LG unveils flexible plastic e-paper display, aims for European launch next month

LG has made no secret of its fondness for flexible e-paper, but those dreams became a reality today, with the announcement of a six-inch display that promises to “revolutionize the e-book market.” The malleable plastic display sports a resolution of 1024 x 768 and can bend at an angle of up to 40 degrees. At just 0.7 millimeters thick, it’s about one-third thinner than similarly-specced glass displays, and weighs in at 14 grams — about half the weight of its glassy competition. LG also claims that the display is super durable, as evidenced by a series of successful drop tests from a height of 1.5 meters. The plan going forward is to supply the display to ODMs in China, in the hopes of bringing final products to Europe by “the beginning of next month.” For more details, check out the full press release after the break.

Source

Breakthrough Opens Door for 60TB Hard Drives

Seagate just shattered the record for storage density on hard drives by using a novel recording method to stuff 1 terabit into a square inch. That’s nearly twice the old record. Hard drives are about to get huge.

Seagate squeezed all of that data into that tiny space by using “heat-assisted magnetic recording” instead of perpendicular recording to write data to disk. ExtremeTech reports:

HAMR, which was originally demonstrated by Fujitsu in 2006, adds a laser to the hard drive head. The head seeks as normal, but whenever it wants to write data the laser turns on. Reading data is done in the conventional way. Just so you understand how small the magnetic bits are in a HAMR drive, one terabit per square inch equates to two million bits per linear inch; in other words, each site is just 12.7 nanometers long – or about a dozen atoms.

In the short term the technology will result in new 6TB 3.5-inch desktop drives and 2TB 2.5-inch laptop drives. Currently the largest capacity drives are 1TB and 3TB respectively for laptops and desktops. That’s already an impressive boost in capacity.

In theory, though, HAMR should allow hard drives to write up to 10TB per square inch, which means that in the future you could potentially cram about 60TB onto a 3.5-inch drive. [Seagate via ExtremeTech]

Western Digital MyBook Thunderbolt Duo is available now starting at $600

Back at Macworld, we laid our peepers on Western Digital’s MyBook Thunderbolt Duo and were able to take a demo setup for a quick spin. Now, the dual-wielding external HDDs are officially on the market. You can snag 4TB (2x 2TB) and 6TB (2x 3TB) versions of this “über-fast” MyBook for $599 and $699, respectively. Don’t forget: you can daisy chain up to six of these bad boys via the dual Thunderbolt ports on the kit’s backside (if you have quite the piggy bank, of course) — just like the four-unit set we encountered sporting 700MB/sec read and 500MB/sec write speeds in RAID 0. WD also says the storage devices are Time Machine compatible as soon as you can unpack ‘em. If you’re anxious to grab one of your own, hit the source link below to part with your funds. And for a quick refresher, take a gander at the gallery below.

Source: Western Digital

This Is the ‘World’s Smallest PC’, and You Can Buy It Now

Late last year, we showed you a sneak preview of the FXI Cotton Candy; a dual-core computer that’s the size of a USB stick. Well, production is underway, and you can pre-order one right now.

Packed inside its tiny little frame is a 1GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor built by Samsung, along with an ARM Mali-400 GPU. It also packs HDMI-out, WiFi and a Micro USB port— and comes with Android or Ubuntu pre-loaded as the OS. It also handles MPEG-4 and H.264 video formats, so you could plug it into a TV and use it as a rudimentary media PC.

It’s soon set to be rivaled by the Raspberyy Pi; a British effort to produce a similar product for around $35. To use the Pi, however, you’ll need to be at home with a command line.

If that’s not for you, the FXI Cotton Candy is available for pre-order at $199, and should arrive sometime in March.

[FXI via The Verge]

Windows 8 Consumer preview available on the 29th of February at 9am US Eastern Time?

Windows8 Consumer Preview Betta Fish

Tom Warren at theVerge is reporting that the final build of Windows 8 (8250) is expected to get signed off on this coming Friday.

More significant is the news of a download time:

Microsoft will unveil its Windows 8 Consumer Preview work during a special event at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona next Wednesday. We are told that the company will release the preview to the public at the beginning of the event, which kicks off at 3PM CET (9AM ET). Build 8250 includes a number of preinstalled games and applications, as well as the new Windows 8 logo.

Time to start your engines..

Remember, you can find moderately priced Windows 8 Tablets at :

Microsoft Store - http://bit.ly/MicrosoftStore-Tablets
Amazon - http://amzn.to/Windows-Tablets

VLC Updates to 2.0; Sports Massive Pile of Upgrades and New Features

Windows/Mac/Linux: Wildly popular open-source media player VLC has updated to version 2.0 and brought a mountain of new and upgraded features with it–including enhanced codec support, hardware decoding, and experimental Blu-ray support.

The new release is a substantial overhaul of the VLC platform that includes a rewritten video output core, half a dozen new video filter algorithms to clean up video and provide a smoother viewing experience, audio resamplers, faster audio processing, multi-thread processor support for popular video formats like H.264, enhanced hardware support for CrystalHD cards and other hardware decoders, and even experimental support of Blu-ray playback.

Whether you’re a long time VLC user or you’ve never heard of it, the new release is worth taking for a test drive. Hit up the link below to read more and grab a copy.

VLC Reaches 2.0

YouTube Surpasses 4 Billion Video Views Per Day January 24th, 2012

Reuters, reported that YouTube is getting approximately 4 billion video hits per day, as the figure has changed with an increase of 25% since May, 2011. Google relates the increase of Youtube video viewership to the increase of smart mobile devices.
Furthermore, YouTube owner Google also announced some other figures, that about 60 hours of video is now uploaded to YouTube each minute, whereas this figure was 48 hours of video upload every minute in May, 2011.

Via

A Deeper Look At Microsoft’s New ReFS Format

Windows ReFS

As early back as 2003, Microsoft has been promising a new file system to replace NTFS, originally known as WinFS. Now, in 2012 a new file system finally is coming. So what is ReFS all about and does it have anything to do with the original WinFS announcement?

First off, WinFS was a technology designed as a relational file system for the storage of structured and unstructured data. After several years of hype, it was essentially quietly killed in 2006.

The main factors for its death laid around the fact that it didn’t offer a significantly better experience than what we already had with NTFS.

So fast forwarding to today, with NTFS as the dominate file system (though many legacy devices still use FAT-32), what makes ReFS worth the change?

First off, Windows 8 is all about change with its touch-centric design, its use of the hibernate kernel for speeding up start-ups and shut-downs, and the introduction of ARM processor support. So now seems like the perfect time to make yet a big change on the file system front as well.

Microsoft is working hard to overcome past perceptions that its Oses are easily corrupted and overly unstable when compared to options like Linux and Mac OS. Despite that fact this has been somewhat true, the folks at Redmond still find it important to lay these security and stability concerns to rest.

So ReFS standards for “resilient” file system, and resilient it is. The main purpose that designers kept in mind with this format is that it is capable of keeping data safe and, hopefully, free of potential corruptibility.

There are several ways it attempts to accomplish this goal, such as keeping metadata integrity with checksums,  verifying and auto-correcting data to limit data corruption, isolating data corruption, keeping user data integrity with integrity streams, and keeping an entire volume intact, online, and accessible.

In general, ReFS’s big data protection features are really meant to be used with Storage Spaces, which provides native RAID and provisioning capabilities within Windows Server 8.

According to the “Building Windows 8 Blog”:

We have tested ReFS using a sophisticated and vast set of tens of thousands of tests that have been developed over two decades for NTFS. These tests simulate and exceed the requirements of the deployments we expect in terms of stress on the system, failures such as power loss, scalability, and performance. Therefore, ReFS is ready to be deployment-tested in a managed environment. Being the first version of a major file system, we do suggest just a bit of caution. We do not characterize ReFS in Windows 8 as a “beta” feature. It will be a production-ready release when Windows 8 comes out of beta, with the caveat that nothing is more important than the reliability of data. So, unlike any other aspect of a system, this is one where a conservative approach to initial deployment and testing is mandatory.

With this in mind, we will implement ReFS in a staged evolution of the feature: first as a storage system for Windows Server, then as storage for clients, and then ultimately as a boot volume. This is the same approach we have used with new file systems in the past.

Initially, our primary test focus will be running ReFS as a file server. We expect customers to benefit from using it as a file server, especially on a mirrored Storage Space. We also plan to work with our storage partners to integrate it with their storage solutions.

So what does this all mean? It means that Windows Server 8 is the only version getting ReFS for now. Additionally, it is not a bootable format at this time and instead is used for extra drives and partitions as a way of keeping crucial data safe and uncorrupted.

Will ReFS truly prove to be an uncorruptable format and a worthy successor of NTFS? It is certainly shaping up that way, but I have a feeling we won’t truly see ReFS shine its brightest until Windows 9.

Google announces record-breaking Q4 results, Google Plus has reached 90 million users

Google reported its fiscal results for the last 2011 quarter and for the year 2011 as a whole. The Q4 results were a record for the search giant, with revenue topping the $10 billion milestone for the first time.

CEO Larry Page was also proud with their social network, Google Plus. It reached 90 million users, more than double the 40 million users reported in October. This also puts them on track to reach the predicted 100 million by the end of February (a prediction that sees Google Plus reaching 400 million users by the end of 2012).

Let’s start with the financial results. Google’s revenue for the full year 2011 went up by 29%. For just Q4, revenue reached the record $10.58 billion (a 25% increase year over year). Operating income for Q4 was 33% of revenues ($3.51 billion, up from $2.98 billion in Q4 2010) and net income was $2.71 billion.

During the last quarter of 2011, almost half of Google’s revenues came from the international market (47%). The UK alone accounted for 10% of revenues.

The number of clicks on Google served ads went up by 34% compared to last year’s fourth quarter, while the cost per click fell by 8%.

Here are a few other numbers – at the end of 2011, Google was sitting on a $44.6 billion pile of cash, their effective tax rate for Q4 of 2011 was 21% and their hired about 900 new people in that same quarter.

For the full year, Google’s revenues reached $37.905 billion with total advertising revenues reaching $36.531 billion. Net income for the year was $9.737 billion. You can check out the full table of informationover here.

All these results weren’t enough to impress Wall Street, which expected the search giant to do better. Shares dropped 9% in after-hours trading as a result.

Anyway, back to Google Plus. According to comScore, Google’s social network had 67 million unique visitors in November, 15.9 million of which came from the US. In December, the number of US visitors was 20.6 million.

Larry Page also claims 60% of Google Plus users use a Google service each day (it’s not clear if he meant any Google service or just G+) and 80% use a service at least once a week.

There was no Android-related info in the press release.

Source 1 • Source 2

Google, Facebook, YouTube Top Visited Websites in 2011

According to the Nielsen research group’s provided data for January-October 2011, Google, Facebook and YouTube are the most visited web sites under three respective categories of over all web brands, social networks&blogs and video brand.
Top 10 Web Brands in 2011

1. Google
2. Facebook
3. Yahoo!
4. MSN/WindowsLive/Bing
5. YouTube
6. Microsoft
7. AOL Media Network
8. Wikipedia
9. Apple
10. Ask Search Network

Top 10 Social Networks & Blogs

1. Facebook
2. Blogger
3. Twitter
4. WordPress
5. Myspace.com
6. LinkedIn
7. Tumblr
8. Google+
9. Yahoo! Pulse
10. Six Apart TypePad

Top 10 Online Destinations for Video

• YouTube
• VEVO
• Facebook
• Yahoo!
• MSN/WindowsLive/Bing
• AOL Media Network
• Hulu
• The CollegeHumor Network
• CNN Digital Network
• Netflix

Via