driving

While the Colin McRae off-road racing series has been popular in Europe, the game hasn't gained much traction here in the U.S. In an attempt to dig up some excitement, Codemasters has decided to rename the latest game DiRT.

Fans of the previous games shouldn't be overly concerned, as Colin McRae is still around in DiRT. In fact, you can race against him on the German Avelsbachring course, as just one of the three events provided in the new game demo, which also offers one course in online multiplayer mode.… Read more

You probably already know that the merchandising mania for Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End has gone just a teeny bit over-the-top. Well, the tech tie-ins don't stop with skull-and-crossbones TVs: Pocket Lint claims to have found evidence of Pirates USB drives made by A-Data. Apparently, they'll come pre-loaded with wallpapers and other movie media goodies, and will be available in up to an 8GB capacity. Now that's some legit buried treasure.

However, there's no product page or pricing information yet. But considering the other sorts of Pirates tie-ins that we've already seen, … Read more

Box.net is beta testing a new plug-in for Microsoft Office that lets users save Office files to their Box.net storage folders. The plug-in works for both Office 2003 and 2007 on Windows XP and Vista, provides users a new "Save to Box.net" button, and gives visual notification when the file is uploading and then successfully sent. Users can then access that file anytime on their Box.net Web storage folder.

The new plug-in was built using Box.net's developer API, which the Box.net team says can be used to add this functionality to … Read more

Working in the technology industry is a daily geekfest. Personally, I love learning about the next generation of software architecture, network intelligence and server virtualization. Yet in spite of the fact that our industry persistently challenges the laws of physics, sometimes it comes face to face with basic obstacles.

I saw this when I worked at a fly-by-night telecom start-up where we pitched high-speed private optical networking services. It was cutting-edge stuff until we realized that dark fiber is far from ubiquitous. More often than not, laying fiber involves digging ditches, getting permits, dealing with unions, and spooling wires up … Read more

We'd pretty much given up on posting any more items about USB storage keys--not because we have anything against them, mind you, but we just couldn't keep up with their kudzu-like proliferation. (Except for the poker chip versions, of course.)

But leave it to those insane-asylum escapees at Brando to come up with one more that we couldn't pass up. The "USB Neck Strap" has a built-in flash drive with 2GB of memory and can also hold a variety of other items that are prone to misplacement, such as keys and even a mobile … Read more

The International Disk Drive, Equipment and Materials Association has finalized a standard that, ideally, will make it easier to find errors on hard drives.

The standard, called Long Block Data, essentially will compartmentalize data in blocks consisting of of 4,096 bytes of data rather than 512 byte blocks of data, the standard for years. The problem is that, with the rapid increases in density, the 512 byte segments occupy too little space on the surface of a platter of a hard drive. There are also way too many of them.

By quadrupuling the size of the segments, the errors … Read more

Harman Kardon is just about to unleash the successor to its Drive + Play iPod interface, and we got a sneak preview of the new system this week. Imaginatively called the Drive + Play 2, the stylish device offers tons more features than its predecessor did, including the ability to show album art, an alphabetic search function, and a unique means of refining playlists on the move. The DP2 will be hitting shelves next week with a price tag of around $400. Check out our Crave slide show for all the info as well as some beauty shots.

Those little black Moleskine notebooks, once the scribble space of choice for Picasso and Hemingway, are now pretty much known as mandatory gear for brooding coffee-shop hipsters and aspiring indie rockers. But little did we know, they also make great external hard drives. A blogger by the name of Sebastian Delmont recently noticed a correlation between the sizes of his Moleskine journal and a hard drive, and cleverly realized that he could modify one of the sleek black books as the external casing for an internal laptop hard drive--saving a lot of cash in the process.

And there you have … Read more

If you've got $399 and a burning need to story 1 terabyte of data, Hitachi has the drive for you.

The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 hard drive from Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is now available at retailers like CDW for a suggested retail price of $399. The company announced the drive earlier.

Although hard drive makers compete in a difficult market that often results in losses for many companies, their engineers nonetheless move at a blistering pace. Hard drive capacity continues to double about every two years, which leads to higher capacity at lower prices.

How much is a terabyte? … Read more