Two quickies:
Samsung promises 256 GiB SSD units later this year, capable of 200 MiBps peak reads and 160 MBps sustained read rates. The storage units will ship in 2,5″ and 1,8″ enclosures, and have SATA-2 interfaces. The best SSDs today top out at around 130 MiBps for reads and 100 MiBps for writes. No price announced yet - current price for an equivalent-sized SSD is 7000 US$.
Seagate promises 2.5 TiB 3,5″ hard drives in 2009.
Just a friendly consumer alert:
STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM SEAGATE’S “FREEAGENT PRO” HARD DRIVE LINE.
I had one 750G drive I purchased just before Christmas last year to save my sisters data off a dying WD external drive. The Seagate replacement died spontaneously before new year - that is, in under a week. With 120 gigs of my sister’s data on it. Fresh from the store.
I asked the place of purchase if they could send it to a data rescue service. They shrugged and said they could send it off to destruction, and give me a new one.
I called Seagate. They stonewalled me with some barely comprehensible blather which, as far as I could make out, was a diplomatic way of saying “you’re fucked, but thanks for your money”.
That was then, this is now. Stupid as i was, I went out and bought a replacement 750 GB Seagate for my sister (also a Freeagent Pro). It’s worked well, up till today, where I came home from work and the sis told me the drive was dead. I spent 5 minutes examining it - it’s dead alright. Doesn’t come on from pushing the power button, not from replugging Firewire cable, not from replugging power cable. The bottom was scalding hot. (A dead converter, probably, but my guess is that I’ll have to gut the drive box and write it off as another loss).
And no - we have’t poured cola in it, we are not operating it in excessively cold, hot, humid, dusty, vibrating conditions, etc. Just a regular, clean home environment, well away from potential harm.
(And you’re right - this by itself has no statistical significance. Thing is, I’m hearing the same from around my circle of acquaintances - dead and dying Seagate drives popping up regularly - too regularly).
Seagate, fuck you and your external hard drive line. What is your 5 year warranty worth if you won’t even fucking save my data on your pathetic products that die after less then a week of light use? I’ll take WD from now on, thanks!
Cuba lifts computer ban
- following Fidel’s circling of the drain, his brother, Raul, took over in 2006 and though he is just as much a communist hardliner as El Fidel, he has shown signs of softening up to… well, lets say, the modern world.
An internal government memo seen by Reuters on Thursday said the appliances long desired by Cubans can go on sale immediately, although air conditioners will not be available until next year and toasters until 2010 due to limited power supplies. Only foreigners and companies can buy computers in Cuba at present, while DVD players were seized at the airport until last year, when customs rules were eased. Now Cubans will be able to buy them freely, paying for them in hard currency CUCs, or convertible pesos, worth 24 times more than the Cuban pesos state wages are paid in.
“Based on the improved availability of electricity, the government at the highest level has approved the sale of some equipment which was prohibited,” the memo said. It also listed television sets, which were already on sale, electric pressure cookers and rice cookers, electric bicycles, car alarms and microwave ovens. Raul Castro, 76, has led Cuba since July 2006 when his older brother Fidel Castro provisionally handed over power after intestinal surgery from which he has not fully recovered.
Welcome to the 80’s, Cuba!
The sale of many electric appliances was banned in the 1990s when the collapse of the Soviet Union deprived Cuba of billions of dollars in subsidies and oil supplies, resulting in an energy crunch and daily blackouts of as long as 18 hours.
You know you’re running a shitty economic system when your entire nation must recieve external subsidies to stay afloat.
Raul Castro has encouraged debate of Cuba’s economic woes and has received a torrent of complaints focusing mainly on poor wages and limited access to consumer goods that are priced in hard currency.
The wonders of state socialism, eh?
The digital universe is now 281 exabytes large
- IDC/EMC estimates that the digital universe of humanity is now around 281 exabytes in size. By 2011, it with be 10 times the size that it was in 2006 (which as 161 exabytes).
Interesting stuff.
Gold breaks 1000$/oz
- or rather, the dollar broke 1/1000 oz of Gold - downwards. This happened on the 14th of March, and is the lowest level for the dollar, ever, even lower than the post-Nixon gutting of Bretton Woods. This is following that the Fed has been inflating the dollar for years, and lately, Bear Stearns crashed from trading at around 60$/share to a miserable 3$. JPMorgan stepped in to buy out BSC, with the aid of the fed who propped them up with 200e9 $.
Making money out of thin air. *shrug*
AT&T CEO says no one wants $10 DSL
AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson apparently subscribes to a different school of marketing and demand than most others — speaking with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the telecom boss flatly denied that AT&T’s $10 DSL plan is hidden on the company’s website, and went on to say that “customers haven’t been clamoring for it,” and that since the 768Kbps “user experience is not what I would consider really state of the art,” he doesn’t really want to sell it to anyone. Of course, customers don’t usually clamor for a product that barely anyone knows is available and that requires absurd hoop-jumping just to get set up, but don’t let them pesky facts get in your way, Randy.
(source)
Ah, the scourge of corporations. Yuck. “Net neutrality” is looking better every day. :/
Censorship or just a coverup of MS’ incompetence at making safe software? You decide:
I tried to send a message, but got an error that says “Could not send; a connection error occurred.” What does this mean?
It may mean that MSN doesn’t like your message.MSN censors messages containing particular fragments of URLs. Previously, the message would simply be dropped with no indication to either side that it went away; now, at least, you get an error message (inline in the message view).
Pieces of text that are known to cause MSN to throw a message into the memory hole:
* .info
* profile.php? (including ‘?’)
* download.php? (including ‘?’)
* gallery.php
* pics.php
* ListAllTopics.php
* .scr (source)There may be others.
Can you fix it?
This censorship is server-side. There’s nothing we can do about it. We could encode URLs, but MSN could always plug that hole and we’d be back where we started.Why do they do this?
The reason that Microsoft has stated is that it is because they may be URLs to exploit Windows or Microsoft Windows Live Messenger security holes.Of course, any URL can be an exploit URL. The correct solution would be to fix the bugs that evil URLs would exploit.
(source)
I’ll propose a better alternative: Jabber. Get it, use it, and spread it. Open, free and safe.
I’m not back yet, but I thought I’d bring you a few pieces of news:
DRAMeXchange says that by fall, Apple’s iPhone and iPod nano products will gobble up 25% of the total worldwide flash memory supply; this will drive up prices together with the fact that a new flash process technology that has recently been launched is producing lower-than-expected yields.
IFPI Denmark says that the CD sales revenue has, for the first half of the year, dropped 10%, compared to H1 2006. I figure that this is due to market acceptance of the online music stores, but my guess is also that the fuX0rs at, say, RIAA and their ilk will say that it was due to piracy… :p
Cisco is killing the Linksys brand. Linksys was founded in 1988, and acquired by Cisco in 2003 after their succesful entry into the router market.
Seagate will immediately cease production of hard drives with the old PATA interface, known for their 40-pin sockets, and the need for manual master/slave configuration - good riddance! Seagate will thus solely produce SATA units from now on. This signals the soon-to-come end of the line for the Parallel AT Attachment interface that saw the light of day 21 years ago. (PATA drives still comprise 33% of desktop sales and 50% of portable drive sales.)
“The legal status of the Zeta operating system that was derived from the source code Be Inc. left shortly before going bankrupt has been unclear for several years. Now, the current owner of the source code, ACCESS, claims “if Herr Korz feels that he holds a legitimate license to the BeOS code he’s been using, we’re completely unaware of it, and I’d be fascinated to see him produce any substantiation for that claim”. The sales of Zeta have been suspended and so has the development been halted as well.
And, in the true /. style, the most insight is in the comments:
It’s funny how Access owns the code, yet they’re not doing a damned thing with it. They’ve halted distribution of a product that isn’t competing with their business, and if history is any indicator, they aren’t ever going to release any BeOS-related software ever. They are an IP company, they buy stuff up, sit on it for a while then license/resell to actual inventors and manufacturers for a profit. This kind of business is one the most revolting abuses of the 21st century, because all they do is kidnap information for a ransom, potentially hiding it away forever if no buyer comes along to pay their inflated price. This type of activity precisely underlines the need for patent reform. This doesn’t help anyone except the people cashing the checks, ultimately IP-hoarding hurts everyone as it stymies technological progress.
So true. Software patents? Scrap ‘em. And of course, also patents on biological software - ie. genetic information.
Applied game theory in action:
DoS extortion is no longer profitable
In the last six months of 2006 we saw a pretty sharp decline in the daily number of denial of service attacks. Although there are likely a number of factors at play here, I think there is one primary factor: denial of service extortion attacks are no longer profitable.
DoS extortion attacks are usually carried out by a bot-network owner. Using their bots, the extortionsist has to make a successful DoS attack against a target organization. Following that they have to issue the extortion request and hope the target organization pays it.
The thing is that DoS attacks are loud and risky. Whenever a bot-network owner carries out a denial of service attack they run the risk of losing some of their bots. This could happen either because an attacking computer is identified and disinfected, or if it is simply blocked by its ISP from accessing the network. Furthermore, if the bot-network owner isn’t careful they could lose their entire bot network if their command and control server is identified. Since a DoS extortionist has to carry out at least one successful DoS attack before they can even demand their pay, they run some serious overhead risks.
So what happens if the target of the attack refuses to pay? The DoS extortionist is obligated to carry out a prolonged DoS attack against them to follow through on their threats. For a DoS extortionist this is the worst scenario because they have to risk their bot network for nothing at all. Since the target has refused to pay, it is likely that they will never pay. As a consequence, the attacker has to spend time and resources on a lost cause.
It is likely that bot network owners are now moving away from DoS extortion and towards more lucrative ventures like spam. Not surprisingly, we saw a noted increase in spam volumes in the last six months of 2006.
Slammer turns Florida election result into worm food
New concerns about the accuracy of electronic voting in Sarasota County, Florida are being raised after a published report documented how the county’s main database system came under attack from a virulent worm. The county server was breached on the first day of early voting in the 2006 election, which included a now-disputed race for a seat in the US House of Representatives.
The attack code was a variant of the infamous Slammer worm that penetrated the county’s server, which unbelievably, was missing five years worth of security patches, according to an article painstakingly reported by investigative journalist Brad Friedman. The breach crippled the county’s entire network, including the electronic voting system, where net connectivity was disrupted for two hours. Those trying to vote during the outage were turned away.
The worm breached the database server’s firewall and overwrote the system’s administrative passwords. The server then “sent traffic to other database servers on the Internet, and the traffic generated by the infected server rendered the firewall unavailable,” according to a two-page incident report unearthed by Friedman. A network security specialist who helped draft the report said he believed the harm to the county’s election systems was limited to the two-hour disruption, because the two networks were not connected. (The specialist conceded that the timing of the attack, on the first day of early voting, “would make somebody raise an eyebrow” in suspecting the election system was being targeted.)
…
The concern over the accuracy of evoting in Sarasota County might seem like the hand wringing of luddites were it not for improbable results in the race for Florida’s 13th Congressional district. Republican Vern Buchanan edged out Democrat Christine Jennings by just 369 votes. More than 18,000 ballots recorded no vote in the race, an “undervote” rate that was about nine times higher than other races. Jennings is contesting the results in court.
Yet another example of not only the incompetence of the public officials, but the dangers or poorly thought out and poorly implemented e-voting.
IBM is on a rampage!
Now they have introduced vacuum as an insulator between the conductors inside CPUs; the benefits are that processors may now perform up to 35% better, while using 15% less power. Counter-intuitively however, the technology is called “AirGap”.
The manufacturing technique for inserting the vacuum gaps was derived from research on self-assembling molecules, called diblock copolymers, conducted by IBM researcher Chuck Black. A diblock copolymer consists of two types of molecules that, in ordinary circumstances, would repel each other. By designing the molecules in a particular way and controlling how they interact, they create intricate patterns through chemical repulsion.
Since IBM is in a partnership with AMD, they will be allowed to make use of the technology, but not Intel (unless the two parties can come to an agreement, which I hope).
We will see AirGap in IBM’s 32 nm processors which rolls out in 2009.
Also, last month, IBM pioneered a new way of designing “3D” processors, where the chip essentially becomes three-dimensional, and not just a two-dimensional slab of transistors. That means that much more space available for components and thus much more potential processing capacity on a die:
(12th of April) IBM today announced a breakthrough chip-stacking technology in a manufacturing environment that paves the way for three-dimensional chips that will extend Moore’s Law beyond its expected limits. The technology – called “through-silicon vias” — allows different chip components to be packaged much closer together for faster, smaller, and lower-power systems.
…
The new IBM method eliminates the need for long-metal wires that connect today’s 2-D chips together, instead relying on through-silicon vias, which are essentially vertical connections etched through the silicon wafer and filled with metal. These vias allow multiple chips to be stacked together, allowing greater amounts of information to be passed between the chips.
The technique shortens the distance information on a chip needs to travel by 1000 times, and allows for the addition of up to 100 times more channels, or pathways, for that information to flow compared to 2-D chips.
IBM is already running chips using the through-silicon via technology in its manufacturing line and will begin making sample chips using this method available to customers in the second half of 2007, with production in 2008.
This means that multi-core CPUs will be MUCH easier to make, because each core can simply be stacked on top of other cores, reducing chip area.
…or so you would think. For advanced things like 3D-gaming and prepress graphics work, it is indeed true, but certainly not for simple tasks like word processing and spreadsheet work.
Low End Mac have been messing around with their old Mac’s, and guess what?Their 18 year old Mac IIci does Word document imports almost 4 times faster than a IBM ThinkCentre with a 3 GHz Pentium 4 processor and .5 Gigs of RAM:
- 
Yes, my fellow computophiles, some caevats apply, and of course the hardware has become much faster than it was back then, but the point is - our programming techniques and code execution efficiency have not followed the pace!
Have you seen the latest Farbrausch creation?
If not, check it out here. This one has a feel of Halflife 2 combined with Max Payne on crack, and only takes up 177 K of software code, using the werkkzeug3/kkrieger engine. Hard to believe, no?
Perhaps the word “tech” is overstating it, but anyway; IBM discovered that if the surface of the chip that needs cooling is etched with very fine grooves, the thermal paste between the heat source and the heat sink conducts heat better, and thus leads to better cooling:
(…) Big Blue boffins at the company’s Zurich Research Lab discovered that if the upper surface of a chip’s ceramic casing is etched with a network of channels, the thermal paste applied to conductively connect the chip to its cooling mechanism - heatsink, fan, whatever - spreads in a more efficient manner. Or, as we say in the trade, it gets thinner.
The upshot: the metal particles suspended within the paste are better able to conduct heat away from the chip.
This means we will soon be able to pump a higher wattage into the CPU, and thus get more performance out of it without it overheating and shutting down in a particularly nasty system crash. Or, for those of us who aren’t die-hard CPU over-clockers and computing speed freaks, we can get the same amount of chip cooling with lower heat sink fan speeds (meaning a lower system noise level) or… even go all the way to passive, noiseless cooling.
Thank you, IBM.
The danish company Softscan says that the data size of spam mails have increased by 77% since September 2006 - this increase is due to spammers sending more picture spam, which is indecipherable by current Bayesian spam-filters.
It is more annoying us users, because once again, we have to spend more time to weed out the crap from our mailboxes, but it also means more expenses for our mail providers, because the spam takes up more storage capacity and eats up more incoming comms bandwidth.
At the moment, between 85 and 90% of all email sent is spam and viruses.
We need harsher anti-spam laws, and more effective international enforcement. Raise your hand if you agree.
…according to the Financial Times:
A recent six-month investigation into whether 40 countries use censorship shows the practice is spreading, with new countries learning from experienced practitioners such as China and benefiting from technological improvements.
OpenNet Initiative, a project by Harvard Law School and the universities of Toronto, Cambridge and Oxford, repeatedly tried to call up specific websites from 1,000 international news and other sites in the countries concerned, and a selection of local-language sites.
The research found a trend towards censorship or, as John Palfrey, executive director of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said, “a big trend in the reverse direction”, with many countries recently starting to adopt forms of online censorship.
Ronald Deibert, associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto, said 10 countries had become “pervasive blockers”, regularly preventing their citizens seeing a range of online material. These included China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Burma and Uzbekistan.
New censorship techniques include the periodic barring of complete applications, such as China’s block on Wikipedia or Pakistan’s ban on Google’s blogging service, and the use of more advanced technologies such as “keyword filtering”, which is used to track down material by identifying sensitive words.
North Korea is essentially cut off from the internet, and censorship of the net is especially intensive in China, Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Other national networks are also impaired by government controls, in Cuba, Egypt, Syria, Beluarus, Burma/Myanmar, Uzbekistan, Turkey, Tunisia and Thailand. This usually takes the form of blocking of websites by the political opposition and harassment or imprisoning of reformists and critics of the politicians/dictators in charge.
InPhase shows off a 1.5 millimeter-trick, 300 GiB capable holographic storage disk, which we are promised will scale up to 1.6 TB by 2010. Data transfer rates from the disk are only 20 MiBps at the moment, though. A ReWriteable version expected in 2008. Shelf life: 50 years.
Price: 18000$ per drive, 180$ per disk.
Mempile presents something somewhat better, a 500 GiB holographic disk sporting 100 virtual layers each of 5 GiB capacity. Future versions will allow 200 layers… truly making it a TeraDisc.
Note: What makes these disks holographic is that they are transparent - there is no reflective layer in the disks, like in CD’s and DVD’s.
Who needs BluRay?
… and as a consequence; the computing-time-consumers: Us!
The next step on the Intel CPU roadmap are the Penryn and Nehalem chips;
Penryn will be a 45 nanometer Dual or Quad core with 6 (Dual) and 12 (Quad) MiB of L2 cache, new SSE4 instructions, and will re-break the 3 GHz mark. It will ship late in 2007.
The details on Nehalem are fuzzy, but we are told that it will be an 8-core chip, it will reintroduce HyperThreading (which we saw in the late-model Pentium 4-chips), and production will commence in 2008.
More.
(PS: This is not an April Fool’s…)
The french analysis company Xiti Monitor recently conducted a survey, showing that approximately one in four europeans uses the FireFox web browser.
The least interest in FireFox is found in Spain, where circa one in seven use FireFox, and the web browser has its highest popularity in Slovenia where a full 40% of the computerized populace use it!
So long, Internet Exploiter. :)
11. December, 2006: Fujitsu announces 300 GB 2,5 inch harddrive for portables. Like most other large-capacity disks, it is limited in its rotational speed (in this case: 4200 rpm - 5400 is the standard today). The drive is one of the first to use PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) technology. Idle power consumption is approximately 0.5 Watts.
4th of January, 2007: Hitachi announces world’s first 1 Terabyte (TB) harddrive at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas: The Deskstar 7K1000. Suggested Retail Price (SRP) is 399$, equal to 40 cents per Gigabyte. The drive operates at 7200 rpm, consumes 9 Watts (idle), features a 32 MB buffer, and is available as ATA-133 and SATA-2 (3.0 Gbps) versions.
January, 2007: Utilizing Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) recording technology, Seagate promises magnetic data densities of 50 Terabits (Tb) per square inch, resulting in 300 Tb hard drives in the future. These drives will store 37.5 Terabytes (TB) for a typical 3,5″ HD. This technology may be available as early as 2012.
PMR technology is expected to top out at 1 Tb of data per square inch.
16th of January: Seagate announces a 15,000 rpm 2,5″ enterprise (which means NOT for general consumption!) harddrive under the name of Savvio 15K The drive capacities offered are 36 and 73 GB, and connected using Serially Attached SCSI (SAS).
Intel announced a major breakthrough in microprocessor design Friday that will allow it to keep on the curve of Moore’s Law a while longer. IBM, working with AMD, rushed out a press release announcing essentially equivalent advances. Both companies said they will be using alloys of Hafnium as insulating layers, replacing the silicon dioxide that has been used for more than 40 years.
(Slashdot)
Plus, Intel is going 45 nm in 2007H2, meaning faster, cooler and more energy efficient chips will come our way before the end of the year. Here’s looking forward to Quad-cores in my next portable…
So… Microsoft Windows Vista, formerly Longhorn, hit the streets today, and I’ve finally had the opportunity to try it out out at various computer stores. This isn’t going to be an in-depth review (you can find lots of those elsewhere on the web), but just my initial observations and comments from a Mac user’s perspective.
The first thing you notice is that the user interface (UI) has seen a major graphic overhaul, and it is just as impressive eye-candy-wise as it is needed after 6 years of stagnation. Minimized web browser windows show the contents in a medium-sized thumbnail (Live icons) when you move the cursor over them in the Task Bar. I much like the color adjustments you can make in the Explorer (Windows’ counterpart of the Finder) windows - that certainly appeals to my aesthetic side.
Side note: It’s annoying that Apple is so conservative in regards to keeping the OS X user interface consistent from Mac to Mac, that you can’t modify the look of your UI - you are limited to fiddling with the text selection colors… wholly inadequate, Apple! You have to use 3rd party software to do anything more serious with the interface on your Mac. (Anyway, lets see if OS X 10.5 with it’s new ‘Illuminous’ interface will change that).
While the menus of Vista in general look smoother than XP due to the new graphics system, the Start Menu (well, I guess it’s just the Windows Menu now, since it doesn’t say “Start” anymore!) has been crippled a bit, because the icons next to “My Computer”, “Documents”, “Network places” and so on have been removed. This will surely confuse new users, because of the lack of visual cues to what it is you’re clicking.
The Task Manager has been enhanced a bit, and a more comprehensive resource monitor (for monitoring the load on CPU, disk, memory and network) has been added as an button you can click in the Task Manager.
Now, the wildcards in the Vista equation are reliability and security. Vista is based on Windows Server 2003, which is based on Windows XP, which in turn is based on on Windows 2000. While Windows 2000 was the best and most reliable Windows version Microsoft has ever made, it goes without saying that MS added a lot of crap in the step from 2000 to XP. Windows 2003 cleaned some of it up and improved reliability (they did, after all, advertise it as a server OS…), but now, Vista yet again adds a lot of more or less superfluous features - and a lot of system code that has not been extensively tested by the *whole* world of PC users outside the gates of Redmond.
With 10 years time of Windows experience under the belt, and even longer as an amused onlooker from behind the protective screen of my Mac, I can attest to that I simply do not trust Microsoft when it comes to the sanctity of my computer and the security of my data and privacy (and I honestly don’t give a shit about Jim Allchin supposedly letting his 7-year old kid play with the computer unsupervised. Like most MS execs, he is full of crap). Microsoft has time and time again shown us that they do not value the privacy and security of their customers, other than as fancy buzzwords on their press releases. Over the years, they’ve churned out lots of software products which were essentially beta-quality, and let the end users struggle with the bugs, horrors and oddities.
Plus, with the more aggressive inclusion of DRM, “Trusted Computing” and Software Activation, it is clear as crystal that Microsoft is intensifying the war against the user. “Trusted Computing” is an oxymoron - Microsoft does not trust you - why should you trust them?
In regards to new features, it is obvious where Microsoft gets its ideas from: Apple. The sleek new graphics system for Vista, Aero, is just a remake of Apple’s Quartz Extreme, the Sidebar and its Gadgets is a remake of Apple’s Dashboard and its Widgets, the BitLocker drive encryption mechanism is a recycled Apple’s FileVault, and the new Resource Monitor is an adaptation of Apple’s Activity Monitor. Those are the first obvious similarities I could find with the short time of trying VIsta out, but I’m sure that there are more.
In essence, it is as always, very clear that Microsoft’s research division is named “Apple Computer”. BillyBoy Inc. has indeed been very busy ripping off Apple!
Summary: Vista is, for most users, an eye-candy update to Windows XP, and granted, it looks good (but, as described above, they had some very good… ah… “inspiration”). But with previous experiences to consider, there is no way whatsoever I’ll install this OS on any computer which carries any important productive role, at least not in the short term. At earliest, I’ll consider playing with it for real in a year, when the worst bugs are ironed out. And I will certainly not use Vista before the cracker community has produced working cracks for Vista, which disables or surgically removes the parts of the OS that would give my anything less than full access to and control over my personal computer.
In short: Save your money and save yourself some headaches. Wait out the upgrade to Vista for at least a year.
Sony is strong-arming adult content producers away from the BluRay format, as reported by IGM:
Adult film producer There Joone [said] that his company, Digital Playground, would be going with HD DVD for future HD releases. Joone reportedly said that none of the Blu-ray manufacturing facilities would press discs for his company, saying that Sony had threatened to pull their licenses if they produced adult content.
History repeats itself. Back in the 80’s when VHS was battling BetaMax, it was also the adult movie business that played the deciding hand in that battle - they chose VHS, and VHS won decisively. Only now Sony themselves are tipping the scales away from their own format. Sony, you are a bunch of morons.
BluRay discs can store 25 GB on a single-layer disc, and 50 GB on a dual-layer disc. HD DVD discs can store 15, 30 and 51 GB for single, dual and triple layer discs. The triple layer HD DVD discs have just been announced by Toshiba at the 2007 CES. Both formats offer more layers in the future.
Too bad, my money was on the BluRay (not only because they are the only next-generation drives you can get for your PC here in Denmark), but I must say that I’m retracting my bet now.
Hell has nearly frozen over.
Good news is that Amiga OS 4.0 has been released by Hyperion.
Bad news is… it only runs on hardware that is not on the market anymore (the AmigaOne).
Supposedly, new, supported hardware will be available in 2007. Let’s hope it will be, for nothing else than to spare the Amiga crowd of further embarrasment.
Unknown to some (myself included, until last week :), there is a copper-based LAN technology out there that is faster than the current “top-of-the-line” 1 Gbps Ethernet: It’s 10 Gbps Ethernet, potentially 10 times faster than common consumer Gigabit Ethernet, and it is extremely expensive; one specimen of a 10 Gbps LAN adapter is Intel’s PRO 10 GbE CX4 Server Adapter, which costs to the tune of 1000 US$. 10 Gbps switches are also outrageously pricey - the cheapest switch I have been able to find is SMC’s 8-port TigerSwitch SMC8708L2, which sells for around 6000 US$!
But that’s not all - this year, there have been various efforts to bump up the speed of Ethernet further; IEEE recently announced that a study group to design the next generation of Ethernet has now agreed on the speed of this technology, which has been nailed down to 100 Gbps (!!!). The standard should be finalized by 2010.
Before you start choking on your own drool in your expectation to see 10 or 100 Gbps Ethernet connectivity in your home in a few years time, I have to disappoint you; if the price was not hint enough, this kind of equipment is practically reserved for ISP’s and really big businesses; essentially, companies that have extreme network connectivity requirements. In the foreseeable future, consumers and even “prosumers” such as you and I, will realistically have no need for the amount of bandwidth that these technologies offer.
Just look at the hard drive in your computer: Most hard drives’ data transfer speeds max out at around 50 MBps (= 400 Mbps) these days (due to drive mechanism limitations), which is around half of the capacity of Gigabit Ethernet. Even when everyone has 10.000 rpm RaptorX (which can deliver around 70 MBps = 560 Mbps) hard drives installed in their computers, Gigabit Ethernet will STILL be enough for all but the most demanding users!
Besides, when it’s time to move beyond (1) Gigabit Ethernet, I’m confident that we will also be going beyond copper and electrons to carry data from point A to point B - we will be adopting optical fiber networking, even in the home of regular Joes.
But the aforementioned ISP’s and big businesses that need extreme bandwidth will have use for not only the 10 Gbps Ethernet of today, but also the 100 Gbps Ethernet of tomorrow, seeing how consumer broadband is taking hold around the world, and high-speed fiber connections are coming to market these years. All that is needed to saturate a 10 Gbps interface is approximately one hundred 10 Mbps clients, and there are already a god deal of these, thanks to the recent advances in DSL and cable technology.
Lastly, while PCI-X@133 MHz is barely enough to saturate a 10 Gbps link, and the top-spec 16x PCIe is nowhere near enough to saturate a 100 Gbps link, we will also have to see enhancements in the area of system interconnects before we will be able to deploy the latter technology, but there shouldn’t be any doubt that that will happen, as well.