Free Republic

Seagate has acquired Samsung Electronics’ hard disk drive (HDD) operations for $1.37 billion in a move that boils the market down to two players. Seagate and Western Digital now control 90 percent of the HDD market with Toshiba a distant third. Under the terms of the deal, Samsung will lump its HDD unit into Seagate in exchange for a cash and stock deal worth $1.375 billion. Samsung will own nearly 10 percent of Seagate and the two companies will cross-license patents. Samsung will also provide NAND flash memory for Seagate’s solid-state drives. In addition, Seagate will supply drives for Samsung’s...

A new process could let your laptop and cell phone recharge a hundred times faster than they do now. A new way of making battery electrodes based on nanostructured metal foams has been used to make a lithium-ion battery that can be 90 percent charged in two minutes. If the method can be commercialized, it could lead to laptops that charge in a few minutes or cell phones that charge in 30 seconds. The methods used to make the ultrafast-charging electrodes are compatible with a range of battery chemistries; the researchers have also used them to make nickel-metal-hydride batteries, the...

A University of Pittsburgh-led team has created a single-electron transistor that provides a building block for new, more powerful computer memories, advanced electronic materials, and the basic components of quantum computers. The researchers report in Nature Nanotechnology that the transistor's central component -- an island only 1.5 nanometers in diameter -- operates with the addition of only one or two electrons. That capability would make the transistor important to a range of computational applications, from ultradense memories to quantum processors, powerful devices that promise to solve problems so complex that all of the world's computers working together for billions of...

The outside looks the same: a big keyboard with a full computer beneath it, and those fat-ass clickety-clack keys. The keyboard description is such a loving homage to that vintage typing sensation, it sounds downright pornographic: "...the new Commodore 64 features genuine Cherry brand key switches, which provide a feel much better than the original, with a lovely IBM classic mechanism and click sound." Inside is where things get modern, because the whole system's had a major overhaul. The new C64 comes with a 1.8GHz Intel processor, up to 4GB RAM, runs Windows 7, and plays back Blu-ray discs. There’s...

After Tuesday night’s Wisconsin Supreme Court election, a computer error in heavily Republican Waukesha County failed to send election results for the entire City of Brookfield to the Associated Press. The error, revealed today, would give incumbent Supreme Court Justice David Prosser a net 7,381 votes against his challenger, attorney Joanne Kloppenburg. On Wednesday, Kloppenburg declared victory after the AP reported she finished the election with a 204-vote lead, out of nearly 1.5 million votes cast. On election night, AP results showed a turnout of 110,000 voters in Waukesha County — well short of the 180,000 voters that turned out...

Due to the growing list of brands disclosing that they have been compromised as a result of this breach, I’m going to go ahead and tag this as a massive breach. And I only expect it to get bigger as more announcements come out from Epsilon customers. Last night we reported on a breach at marketing services provider, Epsilon, the world’s largest permission-based email marketing provider. Initially we wrote that the breach had affected Kroger, the nation's largest traditional grocery retailer. There is a list of companies at the link (but I don't know if that is going to be...

Yesterday, I decided to take my relatively new car out for a spin. Due to a combination of ugly winter weather and health issues, I hadn't driven the car in a couple of months and wanted to give it a spin to keep its "juices" flowing. I got in the car and tried to start it. Nothing. All the symbols lit up and went nuts, but no sound of cranking. Fortunately, Ford gives new owners 5 years of Roadside Assistance. Ford's service responded quickly and professionally. The technician came prepared with a "box" to start the car in my garage....

Two recent developments—a plastic processor and printed memory—show that computing doesn't have to rely on inflexible silicon.Silicon may underpin the computers that surround us, but the rigid inflexibility of the semiconductor means it cannot reach everywhere. The first computer processor and memory chips made out of plastic semiconductors suggest that, someday, nowhere will be out of bounds for computer power. Researchers in Europe used 4,000 plastic, or organic, transistors to create the plastic microprocessor, which measures roughly two centimeters square and is built on top of flexible plastic foil. "Compared to using silicon, this has the advantage of lower price...

Very strange. Suddenly my computer is unilaterally running Utility Man and Narrator and trying to search for files and enter things all by itself. What kind of shenanigans is this? Can anyone explain. Shouldn't have a virus based on activity at all. Deleted utilman.exe and narrator from System32 folder. Still having weird things happening but attempts to access system stopped.

There is no working prototype. No video. No proof that it exists Yet NoteSlate -- a digital drawing pad, or at least the idea of one -- is burning a hole in the blogosphere. A few weeks ago, descriptions and mockups appeared online at technology news and gossip sites around the globe have written about it n at least half a dozen languages, heralding the imminent arrival of a $99 e-ink digital tablet that mimics the simplicity of old-fashioned pen and paper. NoteSlate's homepage opens with a question, handwritten in sloppy capital letters on a graphica rendering of the tablet:...

We have two desktops in our household. Just a couple of weeks ago, my wife's WinXP desktop, at that time just under 3 years old (not on warranty), started going blue screen every day at least once, always when she was using it, but you could always reboot it. I took a pic of the BSOD and emailed it to a computer service guy friend, and he said that machine was on the way out, and not worth repairing. We turned off the machine, bought a new computer, then I transferred my wife's data to the new machine. I wanted...

Steve Jobs - who is on another medical leave of absence from Apple, the company he co-founded and manages as its longtime CEO - is receiving treatment at a cancer clinic where Hollywood star Patrick Swayze was a patient in his final days. RadarOnline.com has confirmed Jobs, 55, has been attending the Stanford Cancer Center in Palo Alto, California, where Swayze sought radical chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer before his death in September, 2009. The skeletal-looking Apple boss was photographed outside the clinic in images set to be published in the next edition of The National Enquirer. In one photo, Jobs...

Obituary Ken Olsen, the founder of minicomputer and client/server company Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) died on Sunday. He was 84 years-old. Olsen started out a maverick, pioneered and drove the minicomputer and supermini revolutions, and then became a dinosaur. But unlike many other senior DEC executives he remains a much-loved and revered figure based on what he did and even taking into account what he stopped DEC from doing. His legacy lives on at HP, which bought Compaq, which bought DEC, and at Xiotech, where Steve Sicola's ISE team started at DEC. Ken Olsen was an engineer first and foremost....

Hackers have repeatedly penetrated the computer network of the company that runs the Nasdaq Stock Market during the past year, and federal investigators are trying to identify the perpetrators and their purpose, according to people familiar with the matter. The exchange's trading platform—the part of the system that executes trades—wasn't compromised, these people said. However, it couldn't be determined which other parts of Nasdaq's computer network were accessed. Investigators are considering a range of possible motives, including unlawful financial gain, theft of trade secrets and a national-security threat designed to damage the exchange. The Nasdaq situation has set off alarms...

I want to copy my 250 Gig Hard Drive to another 250 Hard Drive. I have been doing this for years with Drive Image using the 'drive copy' function in DI7. Now I get an error message "the service did not start due to a logon failure" and the drives do not show up in DI's GUI interface. I have not been able to figure how to correct this problem. I like to copy my whole HD not just make an image, that way if my drive ever fails I just pop the other drive in and I am up...

Five devices, services and trends unveiled at this year's CES that seem doomed from the start. The 2011 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas wrapped last week, and it was a doozy - unbelievably powerful new smartphones, a raft of tablets, TVs that do everything short of toweling off afterward, etc. Inevitably, though, there were some missteps. Companies large and small are pouring millions of dollars into projects that seem in serious danger of being derailed by simple mistakes -- ones that seem obvious to everyone but the people rolling them out, apparently. Here's a list of this year's foolhardiest...

I need the external HD for back up. My internal hard drive is 120 GB and I have never used half. Also, Can I back up 2 computers (about same size) with one external HD? Do they come with an and auto backup feature. Any brand recommendations or advice always appreciated.

I think that I am going to switch browsers from IE8 [since I am having an annoying little problem with it]. Will keep IE as a backup. Now, what should I use? I have heard a few nasty things about Opera, so I am considering between FireFox and Chrome. Any thoughts ???

Clink link. If you'd come today you would have reached a whole nation; Israel in 4 BC had no mass communication. Or Twitter, Facebook, Google... ...check to see what accommodations are in area... ...Joseph just bought a donkey and a cow...

Can one of you techy-types tell me how to get rid of all the crap that's collected on my computer to make it run sooooo slow and jerky? Defragging used to help, but no longer does the trick. A friend once delicately got into the 'Registry' and cleaned it up, but warned that is very tricky biz ... not for rookies. I've got a feeling it's just dragged down with blood-sucking parasites.