News for Saturday, 17 January 2009

As all those who need to start up their Mac with discretion know, it is impossible, even if one tries to block up the speakers with the hands. The bong always ends up with heads being turne.
If one needs discretion: you will find at the address following, https://www.curby.net/filelib/DebongIntel/, a small program called DebongIntel that will make it possible to conceal your machine (only for the Mac Intel) at startup. There are in the disk image two scripts, one to disactivate the Bong, and another to reactivate it.

According to the site The Future Of Things, in five years time one could witness a resurgence of the traditional hard drives (having been put to death by the SSD) thanks to the laser.
The story goes back to 2006 when scientists discovered that under certain conditions a laser could modify the polarity of a magnet. Even though the idea to use this process to store data was immediately considered, many technological obstacles presented themselves. Since the majority have now been solved, the article estimates that in 5 years the first products could arrive.
Freed from their mechanical play-back heads, these disks could see their performances increasing in a very significant way, the whole being related to the capacities of the laser.
Initially, the picosecond laser could already do wonders, but in the long term with femtosecond laser one could consider data flows of 100 Tbits/s i.e. 12,5 TB/s that are practically impossible to imagine.
Even if the manufacturers of disks are obliged for reasons of costs to use less powerful lasers, they could easily propose data flows being multiplied by 100 compared to what currently exists.