Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Seagate Claims 2.5" SCSI Drive is World's Fastest. theraindog writes "Seagate has announced a 2.5" SCSI hard drive that spins at an astounding 15,000RPM. The Savvio 15K is the first 2.5" hard drive with a 15K-RPM spindle speed, but what's more interesting is that Seagate claims it's the fastest hard drive on the market. Indeed, the drive boasts an impressive 2.9ms seek time, which is more than half a millisecond quicker than that of comparable 3.5" SCSI drives. The Savvio 15K also features perpendicular recording technology and a claimed Mean Time Between Failures of 1.6 million hours."[Slashdot] 10:13:12 AM      Google It!.

Large FLOSS Study Gets the Real Facts. Hans Kwint writes "The European Commission's enterprise and industry department has just released the final draft of what could be the biggest academic interdisciplinary study on the economic / innovative impacts of free/libre/open source software (1.8-MB PDF). The study was done by an international consortium led by the United Nations University / University of Maastricht. The lead researcher, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, has overseen a large volume of FLOSS studies in the last few years, including ones on FLOSS policies and worldwide FLOSS adoption. This academic-grade study has a very broad scope and has collected real-world information that is valuable for both companies and government bodies thinking about migration. The study is about the economic impact of FLOSS, not excluding the hidden indirect impact. It compares scenarios of open and proprietary software futures of Europe. The study looks at the FLOSS's competitiveness compared to proprietary software and also provides a few TCO comparison case-studies.[Slashdot] 9:33:24 AM      Google It!.

FUSE Port Brings NTFS Support To OS X. sciurus0 writes "In his session at Macworld on OS X filesytems, Google's Amit Singh announced that he has ported Linux's FUSE module to OS X. The port is called MacFUSE and it is available in source form and as a pre-compiled kernel extension with associated tools. Many FUSE filesystems such as sshfs and ntfs-3g are reported to work."[Slashdot] 9:31:44 AM      Google It!.

x86 Linux Flash Player 9 is Final. Schlaegel writes "The official Adobe Linux Flash blog has announced that Flash player for x86 Linux is now final and no longer beta. Every x86 Linux user, at least those willing to load binary software, can rejoice and no longer feel like a second rate citizen. Distribution packages are also available, for example the Macromedia Fedora repository already has the flash player marked for update." [Slashdot] 9:29:42 AM      Google It!.

Small molecule offers big hope against cancer. Dichloroacetate (DCA) may soon be used as an effective treatment for many forms of cancer, according to University of Alberta researchers. They found that DCA normalized the mitochondrial function in many cancers, resulting in a significant decrea... [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News] 9:25:48 AM      Google It!.

Brain activity provides novel biometric key. An electronic security system that identifies people by monitoring the unique pattern of electrical activity within their brain is being tested by scientists at the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, in Greece. The authentication system r... [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News] 9:25:05 AM      Google It!.

Researchers first to map gene that regulates adult stem cell growth. University of Kentucky researchers have genetically mapped a stem cell gene and its protein product, Laxetin, and building on that effort, carried the investigation all the way through to the identification of the gene itself. This is the first t... [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News] 9:24:07 AM      Google It!.