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Data Storage

The First Terabyte Hard Drive Reviewed 495

mikemuch writes "ExtremeTech has a review and benchmarks of the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 1TB Hard Drive, which ushers in the terabyte age. It performs well on HDTach and PCMark benchmarks, though not as speedily as professional-grade drives. It could be just the ticket for digital media junkies. 'One of the first issues to note is that you may not see an actual one terabyte capacity on your system. First, the formatted capacity is always less than the raw space available on the drive. Directory information and formatting data always take up some space. Second, the hard drive industry's definition of a megabyte differs from the rest of the PC business. One megabyte of hard drive space is 1,000,000 bytes: 10^6 bytes. Operating systems calculate one megabyte as 2^20 bytes, or 1,048,576 bytes. Once installed and set up, Hitachi's 1TB hard drive offers up an actual formatted capacity of about 935GB, as measured by the OS. That's still a lot of space, by anyone's definition.'" Update: 05/17 21:52 GMT by Z : Adding '^s' missing from article.
Security

AACS Revision Cracked A Week Before Release 346

stevedcc writes "Ars Technica is running a story about next week's release of AACS, which is intended to fix the currently compromised version. The only problem is, the patched version has already been cracked. From the article: 'AACS LA's attempts to stifle dissemination of AACS keys and prevent hackers from compromising new keys are obviously meeting with extremely limited success. The hacker collective continues to adapt to AACS revisions and is demonstrating a capacity to assimilate new volume keys at a rate which truly reveals the futility of resistance. If keys can be compromised before HD DVDs bearing those keys are even released into the wild, one has to question the viability of the entire key revocation model.'"
Digital

Submission + - Night vision firm fined $100 million for espionage

An anonymous reader writes: The leading manufacturer of night vision gear for the Defense Department has admitted sending classified materials overseas and will pay a $100 million penalty, according to federal prosecutors. ITT, based in Virginia, exported classified or sensitive technical data to China, Singapore and Britain without authorization. U.S. Attorney John Brownlee said: "American soldiers are "the principal victims of ITT's crimes."
Portables

Submission + - Lenovo disables virtualization on consumer laptops

Anders1 writes: "Last month, I bought a new Lenovo 3000 N100 notebook with a Core 2 Duo processor, which is supposed to support Intel Virtualization Technology. It turns out, however, that my notebook's BIOS unconditionally disables VT extensions, and even goes so far as to set the lock bit of the feature-control MSR such that it is impossible to re-enable them. Lenovo support has been unresponsive. Are they too clueless to flip a single bit in the BIOS, or are they selling intentionally crippled products?"
Quickies

Submission + - Man dies trying to use laptop while driving

Scoopy writes: "The Sacramento Bee reports that a 28-year-old Chico, CA man was killed Monday after he lost control of his car while working on his laptop computer while driving, according to the California Highway Patrol.

"We have reason to believe he was operating his laptop because it was still on and plugged into the cigarette lighter," said CHP Cmdr. Scott Silsbee."
AMD

AMD A Ripe Target For Buyout? 108

SpiceMonkey writes "AMD stock was up 6.74% on Monday on rumors that AMD is a prime buyout target. After their purchase of ATI, they've been pressed to maintain their aggressive policy of chip production increases. As a result, the AMD message board on Yahoo! is full of speculation on who has their eyes on the company. Many folks there think that IBM is the right buyer for the company. There's no firm word that AMD is even being considered for purchase, but it's certainly and interesting prospect."
Graphics

Submission + - ATI R600: The rumours so far

janp writes: "The launch of ATI's R600 (or Radeon X2900) graphics card has been postponed once again. Hardware.Info has compiled all the rumours so far, tried to verify most of them and combined them in one article. It includes some screenshots from AMD/ATI's secret documentation for partners, proving the power consumption to be 280 Watt per card!"
Communications

Submission + - Paging Doctor Kirk.....

gbjbaanb writes: More cool gadgets for slashdotters.. this time, its a star-trek type communicator. This article describes the 'badge' communicator that works using a wireless network.

The new system, called the BT Managed Vocera® solution, operates over a BT wireless local area network. It allows users to speak to each other instantly anywhere in the hospital through a voice-controlled, wearable badge weighing less than two ounces. Staff simply have to say a person's name, department or role to be automatically connected to the appropriate person and can speak to them just like on a normal phone.
While quite cool, and an improvement over paging or finding a telephone, I just hope it needs a touch (and a reassuring tee-twip noise, obviously) otherwise the scope for accidental use could be disastrous. And there is a YouTube demo.
Communications

T-Mobile Bans Others' Apps On Their Phones 349

cshamis writes "T-Mobile has recently changed their policies and now tell their customers with appropriate data plans and with Java-Micro-App-capable T-Mobile phones: no third-party network applications. You can, of course, still use their incredibly clunky and crippled built-in WAP browsers, but GoogleMaps and OperaMini are left high and dry. Would anyone care to speculate if this move is likely to retain or repel customers?"
Power

GE Announces Advancement in Incandescent Technology 619

finfife writes to tell us that GE has announced an advancement in incandescent technology that promises to increase the efficiency of lightbulbs to put them on par with compact fluorescent lamps (CFL). "The new high efficiency incandescent (HEI(TM)) lamp, which incorporates innovative new materials being developed in partnership by GE's Lighting division, headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, and GE's Global Research Center, headquartered in Niskayuna, NY, would replace traditional 40- to 100-Watt household incandescent light bulbs, the most popular lamp type used by consumers today. The new technology could be expanded to all other incandescent types as well. The target for these bulbs at initial production is to be nearly twice as efficient, at 30 lumens-per-Watt, as current incandescent bulbs. Ultimately the high efficiency lamp (HEI) technology is expected to be about four times as efficient as current incandescent bulbs and comparable to CFL bulbs. Adoption of new technology could lead to greenhouse gas emission reductions of up to 40 million tons of CO2 in the U.S. and up to 50 million tons in the EU if the entire installed base of traditional incandescent bulbs was replaced with HEI lamps."The California legislature may want to revisit the wording of their proposed ban on incandescents (AB 722). How about mandating a level of efficiency rather than assuming that innovation can't happen?"
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - SAP skills shortage driving up salaries

bednarz writes: "A shortage of skilled SAP workers is making it difficult for IT departments to fill open jobs and caused the average salary for certain high-level SAP professionals to rise 15.6% in the past year. Consulting firm Foote Partners says the average base salary for directors of SAP program management rose from $115,468 to $133,500 in the calendar year that just ended. This increase dwarfs the typical increases in IT salaries of 3% to 5% a year. Network World has the story: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/021207-sap-w orkers.html"
GNU is Not Unix

Submission + - Sun looks to GPL3 for Java, Solaris

daria42 writes: Will Sun change the licence for Java and Solaris to the GNU GPL version 3? This article has some insightful comments from Sun boss Jonathan Schwartz. "Will we GPL Solaris? We want to ensure we can interact with the GPL community and the Mozilla community and the BSD community," he says.
It's funny.  Laugh.

Submission + - Watching mould grow for fun and profit

donak writes: "In a similar (blue?) vein to the (now decommisioned) coffee pot viewable at an English University website, West Country Farmhouse Cheesemakers bring you "Cheddar growing Mould!" http://www.cheddarvision.tv/ Afficianados are no doubt going wild, in an understated English way."

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