Industry News
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The proper care and feeding of SSD storage |
| Your solid-state drive sits there in
silence. It’s sleek. Elegant. More than a little mysterious. The
hard drive it replaced was easy to understand: A soft hum
assured you that its platters were spinning. A quiet mechanical
click informed you of its read/write operations. You’d groom it
with the occasional defrag. Times were good. |
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Microsoft discontinues Office 2010 sales, some retailers jack up
prices |
Some sellers have raised the price of
Office 2010's lowest-cost multi-license package after Microsoft
discontinued retail sales of the suite.
Giant online retailer Amazon.com, for example, now lists what
Microsoft called the "Full Packaged Product" (FFP) of Office
Home & Student 2010 at $170, $20 higher than the former list
price, representing a 13% surcharge. |
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FCC cracks down on campaign robocalls to cell phones |
| Two companies face fines of nearly $5
million for allegedly making millions of artificial voice
messages without consumers' prior consent. |
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American retailer Genesco sues Visa, demands $13m in PCI-DSS
data breach fines paid back |
| In what seems to be a legal first, the
company is taking Visa to court to try to recover penalties it
claims it oughtn't to have had to pay at all. |
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Google Removing Ad-Blocking Apps From Play Android Market |
| Google, which has been a favorite
target of privacy advocates for the last few years, has taken
another step that's unlikely to endear the company to that crowd
or Android users. The company has begun removing ad-blocking
apps from the Google Play Android app market. |
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Seagate launches new hybrid hard drive that closes the SSD gap,
drops Momentus XT brand |
| For the last few years, Seagate has
pursued a different SSD strategy from other hard drive
manufacturers. Instead of releasing standalone SSDs, the company
has focused on building a line of hybrid hard drives (HHDs) that
incorporate a significant amount of flash memory, but retain a
hard drive’s larger capacity. Samsung and Hitachi have also
dabbled in this market, but it’s been Seagate that pushed its
Momentus XT product line forward with multiple iterations. |
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PC laptops and accidental damage: Best and worst warranties |
| Basic PC warranties are just that:
Basic. They cover faults in the electronics, typically over a
one-year period. Anything outside the realm of a malfunction can
be deemed as "accidental damage", which gives the OEM an escape
route to charge you a lot of money on a repair. |
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'Six Strikes' System Flags P2P Piracy and Throttles Broadband
Connections |
| The entertainment industry is teaming
with five major Internet service providers to this week launch a
new Copyright Alert System that will first warn online pirates
and then start to strangle bandwidth of repeat offenders. |
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100,000+ Americans demand legal right to unlock phones be legal |
| On Saturday January 26, US citizens
lost the right to unlock our mobile phones. On Thursday February
21, two days before the deadline to get enough petition signers
to trigger the administration into re-examining an issue,
100,000 annoyed people demanded that that right be given back. |
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Unauthorized unlocking of smartphones becomes illegal January
26th |
| Starting Saturday, January 26th, it
becomes illegal in this great land to unlock a new smartphone
without the permission of the carrier that locked it in the
first place. |
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| The Secret World of Embedded Computers |
You may have heard it before: computers
are everywhere. It's been a mantra of our computer-controlled
world since the 1970s—just as the microprocessor began to find
its way into common household appliances, cash registers, cars,
and heating/cooling systems.
What launched that invasion, in large part, was the 1974
invention of the microcontroller, a computer-on-a-chip that
integrated common computer components like CPU, RAM, and program
storage onto a single piece of low-cost silicon.
Read more >> |
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| Toshiba Satellite Laptops Recalled for
Burn Hazard |
The U.S. and Canadian governments this
week said that Toshiba is voluntarily recalling some Satellite
laptops for posing a burn hazard to customers.
The burn hazard results from a faulty component. Laptops being
voluntarily recalled include the Satellite T135, Satellite T135D
and Satellite Pro T130 models. The model and part numbers are
located on the bottom of the laptops, and begin with PST3AU,
PST3BU, or PST3LU.
Toshiba laptop recall >> |
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| Important notification for Sony VAIO
laptop F11 and CW2 series owners |
| In rare instances, these notebook
computers may overheat due to a potential malfunction of the
internal temperature management system, resulting in deformation
of the product's keyboard or external casing, and a potential
burn hazard to consumers.
Sony laptop recall >> |
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| Snow Leopard Bug Deletes All User Data |
| By Gregg Keizer |
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| Snow Leopard users have reported that
they've lost all their personal data when they've logged into a
"Guest" account after upgrading from Leopard according to messages
on Apple's support forum.
Read More >> |
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| How powerful was the Apollo 11
computer? |
| By Grant Robertson |
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With all the buzz about the 40th
anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing I got to thinking, how
powerful were the computers that "took us to the Moon?"
It turns out, they were nothing short of amazing.
Read More >> |
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