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2TB USB Thumb Drive On The Horizon?
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According to a video posting on YouTube of memory card maker Transcend and Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) have joined forces to produce a USB 3.0 flash drive with up to 2TB of capacity.
The drive, described as measuring as long as a human thumb and slightly thicker than a penny, was video taped at the Display Taiwan 2011 technology show. The model on display had only 16GB, but the display states that it’s capable of scaling to 2TB.
RIM Heads To The Cloud
August 31, 2011 by admin
Filed under Smartphones
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Canada’s Research In Motion (RIM) will take the wraps off of a new cloud-based social music sharing service called BBM Music, as companies begin to bet on entertainment delivered over the Internet that incorporates social networking features.
Research in Motion, the maker of BlackBerry phones, said select music from Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music and EMI would be available for the users.
A closed beta trial of the BBM Music service is starting on today in Canada, the United States and the UK, the company stated.
The music service is expected to be commercially available to customers later this year for a monthly subscription of $4.99 in a number of countries, it said.
The First PC Had a Birthday
The year was 1981 and IBM introduced its IBM PC model 5150 on August 12th, 30 years ago today.
The first IBM PC wasn’t much by today’s standards. It had an Intel 8088 processor that ran at the blazing speed of 4.77MHz. The base memory configuration was all of 16kB expandable all the way up to 256kB, and it had two 5-1/4in, 160kB capacity floppy disk drives but no hard drive.
A keyboard and 12in monochrome monitor were included, with a colour monitor optional. The 5150 ran IBM BASIC in ROM and came with a PC-DOS boot diskette put out by a previously unknown startup software company based out of Seattle named Microsoft.
IBM priced its initial IBM PC at a whopping $1,565, and that was a relatively steep price in those days, worth about $5,000 today, give or take a few hundred dollars. In the US in 1981 that was about the cost of a decent used car.
Because the IBM PC was meant to be sold to the general public but IBM didn’t have any retail stores, the company sold it through US catalogue retailer Sears & Roebuck stores.
Subsequently IBM released follow-on models through 1986 including the PC/XT, the first with an internal hard drive; the PC/AT with an 80286 chip running at 6MHz then 8MHz; the 6MHz XT/286 with zero wait-state memory that was actually faster than the 8MHz PC/AT and (not very) Portable and Convertible models; as well as the ill-fated XT/370, AT/370, 3270 PC and 3270/AT mainframe terminal emulators, plus the unsuccessful PC Jr.
Lightning Took Down Amazon, Microsoft Clouds
August 12, 2011 by admin
Filed under Network Services
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A lightning strike in Dublin on Sunday caused a power outage in data centers belonging to Amazon and Microsoft, causing the companies’ cloud services to go offline.
Lightning hit a transformer, sparking an explosion and fire which caused the power outage at 10:41 AM PDT, according to preliminary information, Amazon wrote on its Service Health Dashboard. Under normal circumstances, backup generators would seamlessly kick in, but the explosion also managed to disable some of those generators.
By 1:56 PM PDT, power to the majority of network devices had been restored, allowing Amazon to focus on bringing EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instances and EBS (Elastic Block Storage) volumes back online. But progress was slower than expected, Amazon said a couple of hours later.
“We know many of you are anxiously waiting for your instances and volumes to become available, and we want to give you more detail on why the recovery of the remaining instances and volumes is taking so long,” the company wrote at 11:04 PM PDT. “Due to the scale of the power disruption, a large number of EBS servers lost power and require manual operations before volumes can be restored … While many volumes will be restored over the next several hours, we anticipate that it will take 24-48 hours until the process is completed.”
EMC’s Data Breach Cost $66 Million
Between April and June 2011, EMC spent $66 million handling the fallout from a March cyber attack against its systems, which resulted in the compromise of information relating to the SecurID two-factor authentication sold by EMC’s security division, RSA.
That clean-up figure was disclosed last week during an EMC earnings call, by David Goulden, the company’s chief financial officer. It doesn’t include post-breach expenses from the first quarter, when EMC began investigating the attack, hardening its systems, and working with customers to prevent their being exploited as a result of the attacks.
In spite of the breach, EMC reported strong second-quarter financial results, earning consolidated revenue of $4.85 billion, which is an increase of 20% compared with the same period one year ago. Meanwhile, second-quarter GAAP net income increased by 28% from the same period last year, to reach $546 million. The company saw large growth in its information infrastructure and virtual infrastructure products and services, including quarterly revenue increases of 19% for its information storage group.
Those results led executives to increase their financial outlook for 2011 and predict consolidated revenue in excess of $19.8 billion, which would be a 16% increase from EMC’s 2010 revenues of $17 billion.
IBM Debuts Fast Storage System
IBM
With an eye toward helping tomorrow’s data intensive organizations, IBM researchers have developed a super-fast storage system capable of scanning in 10 billion files in 43 minutes.
This system easily bested their previous system, demonstrated at Supercomputing 2007, which scanned 1 billion files in three hours.
Key to the increased performance was the use of speedy flash memory to store the metadata that the storage system uses to locate requested information. Traditionally, metadata repositories reside on disk, access to which slows operations.
“If we have that data on very fast storage, then we can do those operations much more quickly,” said Bruce Hillsberg, director of storage systems at IBM Research Almaden, where the cluster was built. “Being able to use solid-state storage for metadata operations really allows us to do some of these management tasks more quickly than we could ever do if it was all on disk.”
IBM foresees that its customers will be grappling with a lot more information in the years to come.
“As customers have to store and process large amounts of data for large periods of time, they will need efficient ways of managing that data,” Hillsberg said.
For the new demonstration, IBM built a cluster of 10 eight-core servers equipped with a total of 6.8 terabytes of solid-state memory. IBM used four 3205 solid-state Storage Systems from Violin Memory. The resulting system was able to read files at a rate of almost 5 GB/s (gigabytes per second).
HP Announces TouchPad 4G Deal
Hewlett-Packard announced it would release a 4G TouchPad tablet with upgraded hardware that will be available on AT&T’s wireless network.
The tablet will have a 1.5GHz processor, which is a change from the dual-core 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor available with older Wi-Fi-only TouchPad models that went on sale just two weeks ago.
Last August Qualcomm said that by the start of this year it would ship the dual-core Snapdragon QSD8672 chip that could run at clock speeds of up to 1.5GHz.
The TouchPad will have 32GB of internal storage, GPS and built-in AT&T wireless mobile broadband capabilities, HP said in a statement. Specific pricing and availability will be announced at a later date.
Wireless connectivity will be available through AT&T’s DataConnect mobile data plans for tablets or Wi-Fi hotspots around the country, HP said.
TouchPad users have expressed concerns about the device’s performance, especially the long load times for some applications. HP attributes the performance issue to software problems and said it will deliver an over-the-air software update that should resolve some performance problems.
Some buyers also were concerned about the TouchPad’s weight of about 1.6 pounds (740 grams), which is heavier than Apple’s iPad at 1.32 pounds. The TouchPad includes a 9.7-inch screen and comes with WebOS 3.0, which is also used in smartphones.
New MacBook Includes Faster NAND Chip
The soon to be released new version of Apple’s MacBook Air, will feature NAND flash memory with up to 400Mbps performance, about one and a half times faster than its current technology, according to a recent report.
Unlike many notebooks, the MacBook Air has no hard drive or optical drive and instead uses a slim flash board for its internal mass storage device.
Citing an “Asian electronics component company person,” the blog site Macotakara stated that Apple will use flash memory chips that includes the new Double Data Rate (DDR) 2.0 interface. While the rumors could not be confirmed, the upgrade would come as no surprise, since Apple’s next MacBook Air, which originally used Toshiba’s Blade X-gale NAND flash board, has moved to using Samsung’s flash memory. The MacBook Air’s current Samsung flash sports read rates of 261Mbps and write rates of up to 209Mbps and is based on DDR 1.0 technology.
DDR 2.0 provides a tenfold increase over the 40Mbps Single Data Rate (SDR) NAND flash in widespread use today.
In May, Samsung announced that it was producing DDR 2.0 multilevel cell flash chips. Samsung’s flash chips are made using its smallest circuitry, only 20 nanometers wide. The chips boast a performance improvement of three times over its previous technology.
DDR NAND flash comes in two forms: Toggle Mode from Samsung and Toshiba; and ONFI NAND, from the Open NAND Flash Interface (ONFI) working group. The ONFI protocol is used by flash manufacturers, including Intel, Micron, SanDisk, Hynix and Spansion. In March, the ONFI working group announced its 3.0 specification for the DDR 2.0 interface, which also has up to 400Mbps throughput but with only half the number of pins, for a significant reduction in size.
Verizon Ending Unlimited Data Plan In July
June 26, 2011 by admin
Filed under Smartphones
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We are closer to reaching the end of Verizon Wireless’s limited-time offer of unlimited data, says the Wall Street Journal‘s AllThingsD. The website reports that the wireless carrier plans to introduce new tiered pricing plans next month for new smartphone customers — including those buying Apple’s iPhone 4.
If true, the report hardly comes as a surprise. Back in January, when Verizon became the second carrier in the U.S. to offer iPhone service, the company said it would offer subscribers a $30-a-month unlimited data plan for the iPhone’s launch, but highlighted the fact that the offer was for a limited time only.
More Citigroup Accounts Compromised Than Stated
June 21, 2011 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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Citigroup was apparently hit harder by a cyber-attack in May than what was originally reported; which is now 360,000 of its customers. Unfortunately, this number is double the number that Citigroup initially stated.
Citigroup is one of the biggest banks in the US and ranks number 3 overall. The breach occurred on May 10th and was confirmed by Citigroup on June 8thth. That said, around 360,080 North American Citigroup credit card accounts were impacted by the breach, Citigroup stated; which is around 1 per cent of their North American card customer’s base.