|
Advertisement:
|
OCAU News |
IntelInside sent us word that MIT are set to offer all of its 1800 courses for free on the internet. Online students will not be able to earn an MIT degree or have contact with faculty at the university, located across the river from Boston in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT launched its "OpenCourseWare" program in 2003 and already offers hundreds of courses online. A small number of other U.S. schools are following suit. Stanford put some classes on line last year and Bryn Mawr plans to do so soon.
Seagate is shipping disk drives with full disk encryption known as "DriveTrust" technology. Seagate announced today that ASI Computer Technologies will be the first manufacturer to sell notebook computers with full disk encryption (FDE). The ASI notebook model C8015 will feature Seagate's Momentus 5400 FDE.2 80GB hard disk drive with “DriveTrust” technology, a hardware-based FDE to provide strong data protection and requires only a user key to encrypt all data, not just selected files or partitions, on the drive.
Intel is getting into the flash hard drive market which sports 28Mb/s read speeds. The Z-U130 Value Solid-State Drive will be available in 1GB, 2GB, 4GB and 8GB models and boasts sustained write speeds of 28MB per second. This is comparable to the low end of magnetic platter hard drives, which have typical write speeds varying from 30MB to 75MB per second. The drives are contained in a 3.5cm by 2.5cm package and connects via a USB 1.1 or 2.0 interface using a standard 2x5 USB connector.
ASELabs has taken a look at Direct X 10. With the release of the new Windows Vista, Microsoft introduced a key component that would give users good reason to upgrade, in the form of DirectX 10 (DX10). What this means for the end user, is better looking games that use fewer system resources, in a nutshell. The launch of a new version of DirectX could be compared to the launch of a new system in the home console world.
Microsoft Live OneCare (Microsofts' own antivirus offering) has taken a rather destructive attitude to email virii by deleting all the users emails in some cases. According to postings on Microsoft's OneCare forum, erasures have been caused when the antivirus program finds a virus in an e-mail attachment. Instead of then quarantining that single e-mail, users have reported that entire .pst or .dbx files -- the personal folder where non-Exchange Server users' messages and other details are kept -- have been quarantined or, in some cases, even deleted.
OZHardware has taken a look at Vista's performance compared to XP. It is widely known that you need a much faster PC to run Vista than you do to run Windows XP. Microsoft recommend a minimum of a 1Ghz CPU and 1GB of RAM to run anything better than Vista Home Basic (I.e. Home Premium, Business or Ultimate) , and a Directx9 capable video card. I would hate to try and run Vista on a 1Ghz CPU, it would just be painfully slow. So when specing-up your new machine, make sure you at least double the minimum recommended RAM and CPU speed, have a dedicated PCI-Ex16 video card with 128MB of RAM or more, and you will be fine. If your video card supports DirectX9, you should even be able to run Aero.
Eric has sent in this page for more Vista tweaking information for those who want to get the most out of the new OS.
Bit-Tech have posted an article on hard drive technology. From a performance point of view, the hard drive has always been one of the most overlooked components in a desktop system. Perhaps hard drives just aren’t sexy enough? After all, competing with the newest and shiniest graphics cards and processors is a tough business for what is essentially a nondescript rectangular box in which you put stuff.
Check out this video of some serious paintball action in the "Big Paintball Manouvers" 2006, Russian tactical paintball complete with tank. Agg (our very own paintball champion) may want to get in contact with these guys. Warning: Video contains groovy foreign music.
Return to OCAU's News Page
|
|
Advertisement:
All original content copyright James Rolfe.
All rights reserved. No reproduction allowed without written permission.
|
Advertisement:
|
|
|