Category Archives: Tech

Technology in general

Flash drive revolution makes hard disks obsolete

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Sony unveils Flash-based UMPC | Reg Hardware

As flash drives have gotten bigger, faster and more reliable, they have slowly been taking the place of traditional magnetic and optical storage media. This has set the stage for a storage revolution that is already well underway. Last month, Samsung announced that they would be releasing a laptop and UMPC device each fitted with a 32GB flash drive instead of a hard disk. Not to be outdone, Sony announced a similar configuration for it’s latest line of UMPC, the VAIO UX. It will take some time before flash devices can fully replace traditional hard disks, but at the rate storage has been increasing, it probably won’t be long.

America, the surveilance society

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With the revelation of yet another secret government spy program, it should be more obvious than ever that we are living in a surveilance society on the edge of becoming a police state. Last month USA Today ran a front page story on the NSA, revealing the agency was sifting through phone logs and internet traffic of millions of American citizens. This latest revelation by the New York Times has equally troubling constitutional implications. At the same time, it has been reported (here and here) that local police and the federal government (including the FBI, DHS and DOJ) have sidestepped legal warrants in favor of private data brokers, many of which use pretexting to illegally obtain personal information. Congress has had hearings on all of these issues with little to no actual progress. This has been due to the administration and their supporters blocking attempts to pry into the details of these programs. The one exception to this has been the use of data brokers, to which most of those interviewed have been fairly forthcoming. Even so, I can’t help but feel that one day soon, we may here the words “papers, please” on our way to work. Alles klar, herr komisar?

CD/DVD burning on the cheap

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From the beginning, one of the key elements to my high-def HTPC was the ability to write recorded shows to DVD. I didn’t include this functionality into my HTPC until recently. With the price of decent DVD burners dropping into the $35 range, there’s really no excuse not to have one. (In my case, newegg sweetened the deal by offering a 50-pack of RiData DVD+R discs for only $9) Since Windows XP has native CD burning capabilities, I wondered if it would burn DVDs as well. (it doesn’t) Not wanting to buy another full-featured DVD burning product, I did a quick search on the web and downloaded a few promising titles. One that turned out to be amazingly good was CDBurner XP Pro. This program is totally free, but has more features than many titles costing upwards of $40. Not only that, but it’s easy to use as well. If you’re building a new system, or just looking for a replacement to your old burning software, give this title a try. If you like it, consider sending the developers a donation too..