We'd all be pretty surprised if Microsoft came out and claimed that they were designing the Xbox 360 to be as hackable as possible, because it doesn't fit the company's image. Likewise, it would be a little silly to act shocked that the company is planning, in fact, to lock down the Xbox 360 in as many ways as possible. In fact, it's not too surprising given the fact that Microsoft is going to technologically lock out unlicensed accessories for the new console.

Chris Satchell from the Xbox Advanced Technology Group told the BBC that the console was designed from the ground-up to be a secure as possible.

The original Xbox was hacked silly, and more than one person bought the console just to have a cheap Linux box that could be used for any number of media functions. Microsoft, however, isn't interested in selling its console hardware below cost for the sake of hackers. Will the Xbox 360 be hacked? It's a question of interest: if enough people want to see it happen, it probably will.

Card maker Sapphire Technology is demonstrating an ATI Radeon X850 XT PE card at the E3 show in Los Angeles, which is cooled with liquid metal.

The "Blizzard" card uses a liquid alloy pumped over the chip to cool it. The alloy, supplied by NanoCoolers, is 65 times more conductive than water, according to the manufacturer, and the card is 25 percent quieter than the standard ATI solution.

The PCI Express-based Blizzard will ship with 256 Mbytes of GDDR-3 memory. No prices have been revealed, but the card will reportedly ship this summer. More information is available at the Sapphire web site.

MS and Samsung have jointly developed a hybrid hard drive (HHD) that uses a 1Gbit NAND flash memory as a read and write buffer. The drive caches data in the flash memory so that it can stop spinning for long periods of time, as the computer reads and writes to the flash instead of to the disk. When the drive isn't spinning, it uses less power, so this technology will be attractive for mobile hard drives. There's no word in any of the articles I've seen so far as to how flash memory's erasure endurance issues are addressed, if at all. From what I've read, NAND flash is good only for from 100,000 to 1 million writes, which doesn't seem like a lot to me if it's being used as a hard drive replacement.

I wonder about the possibility of making the flash buffer visible to applications, like Photoshop, for instance. It's possible that the OS could allow a certain amount of user-level and application-level management of the flash space, especially as that space grows bigger with drops in flash prices.

I have various optical disc readers from standard DVD players (apart from a computer), and both CD and DVD readers on one or more computers. My home stereo DVD's have been problematic for a while. One of them won't even take a DVD cleaner disk as it doesn't 'recognize' it as a playable disc, even though it plays discs that my other DVD player won't play. Usually, between the two of them, I can play most discs, but occasionally some discs, purchased new, won't play on either of them.

My internal DVD/CD drive in my desktop can't read either DVD's or CD's. It was about 3 years old. The iomega external was about 2 years old. The laptop internal DVD was about 3-4 years old.

When the alarm clock goes off and the snooze button is pressed, Clocky will roll off the bedside table and wheel away, bumping mindlessly into objects on the floor until it eventually finds a spot to rest. Minutes later, when the alarm sounds again, the sleeper must get up out of bed and search for Clocky. This ensures that the person is fully awake before turning it off. Small wheels that are concealed by Clocky's shag enable it to move and reposition itself, and an internal processor helps it find a new hiding spot every day.

I don't like being told when to wake up but I've come to terms with the idea that I have to. In designing Clocky, I was in part inspired by kittens I've had that would bite my toes every morning. Clocky is less of an annoying device as it is a troublesome pet that you love anyway. It's also a bit ugly. But its unconventional look keeps the user calm, and inspires laughter at one of the most hated times of the day.

Fake 320GB Maxtor hard drives have surfaced in Japanese retail channels, the storage company confirmed this weekend.

According to the site, Maxtor has confirmed the purchased drive is a forgery. While some such products are actually legitimately-made units that have failed to pass QA tests and have been appropriated before they are due to be destroyed, Maxtor said that the MaXLine II forgeries were not made in any of its factories.

Indications that the purchased drive might not have been the Real McCoy included an incorrect font on the label and the use of a lower-case 'X' in the drive's family name. The drive also gives BIOS information inconsistent with its external branding and model number.

We never expected this, but two of our favorite technologies – P2P and Wireless USB are about to rolled into one device thanks to Memsen’s Click n' Share keychains. While providing the essential function of storing files as a USB flash drive, when two of these come within range of each other, wireless file sharing can take place between the two drives without any computer intervention. The keychains are also capable of interacting and downloading files such as product brochures from what Memsen calls the DataVendor, a Wireless USB enabled advertising display.

Memsen is currently deciding between Jabil Circuit and Steve Wozniak’s Wheels of Zeus to produce the platform, which will be used in closed testing and convention centers.

While consumers have gone bonkers for music players and other sleek devices sporting tiny hard drives, disk drive companies say there's little room, and even less desire, for further reducing the size of the drive platters--the silver disks that spin around and hold data.

The problem goes back to Archimedes and some basic science. Reducing the diameter of a drive platter greatly reduces the surface area for storing data. And less available storage space makes it more difficult for drives to distinguish themselves against flash memory. Typically, flash memory accesses data faster, but drives can provide far greater storage capacity for the same amount of money.

Brzeski, Healy and several analysts predict that drive makers will be able to maintain an advantage over flash when it comes to large-capacity devices. When 10GB mini drives hit the market next year, 10GB of flash memory might cost 10 times as much, Porter speculated.

It's a well-known fact that we're living in an era of data explosion, and that it's not about to stop. So it's not really surprising that IBM researchers are eyeing 100T-byte tape drive. Yes, you read correctly. They want to increase the capacity storage of their largest units by 250 times, from 400 GB to 100 TB. In order to achieve this goal, they're borrowing "nanopatterning" techniques derived from the microprocessor division. Today, the size of a tape track is about 10 microns. They want to reduce it to 0.5 micron -- or 500 nanometers -- in about five years. IBM doesn't really say when a 100-Terabyte tape drive will be available. But more importantly, the company doesn't say a word about future data transfer rates, which today reach a 80 MB/s. Read this overview for more comments about this problem of data transfer rates.

An executive who froze his broken hard disk thinking it would be fixed has topped a list of the weirdest computer mishaps.

Careless - and preventable - mistakes that result in data loss range from reckless file maintenance practices to episodes of pure rage towards a computer.

"Data can disappear as a result of natural disaster, system fault or computer virus, but human error, including 'computer rage', seems to be a growing problem," said Adrian Palmer, managing director of Ontrack Data Recovery.

"However, individuals and companies can avoid the hassle and stress this can cause by backing up data on a regular basis."