h oh, Samsung’s just announced their first 256GB SSD. Not that you needed to know anything more than that to trigger salivation, but the MLC-flash SATA II drive has speeds of 200MBps read and 160MBps sequential write. Not like we’ll be able to afford it or anything, but they’ll be available come September, with a 1.8-inch version due in Q4.
By Engadget
We’re not sure what whacky voodoo snakeoil these MetaRam people are peddling, but the company’s got some high profile behind it (like Intel, for one), is being led by former AMD CTO Fred Weber, has appears to have some potentially revolutionary RAM quadrupling technology. Claiming to have leapfrogged current RAM technology by 2-4 years, MetaRam uses a specialized “MetaSDRAM” chipset that effectively bonds and addresses four cheap 1Gb DRAM chips as one, tricking any machine’s memory controller into using it as a 4x capacity DIMM. Since a 1Gb chip is apparently far less expensive than a 2Gb chip, MetaRam devices can multiply capacity at prices far lower than their competition; the company claims it’ll be shipping in machines in the first quarter of this year, and Hynix has already announced their own 2-rank 8GB DDR2 RDIMMs for the second half.
Source: Engadget
We’ve definitely been curious about the difference sticking an SSD would make in the MacBook Air’s otherwise average performance and battery life, and it looks like the answer is a resounding “meh.” The crew at Ars Technica ran an SSD-equipped Air through a battery of tests, and found that while the increased random disk read / write speeds and slightly faster processor led to a minor overall speedup and less pinwheeling, the dramatically lower sequential read/ write speeds of the SSD made things essentially a wash. What’s worse, battery life — where the SSD should have shone — was decidedly mediocre. Ars was able to coax the SSD model in to lasting 29 minutes longer than the HDD version they tested, but on average the SSD-equipped MBA didn’t have the juice to last any longer than the HDD model, getting to about 2 hours and 31 minutes before petering out. All said, Ars says the extra $1300 for the SSD MacBook Air just isn’t worth it — but c’mon, you know that’s not stopping the people who are buying Airs in the first place.
Via Digg
Sony Corp. won the fierce competition in the U.S. for TV sales during the holiday season as it beat out rivals offering lower-priced products and shipped the highest number of LCD TVs, which are becoming the dominant model. The Japanese electronics company had a slow start last year because it was late in offering a lineup of fully-digital LCD TVs, but it jumped four spots from the previous quarter to take a 12.8% share in the key October-December period, according to the latest data by Texas-based research firm DisplaySearch. This was the first time Sony took top share in North American LCD TV shipments.
The results, however, also showed the continued volatility in U.S. market share in the face of unrelenting competition. Electronics manufacturers have said that prices fell at a faster pace than they expected last year. Though they all reported increased sales of TVs, their quarterly earnings have suffered from a decline in profitability. Sharp Corp., which had the largest market share in the July-September quarter, fell to No. 4 with an 8.4% share, losing nearly 3 percentage points. Vizio Inc., a privately held Irvine, Calif. company that rose to the top spot in the second quarter, fell to third place with 10.7% share. Vizio, which outsources its production to Asia, has rapidly become a major TV player by selling its ultralow-priced televisions through retail chains like Costco Wholesale Corp. South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co., the biggest producer of all types of TVs world-wide in terms of units, came in second.
Source:NY TIMES
Steve Hirsch’s Vivid Entertainment, the biggest name in the $12 billion-a-year adult video industry, filed a lawsuit last month against PornoTube, one of a handful of popular video-sharing sites styled as the dirtier cousins of YouTube, Redstone’s legal nemesis. Similar to the Google-owned video juggernaut, PornoTube has become a destination for free porn by letting anyone post sex videos without filtering out clips that might be copyrighted. Hirsch believes PornoTube doesn’t do enough to keep his content off its site, and, like YouTube, it has leveraged the traffic it now delivers into marketing deals with other sex video producers. It has left Hirsch, a leader in an industry that has welcomed new technologies like the VCR and VOD much more than its Hollywood equivalents, with little choice but to sue the pants off the free sites.
And the sites are 
:
http://www.sexvidia.com/
http://www.mypornmotion.com/
http://pornotube.com/
http://youporn.com/
http://redtube.com/
http://www.spankwire.com/
http://www.pronshare.com/
http://www.vho.com/
http://xtube.com/
Enojy
We already knew the basic details about the processor at the heart of Apple’s MacBook Air, but those itching to know exactly how Apple and Intel managed to cram everything into that oh so small package may want to head over to AnandTech, which has pieced together a fairly thorough report on the matter. As the site reports, the processor is based on Intel’s 65nm Merom architecture and packs an 800MHz bus, yet it uses the significantly smaller chip package that Intel had originally only planned to debut with the launch of its Montevina laptop platform later this year. That combination, along with the Intel 965GMS chipset with integrated graphics, allowed for a 60% reduction in total footprint size, and a TDP rating of just 20W, as opposed to 35W from the regular Core 2 Duo processor. If that’s still not enough MacBook Air minutia you, you can hit up the link below for the full rundown.
Yeah, the BBC seems to be quite the indecisive bunch, but according to a recent blog posting by Ashley Highfield (Director, BBC Future Media And Technology), its iPlayer may actually see face time on Apple’s revised Apple TV platform. Quite frankly, details are far too thin to actually make anything of this just yet, but he does note that the “effective relaunch of the AppleTV… coupled with its (long anticipated) move to a rental model, means that we can look to getting BBC iPlayer onto this platform too, as we should be able to use the rental functionality to allow our programs to be downloaded, free, but retained for a time window, and then erased, as our rights-holders currently insist.” The post goes on to touch on a number of IP to TV-related topics, but not once does it mention actually being in talks with Cupertino to make this happen. Guess it’s wait-and-see from here, eh?
