Personal Computing

The end of traditional spinning disks might have come one step closer with the release of Micron's new blazing fast solid-state drive. Although PCIe drives have been on the market for some time, none of them have ever attained the speed of this newest arrival. The RealSSD P320h is capable of 3GBps when reading, and 2GBps when writing data. Read More

We brought news of Eric Butler's Firefox extension for HTTP session hijacking called Firesheep back in October last year, but if you haven't already taken steps to ensure your privacy and security online, we hope this does the trick - FaceNiff is a new Android app that can be used to hijack sessions on public or private Wi-Fi networks without needing to lug around a laptop. Read More

As computers, data centers and mobile devices become more powerful, their energy requirements are likewise generally increasing. Possible solutions to the problem include power-saving sleep modes, devices that keep computers from drawing a current when supposedly turned off, and water-cooled processors. EnerJ, a new solution created at the University of Washington, takes a different approach – it supplies less power to regions of the chip that are performing processes that don’t require absolute precision. In lab simulations, it has already cut power consumption by up to 50 percent, although that amount could potentially reach as high as 90 percent. Read More

Until recently, the massive market share of Microsoft's Windows operating system meant that authors of viruses, malware and other nefarious software all but ignored the small kid, Apple's OS X operating system. That's no longer the case, but it's easy to stay safe from the MacDefender malware that's doing the rounds at the moment - here's how. Read More

ViewSonic chose Computex 2011 to unveil its new 24-inch monitor which boasts a built-in 3D emitter. With 3D gaming seen by many as the best use for 3D technology it's a little surprising we haven't seen a the release of 3D monitors to rival the numbers of 3D TVs hitting the market. Nevertheless, ViewSonic is claiming its V3D245wm-LED is the first 24-inch smart monitor sporting an integrated 3D emitter to support active shutter 3D glasses. Read More

LG has announced its first All-in-One desktop computer at Computex 2011 in Taipei, which will allow users to view 3D content using lightweight polarized glasses instead of the heavy shutter-type variety. The highest spec version of the 23-inch, multi-touch LG V300 will come with Intel's second generation Core i7 processor, 8GB of RAM, AMD Radeon HD 6650M graphics, a Blu-ray optical drive, and a 750GB HDD. Hi-Speed and SuperSpeed USB also feature, along with HDMI 1.4. There's a choice of Bluetooth 3.0 or 2.1 with EDR, and the space-saving device is also DNLA-compliant. Read More

Apple has officially announced what's in store for the 2011 Worldwide Developers Conference on June 6 in San Francisco. The latest versions of its OS X operating system for the Macintosh, and iOS operating system for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad will be unveiled, along with a service called iCloud. Read More

iA's Writer app for the iPad has been on my home screen since it launched, and it's one of the apps I bring up when people ask me what brings me to carry a giant iPod touch in my bag. In an age where it's not at all weird for someone who writes for a living to stare at two or more monitors displaying tweets from hundreds or thousands of Twitter users and RSS feeds from hundreds or thousands of websites/blogs in real time, iA Writer is an infinite number of steps in the opposite direction. The effect on my ability to craft words has been nothing short of ridiculous. Read More

Texas Memory Systems has just unveiled a monster enterprise-level PCIe-based solid state storage solution that's blisteringly fast and offers almost a terabyte of available capacity. Nicknamed Gorilla by the company, the RamSan-70 represents the seventh generation of the RamSan product family and uses Toshiba 32nm SLC Flash on a single half-length x8 PCIe card. It's said to offer up to 330,000 IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) read performance and 160,000 write, and up to 2GB per second sustained random throughput. Read More