state

Flash drives: faster, tougher but still in pursuit

The hard drive will not die. Let's get this on the record now, at the beginning of 2008, because readers may see a fair number of stories proclaiming its demise. Though Friday's Intel-Micron high-speed flash memory announcement points to increasing use of solid state drives (SSDs) in digital products, flash is chasing prey that has eluded imminent death for years. SSDs are gaining acceptance selectively not broadly. SSDs in standard notebooks? No. And even if you're, for instance, a PC vendor trying to compete in the ultra-thin notebook market, chances are you will still opt in most … Read more

Student newspaper considers corporate partner

While some may contend that the primary role of college newspapers is to prepare students for work in the establishment press, school newspapers also serve a vital role in keeping the community informed. In fact, college newspapers have broken stories on many occasions that resonated in the mainstream press. Some of these stories may have never seen the light of day if it weren't for the bold actions of determined college students and the newspapers these students control.

For students at Colorado State University, it appears the keys to their student-run paper, The Rocky Mountain Collegian, may soon be wrestled away and handed over to newspaper giant Gannett. According to a recent AP story, "Officials with The Coloradoan in Fort Collins met Tuesday with Colorado State University leaders to discuss a 'strategic partnership' to run the campus paper."

While it's unclear at this time what a strategic partnership would look like, this isn't the first time that Gannett has involved itself with a student newspaper. In August of 2006, a Gannett newspaper purchased FSView & Florida Flambeau, an independent publication that serves the student body at Florida State University. A year later, the University of Central Florida's newspaper was also sold to a Gannett publication. Unlike those instances, the Collegian is run by the university and, as The Student Newspaper Survival Blog points out, "if a deal goes through with Colorado State University, it would be the first time Gannett gets involved in a student paper that had been run by a public university."

… Read more

Unmanned aerial vehicles the size of a cigarette

Researchers at Oklahoma State University are working with DARPA to deliver a sophisticated, unmanned aircraft small enough to fit into a soldier's pocket, reports the Daily O'Collegian.

A state-of-the-art propulsion system, one that uses plasma thrusters with no moving parts, could provide power for micro and nano unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV.)This class of airplane can measure anywhere from a foot to less than 6 inches long.

"What we want the infantrymen to be able to do is pull a pack of six or so out of their pocket and have them ready for use," Jamey Jacob, … Read more

State Department to ease access to passport data

According to a release on Wednesday from the State Department, law enforcement officials and private parties may soon be able to request personal passport details. Currently, only State Department staffers who have undergone "background security investigation" handle such requests. The change to the State Department's system of records notice, or SORN, affects records dating as far back to 1925 and addresses amendments introduced in 2007 to the Privacy and Security Act of 1974.

The State Department release, available in full via Cryptome.org, states that personal passport information (including birth certificates and any other documents used to … Read more

The Gizmo Report: the SPOT Satellite Messenger

I've written here before about emergency locators, those gizmos that can help rescuers find you if you become lost in the wilderness.

The tragic death of CNET's own James Kim and the disappearances of Microsoft's Jim Gray and famed adventurer Steve Fossett have convinced me that anyone who travels outside populated areas ought to carry one of these devices.

Following that earlier post, I was contacted by SPOT Inc., makers of the SPOT Satellite Messenger, which began shipping through major outdoor retailers this fall. They offered me a SPOT messenger for review, and I happily accepted. It … Read more

Intel to squeeze tiny solid-state drives into gadgets

Intel is making a "small" change to its lineup of solid-state drives.

The chipmaker announced late Friday that it is making a solid-state drive for handheld devices that is smaller than a penny and weighs less than a drop of water. The Z-P140 drives will be available in 2GB and 4GB sizes, and are intended for low-power, rugged devices, presumably gadgets like Internet tablets, smartphones, portable video players, and handheld computers. Intel says it is 400 times smaller than a 1.8-inch hard drive.

The drives use flash memory to store data, and have a PATA (parallel ATA) … Read more

Price drops ahead for solid-state drives

Solid-state drives are still going to be somewhat hard to find and expensive in 2008, but mass production, cheaper flash, and tech advances will start to change that in 2009 and 2010.

Micron Technology, the Boise, Idaho-based maker of DRAM and flash memory, this week unveiled plans to come out with solid-state drives. The drives function like regular hard drives. But instead of storing data on spinning disks, solid-state drives store it on NAND memory chips--the kind found in cameras and MP3 players.

Micron will start mass-producing solid-state drives in the first quarter of 2008. The first drives will hold … Read more

Who is the world's biggest patent troll?

In two consecutive days, The Wall Street Journal presented two different answers. The first is not surprising: Intellectual Ventures, the brainchild of ex-Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold. It's now out "to raise as much as $1 billion to help develop and patent inventions, many of them from universities in Asia." I know I will sleep so much more comfortably knowing that IVL will be out plundering Asia so that it can turn around and plunder the rest of the planet.

The second might surprise you: the University of California. The University of California may be especially pernicious because it can sue for patent infringement but has sovereign immunity:… Read more

New meets old: CompactFlash RAID card

In the old days, you'd buy a RAID adapter card to let your computer attach to multiple hard drives that provided data capacity and protection. Nowadays, with flash memory, the storage fits right on the card.

Addonics Technologies announced a $50 PCI card Tuesday that's got four CompactFlash card slots. The cards can be configured as four individual drives, a single large volume, or set up with RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks) 0, 1 or 10 to stripe data across multiple cards or mirror data from one onto another.

Note that there's no support for RAID … Read more