Compact Flash 5.0 Promises Petabytes

That’s 144 Petabytes to be precise, and if you want that in good old Gigabytes, that’s around 150994944 of them. Data transfer speeds are said to be in the order of 32Mb per second, but before you get too excited, no such card or storage chip exists, yet… The newly announced spec from the Compact Flash Association is basically a re-vamp of the way data on a memory card can be accessed, using a faster and more efficient 48-bit address, which opens the way for the theoretical 144Pb storage capacity. It’s sounds impressive but it’s worth remembering that 64-bit systems can theoretically address up to 16-Exabytes of data, which is 16384 petabytes, or 16777216 terabytes in old money. It sounds terrifying, but I only have to think back to the late 1970s and my first home-built computer, which had an impressive1 kilobyte of memory A few years later and my first hard disc drive had a massive 10 megabytes of capacity; I remember thinking at the time that it would take years to fill it up…

Apple Keyboard Hack Proved Possible

Slashdot reports that Apple keyboards are vulnerable to hackers’ attacks due to the complexity of their inner workings, which include RAM and flash memory. According to the report, the hack can potentially place keyloggers and malware directly into the device’s firmware.

To make matters even worse, the author of this “proof of concept” has also published the presentation and code in a PDF that’s free to download for anyone on the planet. The vuln is undoubtedly enticing to hackers, some of which are likely to create one or more exploits for the flaw in question. To better understand how this discovery has turned into a potential security issue, we offer you a few excerpts from the published document.

For ethical reasons, the firmware modification we describe is benign. The firmware is modified so that the LED under the CAP S LOC K key of the keyboard will flash momentarily when the keyboard is first plugged into a system. However, malicious payloads can be developed by individuals with mal-intent. Read more

China Blue takes on Blu-ray

Just when you thought the format wars were over and it was safe to buy a Blu-ray player it looks like the losing HD-DVD format may be staging a stealthy comeback Although Blu-ray won the battle in Europe, the US and Japan, on the other side of the World, in China, it is trailing behind the recently launched China Blue HD (CBHD) format. CBHD is very closely related to HD-DVD thanks to some clever licensing agreements between the DVD Forum and China’s Optical Memory National Engineering Research Centre (OMNERC) based in Tsinghua University. The principle differences concern compression and CBHS has more powerful copy protection, as piracy is a big concern in China. Already Warner Home Entertainment has announced support for the format in China with titles such as the Harry Potter Series, The Golden Compass and Blood Diamond likely to be the first into the shops. There’s speculation other major studios could follow suit

Nokia E71 smartphone review

Nokia’s E-range is aimed firmly at corporate users, with the E71 offering a full QWERTY keypad to make emailing easier, and loads of features that help to make it a great out of office tool.

Build quality is among the best that we’ve seen to date on a smartphone, with aluminium used on the front and rear to create an incredibly stylish yet robust finish. The most surprising aspect of this handset is just how thin it is, however, making it appear a lot smaller than it actually is.

It’s also narrower than rivals such as RIM’s Blackberry Bold, leading to a keyboard that may be too cramped for some users. Raised centres to the keys make it easy to get up a good typing rhythm, however, striking a good compromise between portability and usability. Read more

Italian job Macbook Air

Italian computer manufacturer, 13.3-inch ultra-thin notebook Olidata introduced. “Conte ultraportable” The device name appears in two different versions: The first version of 16:10 in the form of a screen with 1280 x 800 pixel resolution offers support. The other is the screen in 16:9 format and 1366 x 768 pixel resolution offers. Core 2 Duo processors will be equipped with two model.

Optional integrated UMTS or WiMAX as provided. 16:10 ‘hood models other than their Intel Turbo Memory, fingerprint reader, illuminated from behind the keyboard and offers 3 GB of RAM. Read more

Unforgettable USB Drive

If the media is to be believed Government employees are a forgetful lot, losing laptops and leaving CDs and USB drives containing sensitive data all over the place. It’s easily done; though and short of chaining a USB drive to your wrist sooner or later you are going to inadvertently leave one plugged into a PC. Here’s a simple little freeware program that might help jog your memory. It’s called Flash Drive Reminder and all you have to do is download the zip, extract it and copy a couple of small files to your drive. In fact there are two versions, Standard displays a reminder message when you plug the drive into a PC, and another when you log off or shut down the PC; the Quiet version just displays the logoff and shutdown messages.

Superior Memory Usage and Graphics Performance for Windows 7

Microsoft already proved that on the same system configuration Windows 7 would boot a few seconds faster than Windows Vista. But fact is that the evolution from Vista to Windows 7 is not limited to the boosted startup times. In this context, at the Windows hardware Engineering Conference in Los Angeles, Mike Angiulo, General Manager, Windows Planning and PC Ecosystem Team for Microsoft, and Jon DeVaan, Senior Vice President of the Core Operating System Division, revealed Windows 7’s superiority compared to Vista also in terms of memory usage and graphics performance.

“Once we’re even booted we’ve done a lot to improve the memory usage, and the graphics performance. This graph that you see on the screen here shows how in Vista we scale linearly with the number of open windows, so that’s the amount of memory that’s consumed by the system as you open more Windows. Read more

NVIDIA GPUs in Toshiba Laptop

Now, wait a minute, and say that again, please. Could it be that three NVIDIA graphics processors are powering one of Toshiba’s portable computer systems? If so, this is happening at a time when most desktop computer systems are basically powered by a single graphics processor, while the majority of portable PCs are featured with integrated graphics. This should be interesting, at least if you are one of those late-night LAN party gamers looking for the very best in terms of computing experience.

Toshiba is known for offering some of the most interesting portable computer systems on the market but, this time, the company appears to have really outdone itself, with a bit of help from the Santa Clara, California-based green team. Read more

Google Enters The Browser Business

Just a couple days ago Google released its own version of a web browser, dubbed Google Chrome. This is exciting news, because it now increases the pressure on Firefox and Internet Explorer to be all that they can be. It’s even surprising, considering that Google and Firefox were business partners in advertising. Just a while ago Google Adsense was paying people for referring people to Firefox.

Google Chrome has a unique minimalist look that easily separates itself from other browsers. The browser bars are not cluttered full of different options, menus and toolbars, instead it only features your most used browser features, like the back and forward arrows, bookmark button, bookmark toolbar address bar, go button, and two pull down icons for page settings and internet options. Read more

Clever Camera Card

Ho-hum, another 2Gb SD card, but hang on a minute, this one is different. The Eye-Fi Explore is a Wi-FI memory card. So what, you might be asking, SD Wi-Fi cards are nothing new, the one in my PDA must be at least 3 years old, but there is more. This is a fully self-contained wireless device, so it can be used in any SD compatible camera, and used to beam images across a network to a PC, printer or uploaded to the Internet. In other words the camera doesn’t need to be a special wireless-capable model. All you have to do is pop the card into your PC to activate and configure it then put it into the camera and while it is on it automatically sends image to any wi-fi device in range (around 3 – 5 metres). There’s an added bonus, it uses a system called Geotagging to label or identify where the picture was taken. Read more

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