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Up to 10X the capacity of current harddrives can be achieved
Seagate has submitted a patent for a technology it invented that could give current hard drive technology a few more years of life. Using nanotube technology, Seagate plans to bring a hard drive's read and write head even closer to the spinning platter than it already is today. Because of the mechanics of the way hard drives store data, the closer the read and write head is to the patter, the more information can be recorded.
Earlier this year, we started to see hard drives using perpendicular technology make their way into the market. The technology is one of those inventions that changes the fundamental way information is recorded onto disk. Without going into too much background information, perpendicular recording techniques have given new life to hard drives. Despite this however, storage demands continue to increase as consumers find more uses for data-focused consumer electronics such as portable video players, audio players and other mediums.
Using nanotubes, Seagate's patent involves coating the surface of a hard drive's platter with an extremely thin layer of extremely tough lubricant. The lubricant is designed to protect the actual magnetic medium, which in itself ranges from 2 to 50nm in thickness. Using this lubricant, Seagate will lower the read/write head to the point where it actually may come into contact with the platter. Seagate will also be introducing a heating mechanism such as a laser, which will heat up a small area of the platter allowing magnetic particles to be arranged more precisely -- thus allowing greater data densities. The laser itself will be positioned adjacent to the read and write head.
Since the lubricant layer is so thin however, the area that was heated will have some of the lubricant evaporated. To combat this, a reservoir that contains lubricant made of hundreds of thousands to millions of nanotubes is contained within the hard drive. Using precise pressure, the lubricant is evaporated into a vapor, and the vapor then deposits itself onto the area where there was depleted lubricant. According to Seagate, the vapor lubricant will take no more than a single disc rotation to complete the filling processes. The patent also says that hard drives will contain enough nanotube lubricant to last anywhere from 5 to 10 years. From Seagate's patent:

The saturated reservoir 60 of disc lubricant may be placed at any suitable location within the disc enclosure 12. The reservoir 60 delivers a predetermined vapor pressure of lubricant inside the enclosure. Lubricant molecules thereby enter the gas phase and bombard the disc surface with a known rate principally determined by the vapor pressure. A multilayer surface film of lubricant is therefore built up from the gas phase. Equilibrium is then established between the gas phase lubricant molecules and the outermost layer of the formed multilayer surface film.

sa:
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=3122

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According to Google's online help files, uninstalling Google Desktop may break your internet. Although Google offers several solutions to the problem, it leaves one wondering if this is a Microsoft-like tactic of breaking the system on uninstallation (as the uninstallation of Internet Explorer will break Microsoft Windows), or an honest mistake.

sa: http://digg.com/software/Uninstallin..._your_internet

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Little-Known Tweak to Boost Hard Drive Performance!
The speed at which your hard drive transfers data is very important, right? Especially if you need to copy a 20-gigabyte file, like I did. My laptop was initially copying the file at 2 MB/s because it was transferring in PIO-only mode, which would have taken almost three hours. Not only is PIO terribly slow, it consumes lots of CPU power. While copying that 20-gigabyte file, my CPU usage stayed at 100%. Therefore, I tried to figure out the best way to increase the transfer rate. I changed the transfer mode to UltraDMA-6, speeding it up by 600% to 12 MB/s, and the 20-gigabyte file copied in a little over 30 minutes. Plus, my CPU usage was only about 20-30%.

So, how did the drive get lowered from UltraDMA to PIO-only mode in the first place? Well, because Windows has a particularly dumb way of handling transfer modes for storage devices. After six cumulative (all-time total) errors while reading or writing a storage device, Windows will automatically lower its transfer mode. Worse, it never goes back up unless you reinstall the device. This is bad if you put in a scratched CD, causing those six-in-a-lifetime errors happen all at once. Even your hard drive will experience an occasional hiccup, so eventually its transfer rate is not safe either.

However, there is a setting to force Windows to only lower the transfer rate after six consecutive (in a row) errors, and then raise it back up when the errors stop. Therefore, you can keep your drives in UltraDMA-6 mode.

If you would like to try changing the transfer mode for your drives, follow the instructions below. Going from PIO-only mode to UltraDMA-6 will show you the most significant performance boost. However, your results may vary. Of course, your drive and motherboard must support UltraDMA-6, or you won't see much of a difference. Be careful while you are doing this; I am not responsible for any mistakes you make. Please back up your registry first in case something goes wrong!

How to Check Current Transfer Mode

Open Device Manager
Expand IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers
Double click on Primary IDE Controller or Secondary IDE Controller
Go to the Advanced Settings tab to see the current transfer modes. If you see anything besides UltraDMA-6, and especially if you see PIO Mode, then follow the steps below.
How to Force UltraDMA-6

Open up the Registry Editor.
Navigate to the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEMCurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}.
There are several sub-keys under this one, such as 0000, 0001, etc. You are interested in two of them that say Primary IDE Channel and Secondary IDE Channel.
Make the following changes to both of those keys:
Delete any attributes named MasterIdDataCheckSum or SlaveIdDataCheckSum. This resets the tracking for errors that Windows uses to determine when the transfer mode should be lowered.
Add an attribute with the name ResetErrorCountersOnSuccess and a DWORD value of 1. This tells Windows that it should lower the transfer mode when there are six consecutive errors instead of six cumulative errors.
If they exist, set the following keys to a hexadecimal value of ffffffff (eight F's). This will change the transfer modes to UltraDMA-6:

MasterDeviceTimingMode
MasterDeviceTimingModeAllowed
SlaveDeviceTimingMode
SlaveDeviceTimingModeAllowed
UserMasterDeviceTimingModeAllowed
UserSlaveDeviceTimingModeAllowed

Reboot your computer and check the devices to see if they are set to UltraDMA Mode 6.
Let me know about your experiences with this tweak.

sa: http://neodon.blogspot.com/2006/07/l...ard-drive.html

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Seven men who spent months planning a multi-million pound raid on a computer company have been jailed.
The London-based gang admitted conspiring to rob computer equipment from Comstor UK in Cirencester, Gloucs.
The men were arrested last December by armed officers before they could enter the firm's warehouse.
At Harrow Crown Court, ringleader David Thomas, 37, from Luton, was jailed for nine and a half years. He also admitted trying to bribe a police officer.

Police surveillance
In sentencing, Judge Alan Greenwood described the group as a professional criminal gang.
They were placed under police surveillance following a tip-off.
They had been placed under police surveillance early on in the planning of the heist following a tip-off, police said after sentencing.
The gang had spent months "meticulously planning" the robbery and travelling to Cirencester several times to observe the warehouse.
On Christmas Eve they drove to the site in two stolen cars and two vans, armed with coshes, ammonia, heavy-duty tape and handcuffs.
Around £26m of computer equipment was in the warehouse at the time, police said.
Examination of the two vans suggested that they would have been able to carry approximately £4.5m worth of equipment, the court was told.

Bribery bid
Ringleader Thomas was jailed for nine-and-a-half years for conspiracy to rob and perverting the course of justice.

Recording of Thomas trying to bribe officer
While on bail over the offences, Thomas offered £50,000 to a Flying Squad officer in an attempt to sabotage the prosecution case against him.
The officer alerted the Metropolitan Police's anti-corruption command about the bribery bid and Thomas was recorded trying to bribe him.

"If we can get this thing crushed, yeah...you come up with a figure, yeah...," Thomas was heard saying in recordings played out to the jury.

Thus proving that not all people interested in computers are smart...

sa: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/5141106.stm

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The world's largest financial institutions reported an increase in the number of ICT-driven attacks over the past year with more than three-quarters of respondents confirming a security breach from outside their organisation, and almost half experiencing at least one internal breach, according to research from Deloitte. Almost three-quarters of financial institutions who experienced a security breach indicated the estimated amount of damage to the organisation was in the range of USD1 million. In terms of the nature of attacks experienced in the past 12 months, 51 percent of external attacks were attributed to phishing and pharming, followed by spyware/malware utilisation (48 percent). Insider fraud (28 percent) and leakage of customer data (18 percent) were cited by respondents among the top three most common internal breaches.

sa: http://www.electricnews.net/frontpage/news-9716077.html

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Singapore launched a 10-year infocomm masterplan that will propel the nation into 2015 and beyond, with a line-up of activities and goals that spell benefits for the people, businesses and the global community. The vision is to turn the country into an Intelligent Nation and Global City.
Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts Lee Boon Yang said, "Innovation, integration and internationalization will be the basis of our masterplan. The capacity to innovate and create new business models, solutions and services will enable Singapore to be more competitive in a globalized environment. Equally important is the ability to integrate resources and capabilities for economic progress and digital opportunities for all Singaporeans."
The iN2015 masterplan is developed in the past year with inputs from the people, private and public sectors. A steering committee chaired by IDA with representatives from the infocomm industry, sectors like education, health care, manufacturing and logistics, finance, tourism and retail and digital media, as well as the government, guided the development. The masterplan sets bold targets for 2015:
Singapore to be No. 1 in the world in harnessing infocomm to add value to the economy.
A two-fold increase in value-added of the infocomm industry to $26 billion.
A three-fold increase in infocomm export revenue to $60 billion.
Create 80,000 additional jobs.
Have 90 percent of homes using broadband.
Ensure 100 percent computer ownership for all homes with school-going children.
The Next-Generation National Infocomm Infrastructure will be put in place by 2012, capable of delivering broadband speeds up to 1 Gbps, and offer pervasive connectivity around the country. The infrastructure will also be IPv6-compliant and will enable an exciting host of new broadband-enabled services and applications, such as immersive learning experiences, telemedicine, high definition TV, immersive video conferencing and Grid computing.
"The government together with the industry will pursue many of the recommendations from the iN2015 Steering Committee for Singapore's vision to be an intelligent nation and global city by 2015," said Chan Yeng Kit, chief executive officer of IDA Singapore. "IDA sees the iN2015 masterplan as a living plan that will evolve as we look into its implementation and respond to socio-economic and technology changes over the next 10 years."

sa: http://www.gridtoday.com/grid/711850.html

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A team of researchers at New York University's Center for Comparative Functional Genomics are embarking on the second phase of a collaborative research undertaking to predict structures of key proteins, which in turn shed light on their roles in diseases and offer pathways for cures. The inter-institutional project, which uses the IBM-backed World Community Grid, will focus on key human and malaria proteins, merging the biomedical and computation fields in carrying out the study.
"Protein folding is a big problem, there are a large number of proteins and a lot of possible shapes/fold," explained NYU scientist Bonneau, a new faculty member at NYU's Center for Comparative Functional Genomics, with a joint appointment in biology and computer sciences. "In spite of the difficulty, it is an important problem, at the heart of deciphering genomes. The shear amount of compute power needed to carry out this project makes the use of Grid computing essential."
It is for this reason that scientists at NYU have teamed up with IBM. The World Community Grid aims to create the world's largest public computing grid to undertake projects that benefit humanity. IBM has developed the technical infrastructure that serves as the grid's foundation for scientific research.
The first and second phases of the NYU research are part of the Human Proteome Folding project (HPF), which combines the power the idle cycles on millions of computers to help scientists understand how human proteins fold, the shapes they take on after folding. As computers try millions of ways to fold the chains, they attempt to fold the protein in the way it actually folds in the human body (accurately predict the structure). The best shapes/3-D structures identified for each protein are returned to the scientists for further study and public release. Knowing the shapes of proteins will help researchers understand how proteins perform their functions in vivo (in the cell) and the roles of proteins in diseases. With a greater understanding of protein structure, scientists can learn more about the biological systems that underlie most human activity (e.g., biomedical, agricultural, environments). In the end, this work is enabled by the people around the world who have volunteered their idle cycles by downloading the Grid client. Continued

sa: http://www.gridtoday.com/grid/711818.html

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http://neasia.nikkeibp.com/dailynewsdetail/004601

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July 4, 2006 -- Philips Lumileds Lighting Co has established what it claims are new luminance performance records for solid-state lighting technology at 1A. These solid-state light sources are said to demonstrate light output performance levels well beyond what is possible from today's LEDs and are indicative of the research and development work being done at the company.
These achievements will affect the performance and design of light intensive applications such as automotive headlamps, rear-projection televisions (RPTV), and commercial lighting.
In the automotive headlamp arena, new white LED products based on these advances will generate light density exceeding that of the halogen bulb commonly used in automotive headlamps and require a fraction of the physical space. High precision mounting and alignment of the new products in development will yield better light control, resulting in smaller and more efficient headlamps. Combined with higher visibility white performance, LEDs will change the shape of automotive forward lighting.
LED RPTVs are limited in brightness by the light output of current LEDs. The company anticipates that the luminance demonstrated with its new technologies will enable front-of-screen performance brighter than any LED-based RPTV that has been publicly demonstrated. The new solid-state devices also remove barriers to increased display size, and superior contrast and color uniformity. The entire system is improved and the viewers' experience enhanced with improved color gamut, lower profile systems, and longer lifetime.
In the lighting category, applications such as aircraft, roadway and general lighting will benefit from the greatly improved light output performance and the innate ability of solid-state lighting to operate in very cold environments, withstand significant shock and vibration, and be controlled digitally.
The company's Luxeon power LEDs, including Luxeon Flash and the recently released Luxeon K2, continue to transform lighting solutions around the world with their brightness, lumen maintenance, conformal coating process for creating a uniform white beam, and other advanced features and capabilities.

Among the new benchmarks:
-- For white devices, luminance of 38Mcd/m(squared), approximately 50% more luminance than that of an automotive headlamp halogen bulb (approximately 25 meganits) was achieved.
-- For InGaN blue devices, a radiance of 200mW/mm(squared)sr was realized.
-- For InGaN green devices, luminance of 37Mcd/m(squared) was achieved.

sa: http://neasia.nikkeibp.com/dailynewsdetail/004601

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The number of viruses transmitted by emails dropped to a record low in June, but spam is becoming an increasing problem for businesses, according to research published this week.
Figures from security services firm BlackSpider Technologies show that just 0.68 per cent of all emails sent in June contained viruses, breaking the previous record of 0.73 per cent in May.
But this lull in virus traffic does not mean that the threat of cyber crime has disappeared.
"This is by no means a victory for the security industry over malware writers", said James Kay, chief technology officer at BlackSpider. "What we are actually seeing is a switch in virus distribution tactics rather than a drop in viruses," he said.
Separate research carried out by research firm Vanson Bourne on behalf of Business Systems Group shows that 53 per cent of UK businesses rate junk email as the most pressing email security threat – almost twice the urgency given to virus protection.
International spam monitoring organisation Spamhaus says almost 75 per cent of all email traffic arriving at ISPs’ servers is now spam. Spamhaus believes this figure could reach 95 per cent this year.
"This is a pattern that has been taking shape over the past two years. It’s more of an evolution than a new wave in internet crime," said Thomas Raschke, senior analyst at Forrester Research.
"There have not been any significant outbreaks of a virus recently, big firms are using better virus protection, and people are more aware of the threat. Online crime is becoming more sophisticated and criminals are now combining different types of attacks at once," said Raschke.
Rather than sending a virus in an email, malware writers now send spam emails with links to malicious web sites, which download viruses to users’ PCs.

sa: http://www.itnews.com.au/newsstory.a...34514&r=hstory

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Samsung Semiconductor Incorporated has just announced that the company has started mass producing its GDDR4 memory for graphics cards. GDDR4 is now JEDEC sanctioned and commercially “ready” for video card manufacturers. GDDR4 is the memory successor to GDDR3 -- both of which are unrelated to the JEDEC DDR3 memory standard.
The new GDDR4 memory has a data transfer rate around 2.4Gbps on a 32-bit bus. Samsung is shipping the new 80nm memory in 512MB configurations, which is likely configured in 16x32 layouts. Samsung also claims that this 2.4Gbps GDDR4 showed a 45% power savings when compared to 2.0Gbps GDD3. The reduction in power is clearly a welcomed trend.
"We're delighted that we'll be able to use GDDR4 from Samsung in our latest graphics cards,"."Samsung's timely introduction will increase the performance of our upcoming products and ultimately improve the gaming experience for our users,” claimed Joe Macri, ATI Senior Director of Engineering.
ATI is expected to launch its R580+ graphics card before the end of the year. This card is essentially the R580 (Radeon X1900) ASIC with GDDR4 memory – which was built into the R520 and R580 design from the start. NVIDIA has GDDR4 on its roadmap for the next generation GPUs scheduled for sampling this fall as well.
Samsung isn’t the only player in the GDDR4 market: Hynix just announced the company would completely refocus its DRAM efforts specifically on graphics memory. More importantly, Hynix has already announced its GDDR4 is running at 2.9Gbps – a feat Samsung would have to best if it is to stay the number one DRAM supplier.

sa: http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=3162

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Intel Capital has been busy. We reported yesterday on their multimillion dollar investment in videogame advertising, but that amount is pocket change compared to the US$600 million Intel has just invested in Clearwire. The investment is the largest ever for Intel Capital, and it signals the company's continued interest in the WiMAX-style technology pushed by Clearwire.
Who is Clearwire? The firm, headquartered up in Washington state, offers wireless Internet access based on the IEEE 802.16e-2005 standard, with plans to adopt full WiMAX compatibility when the technology finally gets up and running. They already operate networks along the West coast and in Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Denmark, and Mexico. Connection speeds top out at 1.5Mbps and the company says that monthly charges range from US$30 to US$37, with an additional five-spot a month for the modem rental.
Clearwire plans to use the massive cash infusion to help fund a nationwide build-out of its technology, hopefully getting a jump on more established telecommunications companies which have not yet fully committed to WiMAX deployments. Intel wants to push the technology anyway it can, since it hopes to be a major manufacturer of WiMAX chipsets. The first WiMAX laptop cards should be ready by the end of this year, and Intel has already announced plans to incorporate the new technology into its Centrino platform.
While Clearwire races to expand its reach, it faces competition from the established players in the industry. Rupert Murdoch of News Corp. has perhaps been most vocal about his interest in building a national WiMAX network in the US, a move that could suddenly secure the company a major role in Internet distribution (though such a move would have its own difficulties).

sa: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060706-7200.html

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With some calling DFI the new Abit, we thought it only fitting to pit these two companies' latest Athlon 64 motherboards against each other head to head. Can the LANParty UT CFX3200-DR continue DFI's streak of killer Athlon 64 mobos, or will Abit's AT8 32X rise like a Phoenix to retake the enthusiast motherboard crown? Read on to find out.
Board specs
Before we delve into the layout and BIOS quirks of each board, it's worth taking a moment to compare their spec sheets. Note that both use AMD's older 939-pin Athlon 64 socket rather than the 940-pin Socket AM2. AM2 may be AMD's new hotness, but with DDR2 memory offering few tangible performance benefits for Athlon 64 platforms, Socket 939 is hardly old and busted. In fact, for those already invested in DDR memory or Socket 939 processors, there's no compelling reason to upgrade to Socket AM2.

sa: http://techreport.com/reviews/2006q3...9/index.x?pg=1

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Large LCD Roundup


Widescreen Format LCD Roundup

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The game developers have lately achieved quite impressive results with the virtual words visualization, since the graphics cards have become much more powerful. It has become possible to demonstrate extremely complex scenes without fearing that the game would turn into a slide show. This has certainly added more realism to the games of today compared with what we saw 5 years ago, for instance. However, the realistic feeling you get from the game builds up from multiple factors. One of them is the interactivity of the game world, and it is certainly not less important than photorealistic graphics. The interactive character of the world in the game has always been a very tough nut to crack.
The thing is that accurate emulation of the objects’ behavior using real-life physics requires a lot of computational power. If it possible to implement the behavior emulation for a relatively small number of objects, which has been done in Half-Life 2 in particular, then the emulation of real physics for all objects of the scene can easily stall even the most powerful CPU. Yes, today it is the CPU that bears the complete workload of the physics models calculations in the games. When dual-core processors appeared it looked like it was possible to assign one of the cores to this complex task, while the other core would continue working on the game A.I., pathfinding, etc.
This logical solution is though just a semi-measure: the specifics of modeling complex objects and particle systems for such phenomena as smoke, water, etc. requires a lot of parallel calculations, otherwise the performance may turn out unsatisfactory. In other words, we need a computational device with parallel architecture that can quickly process a number of complex calculations if we want to be able to implement a complex realistic physical model in the today’s games. I have to stress that contemporary GPUs or CPUs like Cell, for instance, have exactly the architecture like that. Moreover, ATI Technologies and Nvidia have already announced the ability of their Radeon X1000 and GeForce 7 graphics cards to work as physics coprocessors.
A small and relatively young company , AGEIA Technologies, founded in 2002 has been long working on a special PhysX co-processor designed to process calculations of the physical models in contemporary games. The first solutions based on this chip have recently hit the streets. We are going to take a closer look at this new solution and ASUS PhysX P1 card will help us here.


sa: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/vid...eia-physx.html