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Hard Disk vendors publish a number for some hard disks called mean Time Between Failures (MTBF), and that number has generally risen over the years to be more that a million hours in some cases. User experience, however, seems to differ from expectations, the term can be deceptive, and failure rates can often reach several…

A leather covered hard drive case? Is this an oxymoron? The Zonet ZNS8021 Portable External SATA Hard Drive Case is really cool to look at, but the leather case cover made me skeptical of itis cooling abilities at first. However the unit surprised me. It was able to run several movie length media files directly…

Intel announced on Wednesday that that theyire working on an anti-theft technology that would render a stolen notebook computer useless, according to The Register. The operation of the CPU would be tied to the login authentication. Details remain sparse, and Intelis Mobility Group chief, Dadi Perlmutter, provided few specifics. Basically, however, the notebook computer would…

“The development is frankly bittersweet for us: On the one hand weire delighted to be breaking new ground with Photoshop, and when processing very large files on a suitably equipped machine, Photoshop x64 realizes some big performance gains,” Mr. Nack said. “On the other hand, we work very hard at maintaining parity across platforms, and…

One unnamed source commented “Thereis no reason to bid against ourselves.” Reports in March, however, seemed to indicate that Microsoft was considering an increase in its buy out offer. Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney commented at the time “”While we continue to see no other competing bidders, we believe Yahoo is aggressively pursuing strategic alternatives. We…

Last week, the MacBook Air was the first to fall in the CanSecWest Hacker Challenge. On Friday, Vista suffered the same fate, but thanks to Adobeis Flash, according to Channel Web. Vista was running on a Fujitsu U810. A researcher, Shane Macaulay, won a US$5,000 cash prize when he exploited an unidentified Adobe Flash player…

Photoshop Express beta

Overall PC Spending is trending down, but Apple so far is least unaffected, according to a ChangeWave report released on Wednesday. Only eight percent of the 4,427 consumers surveyed say theyill be buying a laptop in the next 90 days, 6 percent for desktops. For those who do plan to buy a notebook or desktop,…

The class action suit was filed last May by pro photographers Fred Greaves and Dave Gatley after the two bought Apple laptops based on the companyis claims that the displays can show millions of colors. The suit alleged “The displays are only capable of displaying the illusion of millions of colors through the use of…

Version 3 also includes support for background rendering, multiple levels of undo, chroma keying, QuickTime, DV and MPEG4 export, and more. MediaEdit 3 is priced at US$89.95 and is available for download at the Mien Software Web site.

Appleis big brother to the Leopard desktop OS is Leopard Server. Itis designed to run on server hardware, like the Xserve, and make life simpler and better for small to medium workgroups. Apple has succeeded in that goal, according to Ryan Fass at Computeworld on Monday. Setting up a server and all its related services,…

Microsoft has posted an overview of what to expect in Windows XP, Service Pack 3 (SP3). The last scheduled update of the Windows XP system includes only a small number of new functionalities. The update can be applied directly to SP2 or SP1 systems. “Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) includes all previously released updates…

I de spise mail-in rebates. On the marketing irritation scale, mail-in rebates rank up there with infomercials for worthless products and telemarketers that consider the “do not call” list merely a suggestion. I bring this up because I recently had to deal with two rebates for my Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M. To their credit, the Fujitsu…

Over the last 100 years, management philosophy has gone from enslavement to empowerment, according to Leander Kahney at Wired Magazine . Steve Jobs has bucked that trend with what seems like tactics from the Industrial Revolution, and it has worked. The results have allowed Apple to leap ahead of the competition. “In the 1940s, Bill…

Citing recently discovered problems with Lightroom 1.4 and Camera Raw 4.4 Updates, Adobe has removed the updates from their site and suggested that customers revert to Lightroom 1.3.1 and Camera Raw 4.3.1. Instructions for backgrading were supplied at the Lightroom Journal site. “For those not in immediate need of the updated camera support available in…

The Mozilla Project announced on Monday the release of Firefox 3 Beta 4. The new version has over 900 big fixes over Beta 3 and adds several improvements. “The fourth beta of the next major Firefox version offers over 900 bug fixes over Beta 3, including improvements in download manager, full page zoom, better integration…