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| Related Articles |
| Golf: The men behind the big events |
16 June 2007 |
| Organising corporate golf championships has evolved from merely booking a golf course and assembling the prizes for a day's event. |
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| Bigger and better World Travel Market |
28 November 2007 |
| un-audited figures reveal largest event ever staged with record results. |
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| Guy Hands aims to snuff out excesses that cost EMI £100m a year |
29 November 2007 |
| Guy Hands, the new chairman of EMI, has told potential investors that the
company’s former management, led by Eric Nicoli, wasted millions of pounds
on corporate excesses that included use of a Mayfair property worth £5.6
million, the retention of highly paid consultants and extravagant spending
on candles and flowers. |
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| £1bn golf resort plans considered |
29 November 2007 |
| Plans to create a massive £1bn golf resort in the north east go before Aberdeenshire councillors later. |
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| Fire service 'could face charges' |
28 November 2007 |
| A fire service could be charged with corporate manslaughter over the deaths of four firefighters, police say. |
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| Micron exec: SSDs to reach portable devices in 2008 |
28 November 2007 |
| Memory maker Micron Technology on Wednesday introduced a line of solid-state drives (SSDs) and said it would plug the technology into portable storage devices by mid- to end 2008.Micron's new RealSSD hard drive, announced at an event in San Francisco, will come in sizes of 1.8 inches and 2.5 inches with storage capacities of 32GB and 64GB. Micron also announced embedded SSD modules for blade servers with storage capacities of 1GB to 8GB.Purported by many to be the future replacement of hard drives, the growth of SSDs has been stymied by high pricing, longevity, and storage issues. However, the power-efficient and ruggedness of SSDs may attract users, said Dean Klein, vice president of memory system development at Micron.RealSSD is 50 percent lighter than standard hard drives, and at under 2 watts of power consumption, the drives will be ideal for laptops, Klein said. The drives also support the SATA II interface, a standard typically used to connect hard drives to computer systems.With no moving parts, RealSSD drives also have a rugged design and store data reliably. They handle vibrations and resist shock better than rotating media, Klein said.Despite multiple advantages, SSDs may not replace hard drives as storage devices in the near future, he said. SSD technology is under development, and some markets are sensitive to price-per-gigabyte of SSDs, Klein said.SSDs currently cost between $7 and $10 per gigabyte, making them much more expensive than hard drives, which cost $0.20 to $0.30 per gigabyte, according to data from research firm iSuppli.Initial consumers for RealSSD could be OEMs or enterprises, which look for reliability and high data throughput, and laptop consumers, which require portability and power efficiency, Klein said.RealSSD drives could reach consumers in the form of portable storage devices or ExpressCards by mid- to end 2008, depending on consumer demand, Mark Adams, Micron's vice president of digital media said in an interview. An ExpressCard fits in a laptop's PCMCIA slot.Sending SSDs to consumers immediately is questionable as the emerging technology hasn't proven itself yet, Adams said. There is a risk in being first-to-market if the product doesn't sell, which will build up unnecessary inventory of SSDs. Instead, Micron will try to get feedback from OEMs that include SSDs in their products and develop devices accordingly, Adams said.Micron sells portable consumer storage devices through Lexar Media, which it acquired last year.There are already a few vendors that include SSDs in their hardware. Aurora, a gaming systems manufacturer, includes them in its Area-51 ALX and Aurora ALX desktop PCs, and Toshiba includes SSDs in its laptops. |
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| Micron unveils first solid state drive offerings |
28 November 2007 |
| Micron Technology plunged headfirst into the nascent solid state drive marketplace Wednesday with the unveiling of its RealSSD family of storage devices.The RealSSD portfolio features serial ATA II-enabled 1.8-in. and 2.5-in. solid state drives in 32GB and 64GB capacities. Early next year, the company will start mass producing the drives, which are currently being "sampled," said Dean Klein, vice president of memory system development at Boise, Idaho-based Micron.Micron's RealSSD drives, noted Klein, require less than 2 watts of power during active mode and are about 50 percent lighter than hard disk drives of similar capacities. The devices do not require a SATA bridge chip but rather rely on a single-chip controller (optimized for four-channel control of NAND flash) directly targeting the solid state drive application, he added.The new RealSSD line also includes the Embedded USB and Module products. The RealSSD Embedded USB can be plugged into a PC or blade server system to provide operating system storage and boot capabilities via a USB 2.0 interface. The RealSSD Module is a SATA-enabled solid state drive for server-based applications that measures 25mm high by 133.5mm long and less than 4mm thick.Klein acknowledged that adoption of solid state drives for corporate users has been very slow, mostly because of the technology's high price tag. However, he predicted that declining prices of NAND flash technology and the inevitable development of applications for solid state systems will accelerate demand."Technology is going to make [solid state] real. The cost of the NAND components will be a large determining factor in terms of acceptance," said Klein. "Even if we could bring speed of light performance to these devices, there's a lot of applications that still won't take them because the cost is too high or the density isn't high enough."Of the many first-generation solid state drive devices currently available, Klein remarked, "benchmarks have proven them to be fairly lame in terms of performance." Going a step further, he panned BitMicro Networks' 1.6TB solid state drive unveiled this month as a "pricey piece of art." Samsung Electronics and SanDisk are considered two established leaders currently providing solid state drive offerings, analysts noted.Although initially focused on providing solid state drives for the notebook audience -- a natural fit, said Klein, because solid state is lightweight, and offers power savings and a small size -- Micron does have interest in examining larger-capacity solid state products for the desktop and enterprise industry.Jeff Janukowicz, an analyst at IDC, said his IT research firm has forecast that demand for solid state technology will "substantially" increase over the next few years. An IDC report released in July predicted that sales of solid state drives will grow from $373 million in 2006 to a total of $5.4 billion in 2011.While notebook computing will fuel solid state adoption, Janukowicz said he expects the need for improved performance and specialized applications in servers, blade servers, and enterprise storage systems to attract growing solid state interest over time.Janukowicz said Micron's decision to debut an entire family of solid state products with RealSSD and its established NAND and flash memory expertise could prove to be a key differentiator with OEMs. But much work still needs to be done, he noted."Micron needs to work well with PC OEMs that deliver solutions acceptable for the PC market," he said. "The challenge there is [a traditional] usage model of using hard disks in notebook PCs. There is a bit of education process in terms of using solid state disks as primary storage in network computing that needs to take place."Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate |
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| How Do You Tell a Web Name From A Typo? |
28 November 2007 |
| Among the many things the Internet has added recently to contemporary life, there is this: Many grown-ups now sound like babbling toddlers when speaking about the digital world -- because many corporate names now have the ring of a collection of Dr. Seuss characters. |
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| Adwatch: Edwards on 'Corrupt' Washington |
26 November 2007 |
| -- TITLE: "Mess." "Born." LENGTH: 30 seconds. AIRING: "Mess" in Iowa. "Born" in South Carolina. SCRIPT "Born": Edwards: "My dad worked in the mills. When I was born he had to borrow $50 to bring me home here. When the mills closed, I saw first hand how devastating bad government and corporate gre... |
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