octane

New year, new resolutions.

If one of your resolutions is to get a better computer so you can be happier with your life, I'd suggest you double down on exercising, or better yet add eating healthy to the list, because chances are your computer is working just fine.

What you need might just be a new internal storage device and your computer will be as good as new, or maybe even better. This is especially true if you have a system (be it a laptop or desktop, running Macs or Windows) that's 3 or 4 years old and uses an SATA hard drive as its main internal storage device. Most existing computers fit this category, by the way.… Read more

OCZ's latest solid-state drive, the Octane, is a new breed among its peers.

The drive is the first to be powered by OCZ's new Indilinx Everest controller, designed to optimize boot time and application performance. And the Octane offered just that in my testing, helping the test machine take just 12 seconds to boot up.… Read more

OCZ yesterday announced a new lineup of solid-state drives called Octane that offer up to 1TB of storage space. The company says the top-capacity Octane model will cost just around $1,300, which is much cheaper than some 512GB SSDs on the market. Other Octane capacities, including 512GB, 256GB, and 128GB, are priced lower accordingly.

According to OCZ, the new SSDs are based on a next-generation controller called Indilinx Everest that offers better balance between capacity, physical size, and performance compared with previous controllers. The 2.5-inch-design SSDs support both SATA 3.0 (6Gbps) and SATA 2.0 (3Gbps) standards. … Read more

Verizon announced a new LG messaging phone today, dubbed the LG Octane. It has a full four-row QWERTY keyboard housed in a flip form factor similar to that of the LG EnV 3. The Octane comes equipped with a variety of social-networking apps like Verizon's Social Beat that acts as a hub for Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter.

Other features include a microSD slot for up to 16GB of additional memory, Bluetooth 2.1 capabilities, visual voice mail, a HTML Web browser, a 3.2-megapixel autofocus camera, access to V Cast Music with Rhapsody, and it's also Skype mobile … Read more

I miss the old SGI. Silicon Graphics was widely regarded as the greatest computer company in Silicon Valley back in the 1990s. Sometimes forgotten--but not gone--SGI was one of our greatest success stories and one of our greatest tragedies.

Apple may have had more revenue by virtue of shipping millions of small systems, but SGI's hardware spanned the range from video-game consoles (the Nintendo 64) to workstations to supercomputers. SGI's Unix-based operating system, IRIX, was one of the most sophisticated in the industry.

I used to lust over SGI machines. I'd obsess over lists of used SGI gear, looking for a great deal that would let me have my own IRIX box at home. In 2004, I finally bought an Octane with MXI graphics... but that was years after these machines were effectively obsolete, and I paid less than 0.5% (1/200th!) of the original retail price of the machine.

In the mid-to-late 1990s, SGI was not well managed, losing huge amounts of money because its leaders would not… Read more

One hundred fifteen million dollars.

That was how much revenue Activision's Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock brought in in its first week on the market recently.

But the Guitar Hero franchise, which Activision bought in 2006, has lost its monopoly as the only major video game giving users the fantasy that they can join Steven Tyler or Bono onstage.

That's because Harmonix, the studio that developed the original Guitar Hero, has finally launched Rock Band, its own version of the rock star genre game, and the market is likely to heat up pretty quickly.

Many Guitar Hero … Read more

Even as Activision and its RedOctane publishing arm have had a great couple of weeks of sales of their recently released hit, Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, some fans of the game have been complaining about its quality control problems.

On forums and on game blogs, some users are reporting that wireless versions of the game's guitar aren't working properly.

"I was having some real problems once I hit tiers 4 and 5 on medium," wrote Mark Methenitis on his blog, Law of the Game. "I found that the red and yellow buttons were … Read more