Chris Barton, Author at VR World

Business, Enterprise, Technology Security

Desert Indestruction With ioSafe

It all started so innocently; the way it usually does. ioSafe CEO Robb Moore promised us that he had an interesting demo involving data recovery. Data recovery? How interesting can that be? Along the way, Robb informed us about about his newest product, an improved ioSafe external storage solution called the ioSafe Solo SSD Hard Drive. Robb claimed that the Solo SSD Hard Drive is fireproof, waterproof and can survive the crushing force of a collapsing building; quite an intriguing feature considering noted tech centers such as San Francisco Bar Area and Tokyo are prime earthquake country – but most importantly, Robb promised no Powerpoint

Business, Entertainment, Hardware

State of the Consumer Tech Industry: Has the Bleeding Stopped?

The State of the Consumer Electronics [CE] can be summed up in a word: stagnation. Across an increasing number of segments in the CE industry growth was either stagnant or shrinking – most notably in the mature North American and European markets. Overall, the data presented was quite gloomy. In fact, CE growth was flat; exactly zero percent. Important trends identified in 2009: As can be expected China, followed by India and South America, experienced growth in their economies. Asia with the sub-continent of India is beyond question the premier emerging markets to exploit with an influx of wealth especially among the burgeoning middle class.

Business, Hardware

Rise of Asian Tiger: ASUS?s Ascension to Market Dominance?

We opened our pre-coverage of CES 2010 with ASUS?s press conference in the Venetian hotel. It?s a foregone conclusion that press conferences are full of marketing spin and that PR personnel hope that you will view their company through rose colored glasses and this press conference was no aberration. ASUS CEO Johnny Shih began by touting strong third quarter growth and the 3,200 awards ASUS garnered in 2009 – included five CES Design and innovation Awards. Possibly trying to get on the press?s good side, Shih also highlighted the improved media coverage at this year?s CES. It was no secret that ASUS is gunning to

Business, Hardware

Will 2010 Be a Messy Legal Cesspool for Intel, nVidia?

Legally speaking, 2009 was not a great year for Intel Corp. Intel and NVIDIA?s spat over chipset licensing arguably has led to Intel being hit with a lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission [FTC]. BSN* has reported on Intel?s sticky situation however, independent findings on the matter have been published by Danish researcher and author Agner Fog on his website in an article titled "Will Intel be forced to remove the "cripple AMD" function from their compiler?" It is interesting to note that Fog quoted BSN* in his article and corroborated many AMD supporters opinions: "There is something fishy about those benchmarks scores" as some

Business, Cloud Computing, Hardware

Google to Launch ChromeOS Netbook: Don?t Be Evil?

Google has two-plus netbooks rumored for release by the 2010 holiday season. Leaked specs for the sub $300 netbooks are: 10.1 inches screen, 64 GB SSD, 2 GB RAM, webcam, USB ports, GPS, Wi-Fi, 3G and Bluetooth connectivity. More importantly, the netbooks are rumored to be powered by NVIDIA Tegra 2 platform. Multitouch screens with GPS are also planned for high end models. We wentured on to check with our sources to see if this is true or somebody had too much eggnog for Christmas. After receiving an interesting e-mail back, we can say that Tegra 2 is inside for sure but the release date could be

Enterprise, Hardware

NTU: Unlocking the Secrets of the Universe on the Cheap

Humankind is a curious creature. Collectively, we seek answers to questions to questions thought unknowable in another age. Advances are being made on many scientific fronts, especially through the contributions of everyday people through distributed computing projects like Folding@Home, World Community Grid, SETI@Home and many others. Anyone who has ever attempted to set up a home distributed computing farm or designed a state-of-the-art supercomputer knows, the two main limiting factors are cost of the machines and power they consume. GPU-based computing appears to be coming into its own. According to an nVidia press release, National Taiwan University [NTU] is carrying out this work on the

Hardware

Limited OCZ Cryo-Z run is almost sold out at FrozenCPU

Our friends at X-bitLabs broke the news that OCZ Technology finally started to ship their long-delayed Phase Change Cooler. Naturally, we got quite interested this extreme overclocking-related product from OCZ, so we contacted OCZ’s spokesperson to find out more. Our main question was whether OCZ is shipping a new run or even a new revision of its Cryo-Z phase change cooling solution as may be implied in the afore mentioned article or is OCZ merely clearing out old stock from 2006-2008 production runs and to inquire about availability. Bear in mind that this product raised quite a stir when Editor-in-Chief published a story that OCZ

Entertainment, Graphics

AMD launches its own 3D support… sort of

Even though AMD didn’t want to come onboard for stereoscopic 3D and instead focused on Eyefinity multi-display technology, the consumer electronics industry decided to firmly back the 3D boat. Indeed, watching Christmas Carol in Dolby 3D only reminds you that consumers will want to experience that at their homes as well – and the Blu-ray Disc Association today took a major step forward. Hollywood studios are lifting the veil today from Blu-ray 3D, a new stereoscopic 3D standard to be launched at CES 2010. Coming in way behind nVidia, AMD joined the industry unveiling the new Blu-ray stereoscopic 3D standard at the 2010 Consumer Electronics

Software Programs, Technology Security

NTFS Drive Recovery copies HDD Mechanic

We came across an interesting PR release in my inbox the other day. The PR release was basically a simple announcement that NTFS-Recovery.com [can you guess the link to its website?] has released Drive Recovery, which if you have two brain cells to rub together, you?ve already figured out is some sort of data recovery software – which it is. So far nothing new, just another boring PR story, right? There are a lot of hard drive [HDD] recovery software programs on the market. A simple Google search for hard drive recovery software returns 21,400,000 results. There was something different about this one, but I

Enterprise, Technology Security

Northrop Grumman launches "Digitalized War" network

Northrop Grumman, best known for its World War II era fighters and the F-14 Tomcat ? until recently, the U.S. Navy?s premier carrier-based air-defense fighter. Northrop Grumman [NYSE: NOC] has struggled slightly as its share price dipped below $40 a share in March of 2009 but has rebounded positively with a closing share price of $55.89 at market?s close on Dec. 4, 2009. The International Data Links Society’s Annual Symposium took place in Vienna, Austria from the 2nd to the 4th of December at the Messezentrum Wien Exhibition and Congress Center. NG was touting its shiny new defense hardware; in this case Tactical Data Links

Audio/Video, Entertainment

"Best of 2009" madness begins

With the first day of December over and done with, our inbox is starting to fill up with links to best of 2009, with first one being search engine Ask.com with most common asked questions? According to the "Search engine Formerly Known as AskJeeves", 2009 has been an interesting year full questions. People asked the tough questions this year such as this year?s most asked question, "How much should I weigh" and even harder questions for example, "Is Lady Gaga a man?" along with the timeless philosophical query, "What time is it?" What better website to tackle these challenging questions than Ask.com? Looking at Ask.com?s

Cloud Computing, Enterprise, Technology Security

IBM continues to dominate server share, acquires Guardium

Big Blue, a nickname for IBM, continues to dominate ? alright, keep a step ahead of – the competition as top server vendor worldwide. IBM finished 3Q 2009 with a revenue share of 31.7% of the server market. IBM?s closest competitor is nipping at IBM?s heels with 30.2% revenue share. Responsible for IBM?s continued success is the gain of x86 and UNIX based systems revenue share growth. Straight from the Gartner report [Gartner, Inc, "Servers Quarterly Statistics Worldwide: Database," by Errol Rasit et al, November 25, 2009]: IBM continued its momentum in x86 servers, with System x gaining 2.2 points of revenue share in 3Q

Business, Entertainment, Software Programs

CoD: Modern Warfare 2 most successful launch in gaming history

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2?s [MW2] release was the biggest launch in video game history – Activision Blizzard confirms that $550 million in sales were reached in the first five days alone. The Call of Duty video game franchise, including Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2, has grossed more than $3 billion in retail sales globally according to the sales tracking data of the NPD Group, GFK Chart Track and Activision?s own estimate. Infinity Ward?s widely publicized controversial decisions regarding MW2?s multiplayer component – in fact, rival developer DICE and others seized Infinity Ward?s public relations SNAFU to declare their support of gamers and

Business, Hardware

TSMC to launch stress-resilient chip manufacturing for cars

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Ltd. [TSMC] just announced that it will launch a process qualification specification and service package for automotive-grade semiconductor manufacturing, a first for the auto-industry, at the China IC Design Conference which will be held in Xiamen on December 2, 2009. TSMC?s Fab 10 in Shanghai, China is ready to manufacture the ICs, in addition to TSMC?s multiple Fabs in Taiwan, will have the automotive process route ready for auto supply chain companies, including Chinese ones. From the TSMC press release: "Integrated circuits of all types are playing a larger role in the automotive industry. Our commitment is to support automotive IC

Cloud Computing, Software Programs

imVOX enables you to sound like Darth Vader in online games

The new imVOX voice chat software allows up to thirty video gamers to voice chat for free, while the paid subscription option allows for up to 250 gamers at a time to voice chat for $24.99 a year. Ayalogic, the developer behind imVOX has announced that imVOX is currently in public beta and is available for download now. imVOX is compatible with Microsoft?s Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 but is not currently capable of running on Apple?s own MacOS X. Support for Macs is allegedly in the pipeline. Integration with social networks, such as Facebook Connect and Twitter is also planned. According to Ayalogic

Business, Graphics, Hardware, Interviews

INTERVIEW: Dan S. Snyder, Intel Inside[r]

When media and analysts discuss Intel, a lot is said about Intel’s products, but not a lot is said about tens of thousands of people who not just work, but evolve inside the company even for their whole career. Intel is one of those companies – unspoiled by unions, Intel is a company where engineers thrive, but the doors are always open for creative people worldwide. We talked with a lot of insiders who praised the openness of the company, and the fact that you can be involved in a "constructive discussion" is something that is not heard in a lot of companies. For instance,

Graphics, Hardware, Interviews

Interview: OC legend Vince "Kingpin" Lucido

It is no secret that cooling is one of the keys to pushing the envelope in extreme overclocking and benchmarking competitions. Nobody arguably makes better LN2 [liquid nitrogen] containers than Kingpin Cooling. If you by any chance wonder why the company is named Kingpin Cooling and Vince’s nick is k|ng|pin, the reason is quite simple – try to register the company using non-standard alphabet character and you’ll be in for a ride. In this extensive interview, K|ngp|n spoke with BSN* while recovering from some very painful tattoo work. BSN*: What was your first experience with computers? k|ngp|n: It was with an IBM PC, which was

Business, Cloud Computing, Technology Security

IBM survey busts Cloud Computing bubble with a "security" pin?

IBM released findings from the 2009 X-Force Mid-Year Trend and Risk Report. The X-Force report showed an extraordinary number of security threats across all facets of the web due to Web client, server and content threats coming together to produce an intolerable amount of risk to the IT community, corporations, governments and web users at-large. What is going on? According to the report, the increase in the count of malicious web links has risen by 508%. A 508% increase in the first half of 2009 alone. It isn’t just the known web trouble spots such as adult rated content sites and Nigerian scammer e-mails, the

Business, Hardware

Report: e-Paper market is just too big to miss out

At this point in the economic downturn, many IT companies are scratching their collective heads and wondering where the profits went. Time to do some corporate soul-searching and spot-on market analysis in the search for Holy Grail – positive growth coupled with healthy profits. New market hunting we will go. When it comes to new markets, it is hard to miss one that is now even causing Apple to go and develop a tablet – you bet, we’re talking about ePaper. After Amazon Kindle achieved great sales success [you can subscribe and read BSN* on Kindle too], now even paper magazines are going interactive, with

Business, Hardware

Is Dell the greenest IT company?

Dell made corporate accountability information available online. Dell is seeking to provide greater transparency to alert shareholders what the company feels is its vastly improved corporate responsibility; evidenced by almost tripling the count of web pages at Dell.com concerning corporate responsibility. Dell has launched an improved corporate responsibility site. The new site is easier to navigate and highlights more content on Dell’s commitment to sustainable operations, diversity and greener products. Michael Dell, Dell’s chairman and CEO was cited "We have recognized for a long time that corporate responsibility is both the right thing to do and good business. Our global team is making a real