List of computer hardisk brand - which is better?
LaCie®
Your best source for high performance, rugged and designer style hard drives. LaCie® builds high performance storage products that are reliable and attractive additions to your buiness or home media entertainment center.
Imation® Solid State Drives from Imation® are industry leading solid state storage technology that provide an solution for drive-intensive applications and environments that experience heat and cold temperatures.
Samsung®
From optical disk drives to standard hard disk, Samsung® builds the best for desktops or mobile applications including surveillance or DVR and the large enterprise.
SimpleTech® portable hard drives that are built from recycled aluminum and bamboo offer both designer class and green storage. Find high performance read / write speeds and free online backup with purchase.
Buffalo Technology™
Award winning network storage and external hard drives offer easy file access and sharing including flash drive storage for portable secure backup.
Fujitsu Hard Drives
Enterprise class performance and capacity in a small form factor make this the choice for fire safe hard drives safes for paper business documents and removable computer media from Sentry Security group.
HP™
Data storage products, solutions and services for storage infrastructure, networking and information management.
ioSafe
Fireproof and waterproof hard drive manufacturer that offers 3.5" internal drives for computers or servers as well as USB desktop storage with RAID or a NAS storage server.
Western Digital®
Manufacturer of several brands and types of hard disk drives for the home entertainment / media server market as well as external storage
Maxtor®
From DAS (direct attached storage) to Network storage drives this division of Seagate Technology® makes some of the most reliable hard drives built for the home, office or enterprise
IBM® Storage Systems
IBM® systems provide scalable and simple data storage for better integrated infrastructures. Choose and compare blade servers or clusters that offer storage for small and large businesses that are flexible and innovative.
IOGEAR®
Pocket card readers, USB 2.0 hubs SATA hard drive enclosures for desktop solutions.
Toshiba®
Internal hard drives in a 2.5" or 1.8" form factor for consumer electronics, laptops, and portable mobile storage for mobile applications or environments.
Olixir®
Rugged external hard drives for military spec applications are the most durable and reliable disk drives for use as portable storage. With patented shock and vibration protection the drives can survive a fall or drop and now include optional encryption technology in Firewire, USB and SATA versions that are engineered for extreme heat and cold temperature and still stay operable.
Hitachi®
Offers a wide range of products in many sizes with hard drive capacity, performance and reliability.
Kanguru Portable HD
High quality, high speed hard drives work with PCs, Notebooks and Macs! Fast and affordable, Kanguru Drives are a great way to increase your computers storage capacity! Offering external hard drives, removable hard drives and even scalable storage solutions.
Apricorn Portable External Hard Drives
Rugged storage that is small enough to fit in your pocket with 1.8" external disk drives, DVD drives or portable floppy disks are high capacity and built with the latest technology.
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Windows multi-touch mouse vs Apple Magic Mouse
The best multi-touch mouse for Windows
Microsoft Touch Mouse makes navigating Windows 7 a breeze. Discover how its elegant design speeds up computing and handles everyday on-screen actions like scrolling, minimizing/maximizing, and docking with easy-to-learn finger gestures.
Features
* Enhances Windows 7 navigation
* Allows easy switching between tasks
* Easy to learn and fun to use
* Uses gestures to quickly scroll and pan, navigate, and manipulate content
* Helps you get more done in less time
Microsoft Touch Mouse enhances Windows 7
Touch Mouse brings a new dimension to Windows 7. By quickly responding to gestures, it speeds up everyday tasks that are already fast in Windows 7: scrolling, panning, paging forward and back, docking, minimizing/maximizing, showing desktop, and more.
Touch Mouse also provides elegant touch functionality to non-touch Windows 7 PCs, so you can enjoy dynamic touch sensitivity at a fraction of the cost of a new PC.
Introducing Magic Mouse. The world’s first Multi-Touch mouse.
Now included with every new iMac.
It began with iPhone. Then came iPod touch. Then MacBook Pro. Intuitive, smart, dynamic. Multi-Touch technology introduced a remarkably better way to interact with your portable devices — all using gestures. Now we’ve reached another milestone by bringing gestures to the desktop with a mouse that’s unlike anything ever before. It's called Magic Mouse. It's the world's first Multi-Touch mouse. And while it comes standard with every new iMac, you can also add it to any Mac with Bluetooth wireless technology for a Multi-Touch makeover.
Laser Tracking
Seamless Multi-Touch Surface
Magic Mouse — with its low-profile design and seamless top shell — is so sleek and dramatically different, it brings a whole new feel to the way you get around on your Mac. You can’t help but marvel at its smooth, buttonless appearance. Then you touch it and instantly appreciate how good it feels in your hand. But it’s when you start using Magic Mouse that everything comes together.
The Multi-Touch area covers the top surface of Magic Mouse, and the mouse itself is the button. Scroll in any direction with one finger, swipe through web pages and photos with two, and click and double-click anywhere. Inside Magic Mouse is a chip that tells it exactly what you want to do. Which means Magic Mouse won’t confuse a scroll with a swipe. It even knows when you’re just resting your hand on it.
Laser-Tracking Engine
Magic Mouse uses powerful laser tracking that’s far more sensitive and responsive on more surfaces than traditional optical tracking. That means it tracks with precision on nearly every surface — whether it’s a table at your favorite cafe or the desk in your home office — without the need for a mousepad.
Wireless
Magic Mouse connects to your Mac via Bluetooth wireless technology, so there’s no wire or separate adapter to worry about. Pair Magic Mouse with your Mac and enjoy a reliable and secure connection up to 33 feet away. When you combine Magic Mouse with the Apple Wireless Keyboard, you create a workspace free of annoying cables.
And because Magic Mouse is wireless, it can venture beyond the confines of your desk. A quick flick of the on/off switch helps conserve battery power while Magic Mouse is tucked in your bag. Even when it’s on, Magic Mouse manages power efficiently, by detecting periods of inactivity automatically.
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What is multi-touch technology?
What is multi-touch technology?
On touchscreen displays, multi-touch refers to the ability to simultaneously register three or more distinct positions of input touches.It is often used to describe other, more limited implementations, like Gesture-Enhanced Single-Touch, Dual-Touch or real Multi-Touch.
Multi-touch has been implemented in several different ways, depending on the size and type of interface.
From physical point of view there are:
* Resistive Touch
* Surface Capacitive Touch
* Projected Capacitive Touch (PST)
* Bending Wave Touch,
* Surface Acoustic Wave Touch (SAW),
* Infrared Touch (IR)
* Optical Touch technology.
The most popular form are mobile devices (iPhone, iPod Touch), tables (Microsoft Surface) and walls. Both touchtables and touch walls project an image through acrylic or glass, and then back-light the image with LEDs. When a finger or an object touches the surface, causing the light to scatter, the reflection is caught with sensors or cameras that send the data to software which dictates response to the touch, depending on the type of reflection measured. Touch surfaces can also be made pressure-sensitive by the addition of a pressure-sensitive coating that flexes differently depending on how firmly it is pressed, altering the reflection.Handheld technologies use a panel that carries an electrical charge. When a finger touches the screen, the touch disrupts the panel's electrical field. The disruption is registered and sent to the software, which then initiates a response to the gesture.
In the past few years, several companies have released products that use multi-touch. In an attempt to make the expensive technology more accessible, hobbyists have also published methods of constructing DIY touchscreens.
The largest Multi-Touch trackpad ever for Mac desktop computer.
Desktop users, your time has come. The new Magic Trackpad is the first Multi-Touch trackpad designed to work with your Mac desktop computer. It uses the same Multi-Touch technology you love on the MacBook Pro. And it supports a full set of gestures, giving you a whole new way to control and interact with what’s on your screen. Swiping through pages online feels just like flipping through pages in a book or magazine. And inertial scrolling makes moving up and down a page more natural than ever. Magic Trackpad connects to your Mac via Bluetooth wireless technology. Use it in place of a mouse or in conjunction with one on any Mac computer — even a notebook.
Magic Trackpad is just like the trackpad on the MacBook Pro — but bigger. It’s made with the same advanced touch-friendly and wear-resistant glass surface. But with nearly 80 percent more area, it’s the largest Multi-Touch trackpad made by Apple. So there’s even more room for you to scroll, swipe, pinch, and rotate to your fingers’ content. And since the entire surface is a button that clicks, you can use it in place of a mouse.
It fits in perfectly.
Magic Trackpad features the same sculpted aluminum design as the Apple Wireless Keyboard, and side by side the two sit flush at the same angle and height. Go from typing to gesturing in one motion, or do both at the same time. How perfect is that?
System Requirements
* Bluetooth-enabled Mac computer
* Two AA batteries (included)
* Mac OS X Snow Leopard v10.6.4 and latest software update
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Google unveils Conversation Mode for Translate app
Jacob Aron, contributor from http://www.newscientist.com
The universal translator is here - if you don't mind huddling around your phone to carry on the conversation.
English-speaking Android owners can now converse in Spanish thanks to a new version of Google's Translate app. The experimental Conversation Mode, currently only in "alpha" testing, analyses English speech and reads out a
computerised Spanish translation. Native Spanish speakers can then respond in their own language and have it converted back in to English.
A microphone button for each language makes the app extremely easy to use, and instructions are provided in both English and Spanish. You will need a data connection for the translation to work, but as long as the app has access to Google's vast computing resources you'll get the result back instantly. Be sure to speak up loud and clear, as Google product manager Awaneesh Verma warns that the app may struggle with "regional accents, background noise or rapid speech". Even perfect aural clarity won't guarantee a proper translation, since Google admits that the statistical techniques it uses aren't always accurate.
Google first demonstrated the
technology last September with a conversation in English and German but the new app only supports English and Spanish conversations for now. Don't cancel your trip to Berlin just yet though, as speech-to-speech conversion is supported from English to German, French and Italian, but since these languages currently don't work with the Conversation Mode interface your interlingual chat may be a little one-sided.
Despite these limitations, the new app suggests that we'll soon be throwing away our foreign dictionaries. The search giant is almost certainly working to add support for additional languages as part of its continuing efforts to increase the capabilities of Android phones - earlier this week it released a new version of Google Goggles that can solve Sudoku puzzles.
Google's preference for its own mobile platform also means that iPhone owners are currently limited to using the web version of Google Translate, which doesn't include Conversation Mode, but
Apple fans have their own translation tool in the form of Word Lens. While it won't help you carry on a conversation, the app does translate foreign language signs captured with your phone's camera. Even the US military is experimenting with smartphone translation, using its own TRANSTAC software. Forget the phrasebook - just take your phone.
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Apple Planning 3-D Kinect-Like Interface?
By Stuart Fox, TechNewsDaily Staff Writer
While most people only woke up to the 3-D video revolution over the course of the last year, the brains over at Apple have been working on the problem for the better part of the last decade. Last month, Apple received approval from the U.S. Patent Office on a five-year-old patent detailing how Steve Jobs and company would produce a 3-D screen that viewers could use without any glasses. Even better, the patent outlines a Kinect-like interface that allows users to control digital 3-D objects as if they existed in real space.
Apple's particular innovation involves combining those screens with a projector and a tracker. As reported elsewhere, the screen style highlighted in the patent only provide the illusion of depth when viewed at specific angles. Apple's patent shows that the device would track the location of the user, altering the image to maintain an 3-D illusion regardless of the user's position. However, according to the patent, the tracker also serves as a 3-D input for any computer, TechNewsDaily has learned. Further investigation shows that Apple's scientists also envision this system running 3-D interactive programs.
"For example, the 3-D display system can present an unobtrusive 3-D virtual desktop (not shown) to the observer in the virtual display volume. The observer is then able to manipulate objects within the desktop by reaching into the virtual display volume and 'grasping,' 'pushing,' or otherwise manipulating the virtual objects as if they were actually present (which they appear to be)," reads the patent.
"The manipulation of the virtual objects occurs because the feedback mechanism recognizes observer movements, such as finger movements, at the locations of the virtual objects and reconfigures the display of the virtual objects in response thereto."
Forget the Kinect -- the Mac brains want you reaching into your iPhone, not just sliding your fingers across it.
The screen, which Apple has not announced anything official about, uses the same trick as the Nintendo DS: lenticular 3-D. In lenticular 3-D, the screen is not a flat surface, but a series of tiny dome-shaped lenses. Two images -- a left and a right -- pass through the small lenses, and distort in a way to create the illusion of depth. Viola, 3-D without the funny-looking head gear.
However, there are some drawbacks. For one, the patent also includes an eye tracking component, which implies that only one user at a time can experience the full range of 3-D. Additionally, previous attempts at mass producing high quality lenticular screens have only worked on smaller, portable screens.
If only Apple made small, portable products with screens that users would want to interact with in 3-D. They should probably get on with developing a few of those...
Labels: Advanced news
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5 Technologies That Just Might Be Extinct By the End of 2011
By Ned Smith, BusinessNewsDaily Contributor
Remember 8-track players? Typewriters? How about dial-up modems and VHS tapes?
Relics all, they are mementos of earlier technology that time has passed by. In their day, though, each stood as a triumph of the latest, greatest technology. Do you miss them? We didn’t think so.
With that cautionary tale in mind, BusinessNewsDaily decided to cap off the year on a nostalgic note by taking a look at current technologies that are part of our daily life to see which of them might be ready to jump the shark in the near future. We turned to a number of experts in technology and came up with this highly arbitrary list of candidates for the 2011 Technology Death Pool. Let the debate begin.
Cable TV
Even when peace reigns between cable TV companies and the content providers, and we’re allowed to bask in 200-plus channels of content that ranges from the ridiculous to the sublime, we have an uneasy relationship at best with our cable providers. In most markets they have a monopoly and viewers face a take-it-or-leave-it choice. The alternative is rabbit ears and a digital converter.
Jay Levy, a principal at Zelkova Ventures, a venture capital firm with a technology bent , said the convergence of TV and the Internet is going to level the playing field in television distribution.
We’ll still have a cable leading to our homes and apartments, but it’ll be piping in the cornucopia of content that is the Internet. “People are fed up at this point,” Levy told BusinessNewsDaily. “You’ll continue to see a speeding up of convergence of TV and the computer. You have legitimate players like Apple coming after this market who want to democratize TV. People are already making the transition. I don’t think we’re going to miss anything. It’s going to be better and we’re going to be paying less. Is there anything we miss from black-and-white TV?”
Landline Telephones
POTS (plain old telephone service), with its drooping wires all over the place, is a tired old critter that deserves to be put out to pasture. That’s the sentiment, at least, of the millions of mobile users who have made their devices the telecommunications standard bearer here and abroad. Anyone with an older home who has tried to puzzle out its network of hidden telephone wires will agree that it’s time to cut the cord.
One in four households in the U.S. no longer has a landline connection and AT&T has petitioned the FCC to set a date for the extinction of landlines. Clearly, it’s technology whose time has passed. In the future, experts say, our home phone service most likely will be mobile or piped into our homes along with our Internet. The conventional justification for maintaining landlines was that you didn’t lose service if your electric power went out.
“Power outages are so infrequent that people don’t even remember them,” said Stowe Boyd, a social philosopher and webthropologist who has abandoned landlines altogether. “The younger generation will never use landlines at all.”
Laptop Computers AKA Notebooks
Laptop computers have long been a technology albatross around the road warrior’s neck. Many see them as being the worst of two worlds, trapped in limbo between powerful desktops and highly portable smartphones. Eventually, businesses will provide desktop computers in the office for productivity applications and mobile phones for workers away from their desk, said Khalid Muhammad, the Pakistan-based group managing director of the emagine group.
“With the massive growth of smartphones that do everything from taking pictures to handling MS Office documents, I don’t see people and businesses alike bothering to purchase laptops anymore,” Muhammad told BusinessNewsDaily. “As cloud computing grows more and more acceptable, more companies will start making their technologies, applications and data more mobile. Especially when you look at the massive acceptance of the iPhone and BlackBerry, people have already started to move in that direction, but the final push will be when cloud computing takes a firm hold in corporate environments.”
Hard Drives
Laptops won’t be the only casualty if the cloud establishes data storage and processing dominance. The whole idea of cloud computing drives a stake through the heart of the concept of keeping your information stored locally on a failure-prone device such as a hard drive.
“We will move everything to the cloud, with only a local cache in our PCs,” webthropologist Boyd told BusinessNewsDaily. “I don’t want to have to buy another hard drive. You’ve got to fudge around with them. It’s all bad. What if my hard disk crashed?”
And crash they do, as Boyd and legions of users know from firsthand experience.
“The only thing that saved me was my back-up cloud,” he said. “These guys are much less likely to have a catastrophic failure than I am.”
Desktop Operating System (OS)/Browser
Convergence in computing seems to be getting enough traction now to make it a real possibility rather than a pipe dream. It’s not just the convergence of TV and the Internet or the melding of devices such as the latest generation of smartphones. It’s now getting under the hood with your computer’s operating system and the browser that you use as your window to the online world. It can get confusing, even to the initiated. Take Google’s Chrome browser. The engineers in Mountain View, Calif., home of Google, are also developing an OS called Chrome. Which is which? And does it matter?
“The desktop OS will soon be replaced by a minimalistic OS, which is just a browser,” said Girish Lakshminarayana, the co-founder and chief technology officer of Klea Global, a technology firm. “The Google Chrome OS is a step in this direction. You could say this affects all the other technologies that are related to the standard desktop, including the browser and instant messenger (IM). The browser and IM will combine and will enable true real-time exchange and presence. The IM will acquire browsing capabilities. I better be right, because I have founded a company based on this theory, WebtoIM.”
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Next-Generation Intel Chips Focus on Media Processing
By Dan Hope, TechNewsDaily Staff Writer
In the era of the app, it's all about content, and Intel knows this. That's why the second generation of the Core i3, i5 and i7 processors will have a specific media processing focus, Intel says.
Intel unveiled the next generation of Core processors today, a total of 29 new chips and adapters, saying that users can expect to see up to twice the performance in graphics processing compared to the original Core processors.
The boost in performance is due to Intel's new design that puts the graphics processor and the system processor on the same chip, allowing them to share the same cache memory. This improves graphics processing for everything from gaming to YouTube videos. It's not a new concept – other processors have done the same thing – but it is a first for the Core line.
Intel is also including some new features on the Core processors. Intel Quick Sync Video will make video transcoding much faster (17 times faster than other integrated graphics processors). Intel InTru 3D will make 3-D playback possible over an HDMI connection to a TV. And WiDi 2.0 will allow the Core processors to stream full HD (1080p) video.
This is all good news for media fanatics (who isn't at this point), but it still isn't as powerful as having a discrete graphics processor. Gamers especially will still want to have a separate graphics card to handle newer games.
There are no official release announcements for computers running the new Core processors, but manufacturers are expected to announce many of them at the Consumer Electronics Show this week.
* CES 2011 Preview: Cricket Offers Unlimited Music Downloads
* CES 2011 Preview: Toshiba Tablet
* Samsung Sells 10 Million Galaxy S Smartphones Since June
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Germany plans cyber-warfare defense center
(Reuters) -
Germany will create a new cyber-warfare defense center next year to fight off espionage attacks, the German interior ministry said."We plan to create a so-called 'National Cyber-Defense Center' in 2011," a spokesman told reporters on Monday. "It will work by bundling existing know-how in the area of cyber defense."
As
computer systems become more important to control essential services, from power grids to banking, computerized attacks are seen as becoming as important a part of nations' arsenals as conventional or nuclear weaponry.
Britain announced a 650-million-pound ($1 billion) program last month, labeling cyber security a key priority despite broad cuts to government spending, including on defense.
Several Western security experts believe one computer worm, known as Stuxnet, may have been created by a national counterterrorism authority intent on crippling Iran's nuclear program by sabotaging the industrial control system at its atomic energy plant in Bushehr.
(Reporting by Rene Wagner and Christiaan Hetzner)
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