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Seagate Delivers New Family Of Barracuda Drives

Seagate announced the availability of its Barracuda 7200.9 family of internal hard drives to the worldwide distribution channel. Targeted at low-cost and Serial ATA (SATA) servers, mainstream and high-performance PCs, PC gaming systems and media PCs, the new Barracuda 7200.9 family combines up to a massive half-terabyte capacity with fast 3Gbit/second Serial ATA throughput and leading-edge storage technologies such as Native Command Queuing (NCQ) to deliver the industry’s highest levels of performance and reliability.

Seagate NCQ provides a number of advanced capabilities such as command reordering, first-party DMA, interrupt aggregation and race-free status return for
multi-user system builders needing enhanced system-level performance for applications with transactional workloads. With Barracuda 7200.9, Seagate is the only hard drive maker to offer 3Gbit/second SATA with NCQ across all capacities, from 80GB to half terabyte.

Seagate’s Barracuda 7200.9 3Gbit/second SATA disc drive family delivers the high capacity, performance and reliability and great value that system builders need for single-user systems such as media, gaming, high-end workstations and consumer PCs. Barracuda 7200.9 also meets the high throughput and low cost-per-gigabyte requirements of builders of multi-user systems such as low-cost and SATA servers for small offices. To simplify integration, Barracuda 7200.9 automatically configures the drive to either new 3Gbit/second or legacy 1.5Gbit/second SATA systems.

Barracuda 7200.9 drives also improve system data and hardware reliability through enhanced CRC data protection, the latest latching cables and snap-in connectors, and thin cables for improved cooling. All the drives are backed by Seagate’s industry-leading 5-year warranty.

At 3Gbit/second, the Barracuda 7200.9 internal disc drives double the throughput of first-generation SATA drives. The world’s only ninth-generation family of 7200-RPM disc drives for desktop PCs also delivers up to 16 Mbytes of cache for high performance and the quietest operation in a PC hard drive.

All Barracuda 7200.9 SATA drives adhere to the latest Serial ATA 2.5 specification. Serial ATA 2.5 integrates Serial ATA 1.0, all the optional advanced specifications and years of errata into a single document.

Source: SP

The Japanese Will Try to Impose an iPod Tax

What good is a company’s success for, if there aren’t any third party companies to want as much profit as possible?

Apple has succeeded to impose an unbeatable music distribution system, not to mention the iconic player. Still, why shouldn’t there be others to take advantage of this situation as well?

In the US, the music companies are trying, by any means possible, to increase the price for digital music downloads. But the Japanese have another approach, that of installing an “iPod fee.”

Several officials from the Japanese music industry have asked the government to adopt a tax which will be added to the digital music players’ selling price. The money obtained from this tax, appraised at 2-5% of the retail price, is to be divided between production studios, composers and artists. Allegedly, the money represents the losses caused by the illegal duplication of the music files.

It’s worth mentioning that this compensatory system has been active in Europe for almost 40 years, Germany being the first country to adopt it for the stereo players with recording capabilities. Since then, almost every European country has adopted its own compensatory system.

Source: SP

iPod Linux !

Well, if you own a first-generation (1G), second-generation (2G), or third-generation (3G) iPod, you can already do all those things. The only thing holding your iPod back is its firmware.

To unlock your iPod’s full potential, you’ll need to install the iPodLinux operating system on your player. The iPod Linux Project is an ever-evolving, community-developed assortment of applications, games, and other goodies that run on the iPodLinux operating system.

In short, the iPodLinux OS will turn your iPod into a dual-boot entertainment center packed with video, audio, games, and other apps. There are stable versions of iPodLinux available for first- (1G), second- (2G), and third-generation (3G) iPods. Versions also exist for the iPod Mini and fourth-generation iPods, but both are development versions, and they aren’t supported by the iPod Linux Project.

Motorola Razr V3x

Microsoft to Test New Hotmail Interface

Microsoft is preparing to publicly test its new front end Hotmail, code-named “Kahuna” and simply branded: Mail Beta. The upgrade will support an AJAX-based interface that has been rewritten from the ground up using Microsoft’s Atlas framework and a new architecture known as FireAnt.

Explaining the new Mail Beta, program manager Imran Qureshi said, “Some would call it a blank slate I guess. When we asked customers what they wanted the main theme was clear: Make it faster, make it simpler and make it safer. It couldn’t have been clearer.” Interested Hotmail users can now sign up for the Mail Beta test.

Source: BN