Computerworld: Lucas Mearian

Google Drive updates Android UI, adds document scanning

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Wed, 22 May 2013 19:54:00 GMT

Google's Drive cloud storage service has been retooled for Android users and is now capable of capturing a document by converting a photo of it to text.

Western Digital releases its first 1.5TB mobile drive

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Tue, 21 May 2013 10:01:00 GMT

HGST has announced its highest capacity 9.5mm-high mobile drive, a 1.5TB, three-platter model that is being targeted at the "prosumer" market.

House bill would mandate guns with 007-style smart tech

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Tue, 21 May 2013 09:06:00 GMT

Inspired by the latest James Bond film, a House Democrat has filed legislation that would require all U.S. gun manufacturers to build smart technology into handguns to keep unauthorized people from using them.

Review: StarTech's flash drive duplicator, eraser is fast and simple

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Mon, 20 May 2013 16:28:00 GMT

The 1-to-2 Flash Drive duplicator transfers data at up to 1.5GB per minute and like StarTech's hard drive duplicator, it's remarkably simple to use.

How to keep the feds from snooping on your cloud data

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Thu, 16 May 2013 09:49:00 GMT

A growing number of SaaS providers offer secure encryption log-in to Dropbox and other cloud storage vendors, meaning even they can't access the data you store. And neither can the government.

VMware launches dual persona feature for Verizon smart phones

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Wed, 15 May 2013 12:06:00 GMT

Through a deal with Verizon, VMware is going to offer the ability for employees to download a app that allows their companies to run a standardized corporate version of Android OS on their phones along side their personal version.

Google triples free storage to 15GB

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Mon, 13 May 2013 19:03:00 GMT

Google said it is increasing the amount of free storage for users of its Google Drive cloud storage service to 15 GB.

When cars talk, this is what they'll tell each other

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Fri, 10 May 2013 09:56:00 GMT

Researchers at Intel and National Taiwan University are developing technology that allows cars to exchange data, a move that could make roads safer and give drivers a street-wise perspective on those around them.

3D-printed gun maker ordered to take down blueprints

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Thu, 09 May 2013 22:13:00 GMT

The U.S. Department of Defense Trade Controls has apparently ordered Defense Distributed to removed the blueprints for a 3D printable gun from its website.

Western Digital and SanDisk deliver their first hybrid drive

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Thu, 09 May 2013 18:25:00 GMT

Western Digital has unveiled more information on its first hybrid solid-state drive, revealing that it worked with SanDisk to create the 500GB drive.

EMC lays off more than 1,000 as restructuring continues

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Wed, 08 May 2013 19:08:00 GMT

As part of its ongoing restructuring, EMC today announced its latest round of layoffs, which are expected to include 1,004 positions.

Seagate unleashes first consumer SSD; enterprise version gets blazing fast 12Gbps SAS connectivity

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Tue, 07 May 2013 16:59:00 GMT

Seagate Technology today announced its new portfolio of flash-memory devices, taking the wraps off its first consumer SSD and its next generation of enterprise models.

HIPAA rules, outdated tech cost U.S. hospitals $8.3B a year

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Tue, 07 May 2013 09:23:00 GMT

HIPAA, along with outmoded communications technology, reduces the time available for patient care, according to a new survey of healthcare professionals.

It works! First 3D-printed gun test-fired

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Mon, 06 May 2013 16:57:00 GMT

The company that produces a 3D-printable gun successfully test-fired the weapon today, demonstrating the viability of the technology that could allow anyone with a printer and special resin toner to make their own weapons.

Harvard aims to help developers make cheaper solar panels

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Mon, 06 May 2013 10:00:00 GMT

Hoping to usher in an age of low-cost solar power, Harvard's Clean Energy Project in June plans to release a list of 20,000 organic compounds that could be used to make cheap, printable photovoltaic cells.

Here's why new car tech is four years out of date

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Mon, 06 May 2013 09:20:00 GMT

You'd expect a $35,000 car to have technology at least as good as a $200 smartphone, but it often doesn't. Although the auto industry has been slow to keep up with tech trends, that may soon change.

BYOD, or else. Companies will soon require that workers use their own smartphone on the job

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Wed, 01 May 2013 19:59:00 GMT

A Gartner study released today predicts that by 2017, half of all companies will require employees to bring their own smartphones for work purposes.

Action! Big Blue enters film biz with atomic movie

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Wed, 01 May 2013 15:22:00 GMT

IBM enters Guinness Book with world's smallest stop-motion movie made with atoms.

Samsung builds chips to supercharge your smartphone

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 17:13:00 GMT

Samsung began production of the industry's first ultra-high-speed, 4Gbit, LPDDR3 mobile memory, which it says has performance levels comparable to the standard DRAM used in personal computers.

BYOD worries in mind, Novell and NTP bust out secure mobile file sharing

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 10:00:00 GMT

Novell and NTP today announced their own versions of mobile file-sharing applications, both of which take advantage of a corporation's existing infrastructure to offer access to data behind the firewall.

Sandy begets tree-hugging companies

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 09:48:00 GMT

Severe weather shifts are forcing companies to rethink their energy strategies; they're using both technology and geography to become more energy independent.

Smart gun company aims to begin production soon

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 09:46:00 GMT

Smart gun company SGTi is ready to begin production of a new prototype technology that would use a fingerprint scanner to enable a weapon to fire. But like similar ventures, the company is struggling for financial backing.

How big data will save your life

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 10:07:00 GMT

Big data analytics is creating a world where doctors will eventually be able to do a Google-like query on a patients illness and instantly discover how 100,000 other doctors treated their patients. It's also driving new treatments through genomic profiling.

Cisco's new director-class storage switch boosts throughput 6X

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 17:23:00 GMT

Cisco's new director-class switch for storage, unveiled today, increases throughput six-fold and offers N+1 resilience.

WD shrinks laptop drives to just 5mm thick

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 18:11:00 GMT

Western Digital is now shipping what it said is the world's first 2.5-inch, 5mm hard drives and solid-state hybrid drives (SSHDs) for use in ultra-slim notebooks.

Next-gen USB SuperSpeed to eliminate power cords

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 09:41:00 GMT

USB SuperSpeed will move from 5Gbps bandwidth to 10Gbps in the coming year, but it's also leaping from 10 watts to 100 watts for charging, which could power monitors and even HDTVs.

National Digital Public Library launches

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 20:42:00 GMT

The new National Digital Public Library will initially contain 2.4 million digital records, including historical images, video and audio that had previously been siloed in public and private institutions.

Harvard global grid computing project will help create printable solar cells

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 20:36:00 GMT

Harvards Clean Energy Project is conducting a study on millions of potential chemical structures and has identified next-generation organic solar cell material.

IBM to invest $1B in flash memory development

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 21:12:00 GMT

After its buyout of Texas Memory Systems, IBM is now the latest on the vendor bandwagon to push flash into the data centers, saying it will invest a whopping $1 billion into flash research.

Samsung hits high gear, rolls out densest flash chip

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 19:23:00 GMT

Samsung today announced it is now mass-producing a 3-bit per cell, sub-20 nanometer class NAND flash chip that is the densest memory to date.

STORServer enters cloud business

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 20:00:00 GMT

STORServer, a maker of backup appliances, announced private and public cloud backup services.

More than 6 out of 10 companies approve of personal device use for work

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 21:39:00 GMT

CompTIA's second annual Trends in Mobility study found that 64% of companies allow, or mandate, the use of employee-owned devices, with most stating that improving productivity is the main driver.

WD releases its first 12Gbps SAS SSDs

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:00:00 GMT

WD subsidiary HGST today released the its first 12Gbps SAS and Fibre Channel SSD line, which sport top speeds of 1,200MB/s.

Fusion-io releases 1.6TB flash card, HP preps workstations for them

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 17:22:00 GMT

Fusion-io announced a flash module for workstations that has more than three times the capacity of its previous model, and for the first time Hewlett-Packard is preparing to ship workstations with the drives.

Nanowires could boost energy in solar cells by 15x

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 10:00:00 GMT

Building solar voltaic cells from nanowires instead of standard metal conductors can increase the amount of energy that can be captured by a factor of 15, according to a new study by scientists from the Nano-Science Center in Denmark.

Non-volatile DIMM cards coming soon to a server and array near you

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 19:01:00 GMT

Viking and Micron plan to begin shipping forms of non-volatile DRAM on standard DDR4 DIMMs this summer. The cards combine DRAM with a NAND flash backup that speeds recovery and can be used as a tier of storage in a server.

Employees still use online file sharing, even if companies prohibit its use

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 13:40:00 GMT

While most corporations have strict policies against using consumer-class file sharing and collaboration services because they are not secure, employees still regularly use them because they are convenient and easy to use, a survey finds

Know the key legal and security risks in a cloud-computing contract

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 19:11:00 GMT

Youre no longer in control of your data once you hand it over to a cloud storage provider, but youre legally still responsible for it. Knowing whats in your cloud-provider contract is critical, says tech attorney Milton Petersen.

Project stores 3D images of world historic sites in limestone mine

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 14:25:00 GMT

The nonprofit organization CyArk creates 3D digital images of the world's historic sites, but stores them on disk drives dropped each week into a bank security box. As the data is expected to grow to two petabytes over the next five years, the group chose a new archival strategy that includes stashing tape drives in a limestone mine storage facility owned by Iron Mountain.

New Hybrid Memory Cube spec to boost DRAM bandwidth by 15X

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 11:07:00 GMT

The three largest memory makers announced the final specifications for three-dimensional DRAM, which is aimed at increasing performance for networking and high performance computing markets.

Seagate Wireless Plus review: A terabyte of mobile wireless storage

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 10:00:00 GMT

Seagate's Wireless Plus drive offers a terabyte of storage and a way to stash your videos, photos, music and documents or wirelessly stream them to your mobile devices.

New Hybrid Memory Cube spec to boost DRAM bandwidth by 15x

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 04:01:00 GMT

A consortium of 100 vendors will publish a new 3D DRAM spec that by next year will offer data rate speeds of up to 28Gbps for FPGAs, ASICs and ASSPs.

Dell consolidates, plans unified software and all-flash arrays

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 10:00:00 GMT

In the midst of going private, Dell executives said today they've already consolidated their three storage product divisions into one, they are working on merging their system management interfaces, and they have a number of new products coming out over the next year.

Samsung uses Qi charging for Galaxy S4, but sees A4WP as the future

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 09:29:00 GMT

While Samsung's latest smartphone, the Galaxy S4, uses the Qi standard for wireless charging, the company will continue to push the Alliance for Wireless Power's specification as the future standard for mobile devices.

DreamWorks tops compute-cycle record with 'The Croods'

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 10:00:00 GMT

"The Croods" is the most sophisticated 3D film to date from DreamWorks, having taken 15 million more compute hours to render and 250TB of storage to make

Nanowires could boost solar power 15X

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 17:24:00 GMT

A single nanowire can capture 15 times more energy from the sun than standard metal conductors, according to scientists from the Nano-Science Center at the Niels Bohr Institut, Denmark.

Apple leads consumer cloud storage wars

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:14:00 GMT

Apple is dominating the cloud storage wars, followed by Dropbox, Amazon and Google according to Strategy Analytics "Cloud Media Services" survey.

How big is the sound of music?

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 10:00:00 GMT

Music fans and major recording artists are adopting lossless audio file formats to keep copies of their music that are as close to master recordings as possible, leading to multi-terabyte-sized home music storage systems.

WebMD, Qualcomm build consumer cloud for mobile health data

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 19:14:00 GMT

WebMD and Qualcomm Life are collaborating on a cloud offering that will allow consumers with mobile health monitoring devices to sync their data to the cloud, where it can be shared with healthcare providers.

House to meet on regulating mobile health apps

lmearian@computerworld.com (Lucas Mearian) — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 17:53:00 GMT

A House committee this week is meeting to determine whether regulations, including a possible tax on mobile health apps may stifle innovation in healthcare.