Recent Articles
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HVD: Coming to a Storage Device Near You
Holographic storage drives and other products based on holographic storage technology may come to market as early as this year. Tokyo-based Optware Corp. announced plans this week to create products based on its HVD (Holographic Versatile Disc) technology, first for the health care, oil and gas, and pharmaceutical markets, and eventually for the home market.…
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State of the Industry: Building the PC in 2005
Stability and Change Stability begets change. That may seem like a contradiction, especially when you’re talking about the personal computer—an ever-evolving creature. But when you think about the underlying platform, you suddenly realize how stable it’s been for years. The ATX motherboard and power supply have undergone relatively few changes since their introduction in 1995.…
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State of the Industry: Audio in 2005 and Beyond
2004 was a pretty good year for PC audio, though it wasn’t exactly chock-full of huge innovations. Creative took the Audigy 2 mobile, Turtle Beach brought out its first card in about four years, and E-MU shook things up a bit on the audio interface side. The real innovations occurred with MP3 players and subscription…
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A Linux Geek Embraces Mac OS X
I’ve always wanted a Mac. There, I said it. I’m out of my Mac closet. I’ve secretly longed for one but could never really justify buying one. OS 9 and its predecessors held no real interest for me. But when OS X—really a version of Unix under the hood—came out, suddenly the idea of buying…
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Avoiding ‘Evil Twins’ and Rogue Access Points
A whole new class of attacks is emerging to threaten Wi-Fi users. “Evil Twin” and other Wi-Fi-oriented attacks can fool users into providing confidential information or compromise their computers. Here’s the basic evil twin scenario: The attacker sits in the parking lot of a coffee house—or maybe even in the coffee house itself—with a Wi-Fi…
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The 802.11n Blues
What’s wrong with this picture? You’re offered 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi setup that’s both faster and has more range than 802.11g, is both 802.11g- and 802.11b-compatible and doesn’t interfere with conventional 802.11b/802.11g, a la Atheros Communications Inc.’s Super-G. You’d jump at this deal, right? Not so fast. Belkin Corp. is offering this deal with its Wireless…
