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60 gigabytes. Never had problems with it. Yesterday Windows XP froze a few times. Then the computer refused to boot up again. Boot sector wiped out? I can deal with that! I then installed this drive as a slave and it wasn't recognized... was invisible. With Partition Magic this hard drive shows up as 60 gig of (exact words) unallocated space. It had 3 partitions which are now all gone. I used the Western Digital Utilities and the hard drive checks out as being in good shape. No errors. I was using Norton Anti Virus. Using a firewall on a...

Man AdTI Hired to Compare Minix/Linux Found No Copied Code Thursday, May 27 2004 @ 05:01 PM EDT Andrew Tanenbaum has published the most remarkable email from the man hired by Ken Brown to do a line-by-line comparison of Minix and Linux, Alexey Toptygin, who summarizes his findings and posts them on the Internet: "Around the middle of April, I was contacted by a friend of mine who asked me if I wanted to do some code analysis on a consultancy basis for his boss, Ken Brown. I ended up doing about 10 hours of work, comparing early versions...

The way the music dies Tanyia Johnson and Steven Neuman Illustrators CD rot renders compact discs unreadable, causing users to lose data permanently By Steven Neuman News Reporter May 21, 2004 They were supposed to last for 100 years. They were supposed to become family heirlooms, allowing home movies and pictures to literally defy time and keep memories as fresh as the day they were made. But the compact disc, as it turns out, may not exactly last forever. In fact, some CDs undergo "CD rot," the slow, gradual destruction of the data they contain. In manufactured CDs, the...

Firm is competing for the $10 million X Prize Aircraft designer Burt Rutan and his firm Scaled Composites took a giant leap early Thursday toward becoming the first private company to send a person into space. Scaled Composites, funded by Microsoft co-founder and billionaire Paul Allen, set a new civilian altitude record of 40 miles in a craft called SpaceShipOne during a test flight above California's Mojave Desert. The firm is one of 24 companies from several countries competing for the X Prize, which will go to the first privately funded group to send three people on a 62.5-mile-high suborbital...

Thunder, a supercomputer recently installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is possibly the second-most powerful computing machine on the planet--and it was built by a company with about as many employees as a real estate office. California Digital, a 55-person company located on the outskirts of Silicon Valley, created Thunder from 1,024 four-processor Itanium 2 servers to perform a variety of tasks at the lab. Capable of churning 19.94 trillion operations per second, it would have ranked second in the Top 500 list of supercomputers published bi-annually by the University of Mannheim, the University of Tennessee and Lawrence Berkeley National...

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A laser beam under joint Israeli-U.S. development destroyed a long-range rocket for the first time in a test in the skies over the American Southwest, Israel's Defense Ministry said on Friday. Israel has sought an effective defense against ballistic missiles since 1991 when Iraq launched Scuds into the Jewish state during the first Gulf War. It has since developed the Arrow anti-ballistic missile with U.S. funding. "This is a significant step forward," a ministry spokesman said of the test on May 4 of the "Nautilus" Mobile Tactical High Energy Laser (MTHEL) held at the White Sands Missile...

greg_barton writes "At first I thought this was a joke, but this article from Microsoft Watch confirms it: 'Microsoft is expected to recommend that the 'average' Longhorn PC feature a dual-core CPU running at 4 to 6GHz; a minimum of 2 gigs of RAM; up to a terabyte of storage; a 1 Gbit, built-in, Ethernet-wired port and an 802.11g wireless link; and a graphics processor that runs three times faster than those on the market today.'"

APRIL 29, 2004 Speed Bump While Moore's Law Isn't About to be Repealed Soon, We Might See It Slowing Down a Little By Robert X. Cringely The only certainty in the computer industry for the last 30 years has been Moore's Law, which says that computing power doubles every 18 months. From time to time, it looks like Gordon Moore is going to be repealed by some technical limitation, then clever engineers think of a dodge, and we're safe for a few more years. While Moore's Law probably won't go on forever, we are certainly safe through at least the...

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - In a sign that demand is growing for alternatives to Microsoft Corp.'s Windows software, Red Hat Inc. will release a version of the Linux operating system and other programs tailored for desktop computers in corporations, universities and government agencies. Red Hat Desktop, announced Tuesday in London, will be targeted at organizations that are looking to upgrade their PCs but don't want or need all the features that ship with the latest version of Windows, said Matthew Szulik, Red Hat's chief executive."These organizations now, for the very first time, have an alternative to the historical Microsoft-desktop...

The open-source Linux operating system is just one of several choices for desktop computers, enterprise servers and other common implementations. Sometimes it is chosen, but often it is not. But at the high end of the computational power range -- in supercomputers built by national laboratories, NASA or the Defense Department from clusters of processors -- Linux is rapidly gaining ground on Unix as the operating system of choice.

On May 1, 1964, the BASIC computer programing language was born and for the first time computers were taken out of the lab and brought into the community.     Forty years later pure BASIC -- Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code -- has all but disappeared, but its legacy lives on.     "This is the birth of personal computing," said Arthur Luehrmann, a former Dartmouth physics professor who is writing a book about BASIC's development at the university. "It was personal computing before people knew what personal computing was."     Paul Vick, a senior developer at Microsoft, said his company owes...

IBM plans today to announce new server computers that behave more like mainframes and are priced as low as $1,500.The servers will be able to run as many as 10 operating systems on a single machine. One processor can divvy up the workload — packing the capability of several machines into one — by building several virtual machines that run on the underlying hardware. It is a technology that has existed for decades in the mainframe market long ruled by IBM.The first of the server computers, which uses IBM's virtualization engine technology, will begin shipping next month, and the prices...

One way to make solar cells more efficient is to find a material that will capture energy from a large portion of the spectrum of sunlight -- from infrared to visible light to ultraviolet. Energy transfers from photons to a photovoltaic material when the material absorbs lightwaves that contain the same amount of energy as its bandgap. A bandgap is the energy required to push an electron from a material's valence band to the conduction band where electrons are free to flow. The trouble is, most photovoltaic materials absorb a relatively narrow range of light energy. The most efficient silicon...

A serious problem with the most commonly used internet communications protocol has been revealed by computer experts. Experts say the flaw in the Transmission Control Protocol (TPC) could be used to knock out many brands of router - the machines that direct traffic between computer networks on the internet.Details were revealed in an advisory issued by the UK government's National Infrastructure Security Co-Ordination Centre (NISCOC) on Tuesday. The advisory rates the issue as "critical" but states that different hardware and software will be affected to different degrees. Roger Cumming, director of NISCOC says exploitation of this vulnerability could affect the...

<p>Back in 1992, when "yahoo" was something cowboys yelled and "ebay" was just pig Latin, the University of Minnesota developed a new way of looking at data on the Internet. Their protocol, called "gopher" after the UMN mascot, allowed archivists to present the mishmash of information in a standard format, and enabled readers to navigate documents on a world of servers using a simple visual interface.</p>

Almost three quarters of office workers in an impromptu man-on-the-street survey were willing to give up their passwords when offered the bribe of a chocolate bar. The organizers of the conference Infosecurity Europe 2004 plans to announce on Tuesday that they surveyed office workers at Liverpool Street Station in England, and found that 71 percent were willing to part with their password for a chocolate bar. The survey also found the majority of workers would take confidential information with them when they change jobs, and would not keep salary details confidential if they came across the details. Some 37 percent...

The inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, has won a prestigious award which comes with a prize bag of one million euros (£671,000). The "Father of the Web" was named as the first winner of the Millennium Technology Prize by the Finnish Technology Award Foundation.In 1991, he came up with a system to organise, link and browse net pages which revolutionised the internet.The British scientist was knighted for his pioneering work in 2003.Modest manSir Tim created his hypertext program while he was at the particle physics institute, Cern, in Geneva. The computer code he came up with let...

Software warfare TECHNOLOGY REPORTER When Corel Corp. of Ottawa shipped its first and only Linux operating system back in 1999, it was in the unusual position of having an award-winning PC product that attracted more praise than purchase orders.Observers liked the idea of challenging Microsoft Corp. and the overwhelming dominance of its Windows desktop system, but many dismissed Corel's move as well-intentioned lunacy. The dominance of Windows left Linux challengers reluctant to enter the ring, let alone take a jab at the Redmond titan.No surprise, Corel threw in the towel in 2001 and sold off its Linux operations.Three years later,...

Frank Hayes' fears about techies bailing out of a declining American IT workforce are already being realized ["ITAA's Job Dream"]. I've done it. I concluded that IT is largely a dead-end career for Americans and opted out so that my wife could pursue advanced degrees in education and move up in a field that can't be so readily outsourced or filled by guest workers. I rebelled at my former employer's "wage compression," outsourcing and use of H-1B and L-1 visa holders. One year ago, I resigned my IT job at NCR Corp., a Fortune 500 company based in Dayton, Ohio,...

At the heart of semiconductor fabrication are crucial additives called dopants. These impurities change the electronic properties of silicon or other material to make the transistors and other components of a chip. Currently these dopants are added in bulk, their exact location usually no more a problem than the exact location of grains of baking soda or raisins stirred into cake batter. But as electronic devices shrink - and the hope is to get them down to the size of a molecule - serious problems with doping are expected. At that small a scale, the location of a needed doping...