HARDWARE
The Fine Art Of USB Soldering
 A good modder wouldn’t be caught dead without a soldering iron in his arsenal. Now, whether that means you’ll want to reach for the USB Soldering Iron ($28) from Thanko, the Japanese creator of loony USB devices, is entirely your call. Sure, the iron is affordable and sports an LED near the tip to shine some light on the work at hand, but USB? Really? Still, the iron heats to about 392 degrees Fahrenheit when attached to one USB port and 572 F when it’s attached to two ports via an attached 40-inch cord. Use a 9V battery with the included 30-inch battery connector, however, and we’re talking roughly 932 degrees of soldering joy.
The Woz Likes His SSD Storage; Kingston Expands V Series
 Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak detailed his more-than-passing interest in SSD storage in a recent Computerworld interview, explaining that his new chief scientist position with SSD maker Fusion-io is the first position he’s taken with a company “that I didn’t create myself since 1972 with Hewlett-Packard calculators.” Wozniak says early on he used “dynamic RAMs backed up with power in huge tower-like structures that I’d connect to early Macintosh computers.” Still, he doesn’t see disk storage going away entirely, particularly in enterprise-class settings. “It’s just mathematics. You take stuff that’s not accessed very often, it can be accessed slowly. And then you bring it into a faster form of storage when it is being used a lot.”
Elsewhere, Kingston has expanded its value-priced SSD drive family with the SSDNow V Series 40GB Boot Drive (170MBps read; 40MBps write) aimed at “novice SSD users” looking for a desktop pick-me-up. Everyone, however, should appreciate the drive’s $84.99 price (after Newegg.com rebates).
Wikipedia In Your Pocket
 Want to give the "gift of knowledge" this holiday season? The WikiReader ($99; thewikireader.com) from Openmoko is the answer. Designed by former Apple designer Thomas Meyerhoffer, the square, palm-sized touchscreen device packs 3 million text- and English-only Wikipedia articles on microSD. There's no backlight, but operation is three-button easy. Two required AAAs should buy you 12 months of use, and content updates are available via free downloads or a $29 subscription that will net you two new memory cards annually. OK, so the WikiReader won't blow doors down, but as Openmoko puts it, never forget that "75% of the world is offline." States Openmoko CEO Sean Moss-Puitz, "WikiReader is our gift to those who have the openness to experience life and the willingness to be changed by it." Good enough.
Corsair Aims 950W Of PSU Power At Enthusiasts
 Enthusiasts and gamers, meet Corsair’s TX950W (about $170), a PSU sporting a dedicated +12V rail providing 78A (936W), which “equates to 98.5% of the PSU’s total power output.” That ability makes the TX950W “ideal for extreme, multi-GPU gaming systems” using new Intel Core i5 and i7 CPUs, Corsair says. You also get a 140mm fan that won’t crank past its minimum speed until hitting about 65% of the TX950W’s total load, six 6+2 PCI-E and 12 SATA connectors attached to extra-long cables, and 80 Plus Bronze certification. Dylan Rhodes, Corsair director of product marketing for cases, cooling, and PSUs, blogged that a TX950W sample Corsair sent to the 80 PLUS organization actually “blew past the thresholds for Bronze certification.” Although “we have every right to promote the TX950W as a Silver-certified PSU,” Rhodes writes, Corsair is sticking with Bronze designation because “our reputation is important to us, and we can’t guarantee that the TX950W that ends up in your PC will meet the Silver standard.”
Asus Slaps USB 3.0 On A Mobo
 Asus is calling its late-October-released Xtreme Design P7P55D-E Premium/P7P55D Series mobos the first to feature true USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gbps performance. The P7P55D-E ($299) builds the support on the board, while the P7P55D relies on an Asus U3S6 PCI-E 4X card ($29) to gain the ability. Asus states that by “eliminating transmission bottlenecks, the expansion bridge increases hard disk read and write speeds by up to 50%” depending on configurations. The company adds that transferring a 20GB HD movie “now takes less than 70 seconds, while a 4MB song requires less than 0.01 seconds.” The LGA Socket 1156 P7P55D-E uses Intel’s P55 Express chipset and provides two SATA 6Gbps ports.
Tilera’s CPU Hits The Century Mark
 Processor manufacturing upstart Tilera (www.tilera.com) means business with its third generation of CPUs—100 cores of business. Announced in late October, Tilera’s new Tile-Gx family of four processors includes the Tile-Gx100, “the world’s first 100-core processor.” The chip offers “the highest performance of any microprocessor yet announced by a factor of four,” Tilera says. The family, which also includes 16-, 36-, and 64-core processors, also “raises the bar for performance-per-watt to new levels with 10 times better computer efficiency compared to Intel’s next-generation Westmere processor,” Tilera states. Beyond using iMesh interconnect technology that makes an on-chip bus unnecessary, the processors use Dynamic Distributed Cache technology that makes each core’s local cache shareable across the chip. Fabricated using TSMC’s 40nm process, the CPUs top out at 1.5GHz and sport integrated DDR3 memory controllers. Expect Tile Gx-36 samples in Q4 2010 with the other chips to follow. Of the new multicore monsters, CEO Omid Tahernia says, "Customers will be able to replace an entire board presently using a dozen or more chips with just one of our TILE-Gx processors, greatly simplifying the system architecture and resulting in reduced cost, power consumption, and PC board area.”
INTERNET
Ciao To English-Only Web Addresses
The Internet has seen its share of monumental changes in its 40 years. Another will soon occur when, for the first time, international domain addresses will entirely contain non-Latin-based characters. ICANN approved the move at a late-October meeting in South Korea, with ICANN Board Chairman Peter Dengate Thrush stating the move is “the biggest technical change to the Internet since it was invented four decades ago.” Described as a “fantastically complicated technical feature,” the change will rely on a translation system to convert scripts to the correct addresses. ICANN has reportedly been testing the system for years. It’s believed that more than half of the world’s 1.6 billion Internet users use languages centered on non-Latin alphabets. Thus, “this change is very much necessary for not only half the world’s Internet users today, but more than half, probably, of the future users” as Internet growth continues, ICANN CEO and President Rod Beckstrom stated.
Wi-Fi Alliance Directs New Spec At Devices
Hit the bricks, router. Be warned, Bluetooth. There’s a new specification in town, and its name is Wi-Fi Direct. According to recent details from the Wi-Fi Alliance, the WPA2-protected Wi-Fi Direct specification will let supported devices “discover one another and advertise available services” while supporting “typical Wi-Fi ranges and the same data rates as can be achieved with an infrastructure connection, so devices can connect from across a home or office and conduct bandwidth-hungry tasks with ease.” Edgar Figueroa, alliance executive director, stated that users will benefit “even when a Wi-Fi access point isn’t available.” The Alliance stated Wi-Fi Direct-certified devices “will also be able to create connections with hundreds of millions of Wi-Fi certified legacy devices already in use.” Look for certified gear by mid-2010.
Is Real-Time Video Killing P2P?
A “2009 Global Broadband Phenomena” report Sandvine compiled using data gathered from 20+ cable and DSL providers and 24 million global subscribers concludes that there’s been a “dramatic shift in consumer behavior toward real-time ‘experience now’ applications [video, Flash media, etc.] and shift away from ‘experience later’ applications.” For 2009, real-time entertainment traffic rose to 26.6% from 12.6% in 2008, a “doubling in the share of total bytes attributable to real-time entertainment applications,” Sandvine reports. P2P filesharing, meanwhile, declined 25% to now account for more than 20% of traffic. Elsewhere, Sandvine found that during an average month, the top 1% of broadband subscribers totaled 25% of all Internet traffic; North Americans watch the most YouTube videos, but Europeans watch the most minutes; traffic to and from game consoles was up more than 50% per subscriber; and Internet usage peak times shifted from 6 to 11 p.m. last year to 7 to 10 p.m. this year.
SITE SEEING
Keep Your Eyes On The Big Picture
 There’s so much to say about The Big Picture, an amazingly captivating photo blog that Web developer Alan Taylor operates for Boston.com, yet there’s so little that needs to be said. Dial your browser to the site (www.boston.com/bigpicture), and you’ll understand why. The site’s photos—which Taylor posts every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from AP, Reuters, Getty Images, and public domain sources—are poignant, immediately arresting, and do exactly what good photojournalism should: tell a visual story. That’s not entirely surprising considering the site is inspired by Life, National Geographic, and similar outlets in a pursuit to “highlight high-quality, amazing imagery” with a “focus on current events, less-known stories and, well, just about anything that . . . looks really interesting.”
U2 Goes Where No Band Has Gone Before
 On one hand, U2’s Oct. 25 performance at Pasadena’s Rose Bowl before nearly 100,000 fans was just another date on the band’s current global 360 Degrees Tour. On the other hand, considering the concert reportedly drew 7 million Web watchers and generated a reported 10 million streams among fans via U2’s own YouTube channel, the show amounted to more of a “space adventure,” as Bono put it. The concert, which was streamed live and is now available for replays, had close to 1.75 million views on YouTube at last check and is being called the largest event YouTube has ever streamed. Who’s to thank? Apparently the Edge, of whom Bono told the Pasadena crowd, “Every horror movie needs a mad scientist, and ours is just to my right: the Edge. He wants to boldly go where no guitar players have ever gone before. He’s Mr. Spock to us; he’s the Edge to you.”
SOFTWARE
Windows 7 Arrives; Next Up Is Office 2010, SharePoint 2010
 Windows 7’s release has come and gone to mostly positive reviews (“but so were reviews for Windows Vista” early on, Reuters wisely offered), so what’s a Microsoftie to look forward to now? How about public betas of Share-Point Server 2010 and Office 2010? Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in mid-October at the SharePoint Conference 2009 that both betas would be ready in November. Reportedly, anyone will be allowed a look-see, although there was no word concerning how many copies would be meted out or for how long. Microsoft previously made Office Web Apps, the free, scaled-down versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, available for preview in September via Windows Live. Ballmer, meanwhile, dubbed Share-Point 2010 the biggest and most important release of the software to date, saying, “When paired with Microsoft Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 will transform efficiency by connecting workers across a single collaboration platform for business.”
The Karmic Koala Arrives
  An “excellent release.” That was Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth’s reported summation of Win7, which he further cited as a substantial improvement from the past and a credible release even on netbooks. The touchy-feely vibe came roughly at the same time as Canonical dropped Ubuntu 9.10 (www.ubuntu.com), or Karmic Koala, on the Linux world, complete with a new Software Center interface in desktop and server versions, the latter of which packs cloud computing skills “based on the same APIs as Amazon EC2.” “We want to deliver Ubuntu as an end-to-end solution,” Computerworld quoted Shuttleworth. “By 2010, there will be people developing Ubuntu on ARM smartbooks, as well as deploying it on Intel Xeon servers in the cloud.”
Youngsters Would Rather Own Than Stream
More than 8,100. That’s the average number of music tracks that users aged 14 to 24 have amassed in their digital music collections, according to a recent study the University of Hertfordshire compiled for UK Music, the organization that represents UK artists, record labels, producers, and other industry groups. Of the roughly 1,800 people surveyed, 61% admitted to going the P2P route to acquire their tunes, including 83% of those reporting they snatch music downloads daily or weekly and 86% reporting they’ve copied CDs for others. Beyond P2P, 75% report swapping music with others via email, IM, or Bluetooth. Interestingly, 78% expressed no interest in paying for Spotify or a similar music-discovery app, with 89% indicating they prefer to “own” their music vs. stream it.
SOFTWARE SHORTS
AVG & Kaspersky Shore Up Short URLs
  Attention, slaves to Twitter: AVG added a feature to its free LinkScanner utility (http://linkscanner.avg.com) recently that checks abbreviated URLs for malware. AVG says LinkScanner is the “only security tool available today that can detect the presence of these poisoned Web pages, because it tests the destination of each URL in real time and does not rely on blacklists that are outdated as soon as they’re created due to the ever-shifting locations where the bad guys hide.” LinkScanner works with existing AV software and analyzes each link that a user clicks or types against “intelligence gathered by a global community of online threat detectors.”
Kaspersky (www.kaspersky.com), meanwhile, released its own Krab Krawler tool in late October to extract URLs, including shortened ones, from the millions of Twitter tweets posted every day looking for known malware site matches. The tool also checks unknown sites for malicious code. Kaspersky Labs researchers stated as many as one in 500 Web addresses at Twitter lead to a malware-hosting destination.
Gartner Details Top Techs & Trends For IT
In what has become an annual tradition, Gartner recently unveiled its Top 10 strategic technologies and trends for 2010, which the industry analyst suggests companies and organizations keep an eye on because of their impact on “the organization’s long-term plans, programs, and initiatives.” Topping the list was cloud computing, which Gartner says won’t “eliminate the costs of IT solutions” but will “rearrange some [IT budgets] and reduce others.” Other list-makers include advanced analytics, client computing, green initiatives, reshaping the data center, social computing, activity-monitored security, flash memory, virtualization for availability, and mobile applications.
Digital Ants On The March
Wake Forest University and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory scientists are developing an army of digital ants designed to seek out and destroy malware nasties. Commonly referred to as swarm intelligence, the gist of the security approach is that if one digital ant senses that something fishy is going on in a network, it drops a bit of “digital pheromone,” which is essentially a red flag for other digital ants to zero in on. A program overseeing the network’s system then picks up the swarm activity, and, if warranted, it will alert security personnel to the potential risk. Researchers hope to bring 3,000 different types of digital ants to life, each able to detect a certain malware signature.
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