabit-per-second Serial ATA, an ultra-speedy interface between the host bus adapters used in PCs and storage drives such as hard disk drives, solid-state drives, and optical devices.
A replacement for older and slower ATA technology, Serial ATA supported throughput of 1.5 Gbps in its first generation and operates at 3 Gbps in much of the hardware sold today, said Mark Noblitt, Seagate's senior marketing manager for I/O (input/output) development, in an interview with Betanews.
Blu-ray could be Blockbuster's bailout
It takes a lot of discs to stock the more than 7,800 Blockbuster Video stores in North America, and the company is a prolific purchaser of disc-based media, both movies and games. So when the company's substantive value derives directly from the discs it buys, any big changes to its structure could impact the disc production industry, and all the other businesses that rely upon it.
Blockbuster's future has been uncertain since well before it attempted to purchase the now-defunct Circuit City, a move which CEO Jim Keyes said at the time was not in the best interest of Blockbuster's shareholders.
Ballmer: Yes on Windows 7 for netbooks, but maybe not a specific SKU
Once again, comments made by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer during an analysts' briefing two weeks ago are being bandied about by the press as "confirmation" that the company plans to produce a slimmed-down, netbook-ready SKU of Windows 7. However, a complete read of Ballmer's comments, as transcribed by Microsoft (Word document available here), indicate that this isn't what Ballmer said at all. In fact, he seemed intentionally vague on the topic, making clear the company was certainly thinking about the prospect of a netbook Win7 SKU, but confirming nothing.
"I think we have an opportunity when we ship Windows 7, which will fit on a netbook, we have an opportunity to rethink the product lineup for netbooks, product lineup and price lineup, and we get a chance to engage in that dialogue, both with the OEM, and potentially with the OEM and the end user," stated Ballmer last Tuesday, in response to a question from a J.P. Morgan analyst. "Today when you buy a netbook with XP you don't really get a full XP version, you get some restrictions on XP. Some people might say, hey, look, I'm happy with the restrictions, some people might want Windows 7 instead of XP, some might be happy with the restrictions, some end users might not be happy with the same restrictions.
Report: Apple netbook touchscreen supplier named
Taiwanese electronics company Wintek reported to the Chinese Language financial newspaper Commercial Times that it is working with Apple to develop new products that utilize the company's touch panels.
The paper speculated that one such product will be a netbook made by Quanta Computer, which has already manufactured notebooks for Apple, although Wintek said the panels will begin shipping in the second half of the year. Wintek is the company which supplies touchscreens for the iPod Touch, and news of the product was revealed in a similar fashion, several months before the product's debut.
Google Docs security hole may have exposed private documents
Over the weekend, some -- though not all -- users of Google Docs received notifications in their Gmail inboxes stating that some of their cloud-based documents marked as private may have been sharable with other users anyway. The problem apparently concerns marking multiple documents as private with a single command, which ended up not fulfilling that task.
Here is the text of the letter Google Docs users received, which was published over the weekend independently by multiple bloggers who use the service:
Android gets skinned, finally
Android has been commercially available for a little more than four months, and the completed application store for just over two weeks, and now we're beginning to see desktop theme changes that address a fundamental Android feature: the look of its widgets.
If there's one complaint about Android that you might have heard more often than any other, it's about the clock widget. The most frequently used screenshots of the mobile operating system show the big analog clock face hovering over the still blue waters in the wallpaper. It's a mundane representation of what is actually one of the most tweakable mobile home screens.
Internet Explorer 8 can be turned off in Windows 7
A Microsoft Windows 7 group product manager confirmed in an announcement dated last Friday, though which is only making its premiere appearance over the weekend, that in the latest private beta build, users will be able to "turn off" -- to use his own phrase for it -- a greater number of standard Windows features including Internet Explorer 8.
"If a feature is deselected, it is not available for use. This means the files (binaries and data) are not loaded by the operating system (for security-conscious customers) and not available to users on the computer," writes Microsoft's Jack Mayo. "These same files are staged so that the features can easily be added back to the running OS without additional media."
Microsoft Research finds future value in family history
For those Microsoft Research staffers who work at the mothership in Redmond, the company's annual TechFest is a festive and busy week of chatting with the people you really meant to spend more time with during the rest of the year. But if you're from out of town -- in from one of Microsoft's five satellite facilities in Beijing, Bangalore, Cambridge-UK, Cambridge-US, or Mountain View -- this may be one of a very few opportunities all year for you to connect with, and very likely show up, your out-of-town colleagues.
Take for instance the UK-based Socio-Digital Systems group, working thousands of miles from the offline conversations that happen on the Redmond campus. Gathered in the "Digital Past to Digital Presence" booth at the recent 'Fest, the gear the UK group had to show didn't make tiny bubbles float in virtual airspace or synchronize several social networks. Actually, its job was to give a place and presence for people's own history in the here and now.
Beckstrom resigns National Cybersecurity Center post
The buzz online today may have been about Robert Scoble's exit from Fast Company, but there's a major change afoot at the top of the NCSC: Rod Beckström, the director, has submitted his resignation to DHS head Janet Napolitano effective in one week (that is, Friday the 13th). The move comes after rumors of ferocious power struggles at NCSC, which Beckström has led since its inception last year.
The politics at DHS, which oversees NCSC, can't have been much fun for the co-author of The Starfish and the Spider, a book advocating for "the unstoppable power of leaderless organziations." In his resignation letter to Napolitano, Beckström cited his ongoing struggle to keep NCSC out of the clutches of the NSA (which is run by the Department of Defense rather than the civilian DHS and operations from the intelligence worldview rather than that of security professionals or network ops) and noted glumly that "during the past year the NCSC received only five weeks of funding, due to various roadblocks engineered within the department and by the Office of Management and Budget." (Image courtesy beckstrom.com)
Phishers hijack 750+ Twitter accounts
Trend Micro is reporting, and Twitter confirms, that Twitter users are once again under attack by people who need to upgrade their ethics. Targets receive a tweet from someone claiming to be female, 23, and in possession of a webcam. Click the link and you end up on an "adult" site that both attempts to phish your credit-card info and slathers your computer with ads for the same stuff.
Twitter says it has changed the passwords and removed the spam from the 750-odd accounts, none of which were believed to actually be kept by anyone female, 23, and in possession of a webcam. Trend Micro notes tartly that though it's not clear how how the attack was undertaken, "with Twitterers' willingness to enter their Twitter username and password into any number of third-party websites offering Twitter-related services, the opportunities for cybercrime are many."
Will patent reform diminish or restore the value of originality?
The era of the digital machine in human history -- an era which has only spanned the interval of our own lifetimes, if that long -- has seen the difference between a concept and a mechanism narrowed to a barely negligible dividing line. For a concept to be patentable, it need not yet physically exist, yet it must be sufficiently demonstrable -- that is to say, the concept must be so meticulous as to describe something which could, if only for need of a little workmanship, be made real. The legal phrase for this is reduction to practice -- a demonstration of the workability of the concept, which can in most cases (one notable exception being genes) be simply theoretical.
What so few individuals understand about the ideal of the patent is that it is principally an instrument with which you as an individual may attest that a workable concept is yours. It does not calculate a concept's commercial value or practicality or efficiency or usefulness; rather, that as an ideal of a mechanism, it specifies that it is original, that it came from someone in particular, and that it is workable. Ideally, a concept should be attributable to its source, just as this paragraph and this essay will, for whatever it's worth, be attributed to me.
Boxee RSS feature gives Hulu a backdoor
After Hulu and Boxee were forced to stop working together, I began to feel that it was necessary to look closer and explain how this was one of the rare instances where the loss of Hulu wouldn't be so much of a deal breaker. However, upon closer inspection and with frequent use these last few weeks, the loss of Hulu really did create a big chasm in content.
Boxee is a media center application based on XBMC that awaits a dedicated hardware home. In alpha, this software is already more elegant and fully featured than many set top boxes are after RTM, and that's with such critical features as network drive awareness still disabled. It offers support for most audio, video, and image formats and has streaming audio and video solutions built into its interface. However, due to squabbles with content providers, some of these streaming services, most notably Hulu, had to be temporarily disabled.
Greener Apple: New Macs, iPods aim for efficiency, cleaner environment
Through methods ranging from blog jottings by Apple CEO Steve Jobs some time in 2008 to press releases issued just this week, Apple is rather suddenly playing up the environmental friendliness of its PCs. In a product announcement this week for its latest consumer line-up, Apple contended that the Mac mini is "the world's most energy efficient desktop, drawing less than 13 watts of power when idle."
Announcements for Apple's new MacBook Pro, mini, and iMac also suggested that the PCs are well ahead of the curve in terms of compliance with Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) and federal Energy Star guidelines.
Chicago sheriff declares Craigslist 'a public nuisance' for aiding the sex trade
Yesterday, Cook County Sheriff Thomas J. Dart filed suit against classified ad site Craigslist in the US District Court of Northern Illinois to shut down the "erotic services" section of the site, and seek redress for all the resources consumed by Craigslist-related prostitution investigation.
"To say Craigslist's 'erotic services' forum makes prostitution accessible is an understatement," opens the complaint, "Advocacy groups consider the website to be one of the largest sources for prostitution in the country."
Why did the RIAA sue one Shaun Adams of Grand Island, Nebraska?
Those who were familiar with the Recording Industry Association of America's declaration last December that it was discontinuing its strategy of lawsuits against individuals suspected of illicit song sharing, were puzzled to learn through blog sources late yesterday that the RIAA had filed suit last Tuesday against an individual in Nebraska. Is there a particular reason for this suit; did RIAA members decide to make an exception?
As RIAA spokesperson Jonathan Lamy told Betanews this morning, the true facts are that this is no exception. The filing on Tuesday against Shaun Adams of Grand Island is actually the formalization of action the studios had already initiated against him prior to their mutual December decision.
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