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Bush talks with international bloggers

The president-elect has been showing off his Web savvy on Change.gov, but George Bush demonstrated Wednesday he also advocates using the Internet to facilitate democracy.

President Bush, in recognition of Human Rights Day, met with bloggers from Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, and Venezuela at the White House and via video teleconference to discuss blogging in favor of democratic change.

The administration has supported pro-democracy new media efforts through programs like the Broadcasting Board of Governors, an independent group responsible for all U.S. government and government-sponsored, non-military, international broadcasting. The BBG collects reports from citizen journalists with … Read more

SanDisk eyes year-end production halt

SanDisk is evaluating a production halt over the holidays at its manufacturing facilities in Japan, reflecting an overall slowdown in the flash memory chip industry.

"The joint venture is evaluating plans for operations over the holiday season, including a possible stoppage of some production lines," a SanDisk spokesman said Friday. "We constantly consider manufacturing schedules in light of market requirements and this is particularly true during the holiday season," he added.

Milpitas, Calif.-based SanDisk and Toshiba have joint production lines for NAND flash chip manufacturing in Japan.

This follows a Bloomberg report that said Toshiba … Read more

Homeland Security: The reality show

Queue the music: the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is about to get its own reality show.

On Thursday, ABC announced a mid-season replacement show called "Homeland Security USA." From Arnold Shapiro, the Emmy-winning producer of such documentaries as Scared Straight," the network said the series will give viewers an unprecedented look at the work of the men and women at the DHS "while they use the newest technology to safeguard our country and enforce our law."

The 13 hour-long episodes were shot entirely on location throughout the United States.

ABC says the producers … Read more

The 404 239: Where we stop eating sesame cake

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, stealing the Empire State Building, and pirates make their appearance. As usual, it's a weird show today. We discover the classic line from the movie Congo from 1995, starring Tim Curry. Let's just say "Stop eating sesame cake" has become a new catchphrase for The 404. Yes, we're alienating more and more new listeners. Please, for the love of God, tell your friends about this show!

Jeff hates on the possibility that there will be a new Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie. It looks like Joss Whedon is attached to the flick, but sadly no Sarah Michelle Gellar. Also, we discover new and easy ways to pirate content off of Amazon.com...not that we ever would. We don't even know what pirating is. Honest to God. Speaking of stealing stuff, the New York Daily News manages to steal the Empire State Building. Makes us feel really safe here in New York City. We talk about the life lessons that Trey Parker and Matt Stone have taught us through South Park. An idiot guy gets his cell phone stolen at a McDonald's with nude pictures of his wife. Rather than suing McDonald's for $3 million, we think his wife should sue him for divorce. And for the love of all things that are holy, please STOP making those Scary Movie or Saw flicks!

Episode 239 Download today's podcast … Read more

Intel, Hitachi to develop solid-state drives

Intel will target solid-state drives for server computers in a tie up with Hitachi that was announced Monday night.

Intel and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) said they will "jointly develop and deliver" Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Fibre Channel (FC) solid-state drives (SSDs) for servers, workstations, and storage systems.

While Hitachi is a large supplier of hard disk drives, Intel manufactures and sells consumer and enterprise-class solid-state drives (and the flash memory chips inside the drives). The enterprise-class X25-E Extreme SSDs that Intel offers now are based on Serial ATA (SATA) technology. As are its consumer-class … Read more

Micron readies 256GB solid-state drive

Micron Technology will bring out a 256GB solid-state drive early next year while it moves, along with Intel, to a new manufacturing process.

A Micron representative said Monday that the company will start volume production of a 256GB solid-state drive for consumer use in March 2009.

This follows Samsung's announcement last week that it had begun mass-producing 256GB solid-state drives.

The Micron RealSSD C200 will read data at 250MBps (megabytes per second) and write at 100MBps. It is sampling to customers now. Samsung, by comparison, is claiming sequential read rates of 220MBps, with sequential write rates of 200MBps.

The … Read more

Samsung launches 256GB solid-state drive

Samsung on Wednesday night said it has begun mass-producing 256GB solid-state drives. This size tops the largest-capacity SSDs found in laptops today.

Samsung currently offers 64GB and 128GB SSDs for laptops.

The new 256GB drives are faster too, the company claims, more than doubling the performance rate of Samsung 64GB and 128GB SSDs.

The drives combine sequential read rates of 220 megabytes per second, with sequential write rates of 200MBps. "This sharply narrows the performance gap between read and write operations to only 10 percent, compared to a read-write speed difference of between 20 (percent) and 70 percent for … Read more

Intel officially launches Core i7, pricing

Intel's next-generation microarchitecture has arrived. Officially.

Intel made the debut of the Core i7 processor official on Monday afternoon, launching the processor at an event in San Francisco. PC makers, including Dell and Gateway, quickly followed suit with announcements.

"The Core i7 processor speeds video editing (and) immersive games...by up to 40 percent without increasing power consumption," the Intel said in a statement.

Combining the i7 with super-fast solid state drives will lead to significant jumps in performance, according to Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group. "When … Read more

"Smart" wastewater bio-treatment takes over where porta-potty leaves off

In wars of yore, the slit-trench was state-of-the art field sanitation, filled to the brim and then maybe backfilled; but today, when even losers are litigious, it's not a good idea to leave that kind of mess.

Now, the Texas Research Institute for Environmental Studies (TRIES) at Sam Houston State University and PCDworks, a technology innovation firm, have developed a self-sustaining, portable and "smart" wastewater treatment system that promises to take over where the porta-potty leaves off. (PDF)

Housed in the ubiquitous 40-foot shipping container, the Deployable Aqueous Aerobic Bioreactor (DAAB,) can convert a battalion's worth … Read more

SanDisk cranks up solid-state drive speed

LOS ANGELES--Technology introduced at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference by SanDisk could boost solid-state drive performance in Windows Vista by 100 times.

The largest supplier of flash memory cards unveiled an advanced flash file system for solid-state drives that "has the potential" to accelerate random write speeds by up to 100 times over existing systems.

Despite being generally faster than hard-disk drives (particularly at reading data), solid-state drives fall short of hard disks when they randomly write data. Random writes are generally considered to be the Achilles heel of solid-state drives.

To maximize random write performance, SanDisk developed … Read more