Now contain yourself! News that Intel has released the final draft specification for USB 3.0 has been sending ripples of excitement throughout the PC industry. You too will have to come to terms with a whole load of new jargon if you want to stay ahead of the game. Provisionally dubbed ‘SuperSpeed USB’ the big selling point is that data transfer speeds are up to 10 times faster than USB 2.0, which means a whopping 5 Gigabits per second. That’s really fast, quick enough to whizz a DVD from one place to another in just a few seconds and it’s going to make things like data transfer from things like MP3 players, cameras and storage devices virtually instantaneous. Plugs and sockets look superficially similar, and it should be backwards compatible but USB 3.0 sockets have an extra 5 contacts, set behind the front five contacts and these are the ones that carry the SuperSpeed data. Read the rest of this entry »
Hard on the heels of Hitachi’s 5 terabyte hard drive (see below) comes more data storage news, this time the promise of cheaper and more reliable and longer lasting solid state drives (SSDs). Later this year Samsung are about to start production on 64 and 128Gb SSDs, with 256Gb drives in the pipeline later in the year. The Flash memory modules are mounted inside a metal case that’s the same size and can directly replace standard SATA II type hard drives in laptops, and since there are no moving parts they are not only faster than HDDS but they also out-perform and consume less power than rival first generation SSDs.
A growing number of people, concerned about personal privacy and security are opting to get off the grid but that’s always been a bit difficult with the Internet. It knows where you are, and what you are doing, but there are ways to become totally anonymous.
One way is to use TOR, or The Onion Router. It’s a network of virtual connections or relays, dotted around the world, operating in complex ‘layers’ (that’s where the Onion bit comes in) that stops you from being identified or tracked when you are online. Ironically much of the development work for TOR was sponsored by the US Naval Research Laboratory but now it’s gone independent, and it is free to use. Read the rest of this entry »
Now contain yourself! News that Intel has released the final draft specification for USB 3.0 has been sending ripples of excitement throughout the PC industry. You too will have to come to terms with a whole load of new jargon if you want to stay ahead of the game. Provisionally dubbed ‘SuperSpeed USB’ the big selling point is that data transfer speeds are up to 10 times faster than USB 2.0, which means a whopping 5 Gigabits per second. That’s really fast, quick enough to whizz a DVD from one place to another in just a few seconds and it’s going to make things like data transfer from things like MP3 players, cameras and storage devices virtually instantaneous. Plugs and sockets look superficially similar, and it should be backwards compatible but USB 3.0 sockets have an extra 5 contacts, set behind the front five contacts and these are the ones that carry the SuperSpeed data. Read the rest of this entry »
