![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
The Gamer's Bill of Rights has been unveiled today. Of the ten “rights” listed, I personally think that number eight on the list is the most important. In fact, I think number eight would actually eliminate the need for at least two of the other rights listed.
Gamers shall have the right to not be treated as potential criminals by developers or publishers.
Engineers and researchers at the IBM are testing a 4-terabyte, high-speed solid-state drive array and the results are nothing short of impressive.
Under the rubric Project Quicksilver, IBM coupled solid-state drives with its storage virtualization technology to achieve a sustained data transfer rate of more than 1 million input/output per second (IOPS), with a response time of less than one millisecond in a 4.1-terabyte rack of SSD storage. SSDs are being supplied by Fusion-io.
Mac clone maker Psystar officially responded to Apple's copyright infringement lawsuit by countersuing for anticompetitive business practices. Say what you will about these guys, they may not be very smart but they got balls.
As expected, the 54-page complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, charges Apple with restraint of trade, unfair competition, and other violations of antitrust law. Miami-based Psystar, owned by Rudy Pedraza, requests that the court find Apple's end-user license agreements (EULA) void and seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages.
Welcome to the Friday edition of [H]ard|OCP [H]otDeals! Need storage? Grab a few of these 1000GB Hitachi 7200rpm SATA Deskstars for $169.99 each. That’s a $30 saving just for being an [H] reader! You can also get a 2GB OCZ Fatal1ty PC8500 kit for half price while supplies last. This Core 2 Duo E8400 is $164.99 and this EVGA GeForce 8600 GT is just $44.99 and both deals come with free shipping. On the subject of free shipping, we are still offering $5 off on all RatPadz GS and RatPadz XT and free shipping in North America.
Get it? Kids in Brazil are using Intel’s Classmate PCs so they are “getting a new classmate.” Oh so clever.
The stakes are also high for the technology companies involved. Intel and Microsoft hope to show not only the power of giving laptops to students--but also to show the world that they too have a product in this area--with so many headlines in the U.S. focused on Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child project.
Kevin Mitnick has a tell all book coming out next year and my only question is “what is there to tell?” Seriously, we have seen this guy’s whole life / exploits in the news for the last decade, unless he is going to dish on how prison life was, what is there to tell? At least Mitnick did say this about the book:
I'm trying to save that all for the book. What I can tell you is what won't be in the book--I won't be whining about my trial or my mistreatment by the government or [Mitnick-chronicling] John Markoff.
Microsoft is dropping almost a half a billion dollars on a company that has several consumer shopping sites, including one of the leading price comparison and online shopping sites in Europe.
The deal calls for Microsoft to commence a cash tender offer to purchase all of the outstanding shares of Greenfield for $17.50 per share, or roughly $486 million. Wilton, Conn.-based Greenfield, which acquired Ciao in 2005, also owns an Internet survey business, which Microsoft plans to sell off. Microsoft said it has already secured an unnamed buyer for that unit.
The trial against The Pirate Bay has been delayed until later this year or early next year. It seems the prosecution is having a bit of a hard time with the case and rounding people up, getting damage estimates and serving summons are all causing delays.
“The process has taken a lot of time. First, it took time serving judicial summons to the defendants and then we had to gather damage claims from the complainants,” Anita Thimberg, a clerk at the Stockholm District Court, told DN.se.
According to the folks at Bit-Tech, that new Lian Li PC-XB01 case doesn’t really provide much more than a new way to void the warranty on your Xbox 360. Kind of a bummer, I thought it was pretty cool looking.
For the rest of us, what real advantages does the PC-XB01 offer over the stock setup? The sad answer is, right now, not a great deal. While operating temperatures with the XB01 are a good deal better, the die shrink from 90nm to 65nm has, for the most part, solved the 360's overheating and red ringing problems.
Yahoo Mash is closing down, apparently no one liked it. Well, at least not enough people liked it to keep it open. Any of you ever use the site?
An e-mail to Mash members from Yahoo community manager Matt Warburton read, "Thank you for trying out our Mash Beta service. We hope you had fun with it. Please note that we will shut down Mash on September 29, 2008. As a result, your current profile on Mash will no longer be available."
It is official, Comcast announced that they will have a 250GB per month cap on internet usage starting October 1st. What do you think? Is the 250GB cap enough or do you think it should be more?
Comcast floated the idea of a 250 gigabyte cap in May and mentioned then that it might charge users $15 for every 10 gigabytes they go over, but the overage fee was missing in Thursday's announcement. Curbing the top users is necessary to keep the network fast and responsive for other users, Comcast has said.
Engineers and researchers at the IBM Hursley development lab in England and the Almaden Research Center in California have demonstrated groundbreaking performance results that outperform the world's fastest disk storage solution by over 250(1) percent. IBM has demonstrated, for the first time, the game-changing impact solid-state technologies can have on how businesses and individuals manage and access information.
