Norway's FXI Technologies has begun taking orders for its ultra-tiny CStick Cotton Candy Linux computer, pricing the PC-in-a-stick at just £139 for Brits.

What your £139 plus P&P gets you is an 80mm long unit with a USB jack at one end and an HDMI connector at t'other. In between, you'll find a Micro SD card slot to equip the CStick with storage, and a micro USB port.

At launch the diminutive machine will be offered in two configurations, one at $25 and the other at $35. The extra $10 gets you double the RAM at 256MB, as well as the addition of an Ethernet port for getting online. Its creators have also announced the "Gertboard," a small expansion board that can be added to the Rasberry Pi. Its purpose is to "flash LEDs on and off, drive motors, run sensors and all that other fun stuff."

"This facility had been submerged in some six feet of water since October 15, the estate was pumped dry on November 17, main power was restored on November 26 and production restarted November 30," according to a statement.

For the industry as a whole, WD expects that hard drive shipments in the December quarter will be limited to approximately 120 million units, including units that were in inventory at the beginning of the quarter. Demand for the December quarter is in the range of 170 million to 180 million units.

China is stepping up its semiconductor manufacturing efforts and using domestic chips for its latest supercomputer. It's going to be interesting to see how fast China can close in on U.S. supercomputer processor makers Intel, AMD, and Nvidia.

The Wall Street Journal noted that the China domestic supercomputing effort is very credible and signals an effort to cut the country's reliance on western companies. It's unclear whether China's chips are completely original blueprints or based on a previous design.

"Secure boot" is a technology described by recent revisions of the UEFI specification; it offers the prospect of a hardware-verified, malware-free operating system bootstrap process that can improve the security of many system deployments. Linux and other open operating systems will be able to take advantage of secure boot if it is implemented properly in the hardware.

Where are the ARM powered desktops? I finally see some desktop models however they are relegated to "developer" models with USD200+ price tags (trimslice, etc). Raspberry Pi seems to be the only thing that will be priced correctly, have the right amount of features, and may actually be released.

Are ARM powered desktops destined to join the mythical smartbook?

According to SF Weekly, six investigators claiming to be members of the San Francisco police department descended upon one Bernal Heights, San Francisco man’s home in search of a lost iPhone 5 prototype that CNET originally reported had been left in a bar.

The SFPD confirmed the investigators weren’t police officers at all. Instead, it appears as though they may have actually been members of Apple’s security team allegedly impersonating police officers.

A commercially available pump made by Medtronic, the world's biggest medical device manufacturer, is vulnerable to attacks that allow strangers to increase, decrease, or stop the flow of insulin being administered, the Associated Press reported.

That's in addition to the zinger here in which Medtronic recently said: "To our knowledge, there has never been a single reported incident outside of controlled laboratory experiments in more than 30 years of device telemetry use, which includes millions of devices worldwide."

Recent guesstimates have placed Google's server count at more than 1 million. But new data on Google's energy use suggests that the company is probably running about 900,000 servers.

"Google's data center electricity use is about 0.01% of total worldwide electricity use and less than 1 percent of global data center electricity use in 2010," Koomey writes.

The company has designed a new storage and computation system called Spanner, which will seek to automate management of Google services across multiple data centers.

A new worrying phenomenon has cropped up in China and Apple has been its first victim; meet the first fake Apple Stores, entire buildings that have been designed to look like the real thing.

A website called BirdAbroad has pictures of what looks like an Apple store but is in reality a completely genuine rip-off; the author of the post also confirms that the store was torn down and replaced by a bank but that two others have quickly appeared near to the original location located in a Chinese town called Kunming.