Monday, September 21, 2009

Seagate Ships World's Fastest Desktop Hard Drive; First Drive to Feature Serial ATA 6Gbit/Second Technology

SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif. - September 21, 2009 - Seagate Technology (NASDAQ:STX) today began global shipments of the world’s fastest, largest-capacity mainstream desktop hard drive – Barracuda® XT, a 7200RPM product featuring 2TB of storage capacity and a blazing fast Serial ATA (SATA) 6Gb/second interface. The 3.5-inch desktop drive, the industry’s first to feature a SATA 6Gb/s interface, meets the capacity demands of gaming, digital video-environments and other storage-hungry desktop computing applications while delivering the highest performance in its class.

The introduction of the Barracuda XT drive marks the shift to the next generation of desktop computing speed as Seagate doubles the storage bandwidth of current computers.

“Capacity and performance remain the defining attributes of hard drives for PC gamers, digital multimedia content developers and many other customers requiring high-end systems at home and in the office,” said Dave Mosley, executive vice president of Sales and Marketing at Seagate. “Seagate is meeting these requirements with the first 7200RPM desktop hard drive to combine 2TB of storage capacity with the fastest Serial ATA interface to date.”

The Barracuda XT product, a four-platter drive featuring an areal density of 368 Gigabits per square inch, delivers the highest performance – burst speeds of up to 6 Gigabits per second – for all PC applications, maintains backward compatibility with the SATA 3Gb/second and SATA 1.5Gb/second interfaces, and uses the same cables and connectors as previous SATA generations to ease integration. The hard drive’s SATA 6Gb/s interface enables system builders using SATA 6Gb/s drive controllers to build high-performance desktop PCs, full-tilt gaming rigs, and home and small business servers, and its 64MB cache optimizes burst performance and data transfer speeds.

“Marvell is pleased to be announcing the industry’s first commercially available SATA 6Gb/s solution and working with Seagate to introduce this technology,” said Dr. Alan J. Armstrong, vice president of Marketing, Business Storage Group at Marvell. “Marvell has been working with a broad group of partners and customers to bring this solution to market. As early adopters of Marvell’s SATA 6Gb/s technology, both ASUS and GIGABYTE offer motherboards to complement SATA 6Gb/s hard drives.”

Read the full article

The 5th Amendment, it's really a good thing...

Why You Should Never Talk to The Police, with out your lawyer or immunity
"Dont talk to the Police" is the word of advice of a Professor in law, and a former Criminal Defense Attorney share their views and experiences on the law"


Example Reasons
1) There is no way they can help you. You can not talk your way out of getting arrested.
2) Police cannot testify to your benefit at trial. See Federal Rule of Evidence 801(d)(2)(A). Police can only testify against you.
3) Even if your are totally innocent you will always give information that may be used to convict you (wrongly).
4) Police are not your best friend, priest or buddy they are paid to arist




Sunday, September 20, 2009

Steve Wozniak: How I Invented the Personal Computer

Insurers Fight Speech-Impairment Remedy

"Kara Lynn has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., which has attacked the muscles around her mouth and throat, removing her ability to speak. A couple of years ago, she spent more than $8,000 to buy a computer, approved by Medicare, that turns typed words into speech that her family, friends and doctors can hear.

Under government insurance requirements, the maker of the PC, which ran ordinary Microsoft Windows software, had to block any nonspeech functions, like sending e-mail or browsing the Web.

Dismayed by the PC’s limitations and clunky design, Ms. Lynn turned to a $300 iPhone 3G from Apple running $150 text-to-speech software. Ms. Lynn, who is 48 and lives in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., said it worked better and let her “wear her voice” around her neck while snuggling with her 5-year-old son, Aiden, who has Down syndrome.

Medicare and private health insurers decline to cover cheap devices like iPhones and netbook PCs that can help the speech-impaired, despite their usefulness and lower cost.

Instead, public and private insurers insist that, if Ms. Lynn and others like her want insurance to pay, they must spend 10 to 20 times as much for dedicated, proprietary devices that can do far less.

The logic: Insurance is supposed to cover medical devices, and smartphones or PCs can be used for nonmedical purposes, like playing video games or Web browsing.

Disease experts say companies like DynaVox and Prentke Romich make many sophisticated, helpful products. Still, advocates argue, advances in computing and easy-to use speech software have opened doors to use cheap mainstream alternatives. Indeed, the price drops have made it possible for A.L.S. assistance groups to buy dozens of netbooks, install specialized software like Proloquo2Go and lend them to clients."

Saturday, September 19, 2009

Apple's fifth take: Ars reviews the iPod nano with video

Once again, we have taken a look at the new iPod nano to see if its new features are cool enough to keep it at the top of Apple's bestseller list. And, since video is one of the nano's major new features, we compared its video quality to other pocket video cameras.

Another year, another iPod nano. As expected, Apple introduced the next generation of its flash-based music player during the September 2009 iPod event, once again building on its current feature set in an attempt to appeal to more buyers.

The new nano (fifth generation, for those keeping count) is very similar to the fourth-generation version. What differentiates the 5G nano, however, are a few major feature additions plus a handful of refinements intended to keep the nano on everyone's stocking stuffer list.

Quick look at what's new

If it weren’t already plainly obvious, the major new feature of the fifth nano is the addition of a video camera. That alone could have probably justified the new device, but Apple went a few steps further, leveraging existing (but latent) capabilities already on the nano to add several other features. These include a full-featured FM tuner application, a pedometer, a Nike+ receiver, VoiceOver support, and a voice notes application.

Read the full story at Ars Technica By Jacqui Cheng, Clint Ecker

Friday, September 18, 2009

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: the Ars Technica review


Mac OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard has landed. This time around, Apple goes light on the glitz in favor of some heavy work under the hood. John Siracusa dives deep into Apple's new OS offering to see what's new, what's still the same, and whether it's worth upgrading.

In June of 2004, during the WWDC keynote address, Steve Jobs revealedMac OS X 10.4 Tiger to developers and the public for the first time. When the finished product arrived in April of 2005, Tiger was the biggest, most important, most feature-packed release in the history of Mac OS X by a wide margin. Apple's marketing campaign reflected this, touting "over 150 new features."

All those new features took time. Since its introduction in 2001, there had been at least one major release of Mac OS X each year. Tiger took over a year and a half to arrive. At the time, it definitely seemed worth the wait. Tiger was a hit with users and developers. Apple took the lesson to heart and quickly set expectations for the next major release of Mac OS X,Leopard. Through various channels, Apple communicated its intention to move from a 12-month to an 18-month release cycle for Mac OS X. Leopard was officially scheduled for "spring 2007."

As the date approached, Apple's marketing machine trod a predictable path.

Apple even went so far as to list all 300 new features on its website. As it turns out, "spring" was a bit optimistic. Leopard actually shipped at the end of October 2007, nearly two and a half years after Tiger. Did Leopard really have twice as many new features as Tiger? That's debatable. What's certain is that Leopard included a solid crop of new features and technologies, many of which we now take for granted. (For example, have you had a discussion with a potential Mac user since the release of Leopard without mentioning Time Machine? I certainly haven't.)

Mac OS X appeared to be maturing. The progression was clear: longer release cycles, more features. What would Mac OS X 10.6 be like? Would it arrive three and a half years after Leopard? Would it and include 500 new features? A thousand?

At WWDC 2008, Bertrand Serlet announced a move that he described as "unprecedented" in the PC industry.

That's right, the next major release of Mac OS X would have no new features. The product name reflected this: "Snow Leopard." Mac OS X 10.6 would merely be a variant of Leopard. Better, faster, more refined, more... uh... snowy.

This was a risky strategy for Apple. After the rapid-fire updates of 10.1, 10.2, and 10.3 followed by the riot of new features and APIs in 10.4 and 10.5, could Apple really get away with calling a "time out?" I imagine Bertrand was really sweating this announcement up on the stage at WWDC in front of a live audience of Mac developers. Their reaction? Spontaneous applause. There were even a few hoots and whistles.

Many of these same developers applauded the "150+ new features" in Tiger and the "300 new features" in Leopard at past WWDCs. Now they were applauding zero new features for Snow Leopard? What explains this?

It probably helps to know that the "0 New Features" slide came at the end of an hour-long presentation detailing the major new APIs and technologies in Snow Leopard. It was also quickly followed by a back-pedaling ("well, there is one new feature...") slide describing the addition of Microsoft Exchange support. In isolation, "no new features" may seem to imply stagnation. In context, however, it served as a developer-friendly affirmation.

The overall message from Apple to developers was something like this: "We're adding a ton of new things to Mac OS X that will help you write better applications and make your existing code run faster, and we're going to make sure that all this new stuff is rock-solid and as bug-free as possible. We're not going to overextend ourselves adding a raft of new customer-facing, marketing-friendly features. Instead, we're going to concentrate 100% on the things that affect you, the developers."

But if Snow Leopard is a love letter to developers, is it a Dear John letter to users? You know, those people that the marketing department might so crudely refer to as "customers." What's in it for them? Believe it or not, the sales pitch to users is actually quite similar. As exhausting as it has been for developers to keep up with Apple's seemingly never-ending stream of new APIs, it can be just as taxing for customers to stay on top of Mac OS X's features. Exposé, a new Finder, Spotlight, a new Dock, Time Machine, a new Finder again, anew iLife and iWork almost every year, and on and on. And as much as developers hate bugs in Apple's APIs, users who experience those bugs as application crashes have just as much reason to be annoyed.

Enter Snow Leopard: the release where we all get a break from the new-features/new-bugs treadmill of Mac OS X development. That's the pitch.


Continue reading the full story at Ars Technica By John Siracusa

FUD report: Snow Leopard 'not as secure' as Windows...

"Another week, another lax Mac OS X security FUD emanating from the usual quarters, making the risible claim Apple’s platform is inherently less secure than Windows.

Story goes like this: The hacker who successfully broke into a Mac at a hacker’s conference some time ago has tested Snow Leopard against WIndows 7, and accuses the Mac OS as being “less secure” than Microsoft’s Vista upgrade.

Charlie Miller is one of the team from Independent Security Evaluators who successfully "pwned and owned" an Apple MacBook Air, in a hacking contest sponsored by TippingPoint's Zero Day Initiative."

Read the full story at 9 to 5 Mac by Jonny Evans

"He conveniently forgets all of the other security features in Snow Leopard. Why doesn't he touch on:
- stack frame protection
- code injection protection
- automatic replacement of common C functions (e.g. srtcpy) with hardened versions
- heap consistency checks
- the reduction in setuid executables
His opinion on ASLR is valid, but extrapolating that to the overall security of the OS is garbage."