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From the Mercury News: On Sept. 13, 1956, an IBM lab at 99 Notre Dame Road in San Jose began shipping a product that changed history. It is Silicon Valley’s unsung hero, though it taught us bits and the mega, giga, tera, peta and exa bytes. Dubbed RAMAC, or Random Access Method of Accounting and …
From InfoWorld: Dell and Sony knew about and discussed manufacturing problems with Sony-made Lithium-Ion batteries as long as ten months ago, but held off on issuing a recall until those flaws were clearly linked to catastrophic failures causing those batteries to catch fire, a Sony Electronics spokesman said Friday. Spokesman Rick Clancy said the companies …
From TechRepublic: If there’s a storage fanatic in your family, a perfect gift could be coming for her or him toward the end of the year: 1-terabyte hard drives. Desktop hard drives holding 1 terabyte, or 1,000 gigabytes, of storage will likely debut in 2006, according to Bill Healy, senior vice president of product strategy …
From the New York Times: Privacy advocates and search industry watchers have long warned that the vast and valuable stores of data collected by search engine companies could be vulnerable to thieves, rogue employees, mishaps or even government subpoenas. Four major search companies were served with government subpoenas for their search data last year, and …
From ComputerWeekly.com: Research by BT, the University of Glamorgan in Wales and Edith Cowan University in Australia, has found that while 41% of the disks were unreadable, 20% contained sufficient information to identify individuals. The research, based on the acquisition of 300 PCs from auctions, computer fairs and on-line purchases, also found that 5% of …
From MSNBC: It looks like a taping of “ER.” A surgeon stands over a patient, scalpel in hand, ready to perform a high-tech spinal operation. He has a team of professionals supporting him—two anesthesiologists, four nurses and an X-ray technician. Meanwhile, three men with broadcast video cameras dot the room, listening through earpieces as a …
From the Globe and Mail: Simon Pulsifer has never really blended in with the crowd. In kindergarten, he began building elaborate, fantastical buildings out of Lego, already bored by the construction plans on the back of the box. In Grade 8, he, attired as Stalin, and other friends re-enacted the Yalta conference on the balcony …
From BBC News: About one-third of digital camera users in the UK are not backing up their photographs, reveals research. But at the same time, the survey of 2,227 consumers revealed 89% of those quizzed now own a digital camera or camera-phone. And just under half are taking more than 10 snaps each month.
From the Globe and Mail: Some computers with wireless Internet capabilities are vulnerable to attacks that could expose passwords, bank account details and other sensitive information, even if the machines aren’t actually on-line, researchers said. The researchers demonstrated the vulnerability at a computer-security conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, showing how to take complete control …
From the New York Times: Like many amateur photographers, Joe Dejesus posts his photos online and compares them to the work of others on the photo-sharing site Flickr. At some point last year, a number of landscape photos caught his eye with their vibrant tones and colors. Their secret was a software technology known as …