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Sanyo's New High-Power Blu-ray Laser Will Burn 100GB Discs at 12x, Someday
Posted by John Mahoney at 5:15 AM on October 7, 2008
Even though the blank media companies have been touting 200GB Blu-ray discs for years, mostly as part of the psy-ops war against HD-DVD, the largest discs today's players and burners can handle are dual-layer 50GB blanks that burn at up to 8x. A new 450 mw blue laser diode unveiled by Sanyo, however, will enable players to read and burn four-layer 100GB discs at up to 12x speeds. Actual drives with the new laser are still probably a year or two away. [Computerworld]
To the modern modder, the NES cartridge is 
BusinessWeek reports that counterfeit hardware has been found to be the cause of several malfunctions in high-level military machinery. The phony infiltration has a distinct possibility of leading to espionage or sabotage. In other words, move over, 
AMD has confirmed rumours that it is working on DirectX 11, announcing at CEATEC that it plans to release its first DirectX 11-compatible GPUs in 2009. The company also predicted an increase in general purpose computing on GPUs (GPGPU) and a transition to a 40nm fabricating standard, which ought to give graphics chip performance rates a considerable boost. In layman terms: Things are about to get a lot bigger and a lot prettier. [
D-Link announced a new router yesterday which sounds a lot like other flagship home routers that have already hit market: The $US200 DIR-825 is dual-band 2.4GHz and 5GHz N plus Gigabit ethernet. These are all great features, but the surprising one is that the USB port in the back uses a new protocol that lets networked PCs treat it as a local USB port, even if they're all the way across the house. The good news for your broke arse is, if you have one of several D-Link routers listed below, you can inject your router's USB port with the same virtual connectivity... for free.
If you're working at Dunder-Mifflin and you're lifting a highlighter or two every now and then, Michael may feign disapproval, but that's about it. On the other side of the coin is Victor Papagno, a sysadmin for the US Naval Research Laboratory, who was recently busted for jacking over 20,000 pieces of gear worth $US120,000--from ink cartridges to hard drives to software--over the course of 10 years.
You probably won't remember the WRT610N router from Linksys - even 
We've already seen the SpursEngine teased in laptops, but Toshiba is becoming vocal about bringing the SpursEngine—the same technology found in the PlayStation 3 Cell processor—to standalone video cards in 4-core configuration. The first will come from Leadtek later this month for $US286, a 128MB card that can fit into a small form PC, and it will be followed in November by Thomson cards that will start in the high $US300s. SpursEngine cards have built-in MPEG2 and H.264 codecs which equal smooth video playback and the ability to uprez SD content on the fly. And at least Leadtek's offering sounds like a solid alternative to small media PC packed with integrated graphics. [
Broadcom already makes a boatload of the GPS chips found in mobile phones and other location-aware gadgets, and now they're adding Skyhook's Wi-Fi positioning service to most of their mobile Wi-Fi chipsets, spreading the location-based love even without GPS. This is how iPhone regular finds your location in addition to using nearby cell towers (Skyhook IDs your position by comparing to those of known hotspot SSIDs in the vicinity), so look for even more location-based services coming to more phones in the future. [
TDK has announced a new hard drive at CEATEC that manages to fit 260 GB of data into a 1.8-inch form factor. Using their prototype TMR head, TDK is able to attain a surface recording density of 803 gigabits per square inch, besting Toshiba's previous 378 gigabits per square inch. The leap was possible by combining the TMR head with recent perpendicular magnetic recording techniques, and TDK personnel still think its possible to reach 1 terabit per square inch. [
Sound the alarm for hard disks—it looks like solid state drive prices have plunged enough to finally jump out of early adopter territory. California-based flash memory maker Super Talent is now offering a 128GB SSD for $US300 retail. That's $US150 cheaper than a 
Samsung released a video in which members of their staff threw an SSD off a three story building and then plugged it into a laptop, where it was operational. Though the computer screen at the end of the video gets washed out, you barely makeout the Windows XP desktop. Naysayers and skeptics should also note that once the SSD was thrown off the building, the video was never cut. Not too shabby. [
Slowly but surely we're seeing Wireless-N Wi-Fi become more established in the marketplace, and it's a good sign to see Netgear refreshing their line. Their new WNR2000 ($US89) is a standard N router and the DGN2000 ($US119) is the same router with a built-in DSL modem. Both systems feature Netgear's password-less Push 'N' Connect service along with more expensive kit bundle options that include USB Wireless-N dongle to upgrade older systems. And both units are available now. Read on for the full press release version of what we just said.
There are plenty of dual-hard-drive outboard storage systems on the market, but SimpleTech's Duo Pro struck me as particularly brimming with awesomeness. It's not a NAS—it's totally local—but you have a choice of USB 2.0, FireWire 400 and 800, and eSATA, which clocks a max transfer speed of 3Gb per second. (That's gigabits, not gigabytes.) You can naturally do RAID 0 or 1, and though the current options are a 1TB total for $US280, a 1.5TB total for $US420 and a 2TB version for $US550, you will be able to choose a 3TB config when the winter winds start to blow. Have a look at the back of this in the photo below the jump. [
Hackaday's running a cute little electronics project at the mo (well, if you think electronics can be cute) which shows you how to build a fully working web server on a circuit board no bigger than a business card, in plan at least. It's capable of serving up web pages and files and instead of using tricky-to-access EEPROMs it runs from code stored on a FAT-formatted SD card—easily accessible by PC. Check it out: it's pretty fascinating, and is a project you can follow...assuming you're darn good at delicate soldering work, and are into DIY electronics. Just don't go sewing the board to 
Not to be outdone by the 
Onwards and upwards in the overclockers' heatsink game: The crazed coolant doctors at 
Sony and Toshiba announced that they had successfully shrunk the 65nm cell down to 45nm 
Whenever our journalistic brethren get to set something on fire and douse it with water, we like to commemorate the moment. Wired's Gadget Lab just performed such a battery of tests on the SentrySafe fire-and-flood proof hard drives, ones we 
Stacked-up chip technology isn't new, but scientists at the University of Rochester have built the first properly-3D chip recently. Unlike previous attempts, with layered standard 2D chip-circuitry on top of similar layers, the new chip actually has components built into a 3D-matrix, with interconnects between layers.
Poor Wei-han Lien is probably dead right now after posting a description of his current duties—managing the ARM CPU architecture team for the iPhone—on LinkedIn. As you know, Apple keeps all its future plans secret so Jobs doesn't stroll out on stage and announce something everyone's known for about months (
50 years ago today, Texas Instrument's Jack Kilby demonstrated the first working integrated circuit, or microchip. It's a crude conglomeration of just five components, but it was also proof that a circuit could be miniaturised by housing all of its components on one piece of semiconductor material, allowing all these parts to work together without laborious (and technologically infeasible) manual connections. In essence, it's the electronic wheel captured in first eureka. [
We all owe a lot to this place. The birth of the world's first silicon chip happened here, and now, it's a nice place to pick up some fresh produce. 
Biswahoman Pani worked for Intel. Claiming to miss his wife, he requested a transfer from California to Intel's Hudson facility where she worked. That same day, when the request was granted, Pani turned in his resignation and announced that he'd be taking vacation for his last two weeks at the company. His new job would be with a hedge fund.
Who doesn't love a Zip drive? With their sweet 100MB of magnetic memory, they used to save my arse back in the day. (My Performa 6400 even had an internal Zip drive.) And who doesn't love a marionette? With their beady eyes and history of horror-film animation, they touch the heart of any child from 1 to 100, sometimes with a knife. Put the two together, and what do you get?
