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Submission + - Kingston HyperX Predator SSD Takes Gumstick M.2 PCIe Drives To 1.4GB/sec (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Kingston recently launched their HyperX Predator PCIe SSD that is targeted at performance-minded PC enthusiasts but is much less expensive than enterprise-class PCIe offerings that are currently in market. Kits are available in a couple of capacities and from factors at 240GB and 480GB. All of the drives adhere to the 80mm M.2 2280 "gumstick" form factor and have PCIe 2.0 x4 connections, but are sold both with and without a half-height, half-length adapter card if you'd like to drop it into a standard PCI Express slot. At the heart of the Kingston HyperX Predator in Marvel's latest Marvell 88SS9293 controller. The Marvell 88SS9293 is paired to a gigabyte of DDR3 memory and Toshiba A19 Toggle NAND. The drives are rated for read speeds up to 1.4GB/s and writes of 1GB/s and 130 – 160K random 4K IOPS. In the benchmarks, the 480GB model put up strong numbers. At roughly $1 per GiB, the HyperX Predator is about on par with Intel's faster SSD 750 but unlike Intel's new NVMe solution, the Kingston drive will work in all legacy platforms as well, not just Z97 and X99 boards with a compatible UEFI BIOS.

Submission + - When You're the NFL Commish, Getting E-Medical Record Interoperability's a Cinch (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: The NFL recently completed the rollout of an electronic medical record (EMR) system and picture archiving and communication system (PACS) that allows mobile access for teams to player's health information at the swipe of a finger — radiological images, GPS tracking information, and detailed health evaluation data back to grade school. But as NFL football players are on the road a lot, often they're not being treated at hospitals or by specialists whose own EMRs are integrated with the NFL's; it's a microcosm of the industry-wide healthcare interoperability issue facing the U.S. today. The NFL, however, found achieving EMR interoperability isn't so much a technological issue as a political one, and if you have publicity on your side, it's not that difficult. NFL CIO Michelle McKenna-Doyle, who led the NFL's EMR rollout, said a call from a team owner to a hospital administrator typically does the trick. Even NFL Commissioner Roger Godell once made the call to a hospital CEO, "and things started moving in the next couple of days," McKenna-Doyle said. "They're very aware of the publicity."

Submission + - Life Insurance Companies Hoping Wearables Can Delay Death Payouts 2

Submitted by cameronag
cameronag writes: Life insurance companies have started providing free fitness trackers (such as FitBits) to new customers. In exchange for letting their activity be monitored, customers can receive discounts of up to 15%. Insurer John Hancock said of the recent move, "Delaying a death benefit would obviously be good for us, but also good for them." According to recent research, up to 57% of adults would be likely to use a fitness tracker in exchange for lower premiums.

Submission + - Kludgey Electronic Heatlh Records Are Becomming Fodder for Malpractice Suits (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: The inherent issues that come with highly complex and kludgey electronic medical records — and for the healthcare professionals required to use them — hasn't been lost on lawyers, who see the potential for millions of dollars in judgments for plaintiffs suing for medical negligence or malpractice. Work flows that require a dozen or more mouse clicks to input even basic patient information has prompted healthcare workers to seek short cuts, such as cutting and pasting from previous visits, a practice that can also include the duplication of old vital sign data, or other critical information, such as a patient's age. While the malpractice suits have to date focused on care providers, they'll soon target EMR vendors, according to Keith Klein, a medical doctor and professor of medicine at UCLA. Klein has been called as an expert witness for more than 350 state or federal medical malpractice cases and he's seen a marked rise in plaintiff attorney's using EMRs as evidence that healthcare workers fell short of their responsibility for proper care. In one such case, a judge awarded more than $7.5 million when a patient suffered permanent kidney damage, and even though physicians hadn't neglected the patient, the complexity of the EMR was responsible for them missing uric kidney stone. The EMR was ore than 3,000 pages in length and included massive amounts of duplicated information, something that's not uncommon.

Submission + - California has become the first state to get over 5% of its power from solar (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: While the rest of the nation's solar power generation hovers around 1%, California clocked in with a record 5% of power coming from utility-grade (1MW or more) solar power sources, according to a report from Mercom Capital Group and the Energy Information Administration. That's three times the next closest state, Arizona. At the same time, 22 states have yet to deploy even one utility-grade solar power plant, according to the Solar Energy Industry Association. Meanwhile, the rest of the world saw a 14% uptick in solar power installations in 2014 for a total of 54.5GW of capacity, and that figure is expected to grow even faster in 2015. While China still leads the world in new solar capacity, Japan and the U.S. come in as a close second and third, respectively. In the U.S. distributed solar and utility-grade solar installations are soaring as the solar investment tax credit (ITC) is set to expire next year. The U.S. is expected to deploy 8.5GW of new solar capacity in 2015, according to Mercom Capital Group.

Submission + - Samsung Introduces M.2 and mSATA Versions Of The SSD 850 EVO Line (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Samsung is introducing a number of new members to their SSD 850 EVO line-up of Solid State Drives today, based on different form factors than their standard 2.5-inch drives. Samsung's new mSATA and M.2 Samsung SSD 850 EVO drives that were just announced, however, leverage all of the same technology. The last few generations of Samsung's 2.5" Solid State Drive utilized PCBs that barley filled up half of their encloses, and a large portion of those PCBs were dedicated to the standard SATA power and data cable connectors, so it's no surprise to see these new, smaller variants arrive with mSATA and M.2 support. Samsung will be offering SSD 850 EVO series drives with capacities ranging from 120GB all the way up to 1TB in mSATA flavors, but the M.2 models top out at 500GB. The 120GB, 250GB and 500GB models feature dual-core Samsung MGX controllers. The controller is fundamentally similar to the triple-core MEX controller used in the recently released 850 Pro series, though a core has been removed. Samsung claims it made this move in order to save power, because the extra core didn't help performance on the lower capacity drives. Note, however, that the 1TB mSATA drive has the original MEX controller. Performance-wise, the 500GB drive tested here performed well throughout a battery of tests, whether large sequential transfers, or small file random workloads. It also offered very low access times. The compressibility of the data being transferred across the Samsung SSD 850 EVO had no impact on performance as well.

Submission + - Toshiba Announces 3D Flash With 48 Layers -- The Industry's Densest (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: Admitting it has bumped up against a 15 nanometer process wall, Toshiba announced it's focusing its efforts on three dimensional NAND using its Bit Cost Scalable technology in order to increase capacity. It has dedicated a Japanese fab plant to it and developed 48-level 3D NAND, which bumps density up 33% over previous 3D NAND flash. The new 3D NAND will be able to store 128Gb of data per chip (16GB). Samsung has been mass producing 32-layer, triple-level cell (TLC) 3D NAND since last October and has incorporated it into some of its least expensive SSDs. Yesterday, Micron and Intel announced their own 32-layer 3D TLC NAND, which they claimed will lead to 10TB SSDs. While Toshiba's 3D NAND is multi-level cell (meaning it stores two bits per transistor versus three), the company does plan on developing a TLC version. Toshiba said it's not abandoning 15nm floating gate flash, but it will focus those efforts on lower capacity applications.

Submission + - Elon Musk's SolarCity Offering To Build Cities, Businesses Their Own Grids (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: Rooftop solar distributor SolarCity announced a new service where it will build a centrally-controllable power grid for cities, business campuses and even islands. Marketing its GridLogic service by calling attention to the recent uptick in natural disasters and the extended power outages that resulted from them, SolarCity said its "microgrids" are fully independent power infrastructures fed by solar panels with lithium-ion backup batteries (courtesy of Tesla). SolarCity claims its GridLogic program can provide electricity to communities and businesses for less than they pay for utility power and the facilities can still be connected to their area's utility power grid as an added backup.

Submission + - Apple Makes Good on It's Promise to Double MacBook Pro Performance (computerworld.com) 2

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: Benchmark tests performed on the 2015 MacBook Pro revealed it does have twice the read/write performance as the mid-2014 model. Tests performed with the Blackmagic benchmark tool revealed read/write speeds of more than 1,300MBps/1,400MBps, respectively. So what's changed? The new MacBook Pro does have a faster Intel dual-core i7 2.9GHz processor and 1866MHz LPDDR3) RAM, but the real performance gain is in the latest PCIe M.2 flash module. The 2014 model used a PCIe 2.0 x2 card and the 2015 model uses a PCIe 3.0 x4 (four I/O lanes) card. Twice the lanes, twice the speed. While Apple uses a proprietary flash card made by Samsung, Intel, Micron and SanDisk are all working on similar technology, so it's likely to soon wind up in high-end PCs.

Submission + - Elon Musk predicts driving may someday be illegal (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: During a discussion at a Nvidia conference, Elon Musk predicted that in the future, consumers will not be allowed to drive cars because it will be considered too dangerous. "You can't have a person driving a two-ton death machine," he said. Others agree. Thilo Koslowski, a vice president at Gartner, said instead of laws dictating drivers must cede control to their car's computer, we may someday someday just pass signs requiring drivers to activate auto-drive functionality for certain particularly treacherous stretches of roadway. Kowlowski said fully autonomous vehicles won't be ubiquitous for another 10 to 15 years, but the government could spur that on by offering tax incentives as it does today with all-electric vehicles and hybrids.

Submission + - Hertz Installs Internal Cameras in Rental Vehicles (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: Hertz as installed internal cameras in about 12% of its rental fleet as part of an upgrade to its in-vehicle navigation system NeverLost. While the sixth iteration of NeverLost includes the camera, Hertz said it currently can't be activated because there's no software behind it. The nation's largest rental car company said the cameras were selected as a feature of their new Magellan touchscreen GPS system as a way of someday offering passengers video conferencing with Hertz representatives in the event of a problem. Hertz began installing the cameras last summer and to date has 60,000 of them in rental vehicles. The company said it doesn't know when or if it will activate the cameras, "We'd have to see whether there'd be customer acceptance of it, and you'd be weighing the convenience of video conferencing...against the privacy concerns some people have," a spokesman said.

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