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Hitachi unveils LifeStudio storage solutions

Recently, Seagate announced the GoFlex external hard drives, which are revolutionary in terms of their interface flexibility. Now Hitachi says it has an "industry first" of its own.

The company on Wednesday unveiled its latest in external hard drives, the new LifeStudio family. The drives are available in desktop and mobile versions, which share a new feature: the new Hitachi LifeStudio software designed to help users manage their "digital mess."

Hitachi bundles the software with any new LifeStudio external hard drive and it will launch automatically each time you connect the drive to a computer, be it a PC or a Mac. Apart from making data backup easy, the LifeStudio software is able to quickly find and organize digital content stored on any hard drive connected to the computer. For example, if you have a lot of photos and don't know where they're stored, the LifeStudio software helps find the one you need when you need it by automatically organizing them by date. It will display their thumbnails on a 3D wall in chronological order, somewhat like the Cover Flow feature on the iPod.

The software also integrates with social Web sites, such as Facebook and Flickr, and enables users to manage photo albums on these sites without having to use a Web browser to log in the traditional way. For example, from within the LifeStudio software, you can download your friends' Facebook photo albums. You can also quickly upload a photo to Facebook, view and edit comments on it, and so on. … Read more

Hitachi humanoid rolls over floor junk, looks cute

Hitachi is showing off an improved version of its Emiew humanoid robot that's better at understanding what you say and rolling over all the junk on the floor of your apartment. Those two functions may or may not be related.

According to Hitachi, Emiew 2 can now distinguish voices in a noisy setting and roll over cables and floor tiles of different heights while maintaining its balance (see the vid below).

Equipped with a 14-channel microphone system in its head, Emiew is also able to cancel out noise generated by its own innards to hear people better.

Emiew 2 … Read more

Hitachi seawall closes automatically in tsunami

Japanese dam builder Hitachi Zosen has developed a seawater barrier that deploys automatically when tsunami waves approach shorelines.

The Neo Rise barrier is a form of floodgate designed to prevent damage from tsunamis, floods, and storm surges brought on by typhoons.

It's based on Hitachi's air-powered flap gates, which lie at the bottom of harbors and close them off in the event of a major change in sea level.

Neo Rise (from "no energy, no operation, rising seawall") is set up on land. It runs on hydraulic power associated with riding tides and closes automatically, protecting … Read more

Hitachi unveils new 7mm laptop hard drives

Standard laptop hard drives (2.5-inch) come in three tiers based on their thickness: 9mm, 12.5mm, and 7mm.

The first one, such as the Seagate Momentus XT (500GB), is the most popular and used in most notebooks and other 2.5-inch-based storage applications. The 12.5mm standard, such as the 1TB WD Corpio Blue, is a newer standard that offers higher capacities but can only fit in later models of laptop computers. The third, 7mm tier is used for ultraportable applications, such as Netbooks or tablet PCs. For a long time, this ultracompact tier of internal hard drive was … Read more

Dell sues Sharp, Hitachi, Toshiba over LCD price fixing

Dell has accused five Asian firms that make liquid crystal display panels of illegally colluding on prices.

The world's third largest PC maker filed a complaint against Hitachi, Sharp, Toshiba, HannStar, and Seiko in U.S. District Court in San Francisco on Friday, according to a Reuters report. Damages sought by Dell have not yet been determined.

Dell is only the latest major buyer of LCD panels to allege price-fixing by several of the industry's largest suppliers. In October, AT&T, which purchases LCD panels for its cell phones, accused LG, Samsung, and AU Optronics of price … Read more

Report: Asian firms eye alternative chips

Updated on September 16 at 6:30 a.m. PDT: adding information from Hironori Kasahara, a professor of computer science at Waseda University

Large electronics companies are building a chip for consumer electronics devices in Japan, while a China-based device manufacturer said it is working on devices using the ARM chip design, according to reports.

In Japan, some of the country's largest electronics and chip manufacturers are collaborating in an effort to develop a new low-power processor design for consumer electronics devices, according to Nikkei, which Forbes reported earlier.

The Japan-based group includes Fujitsu, Toshiba, Panasonic Renesas Technology, NEC, … Read more

Hitachi announces high-speed 500GB laptop hard drive

Less than a month ago, Hitachi announced its 2TB hard drive for desktops. The company on Tuesday brought the same speed to its newest Travelstar hard drive for laptops.

The new hard drive is called Travelstar 7K500. This is a 500GB, 2.5-inch, SATA 2 (3Gb/s) hard drive designed for high-performance notebooks and external storage solutions. The new Travelstar 7K500, according to Hitachi, delivers up to 56 percent higher capacity and 16 percent better application performance than its predecessors. It also comes with Hitachi's new technologies designed to withstand shocks and vibration, and offers better power management and … Read more

Pi-obsessed Japanese reach 2.5 trillion digits

It's funny how the Japanese love to waste their supercomputers on climate change and car design instead of nuclear weapons like in some countries.

Now they're squandering their teraflops chasing down irrational numbers.

The T2K-Tsukuba System, a supercomputer at the University of Tsukuba northeast of Tokyo, has calculated the value of pi to more than 2.5 trillion decimal places, a record. The old record of more than 1.2 trillion decimal places was set in 2002 by a team from the University of Tokyo and Hitachi.

The new value of pi is 2,576,980,370,000 … Read more