Samsung expects solid-state drives to reach price parity with hard-disk drives within the next few years amid steep annual price declines in flash memory chips.

And what will happen to the price of SSDs this year? "The rest of the year is quite unpredictable. Because the SSD price is directly tied to the price of flash, no one knows. Everyone is just giving their best guess as to what will happen in the flash market," he said. To date, flash memory prices have dropped so much that chipmakers can't make money.

Several exhibitors have complained their wares have been nicked by nimble hands this week, with A-Data getting particularly badly burned.

"We didn't expect someone could steal an SSD, especially since it's under a [glass] case", said a shocked Iwi Lin who told the INQ he discovered the thievery after the booth's display screens went blank.

A Chinese man was reportedly killed at a computer shop last Friday after the cell phone in his chest pocket exploded, severing a major artery in his neck and leading to massive blood loss.

Police have not released the make or model of the phone. Some reports indicate the fatal explosion occurred at a Lenovo store in Guangzhou, China — although it's not clear if the shop was an official outlet or if it just advertised Lenovo products.

I've recently had two CD-Rs reported to me as faulty which are just 3 years old. This is worrying - I suspect the failure rate for this batch could be 10%.

I'd like to measure decay over time in my environment with my media and my other variables; and I expect others would too.

The recall applies to certain Sony 2.15Ah lithium-ion cell batteries made in Japan and sold around the world in laptops made by Hewlett-Packard Co., Dell Inc. and Toshiba Corp.

This also pales in comparison to the recall of more than 10 million of a different model of Sony batteries in 2006 and 2007, which affected almost every major PC manufacturer, including Dell Inc. and Apple Inc.

Sony said its own Vaio laptops don't use the battery in question. Last month, however, the company recalled 440,000 Vaio notebooks worldwide because of a wiring flaw that can cause overheating.

In the Android Market terms of service, Google expressly says that it might remotely remove an application from a user's phone.

Google says that if it does remotely remove an application, it will try to get users their money back, a question that iPhone users have wondered about in the case of an iPhone application recall.

Air safety investigators say it is too early to blame passenger laptop computers for causing a Qantas jet to abruptly nose dive on a flight from Singapore to Perth.

The mid-air incident resulted in injuries to 74 people, with 51 of them treated by three hospitals in Perth for fractures, lacerations and suspected spinal injuries.

Laptops could have interfered with the plane's on-board computer system, it has been reported.

For less than a pound a security expert has got front-door access to a council's internal network.

When he switched it on and plugged it in, the device automatically connected to the internal network of Kirklees Council in West Yorkshire.

A connection such as this allows privileged access to networks. In the wrong hands, such as criminally-minded hackers, it would allow them to conduct reconnaissance and find out if the network had any vulnerabilities worth exploiting.

How is this feat of engineering and environmental marvel achieved, we hear you cry? Easy, the power supply just turns itself off in power-save mode - it's as simple as that.

There's a switching element within the power supply to the monitor, that's controlled by the PC. When the screen's powered down, it also triggers the PSU to completely disconnect from the mains. The next time the PC sends an output to the monitor, a wee electrical signal restores the display's power to full glory.

A new online service aims to bring customized manufacturing to the masses by allowing consumers to submit digital designs of products that are then printed, using 3-D printers, and shipped back.

Users submit their design in digital form, after which Shapeways's software checks it over to ensure that it can be made. Shapeways then passes the design to its production line of polymer printers, delivering the tangible object within 10 days of ordering, with prices typically between $50 and $150.