PC Perspective tested one of OCZ’s 256GB Colossus drives and found “read and write speeds are about as fast as SATA 3Gb/sec will go!” It’s nuts that our drives are finally catching up with the plentiful, SATA pipelines, even if OCZ has hacked speeds a bit by essentially building one giant drive out of four smaller SSDs.

Whatever works. Now to sell a spare kidney for the $US3300, 1TB configuration. Read the full testing results at: [PC Perspective]

[Fudzilla via MaxConsole]

[Drobo]

According to Fudzilla, the platform will include a new memory controller to accommodate DDR3 RAM which, despite supporting two slots, will remain single-channel. Pineview, the next Atom before Cedarview, hasn’t even shipped yet — that’s expected to be the beginning of next year — so it’s interesting to glimpse this far into the future, where Atom, such as it is, will remain positioned almost exactly where it is now. Oh well! [Fudzilla]

Disclaimer: That Atom sitting on the penny up there is an older version (not that the new one will look any different).

That’s the starting eBay bid for this motherboard. According to the original invoice included in the auction package — dated December 7, 1976 — he also was the one filling the sales forms. At least this one, which says Steven. Since it was only him and Woz at the time — and the latter was always busy creating beautiful electronics and calling the Pope — it’s pretty safe to say that this was indeed Apple’s current CEO and then CEO, CFO, CMO, COO and CLSDI. The original package has Steve Jobs’ parents as the return address:

It includes:

• The computer itself
• The original shipping box, with Steve Jobs’ parents’ house as a return address
• The original manual, with schematics to build your own Apple 1
• The tape interface card
• The manual for the tape interface
• A plain Scotch-brand cassette tape with a simply-typed label “BASIC” that came with the unit
• A letter, signed by Steven Jobs in 1976, explaining connecting a keyboard and monitor, as well as detailing when dealer applications would be available
• An original full-page glossy advertisement for Apple, included when the Apple 1 computer was shipped. (The ad is almost unrecognisable as an Apple ad due to its elaborate Isaac Newton logo. The artist who drew that logo was the third original partner in Apple Corp. His stake in Apple was bought out for a couple thousand dollars when the company started getting serious).
• Photographs of all prior owners of this unit.

The Apple I was the first Apple computer. The two Steves started to sell it on July 1976. The price then was $US666.66. At the time all computers needed to be assembled, but the Apple I was a motherboard — assembled by themselves at Jobs parents’ garage — was ready to connect to a keyboard, monitor and cassette player. [eBay via Tuaw]

These Intel Atom N280 1.66GHz Windows Home Servers can back up to 10 PCs and serve all the files you want. It has two 3.5-inch bays for up to 2 terabytes of storage space, with one Gigabit Ethernet port, and six USB 2.0 ports to add more storage or whatever you want. [Asus via Hot Hardware via Engadget]

Cats: they’re kinda dumb. They only seem smarter than dogs because they’re not so friendly, and our society judges kindness harshly. It’s a true and interesting theory! Which is why, after mice, simulating a feline-sized brain on a BlueGene/P supercomputer was next on IBM’s to-do list. But for all the kitty talk here, this project wasn’t specifically about creating a computerised house pet; it’s part of a larger, ongoing project to eventually simulate a full human brain. The cat equivalency, derived from the number of virtual neurons and synapses the simulation can manage, at 1.6 billion and 9 trillion, respectively, just gives a sense of how far along the project is: Today, despite being the biggest simulated brain ever, it’s only capable of simulating the human visual cortex, or as PopMech so delicately puts it, “the wrinkly outer layer” of the human brain.

So how long before a supercomputer can simulate (roughly — since these computer simulations don’t have the same neural patterning and learning capabilities of a real brain, among other things) an entire human cortex? Weirdly soon, says the project’s lead scientist:

To [simulate a human cortex], he’ll need to find 1000 times more computing power. At the rate that supercomputers have expanded over the last 20 years, that super-super computer could exist by 2019. “This is not just possible, it’s inevitable,” Modha says. “This will happen.”

People need to stop getting worked up about the future, honestly: Before we have to worry self-aware robot uprisings, we’re going to have to deal with decades of extremely dumb, extremely expensive fake pets. Enforced caution, I believe this is called. [Popular Mechanics]

MaximumPC put the 5970 to the test, and found that it lives up to its promise. The 2GB dual-GPU card is the first to support DirectX 11, and basically doubles its wholly respectable predecessor (the 5870) in specs, capable of delivering nearly 5 teraflops of raw processing power. It’s a massive card, about 30cm long, designed mostly for heat dissipation, at which it apparently succeeds at. It’s also got easy access to overclocking via AMD’s OverDrive, and can drive up to three displays simultaneously with a maximum resolution of 7680×1600. So it’s pretty much the greatest thing ever, and it’s got a price tag to match: $US600 upon its undisclosed release. Yow. [MaximumPC]

Unfortunately, in addition to the expense, it can’t be used as a bootable drive quite yet, although Fusion-io claims that feature is coming. And we probably shouldn’t gloss over the expense — yeah, it’s a “consumer drive” and it’s cheap compared to similar drives, but it’s still $US900 for 80GB. But it’s a cool look at where storage could be headed, and if you’ve got enough money to snag one (available at Amazon), well, I hate you lots. [HotHardware via Engadget]

While the Mini NAS truly is small, it’s got plenty of features in that 0.45kg package. It supports both SMB (Server Message Block) and open-source Samba network protocols, provides FTP access for up to eight simultaneous users, and can be used as a Bittorrent downloading appliance or as an iTunes media server. Not bad for $US70. [Addonics]