SpawnPoint

You've got a file on your laptop that you need to access — but you don't want to wait for your laptop to boot up to get at it. New technology from the company Silicon Storage Technology will make the contents of a hard drive accessible via a computer's USB port even when the computer is powered down. 'FlashMate combines hardware, firmware and software in a system application subsystem that manages a notebook computer's hard drive. It is based on SST's expertise in NAND flash controllers and memory subsystem design with Insyde Software's expertise in PC BIOS, system software and power management. FlashMate can work in conjunction with features such as Windows Vista ReadyDrive and serve as nonvolatile cache for the hard disk drive, thus enabling a standard hard disk drive to function as a hybrid drive.

More than 300 players participated in a three-day Counter Strike LAN competition. The catch? They were all Tianjin (China's northern port city) police officers.

"The competition is organized to sharpen anti-terrorist skills of Tianjin's police force, as we find the nature of the game very similar to that of our daily practice", said officer Zhang Bin, one of the organizers.

Counter Strike was first introduced a mod for Half-Life in June, 1999. Later in November 2000, it was released as a stand alone game by sierra. In 2004, statistics showed over 85,000 players simultaneously playing Counter-Strike at any point in time, and at the moment, Steam regularly shows over 200,000 players for Counter-Strike

During the competition, a panel of referees was introduced to ensure no cheating (mainly peeking).

"Given its close resemblance to real-life scenarios, the game greatly enhances the terrorism awareness of our officers, and it is very important as terrorism has become a global issue", said Han Zhen, a tactical instructor of Tianjin police. "In particular, it trains our officers in the use of weapons and taking advantage of different terrains, and is also a test of mental strength in a duel with a terrorist, enhancing police forces through technology".

According to Han, almost half the total Tianjin force turned to be regular Counter Strike players. Counter Strike "training" took place "after work" and is considered "a supplement to their [Tianjin's officers] traditional means of training".

Officers reported noticeable improvement in self-protection on field missions after the play, Han Zhen stated.

A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.

The average age of the worlds greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:

• From Bondage to spiritual faith;
• From spiritual faith to great courage;
• From courage to liberty;
• From liberty to abundance;
• From abundance to complacency;
• From complacency to apathy;
• From apathy to dependence;
• From dependence back into bondage.

-Alexander Fraser Tytler, 1790 - a Scottish historian

Sub-$200 Chinese-manufactured HD DVD players are slated to be released by Venturer Electronics by the fourth quarter.

Venturer's SHD7000 will be priced at $199, according to a company representative, which would make it the cheapest stand-alone HD DVD player available today.

To date, Toshiba has the offered lowest priced stand-alone player, its entry level HD-A2 $299 model.

A statement from Venturer, whose North American headquarters is in Markham, Ontario, touts the player “to be one of the lowest among entry-level HD DVD players.” 

The SHD7000 features 1080i video output, Ethernet connectivity and advanced audio technology Dolby TrueHD. In addition to HD DVD and CD playback, the model also upscales standard-definition DVDs to near high-def quality through an HDMI connection. The player will be distributed nationally to retailers.

For months, HD DVD backers have said that Chinese manufacturers would soon start producing ultra low-price players, likely impacting the format war. Venturer represents the first such company to potentially get the ball rolling.

"Seagate will introduce drives based on flash memory in various storage capacities across its range of products including desktop and notebook PCs, according to Sumner Lemon at IDG News Service. The drives are expected to consume less power (longer battery life), offer faster data transfer rates and be more rugged than spinning disk, which has moving parts that can be damaged from an impact."

I know the main concern most of you have is flash/solid state drive lifespan - lets look at it like this:

Take a 40GB hard drive, and pretend it's Flash memory.  If you wrote 40GB worth of data to it every single day (with the circuitry inside a drive to spread writes out over cells evenly) you would average 1 write per day across each cell.  Flash memory can be written to a minimum of 10,000 times before dying, most is even more reliably by an order of magnitude (100,000 writes).  Assuming we have crappy 10,000 write limits, we could write 40GB to the drive every day for 10,000 days (or 27 years) before failing is an issue.

Looking at the 40GB drive in one of my machines, the total writes in its uptime comes to about 800MB, which is a shade under 24 hours uptime.  That's 800MB worth of writes in a day, 50 times *less* than writing 40GB to the drive every day, so a 40GB flash drive at my current usage rate could be expected to last 27 * 50, or 1350 years.

A lot longer than I have to worry about. The numbers are going to differ for some people, but the initial stats work out - few people would write to every cell every day, and even then that's decades worth of use.

"A new study from pro-business think tank Institute for Policy Innovation claims that music piracy accounts for $12.5 billion in lost output to the US economy. That includes 71,060 lost jobs and $422 million in lost tax revenues... if the figures are accurate. Ars Technica's write-up points out a number of flaws in the IPI's reasoning. 'The study makes for some alarming reading, but it suffers from a few significant flaws. First and foremost, it appears to fall into the "illicit downloads = lost sales" fallacy, the view that each song obtained over a P2P network is a lost purchase.' There's more: 'The IPI study also assesses the increased demand for music if piracy didn't exist and assumes the market would remain as "intensely competitive" as it is today. The problem is that music fans are largely disenchanted with the market. By and large, music fans think that music is too expensive, and that much of what is available isn't very good.'"

Microsoft has finally released pre-beta versions of Windows XP service pack 3 and Windows Vista service pack 1 to a select group of testers.

Windows Vista suffers from several issues with ReadyBoost, copying/moving large files, resuming from sleep/hibernate and Blu-ray playback on numerous systems. Microsoft solved a number of these problems through 938979 Vista Performance and Reliability Pack and 938194 Vista Compatibility and Reliability Pack.

Windows Vista SP1 (build 6001.16549) is distributed as a 3.07GB iso image for the 32-bit version and 4.3GB for the 64-bit version, while Windows XP SP3 (Build 5.1.2600.3180) is distributed as a 350MB update which supposedly fixes over 900 issues with the popular operating system.

Microsoft has told select testers that the public beta Windows Vista SP1 will be available within few weeks, but -they they added- it won't be needed since Microsoft has been rolling out fixes and updates regularly via Windows Update. Microsoft also told selected testers earlier this summer that, if testing went smoothly, the final Vista SP1 would be out in November 2007.

Funded by Intel, the researchers at Purdue University developed an new technology that would improve computer chip cooling dramatically. The new technology is based on ionic wind engines and should increase chip cooling rates by as much as 250%.

"Other experimental cooling-enhancement approaches might give you a 40 per cent or 50 per cent improvement", said Suresh Garimella, a professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue. "A 250 per cent improvement is quite unusual. "

The experimental cooling device works by generating electrically charged atoms using electrodes placed near one another. The device containes a positively charged wire, or anode, and negatively charged electrodes, called cathodes. The anode are positioned about 10mm above the cathodes. When voltage passes through the device, the negatively charged electrodes discharge electrons toward the positively charged anode. The electrons collide with air molecules, producing positively charged ions, which are then attracted back toward the negatively charged electrodes, creating an "ionic wind". This "breeze" was found to increase the airflow on the surface of the experimental chip and so dramatically improve cooling.

The research team hopes to miniaturize the new technology and introduce it into computers within three years. Later on, they hope to integrate it into portable consumer electronics products such as mobile phones.

 Microsoft's tight lips regarding the next Windows XP Service Pack have led many analysts to believe that Microsoft is planning to cancel it, but Microsoft has finally dated it.

However, even when announcing the date Microsoft kept it vague. All we know for now is that Service pack 3 along with Windows Server 2008 will be released within the next 7 months and that they will both support for interoperability between Microsoft's Network Address Protection (NAP) and Juniper Network's Unified Access Control (UAC) standards for network access control (NAC) deployments.

The complete Service Pack 3 features set (and the reasons why you should install it) are yet to be announced.