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Texas Memory Systems has introduced what it claims is the world’s fastest, most capacious solid state drive: the RamSan-440. It is not intended for the consumer market, though, but rather for enterprises willing to pay its hefty price tag in exchange for top performance, fast speed and high storage capacity.

Starting at around $140,000, the RamSan-440 can sustain a record setting 600,000 IOPS (input/outputs per second) and is available in capacities of 256GB and 512GB – four times that of its predecessor and now entry-level RamSan-400. It uses DDR2 RAM to deliver 4Gbps random read and write speeds with a latency of less than 15ms and NAND flash modules in a RAID configuration for data backup.

While such a costly and complex system might seem like overkill for a market still wary of SSD deployment in enterprise systems, TMS says it has already deployed similar products among customers in financial, telecom, e-commerce and other fields in which downtime or processing lags are not tolerated.

Solid state drives may be the inevitable future of computer storage, but there’s still plenty of demand for traditional hard disk drives. In fact there has been no indication of a market slowdown, which has affected the NAND flash industry, but rather a healthy 21% gain in shipments over the same period last year.

According to market research firm iSuppli, 137 million hard drives were shipped during the first quarter of this year, with units primarily being snapped inside notebook PCs, consumer electronics, desktops, and external drives. Vendors saw some healthy operating margins, too. Seagate reported $363 million in profits, or 11.7% of revenue, Western Digital announced $298 million, or a 14% return and Hitachi GST stated it had earned $65 million, or 4.6% of revenue.

It remains to be seen how flash-based storage will affect the HDD industry overtime, but as long as demand for low-cost storage capacity continues to rise, hard drive makers will find ways to stay competitive for some time. iSuppli says vendors are on track to ship 573 million drives by the end of this year, which represents 11 percent growth over last year's final tally.

Japanese browser maker takes on IE, Firefox @ ComputerWorld
Yahoo CEO remains upbeat despite lackluster quarter @ Miami Herald
Crowd-sourcing the e-car @ Reuters
MotionPlus totally ambushes third-party developers @ WiiFanboy
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Another spammer has been convicted to jail time. Robert Alan Soloway, also known as the Spam King, has been sentenced to nearly 4 years in prison after pleading guilty to charges of e-mail fraud, mail fraud, and tax evasion back in March – a rather lenient verdict considering he was facing a maximum sentence of 26 years behind bars.

The prosecution argued that Soloway should get more prison time, asking for a sentence of 7 - 9 years to echo the severity of past sentences in similar spam cases. The defense countered that Soloway didn't damage anyone’s computer, he didn’t send out malicious code, and he never directed people to pornography, as some spammers have done.

Robert Soloway is the second person in the US to be convicted under the Can-Spam Act for flooding people’s inboxes with fraudulent email messages. But while the Soloway case is seen as a step forward in the fight against the spam nuisance, another convicted offender with the same criminal moniker escaped from a federal minimum-security prison camp in Colorado over the weekend.

Late last month OCZ Technology revealed a partnership with Fatal1ty to develop a new range of high-performance memory and power supplies tailored for the needs of gaming enthusiasts. Well, their efforts are now starting to come into fruition with OCZ unveiling its first Fatal1ty-branded DDR2 and DDR3 memory modules.

OCZ claims it “worked closely with Fatal1ty and his team to design new memory kits that pair perfectly with the top selling motherboards.” Marketing talk aside, the family of OCZ Fatal1ty memory modules include 4GB PC2-6400 (800MHz) kits with CL5 4-4-18 timings, 2GB and 4GB PC3-10666 (1333MHz) kits with CL9 9-9-26 timings as well as a 2GB PC2-8500 (1066MHz) EPP-ready kit with CL5 5-5-15 latency settings for “plug and play” overclocking on DDR2 Nvidia platforms.

Pricing and availability has not been announced. You can read more about these modules on OCZ’s product pages for DDR2 and DDR3 Fatal1ty memory kits.

During its Gamefest 2008 developer conference in Seattle, Microsoft not only made the multiplayer component in Games for Windows a free service but also revealed details concerning DirectX 11, the latest edition of its PC gaming graphics API.

Like its predecessor, DirectX 11 will be exclusive to Windows Vista and future versions of Microsoft’s operating system. Features include a new compute shader technology that lays the groundwork for developers to utilize video cards as parallel processors, as well as improved multi-core support and support for tessellation, which supposedly improves the appearance of close-in models.

Microsoft also revealed that the new software will add features to existing DirectX 10-compatible hardware, though it was not clear what those features may be. Don't go tossing your DirectX 10 card just yet, however, as DirectX will be available sometime in 2009-2010 when the next version of Windows ships.

It looks like Microsoft has finally caved to demands from PC gamers who have long-enjoyed online multiplayer for free. At its Gamefest 2008 event, the company announced it is making all of the Live functionality for the Games for Windows platform available at no cost – that includes Achievements, TruSkill matchmaking, friends lists, voice and text chat, and cross-platform play with Xbox 360 on games that support it.

The move is effective immediately and will affect all current and future Games for Windows titles too. In addition, Microsoft has reduced the technical requirements for those developers looking to utilize Live and will be adding a new Marketplace to the PC version of the service later this year along with a revamped user interface.

The move is certainly great news for gamers and should make Games for Windows a more direct competitor to Valve’s Steam service. I wonder, though, if Microsoft plans to reimburse those who already paid for a Live Gold Membership.

Firefox has come a long way since its debut in 2004, from the introduction of tabbed browsing and pop-up blocking in early builds to more recent features such as improved page rendering and anti-phishing protection in its latest 3.0 incarnation. Its adoption has grown steadily since inception, mostly at the expense of Internet Explorer, and now holds approximately 16% global usage share of web browsers.

Just before the launch of Firefox 3 in June, Wired sat down with Mozilla’s CEO John Lilly to talk about future plans for the browser. They’ve just recently posted the interview where they mention a couple of things worth noting, such as Lilly’s views on competition from Apple in both the desktop and mobile fronts as well as Mozilla’s dependence on advertising revenue from Google. Check out the full interview here.

Smaller PCs Cause Worry for Industry @ NY Times
What's Killing SOA? @ PC World
Oyster card hack to be published @ BBC News
Features removed from Windows Vista @ Wikipedia
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Their timing couldn’t possibly be worst – with Psystar’s recent run-in with Apple’s lawyers and all – but a new company is supposedly set to join the world of Mac clones. Open Tech has announced their new hardware lineup, including a desktop designed to run not just Windows XP and Vista, but Ubuntu and Mac OS X Leopard as well.

Though details are still rather scarce, a tentative configuration includes a 3.4GHz Intel processor, a 500GB hard drive, and 3GB of DDR2 RAM. Instead of loading the operating system onto a computer, Open Tech intends to evade the legal hassles incurred by Psystar by merely selling systems along with a “do-it-yourself” kit for users to install the OS of their choice – which they have to buy separately.

In other words Open Tech is dodging responsibility by letting the user violate the license agreement himself. Of course, inciting users to break the OS X license agreement is also one of the reasons Apple is suing Psystar.

Earlier this month news emerged about a flaw in the DNS standard that could allow attackers to redirect Internet requests to wherever they want – such as sites that engage in phishing or malware distribution. While Dan Kaminsky was hoping to wait until the Black Hat Conference to release details of the flaw he discovered, it appears that another researcher has jumped the gun and posted a hypothesis on how to exploit it.

On his blog, Halvar Flake described how an attacker could conduct DNS cache poisoning by overloading the server with requests until a legitimate answer is received. The technique also involves redirecting the name server to an IP address set up by the attacker and the use of “Bailiwick checking.” Matasano Security was already in on the details of the flaw and posted confirmation of Flake’s hypothesis, adding that an attacker with a fast internet connection would only need 10 seconds to carry out such an attack.

Kaminsky, for his part, has declined comment on Flake's speculation but urged DNS operators to patch their servers immediately.

It is Vista’s fault that solid state drives aren’t performing as well as its promoters had predicted. At least according to SanDisk’s Chairman and CEO Eli Harari, who recently announced it has delayed the launch of optimized drives until next year to overcome serious performance issues with the operating system.

Speaking at the company’s second quarter earnings conference call, Harari deflected blame for being behind schedule by claiming “Vista is not optimized for Flash memory solid state disks.” According to Harari, SanDisk didn’t fully understand the limitations in the Vista environment and thus now they are forced to develop new Flash memory controllers that can be built into SSDs to allegedly compensate for the operating system’s shortfalls.

His statements were notably short on details, though. It would seem like SanDisk is just throwing out a red herring to draw the spotlight away from deficiencies in their SSD products, especially when we’ve already seen OCZ’s Core SSDs performing at levels comparable to those of 10,000 RPM hard disk drives.

ATI has released their first official driver with Radeon 4800 support. The new Catalyst 8.7 release brings the usual round of bug fixes along with a handful of performance enhancements in games including Company of Heroes, Call of Duty 4 and Lost Planet.

Users can also expect resolved problems in a host of games as well as a new “full Hardware information” section in the Catalyst Control Center that details each graphics card installed on a system. On the Linux front, the latest Catalyst release fixes a few bugs and adds support for Ubuntu 8.04, SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 SP2, and openSUSE 11.

You can learn more about the changes and fixes within the official release notes. As usual, the drivers are available for Windows XP 32 and 64-bit, Vista 32 and 64-bit, and Linux 32 and 64-bit.

Despite concerns of sluggish sales due to a troubled US economy, Apple today reported a 38 percent jump in revenue and a 31 percent gain in profit in its fiscal third quarter compared to a year ago – the best June quarter for both revenue and earnings in Apple’s history – thanks in no small part to the strength in sales of its Macintosh line of computers.

The company said revenue rose to $7.46 billion in the quarter ended June 28, and profits reached $1.07 billion, or $1.19 a share. Apple said it shipped 2.5 million Macintosh computers, up a whopping 41 percent from a year earlier. While iPod sales have been expected to begin flattening out, the company managed to move 11 million units during the quarter, for a rather unexpected year-over-year growth of 12 percent. Apple also said it sold 717,000 iPhones, compared with 270,000 a year ago. Interestingly, the iPhone does not appear to have cannibalized iPod sales, though the lower-priced iPhone 3G may change that beginning in the coming quarter.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs also took the occasion to tease fans about several unnamed new products that will supposedly launch “in the coming months.” The company’s shares nevertheless fell 9 percent in after-hours trading after revealing one of its typically conservative fourth-quarter earnings forecasts, where it said revenue would reach $7.8 billion and earnings would be about $1 a share.

Nvidia’s mobile GPU lineup has expanded today with the introduction of five new high-end products in the GeForce 9M series: the GeForce 9700M GT, 9700M GTS, 9800M GTS, 9800M GT, and 9800M GTX. Not only these new cards promise improved gaming performance, but also to help save power and increase battery life.

At the top end sits the flagship GeForce 9800M GTX, with a core frequency of 500MHz and 112 stream processors each running at 1250MHz. The card is based on the same G92 core of the previous-generation GeForce 8800M GTX but has a higher 420 gigaflops floating-point arithmetic rating. Next up is the 9800M GT and 9800M GTS, both based on the G94 core with a frequency of 500MHz – oddly, the 9800M GT appears to have better specs than the 9800M GTS with 96 stream processors compared to 64 on the latter.

The 9700M series includes the GeForce 9700M GTS and lower end 9700M GT. All these new models share many of the same features as cards announced early last month when the GeForce 9M line was unveiled, including Nvidia’s Hybrid SLI and Hybrid Power to save battery life.