Apple: 6G iPod & Apple's Future?

"CNET rounds up what we're going to get from the next iPod and where Apple is heading as a company and as a business juggernaut. [They have the] 100GB widescreen video iPods, Wi-Fi-enabled iPods capable of on-the-fly movie downloads over the air, unlimited downloads from iTunes for a flat fee and the UK finally getting its content-hungry hands on movie downloads. Apple has dropped the 'Computer' from its company name, and is making significant advances into the media-distribution business. It's bringing video to everyone everywhere with iTunes movies and now Apple TV, and the rumours and speculation we've discussed promote the theory that Apple is setting itself up as a major player in the media-distribution industry."

8 CORE Mac Pro OFFICIALLY announced by Apple!!

8-core or quad-core Mac Pro workstation Meet the latest addition to the Mac Pro family: The world ’s first 3.0GHz, 8-core Intel Xeon-based Mac Pro. Consider the bar officially raised.

8 CORE Mac Pro OFFICIALLY announced by Apple!!

AMD Athlon 64 6000+ Launched And Tested

AMD officially launched their next speed bump in the Athlon 64 product line, in the form of a new 3GHz part branded the Athlon 64 6000+. This new dual-core Athlon 64 sports 1MB of on-chip cache per core and is designed for AMD's Socket AM2 platform. This chip is still built on AMD's 90nm fab node and is comprised of some 227 million transistors. It also carries a thermal power profile of about 125Watts. Unfortunately, in all the benchmarks seen here, it was still unable to catch Intel's Core 2 Duo E6700 chip at 2.66GHz."

http://tinyurl.com/2semeo

In-car record players from the 1950's

Record players were installed on a slide-out turntable beneath the dash and hidden behind a drop-down door that could be opened at the push of a button. I remember a old friend of mind who had one those In-Car Record players. Every time his car would go over a bump the tone air would skip all over place and it would ruin the player needle stylist!

Seagate to Release First 15k RPM 2.5-inch HDDs

This afternoon, Seagate Technology made an unexpected announcement coming so soon after the Storage Visions conference in Las Vegas – a tag-along with CES. The company’s second wave of Savvio hard drives in the 2.5" form factor will be revved up from 10,000 to 15,000 revolutions per minute.

But as an indication that such revolutionary speed, literally speaking, may not yet be cool enough for notebooks where the company’s Momentus product line revs up to 7200 rpm, the 15K series is being billed for use in RAID storage batteries for the enterprise. There, Seagate says the new Savvios will run cooler than a typical datacenter installation, drawing 40% less power per drive while consuming about a third of the rack space.

http://tinyurl.com/24luf8

Netflix Starts Offering Flicks On The Net

Beginning this week, some subscribers to DVD-by-mail service Netflix will be able to watch movies and TV shows on the Web. Netflix Inc. will start showing movies and TV episodes over the Internet this week, providing its subscribers with more instant gratification as the DVD-by-mail service prepares for a looming technology shift threatening its survival.

The Los Gatos-based company plans to unveil the new "Watch Now" feature Tuesday, but only a small number of its more than 6 million subscribers will get immediate access to the service, which is being offered at no additional charge.

Netflix expects to introduce the instant viewing system to about 250,000 more subscribers each week through June to ensure its computers can cope with the increased demand.

S.F. Finalizes Wi-Fi Deal With EarthLink, Google

EarthLink Inc. and Google Inc. have finalized a four-year deal to provide free wireless Internet service throughout San Francisco after seven months of sometimes-tense negotiations that stalled the city's effort to ensure all its residents, visitors and businesses have easy access to the Web.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom signed off on the contract Friday, but the details still require the approval of the city's Board of Supervisors and Public Utilities Commission.

Google launched a free Wi-Fi service in August in its home town of Mountain View, making the 11.5-square-mile city of 72,000 people the largest U.S. community with free Wi-Fi throughout its borders.

http://tinyurl.com/tncf5

Warner Bros. new "Total HD" disc tries to settle Blu-ray/HD DVD war

Warner Bros plans to announce a new single videodisc, called a Total HD disc, that can play films and television programs in both Blu-ray and HD DVD. They hope to make the new generation of DVD entertainment easier on the consumer by making movies and television libraries available in BOTH formats on a SINGLE disc.

http://tinyurl.com/y36snn

Get Ready for DRM-FREE 2007: Amazon, LimeWire, MySpace, eMusic, Yahoo Music

More rumors are surfacing around Amazon offering DRM-free MP3s to compete with Apple's iTunes. Only this time the rumors include other MP3 download services and are coming from the mainstream press (does that make it more or less credible?). Looks like certain key executives have converted to the idea that digital downloads should be sold as unprotected MP3s.

http://tinyurl.com/y7ky4j

Hitachi to unveil ultra high-end storage array

Code-named “Broadway,” the forthcoming storage array can be deployed with one Integrated Control/Array Frame and one to four Array Frames, which hold a maximum of 1,152 drives for a maximum internal capacity of 576TB and the ability to address as much as 256 petabytes of external storage. Now Everyone geek will have No accuse because now they will have access to an Virtual Bottomless Pit of Storage. So they can go out to purchase and download more crap 'until the cows come home' of digital media contains, for their Shinny brand new Raid 6 256 petabytes MAS!!

http://tinyurl.com/yzlstj

A peek at faster Power6, Cell chips

IBM's Power6 processor will be able to exceed 5 gigahertz in a high-performance mode, and the second-generation Cell Broadband Engine processor from IBM, Sony and Toshiba will run at 6GHz, according to the program for the International Solid State Circuits Conference that begins February 11 in San Francisco.

For servers, IBM has said its Power6 processor, due to ship in servers in 2007, will run between 4GHz and 5GHz. But in the ISSCC program, Big Blue said the chip's clock will tick at a rate "over 5GHz in high-performance applications." In addition, the chip "consumes under 100 watts in power-sensitive applications," a power range comparable to mainstream 95-watt AMD Opteron chips and 80-watt Intel Xeon chips.

http://tinyurl.com/vxxt8

FCC approves AT&T-BellSouth merger

The Federal Communications Commission approved the roughly $86 billion megamerger between AT&T and BellSouth on Friday, ending a bipartisan standoff.

The commission, which had been split between Democrats and Republicans for months on what--if any--conditions should be imposed on the merger, accepted conditions that AT&T had proposed in a formal letter sent to the commission on Thursday. The merger was approved by 4 to 0 vote.

http://tinyurl.com/y76ls5

Woz Gets Questioned by the Secret Service for Using $2 Bills

While generously feeding these machines I tipped the waitress a couple of $2 bills. Waitresses in casinos and other places often exclaim at how much they like getting these and how their kids love them. I have tons of $2 bill stories that will make a whole chapter in my book someday. My $2 bills are real and legit but unusual.

read more | digg story

Saturn's greatest hits

NASA is asking people to choose the best photograph taken by the Cassini spacecraft as it approaches its second anniversary at the planet Saturn.

NASA lets viewers vote for the best of the 15 photos listed.
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

http://tinyurl.com/y6py7s

Vaporware '06: Return of the King

Pull back the red curtain and dim the lights. It's the 9th annual presentation of the Wired News Vaporware Awards, our ode to the year's top technology products promised, hyped and scheduled, but not delivered.

read more | digg story

Turn Off Unnecessary Windows XP Services

Turning off unnecessary services in Windows XP can greatly reduce your exploit risk, while improving system performance. It's a good time to inject that often there are all sorts of "download optimizers" and other cute programs that vendors like to push on users. The first rule is "If you don't know you need it, you probably don't."

read more | digg story

Pandora Goes Social

Tonight Pandora is releasing a additional features aimed at increasing interaction among members. These social features include listener profiles with musical preferences, bio information, etc. (previously listeners had only a list of bookmarked songs), as well as listener search and lists of users who are fans of particular bands.

read more | digg story

See real-time weather on a Google map

Weather junkies, your site has come in. Weather Bonk gives you not only the local forecast, but also traffic webcams, monthly averages and live conditions overlaid on a Google map.

read more | digg story

New Mozilla issues security updates

The Mozilla Foundation has issued "critical" security updates to vulnerabilities discovered in the Firefox browser, Thunderbird e-mail client and SeaMonkey application suite.

Flaws were found in versions of the open-source software prior to both Firefox 2.0.0.1 and Firefox 1.5.0.9, as well as prior to Thunderbird 1.5.0.9 and SeaMonkey 1.0.7, Mozilla said Tuesday.

The vulnerabilities could potentially be exploited to conduct cross-site scripting attacks, to let malicious attackers launch a remote execution of code on users' computers, and to expose sensitive information, according to an advisory from security company Secunia.

http://tinyurl.com/y5akp7

Dish Network to Launch IPTV Service?

The Satellite Guys forum floats the rumor that Dish Network may be exploring the possibility of starting their own IPTV service for broadband users. The rumor proclaims that the service (dubbed DishONLINE) will go live on February 15th, 2007, offering SD and HD quality movies, music, news and adult films. It looks like this portion of the Dish website has been gearing up for the IPTV launch. Of course, we're still waiting on the rumor that there would be a DirecTV blade on the Xbox360 dashboard.

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/80418