Category: Peripherals
10TB optical discs coming in the next five years
All plans for slightly bigger DVDs have been blown out of the water today with claims from a group of scientists that they can store up to 10TB of data on a single disc.
The team of egg heads from the Swinburne University of Technology, Australia, has added the dimensions of colour and light polarization and employed them to store the huge amounts of extra information. Confused? I’ll do my best to explain.
The colour is the tricky part. How can you store information in colour? I know. Weird. Well, the deal is that the surface is made of gold nanorods and these nanorods react differently to different kinds of light. Colours are, of course, different kinds of light of varying wavelengths, so you can record multiple amounts information on the same nanorods. Capiche? Yeah, bit of a mind melter.
The slightly simpler one to get your head around is the polarized light. You can filter light such that the waves are in a single unified orientation. You can then record onto the discs many time over, each time using light that is polarized in a different direction, and, between these two methods, it takes data storage into crazy land. The Aussie boffins have already been signed up by Samsung and are thought to have produced a 1.6TB version just to prove it works.
A 10TB incarnation could hold something like 300 feature films or a quarter of a million songs – something to terrify and excite pirates and record and film producers in equal measure.
Fortunately, the gold in these nanorods doesn’t seem to make this invention prohibitively expensive with each disc costing a matter of pence. What could be a problem, though, is the kind of hyper disc players we might need to decode all this light and colour nonsense and exactly how long it might take to read and write one of the things. Still, faskinating stuff.
(via PC Pro)
AMD breaks the 1GHz barrier with the ATI Radeon HD 4890
AMD seems to release a new chunk of silicon every five minutes but when they break the 1GHz barrier with a graphics card, it’s worth taking notice.
The ATI Radeon HD 4890 is the first standard air-cooled GPU to reach the clock speed milestone, nine years after they managed with CPUs, and it offers 1.6 TeraFLOPS of graphics crunching power.
AMD claims this factory over-clocked unit is 50% faster than the competition. What we do know for sure is that it’s going to make video transcoding, post processing and, of course, gaming that little bit smoother.
AMD
Mvix Nubbin – wireless-N USB adaptor for your ancient laptop
The Mivx Nubbin might not be the sexiest name for a product but when this little USB devil can give your old arse laptop the kind draft-N wireless your router’s been able to do since the Dark Ages, who cares?
Naturally, it’s backwards compatible with IEEE 802.1n draft 3.0 and IEEE 802.1b/g to suit your location and it’ll deliver up to 150Mbps speeds with just a 3/4 inch body. That makes it the smallest USB draft-N adaptor in the world today – well, at least for the next three minutes.
Yours for $39 including free postage if you happen to live in the US.
D-Link launches DIR-825 modem – aka the "route-master general"
It’s not every day I consider spending £129.99 on a wireless router but then it’s not everyday you meet the D-Link DIR-825. Naturally, we’re talking draft-N wireless here, backwards compatible with all the other standards and it goes without saying that all four of its LAN connections are gigabit Ethernet.
There’s also a gig WAN port too as well as a USB Shareport where you can plug a printer or other such device that can then be accessed wirelessly by any computer on the network. The router supports quadband wireless at 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequencies for separation of signals and an easier way to prioritise your bandwidth between simpler browsing tasks at the lower level and the likes of HD streaming at the top.
You’re getting a better penetrating and faster signal and it still manages to maintain the green standards that D-Links to have in place. It also supports the IPv6 should the rest of your equipment be sufficiently advanced. It’s available from now in the UK.
D-Link Buy it
Intel announces 'Jasper Forest' chip
Intel has just announced a new chip based on its Nehalem-EP architecture called “Jasper Forest”. It’s aimed at storage products and embedded applications and the I/O hub has been integrated right onto the chip.
Jasper Forest is named after a petrified forest in Arizona, pictured above. Intel often names its chips after geographical locations, with Nehalem named after an Oregon-based tribe of American indians.
(via Macworld UK)
ATI unleashes the Radeon HD 4890
AMD has just dropped us word of their latest graphics card release, the ATI Radeon HD 4890, which they’re claiming is the most powerful graphics processor in the world.
The beast runs at 850MHz, has 1.36 TeraFLOPs of processing power, as well as 1GB of GDDR5 memory and the functionality to cram four of these things in the same machine, using ATI’s Crossfire technology.
It’s notably faster than its predecessor, the HD4870, but slower than the dual core X2 variant. Pricing reflects that, with the card retailing between £185 and £200. It’s not a massive leap, just an evolution of existing cards, but it’s certainly a solid upgrade if you’re running a graphics card that’s a couple of years old.
ATI Press Kit
SHINY VIDEO REVIEW: Logitech G13 Gameboard
Gaming peripherals usually fall into one of two categories – useless or ridiculous. Sometimes both, but there isn’t often something that’s both sensible and useful. That’s why I was mildly startled by the G13, which does what it does very well, and doesn’t look like it was designed by a moron on acid.
Unfortunately, you pay through the nose for that kind of quality. £75’s worth of nose, to be prescise. Competing products, despite not being quite as good, are less than half that price. Perhaps in a few months it’ll cheapen down a bit. I’ll be waiting patiently until then before I make a purchase.
Microsoft notebook Cooling Base and extra Arc Mice colours
It’s all very well having the Xbox but, what with the notebook market currently under explosion, you can understand why Microsoft might not be feeling the love in the PC hardware market.
So, today, they set aside their Lifecams and announce a slightly pointless laptop cooling station for the price of $29.95…
GALLERY: HP bosses to product team: "Release the mice!"
In a dark castle, somewhere in deepest Transylvania, HP’s bosses squint into a crystal ball. “What do you see?” says one. “Everyone’s in Barcelona at MWC” comes the reply. “Ah! So the last thing anyone would expect is for us to release five different mice and a webcam, with some targeted towards women!”.
Joking aside, here we’ve got four mice, a mouse-and-keyboard combo, and a webcam. They run the gamut of target audiences, from gamers to girls (not that two audiences can’t overlap) and they all look pretty, so I’ve stuck them in the gallery. Click on the flowery number below to begin.
D-Link opens up home Big Brother options with its DCS-910 and DCS-2121 wireless network cameras
D-Link has invented a niche it’s calling the “home security market” – and has released a couple of webcams to help you discover who it is that’s eating all the biscuits.
The DCS-2121 Megapixel Wireless Network Camera is the hottest of the pair, coming fully loaded up with wi-fi connectivity…
