Chad’s News

The things you can do with a floppy drive stepper motor and mad programming skills.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/…
(via Neatorama)

Back in November, Chad’s News discussed the possibility of using GPUs to perform computations. Well, now it’s been done officially. According to the linked article, a PC with four graphics cards (8 GPUs total) has the computational power of 300 dual-core CPUs. This comes with a caveat, of course, as GPUs only excel at certain types of problems. But still, I think it’s a pretty impressive accomplishment.

Link: http://www.dvhardware.net/…
(via Slashdot)

Tired of solid state drives that cost way too much, but you still want the advantages of having one? The linked article tells how to make an SSD of your own for much less.

Link: http://www.engadget.com/…

Now this is -my- type of hard drive enclosure. It’s called a “stage rack.”

Link: http://www.engadget.com/…

Apparently it’s not a wise idea to be an early adopter with regards to the Blu-ray high-definition movie format. Due to competition from the HD-DVD format, the Blu-ray specification was released about a year early. Smart shoppers will wait until players are available that support “Profile 2.0″ of the spec. There’s also an intermediate step called Profile 1.1 (current players, with the exception of the PS3, support Profile 1.0).

Link: http://consumerist.com/…

Update: Ars Technica has an article that explains more about the various specifications and the players that support them.

Asus is advertising a scratch-proof monitor. One Ukranian reviewer took this claim to the extreme, going so far as to fire a crossbow bolt at the screen. The video is not in English, but it pretty much speaks for itself.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/…
(via digg)

Amazon has introduced a new e-book reader called the Kindle. It’s designed to feel more like an actual book and to be easy to use. We’ll see how popular it turns out to be, but a good sign is that they sold out in 5½ hours. The Kindle requires a wireless connection to the internet, but the $399 purchase price includes free lifetime connectivity.

UPDATE: Ars Technica has a review of the Kindle.

Link #1: http://arstechnica.com/…

Link #2: http://www.newsweek.com/…
(via Engadget)

Link #3: http://news.bbc.co.uk/…

Chad’s News has previously discussed solid state hard drives (SSDs), but this item was a surprise: BitMicro Networks announced the release of 1.6TB SSDs early next year. No price information is available, but I bet they’re expensive.

Link: http://www.computerworld.com/…
(via Slashdot)

The eRazer™ is a neat little gadget that allows one to directly erase a hard drive without involving a computer. There are several models, with options for single- or multi-pass erasure, 2.5″ or 3.5″ drives, and IDE or SATA interfaces.

Link: http://www.engadget.com/…

If you purchased a Seagate hard drive in the United States between March 22, 2001 and September 26, 2007, then you are part of a class-action settlement and can get useful stuff or money. Note that you have to have purchased the hard drive by itself—it doesn’t count if it came with a pre-built system.

Link: http://www.harddrive-settlement.com/…
(via engadget)

If you are thinking of upgrading your wireless network to the (draft) 802.11n standard, perhaps it’s time to think again. There are some problems with patent ownership that have not been resolved.

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…

Seagate has announced it will discontinue manufacturing IDE hard drives by the end of the year. The interface, also known as PATA, is losing ground to the newer, faster, and more popular SATA format.

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…