Patriot’s Torqx SSDs Challenge OCZ’s Vertex, Available for Sale Next Week

Patriot Memory is a company best known for its DRAM modules, but as with a lot of their competitors, they’ve been trying to expand into the rapidly growing Solid State Drive (SSD) market.

The big fish in the enthusiast SSD market right now is OCZ Technology’s Vertex series. Using a NAND flash controller from Indilinx, it offers superior random read and write capabilities, being surpassed only by Intel’s more expensive offerings. They recently launched the Vertex EX series, a SLC flash version targeting the enterprise market.

However, having a premium product has led to high demand, resulting in a premium price. Other competitors have started launching SSDs using Indilinx controllers as well. Super Talent has the UltraDrive LE using SLC flash, and the UltraDrive ME using conventional MLC flash. G.Skill’s Falcon series and Solidata’s K5 and K6 series also use the coveted controller.

Patriot had originally announced its latest SSD on April 30 as the Fusion SSD series.  However, no drives were actually made available for sale. The company then renamed them as the Torqx SSD series, but as of publication none are currently available for purchase. Patriot assures us that the drives are now in mass production, and will be shipping out to distributors next week.

 

The Torqx series uses Indilinx’s controller and comes with 64MB of onboard cache. Patriot is promising maximum sequential read speeds of up to 260MB/s and maximum sequential write speeds of up to 180MB/s for 256GB and 128GB models. The 64GB model is much slower, at 220MB/s max read and 135MB/s max write. Random read and write speeds were not available.

In order to win customers and gain market share, Patriot will ship free 3.5" brackets with all of their SSDs so customers can use their SSDs in desktops. Most SSDs come in the 2.5" format designed for laptops. This might be a good deal for consumers, but we will have to wait until the street prices of the Torqx series become available to be sure.

This post has been written by Jansen Ng on May 20, 2009 3:30 PM couresy of dailytech.com.

Earthrise interview explains Masthead Studios approach to sandbox design

Bulgarian game developer Masthead Studios has been putting a lot of effort into spreading the word about their upcoming post-apocalytic MMO Earthrise. Massively had a chance to sit down with Masthead Studios CEO Atanas Atanasov at GDC 2009 for a preview of Earthrise which gave us a taste of what to expect from the title, but we’re always on the lookout for more info about the game.

We’ve come across a short interview at QJ.NET with Atanasov that might be worth a read if you’re excited about the dystopian MMO. He discusses some of the major game design decisions Masthead Studios made with Earthrise in respect to character progression (both online and offline) as well as departing from a few of the tried-and-true systems found in other MMOs on the market. Have a look at the Earthrise interview over at QJ.NET for more on the sandbox elements of this first release from Masthead Studios.

This post has been written by James Egan on May 19th 2009 at 8:00PM couresy of massively.com.

Video: Japanese astronaut surfs through space on ‘flying carpet’

The Japanese can turn pretty much anything into a variety show. So it’s no real surprise to hear that the Japanese public have issued a set of 16 zero-gravity challenges to be carried out by Jaxa astronaut, Koichi Wakata, during his time at the International Space Station. Tasks included folding laundry, applying eye-drops, and attempting to ride a "flying carpet;" the latter accomplished with some adhesive tape and a full-size bathroom mat. Seriously, shaka brah. Check the surf and full length videos after the break.

This post has been written by Thomas Ricker on May 20th 2009 at 5:20AM couresy of engadget.com.

Darth-in-a-bot to pop up at Maker Faire

Bre writes:

We got ABS into the MakerBot store (store.makerbot.com) and Marius and Philip of the Whatever Lab in Vienna were visiting and they set up the MakerBot named Martha Vader to sing the imperial march and make a Darth Vader Head. The force is strong with this one.

Bre will be at Maker Faire in San Mateo:

We’re going to be showing up at Maker Faire with 3 makerbots and our plan is to run them straight through the entire Faire cranking out 3D objects from Thingiverse and setting them free into the world.

We’re also going to be on a mission to make robot friends with all the other robots at the Faire!

There is really a huge amount of information on the MakerBot blog. Lots of How-Tos and good examples. Open source all the way, though we’re going to have to wait for that photographic evidence proving their ultimate open source cred. Maybe a long time…

This post has been written by Chris Connors on May 20, 2009 02:00 AM couresy of makezine.com.

Ubisoft aiming to become Hollywood special effects masters

For some time now, Ubisoft’s overall agenda has been gravitating towards the movie industry. And though it used to be all about the usual movie tie-ins or licensing agreements, Ubi’s CEO, Yves Guillemot, says the company is planning on taking up real estate in Hollywood’s special effects market. "We want to create the capacity to develop special effects for movies. Those worlds have to merge more and more," said Guillemot to the Financial Times. "We don’t want to make movies, but the expertise we have is key to creating special effects, graphics and animation."

Ubisoft is already on its way to achieving its goal, as the company is working closely with Twentieth Century Fox on James Cameron’s new flick, Avatar (not to be confused with the cartoon), sharing development on both the movie and game. Not to mention the fact Ubisoft did a pretty good job on Jake Gyllenhaal’s abs for the Prince of Persia movie.

[Via Edge-Online]

This post has been written by Majed Athab on May 20th 2009 at 5:00AM couresy of joystiq.com.

Microsoft, Linux Foundation Both Oppose Software Defect Warranties

It doesn’t happen often, but Microsoft and the Linux Foundation have issued a joint letter voicing their displeasure over the American Law Institute (ALI)’s latest effort to create an implied warranty stating that all shipped software have no material hidden defects.

The ALI is largely made up of judges and attorneys who are assigned the task of dealing with protocols related to software sales and warranties.  Due to serious flaws and other issues, more consumers are interested in having politicians and others deal with defective software, as it can be sometimes difficult to get the companies behind the software to take responsibility.

"Parties should be able to choose the rules that best suit their needs, as they have the most knowledge about their particular transaction," according to the joint letter.  "That is not to say that certain protections — for example, in the business-to-consumer context — are not warranted. But even in today’s common law approach to software contracts, there is no great failure in terms of substandard quality or unmet expectations that would justify imposition of new mandatory rules, particularly given existing remedies under misrepresentation and consumer protection law."

Both the Linux Foundation and Microsoft especially don’t like the following statement written into the ALI’s Principles of the Law of Software Contracts:  "A transferor that receives money or a right to payment of a monetary obligation in exchange for the software warrants to any party in the normal chain of distribution that the software contains no material hidden defects of which the transferor was aware at the time of the transfer.  This warranty may not be excluded."

Specifically, Microsoft and Linux Foundation officials want the ALI to clarify that statement, as they believe it’s a bit too vague, while also wanting their attorneys to read over the published principles.

The ALI is meeting this week, and a final vote by all participating members will take place on the proposed draft.  For clarification, the ALI is not a legislative body that can create laws, though the group’s writings are popular reference points for attorneys and judges.

The fallout is far from over, and it should be interesting to hear future statements regarding the implied warranty from both sides in the future.  For example, Microsoft and the Linux Foundation will likely square off with the European Union, as EU legislators recently created a proposal aimed at better protecting consumers.

Microsoft and the open source community have butted heads numerous times in the past, so the realization that there is an issue serious enough to have them combine forces is impressive, IT analysts said.  

"The mere fact that the Linux Foundation and Microsoft are joining forces may be viewed by some as remarkable," according to Microsoft general counsel Horacio Gutierrez.  "But there is a wide range of issues that affect all software developers alike."

This post has been written by Michael Barkoviak on May 19, 2009 3:02 PM couresy of dailytech.com.

Password reminders: hard to remember, but easy to hack

Forgetting which password you used for a rarely used shopping site can be a pain, one that’s often made worse by the fallback authentication method. If you’re like me, you’re often stumped by which of your past pets you considered your favorite two years ago, or whether you put a "the" in front of your favorite sports franchise when first registering. Those sorts of failures should be worth it, since they add an extra layer of security to the password recovery process. 

Except they don’t.

That’s the conclusion of a study that will be presented this week at the IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy, which looked at the backup security questions used by a variety of webmail services.

The study was a joint effort involving researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft Research; the latter organization is hosting a copy of the study. The authors focused on webmail for a number of reasons. For one, securing mail accounts against use by spammers is an ongoing challenge for service providers. Webmail services are also exceptionally sensitive to these backup authentication methods, since they have no guarantees that a user will have a second e-mail address at which to receive reauthentication instructions. Finally, people often keep personal information in their webmail accounts, leaving it vulnerable to hacking, as a certain Alaskan politician is now well aware.

So, the researchers recruited a number participants through a population of subjects maintained by Microsoft Research, and had them bring along a coworker, friend, or family member to two test sessions (there were a total of 130 participants). To induce serious participation, a variety of raffle tickets and gift certificates were provided. The subjects were asked to answer a series of questions taken from webmail services, and given the opportunity to guess what their companions answered, both with and without the opportunity to research them on the Web.

At the follow up visits, which occurred three to six months later, the failure rate was about what you’d expect, in the area of 20-25 percent, depending on how stringent the validation is. Ironically, that’s about the same rate as people were able to provide their companion’s personal information, like town of birth or pet’s name. The researchers broke this latter figure down according to whether a person would trust their companion to have the password anyway; this made some difference, as trusted individuals got the information right in over a quarter of the cases, but those that weren’t trusted still got it right over 15 percent of the time.

Realistically, it’s not much of a surprise that some relevant personal information could be harvested from information on Facebook and Flickr pages. The real worry is that a large percentage of the answers could be guess purely based on statistics. Some of this information is geographical—knowing where a person’s from makes it a bit easier to predict their answer to questions about their favorite town, place of birth, or favorite sports team. Others, like favorite book or historic figure, are simply measures of popularity. The same presumably goes for things like high school mascots, where lions and tigers and bears (oh my!) are probably over-represented. In all of these cases (and a few others), over 10 percent of the participants provided identical answers to these questions.

Google gives its users the chance to write their own questions, but that didn’t seem to improve matters much. Many of the participants chose things like eye color or blood type, which have a limited number of reasonable answers, and are subject to random guessing.

Perhaps the most disheartening thing about the study, however, was the fact that it shouldn’t have needed to be performed. The authors cite two studies that appeared in the 1990s and focused on the use of personal information for identity verification, and both saw failure rates in the same neighborhood as this study. Those who forget the past…

Image credit: Stig Andersen and Deniz Ongar.

This post has been written by John Timmer on May 19, 2009 9:59 PM couresy of arstechnica.com.

NTT DoCoMo counters SoftBank with 18 new handsets of its own

8 megapixel cameras and 3-plus-inch wide VGA displays are the order of the day in NTT DoCoMo’s 18-strong summer 2009 range of phones from Panasonic, LG, Fujitsu, NEC, Sharp, HTC, and Toshiba, but a few are definitely standing out for us. First would be the unforgettable N-09A from NEC, integrating patent leather right into the phone’s case; it’s not often that you need to condition your handset with saddle soap, so that one definitely caught our eye. Next up, we have a couple smartphones (not to say that anything in this lineup can be labeled "dumb" by any stretch) from HTC and Toshiba — the expected HT-03A and T-01A, respectively, which are localized rebrands of the Magic and TG01. Only a Japanese carrier lineup oozes enough machismo to make a TG01 look like a 16-ounce can of weak juice, so our hats go off to you, NTT DoCoMo — thanks for ruining one of 2009′s most promising devices for us. Hey, at least they’re offering the Magic in both white and black.

This post has been written by Chris Ziegler on May 19th 2009 at 5:39AM couresy of engadget.com.

MetaPlace open beta is on

Are you fond of world or story building? Maybe you’re thrilled about trying your hand at creating items. Do you have an idea for a great game, but no place – or way – to design it? Are you fascinated by the concept of in-browser-only (not browser/spawn another app like FusionFall or Free Realms) games. Or maybe you’re just the type of person who loves to check out new and interesting things created by other people. If any of the above sounds interesting to you then you’ll likely want to pop over to the MetaPlace site and check out their shiny new open beta test!

MetaPlace, designed to be a place full of infinite possibility where players can meet, game together, and socialize, has been in closed beta for quite some time. We’re curious to see how this world evolves, considering Raph Koster‘s view on avatar rights to their own created property versus other virtual world platforms like Linden Lab‘s Second Life. Between that and the basic concept for MetaPlace, we suspect virtual world and MMO afficinados alike will be keeping an eye on this.

This post has been written by Krystalle Voecks on May 17th 2009 at 8:00PM couresy of massively.com.

The REAL story behind the 104-Year-Old who joined Twitter

Dear reader, TechCrunch owes you an apology. But at least we are apologising – unlike the many news outlets that ran the blatant PR that was the “104-Year-Old joins Twitter” story last week.

To explain.

On May 15 two UK newspapers ran the story about 104 year old woman “Ivy Bean” / @ivybean104 joining Twitter. Both The Daily Telegraph and The Sun ran with the story, which was followed up and “celebrated” by The Next Web blog.

What none of these stories told you, however, was that poor old Ivy had not joined Twitter just because it was suddenly the talk of the old peoples home. No. She joined because home PC maintenance company Geek Squad signed her up, propped her up for a photo opportunity and press-released the hell out of it. And frankly I hope they paid her, or at least donated to her favourite charity because this is one of the most self-serving, cynical PR stunts I can remember.

And to prove it, here’s the pictures all the news outlets ran (when they all have the same picture, it’s a sure sign it’s a press release). Is that a Geek Squad guy just behind her head?:

And here’s the incriminating Twitpic, clearly taken by Geek Squad of their man Martin Dix, hovering behind Ivy, having just signed her in to Twitter and presumably explained the service. It was even taken on Ivy’s own Twitpic account and frankly I seriously doubt she knew what was going on.

Note also that her first ever Tweet is clearly related to the PR shenanigans going on around her:

“I’m enjoying Twitter for the first time and having my photo taken.”

Now, she Tweeted that Tweet at “10:02 AM May 14th from web”. That’s important, because this was only one day before the story went live on the Sun, and Telegraph site at 8:20am May 15. In other words, cynical Geek Squad had already targeted Ivy as being the oldest person they could find and convince to go on Twitter. The fact it was a day before the story went live speaks volumes.

Ivy also Tweeted:

“I’m on Twitter! Come and follow my feed at IvyBean104.”

Since when did a 104 year old suddenly start using words like “feed”?

In fact, only The Sun newspaper actually indicated that this might all be PR-nonsense cooked up by Geek Squad, referring to its “Silver Surfers’ Day” campaign to “encourage more elderly people to get online”. Classic PR-guff.

However, TechCrunch’s (and here’s our apology) MG Seigler decided this whole thing was a ruse to get The Telegraph onto Digg. And admittedly, The Telegraph has been gaining a reputation for using Digg quite substantially lately. It gets a lot of traffic from social sites, and the UK press has a sneaking suspicion Tele sub editors have all taken courses in headline writing for Digg.

However, we’re happy to point out that the story wasn’t just cooked up by the Telegraph to get onto Digg – but lots of journalists and bloggers fell for Geek Squad’s PR.

Compounding the issue however is The Next Web which seems to think TechCrunch’s non-scoop was itself an attempt to get on Digg – and predictibly did a post on it in a slightly bizarre tirade. Clearly, The Next Web did not realise it was a Geek Squad press release the first time round and still hasn’t. Instead it attacks TechCrunch for not “celebrating” the fact a 104 year old is on Twitter.

Come again? Since when were independent bloggers supposed to just “celebrate” things – instead of getting the facts right?

My view is that WHERE stories come from is at least as important as what they are about. I hope we can all learn from this episode. In the race to feverishly post about Twitter, sometimes the facts are starting to get lost in the hype.

Oh, and to complete this ridiculous circle, feel free to Digg this post.

This post has been written by Mike Butcher on May 18, 2009 couresy of techcrunch.com.

« Previous Entries

Next Entries »

• Blog Stats

  • 53,285 hits

• Archives

  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • October 2009
  • July 2009
  • June 2009
  • May 2009
  • April 2009
  • September 2008
  • May 2008
  • March 2008
  • November 2007
  • October 2007
  • August 2007

• Blogroll

  • apples and moustaches