Western Digital

Western Digital announced today they'll be offering the 10,000rpm VelociRaptor 2.5" hard drives for enterprise class 1U and 2U servers. The new drives will be available in capacities up to 300GB with 16MB caches and will use 35 percent less power than the previous generation Raptor drives. They're said to have the highest reliability rating of any enterprise SATA drive at 1.4 million hours MTBF.

Currently, WD says the drives are under evaluation by OEMs, but we should expect to see them available at retailers at the end of the month for an undisclosed price.

There is no argument that the founding idea of the Wiki is an admirable one. Collaborative contribution to the betterment of information is a noble goal that has had its fair share of successes. And its share of ignominies.

The simple problem for Wiki's simple idea is that humans are easily incited by disagreement. Further more, many people who have slept at a Holiday Inn Express understand that they are experts in a field with which they have no experience. Therefore sites like Wikipedia are often corrupted by misinformation or ninja-edits. The problem is severe enough to spawn corollary websites designed to track and identify illicit editors.

Google hopes to address these problems with the introduction of Knol. All contributors to their service will be certified professionals in their given field. What's more, their content will be presented with their real name and subject to peer review just as science handles the introduction of its new information.

The service has launched with a preponderance of medical-related information, and is expected to fill out in the future as more professionals sign on and Wiki their skills.

The Solid State Disk's (SSD) slow rise to preeminence is not without its technical hurdles, says Eli Harari, the Chairman and CEO of SanDisk. In a recent conference call regarding SanDisk's second quarter earnings, he firmly suggested that the next generation of Solid State Disks employing multilevel cell (MLC) technology will be too complex for Vista to leverage correctly.

MLC NAND flash is set to revolutionize the anemic capacities of today's SSDs. Current disks use four transistor states per cell to hold two bits of information. MLC drives will address the present inability to increase areal density by vertically stacking multiple levels within a single cell. This technology is expected to usher in drives boasting capacities exceeding 256GB.

Harari suggests that Vista's ability to coordinate the exchange of information between the mainboard's controller and the on-disk controller is insufficient with the next generation. He further ascribes SanDisk's ailing development cycle to these issues by saying, "We have very good internal controller technology, as you know...That said, I'd say that we are now behind because we did not fully understand, frankly, the limitations in the Vista environment."

He goes on to suggest that we have not yet realized the enormity of the problem because "Existing controllers can get the job done for 8-, 16-, and 32-gigabyte storage because these are relatively unsophisticated and demanding requirements."

These statements come as the first indication we've heard that Vista's SSD performance is less than acceptable. We are concerned with the validity of these assertions given that SanDisk is blaming their sluggish development process on a previously unheard of problem.

Perhaps other SSD manufacturers will confirm these claims in the coming weeks as MLC technology is closer to release, but for now we're going to take all of this with a grain of salt.

Intel cut prices today for some popular chips. Here's the breakdown:

Core 2 Quads

• Q6600 is now $193, down 14 percent.

Core 2 Duos

• E8500 is now $183, down a staggering 31 percent.
• E8400 is now $163, down 11 percent.
• E7200 is now $113, down 15 percent.

Xeons

• X3220 is now $198, down 12 percent.
• X3210 is now $198, down 12 percent, making the above a better value.
• E3110 is now $167, down 11 percent.

Everything else stays the same, sadly. Reports are circulating that some of the major retailers haven't applied the price cuts yet, so those of you shopping for new chips may want to hold out a few days until the cuts take hold.

It's that time again, folks! AMD has up and released revision 8.7 of the Catalyst-series drivers for their Radeons. They're a little sparse in the way of new features, but could provide performance enhancements that will make some gamers happy:

• 3DMark Vantage: Performance increases of up to 20% is noticed in the Performance Preset on single card configured systems when using ATI Radeon™ HD 36xx or ATI Radeon™ HD 34xx products
• Company of Heroes DX10: Performance increases of 3% to 12% is noticed in specific maps on single card configured systems when using either an ATI Radeon™ HD 48xx, ATI Radeon ™ HD 38xx, or an ATI Radeon™ HD 36xx product
• Lost Planet DX10: Performance increases of 4% to 15% is noticed in specific maps on single card configured systems when using either an ATI Radeon™ HD 48xx, ATI Radeon™ HD 38xx, or an ATI Radeon™ HD 36xx product
• Call Of Duty 4 DX9: Performance increases of up to 4% in specific maps is noticed on single card configured systems when using an ATI Radeon™ HD 48xx product Lost Planet DX9: CrossFire™ scaling improves up to 1.7x and performance increases up to 80% across all Radeon products when AA and AF is enabled

You can get your hands on the goods from the boys in red green over here.

OMG HI UR 2 CUTE

TechCrunch revealed today that Fox Interactive Media's Myspace social networking phenomenon has agreed to start implementing OpenID authentication. This brings their 200 million user accounts to the already-300-million-strong OpenID userbase.

No, this does not mean we'll be hearing the latest hits from Estelle and Kanye West or having "glitter bling" on OpenID-enabled sites.

Single sign-in is something of a panacea for those of us who live on the web. Perhaps one day OpenID will be the one.

According to John Gruber, the iPhone 3G is essentially sold out across the United States. That didn't take long, did it?

Through the flurry of hardware releases, architecture and roadmaps, we occasionally stumble upon a delightful morsel of raw ingenuity that does nothing less than astound. Today, that morsel comes to us in the innocuous form of the Apple I BASIC cassette tape.

These cassettes are extremely rare, given that there were only 200 Apple I computers released, and less than 100 are known to exist. To make matters worse, not all Apple I computers came with this prized cassette tape. This tape contains the first piece of software that Apple ever sold.

In 2002 someone produced an audio recording of the BASIC tape being played back. A simple algorithm was created to analyze the waveform on the Atari, convert that to binary and run it on an Apple I emulator. They dumped the output of the emulated BASIC and released it to the public, where others continued to modify the code to correct what were perceived as errors. The only dump of the tape that can be easily found includes these changes, which gives us cause to question the accuracy of the code.

Assembly language blog Pagetable recently took another stab at the project by analyzing the original and unmodified WAV recording with new tools. With Audacity, custom conversion code and a HEX editor, Pagetable has produced the world's first certifiably pristine code of software that was written to magnetic tape more than 30 years ago.

What a fantastic and outrageously clever project.

Has Nvidia silently given an additional slash to the GTX 280? I've seen no official announcements, but Newegg and a few other retailers are listing several GTX 280 products for $449 today, $50 less than the most recent round of cuts. No rebates. No gimmicks. While some say this spells trouble for AMD's HD4870X2; I think what this really shows is Nvidia's acknowledgement of the 4870X2 as a real competitor. We've seen $200 in price cuts since the GTX 280 was released just one month ago and it’s major competitor has not even hit the streets. It looks like the battle will rage on, but one thing is for sure. The clear winner is the consumer.

The Danish company Danamics claims to have created the world's first liquid metal based CPU cooler, the Danamics LM10. What looks similar to the heatpipes that have become so common on modern coolers actually contain a liquid metal with a thermal conductivity superior to that of the liquid inside traditional heatpipes. The liquid is circulated by an electromagnetic pump and requires no moving parts.

Danamics LM10 is the world’s best performing air-cooler. By utilizing the unique properties of liquid metal, the cooler has the lowest thermal resistance of any air-cooler in the market. The cooling capabilities exceeds most watercoolers in a single device.

That's quite the claim to live up to. Danamics says the LM10 should be available "soon". Yeah. See you then.