memory

Lexar JumpDrive Triton review: More than just USB, it's USA!

This is not one of those typical thumbdrives being given out at social events. For one thing, the Lexar JumpDrive Triton may be the first device I've run into in a long, long time that doesn't bear the "Made in China" label. Instead, there's a message on its back that clearly reads "Product of USA." While it's unclear if the drive is actually made entirely in the States, one thing is for sure: it holds a lot more appeal than just patriotic sentiment.… Read more

Reclaim PC performance with Vista Services Optimizer

Many programs install services such as update helpers that start with Windows yet are rarely needed. Turning off or modifying the startup behavior of unnecessary services can cut the time it takes Windows to boot and boost your system's performance. Power users are familiar with such tweaks, but the inexperienced user who has the most to gain is often too intimidated to even try it.

Help is available in the form of Vista Services Optimizer, a free program that tweaks your Windows PC's performance by shutting down or modifying services that you don't need or don't … Read more

Mozilla contemplates nuking McAfee

The SiteAdvisor add-on for Firefox evaluates search results to let you know how safe a site is to visit before you go there, but one Mozilla engineer says that it drags down Firefox and causes huge memory leaks.

(Update: McAfee announced a fix for later next week, and Mozilla acknowledged it. See below.)

It's just the kind of problem that Mozilla doesn't want to be dealing with as it finds itself knee-deep in an ambitious development plan and surrounded by ever-tougher competition.

Mozilla engineer Nicholas Nethercote wrote a blog post early today in which he recommended that Firefox … Read more

Nvidia, Rambus settle patent dispute

Nvidia and Rambus have settled a longstanding patent license dispute.

The agreement covers a "broad range" of chip products offered by Nvidia and settles all outstanding claims, including resolution of past use of Rambus' patented innovations, the companies said. The term of the agreement is five years.

Though neither financial nor technological details were disclosed, the dispute between the two companies has not exactly been private.

In 2008, Rambus sued Nvidia, accusing the graphics chip supplier of violating 17 Rambus-held patents on memory controllers. At that time, Rambus claimed that chipsets, graphics processers, and media communication processors across … Read more

Purge the OS X disk cache to analyze memory usage

The memory in your system, commonly referred to as RAM, is the work space the system uses to store executable code and loaded data. If your system is slowing down then you may be low on RAM. Although you can install more or free some up by quitting some running programs, first it may help to analyze how much RAM your programs actually are using.

If you open up the Activity Monitor utility on your system and go to the Memory section, you can see a pie chart of the system's physical memory usage, where generally the larger the … Read more

Here's why Obama is visiting Intel

On Wednesday, President Obama is due to visit an Intel plant in Arizona. Here's why.

Obama aims to highlight manufacturing in America--one of the State of the Union's themes--and it's hard to find a better example of that than the world's leading chipmaker. Intel is now one of America's foremost manufacturers, boasting some of the most sophisticated manufacturing facilities in the world, many of them sprinkled throughout the U.S.

Its development fabs (fabrication plants) in Oregon are the most cutting-edge of its leading-edge factories and have already received one presidential visit, in February … Read more

Antique IBM memory box + math = mind-blowing

This piece of computer history launched 1,500 tweets.

The man in the photo (my husband, Tim) is holding an IBM Type 706 Williams-Kilburn Tube Electrostatic Memory drawer that we found in my grandfather's pole barn. (What's a pole barn? Basically, a really big shed.)

Before I tweeted this photo, Tim and I did some rough, back-of-the-envelope calculations to guess how much memory this circa-1954 hunk of valve and metal contained.

4K of IBM memory found in my grandpa's pole barn, captured in a 692K photo. #mindblown twitter.com/lturrentine/st...

— Lindsey Turrentine (@lturrentine) January 22, 2012

We estimated, based on what my grandfather could remember from his days as an IBM salesman, that the memory drawer stored 4 kilobytes of data.

Meanwhile, the tweet went nuts, going and going, and even making its way to the front page of Gizmodo. I'm not sure whether that counts as viral, but it's as close as I've gotten on Twitter.

So we decided to look for more information on the IBM 706, which IBM built in the mid-'50s to serve as a modular memory component for the IBM 701 computer, otherwise known as "The Defense Calculator" (a creepily Cold War name for a computer intended for scientific calculations).

The IBM 706 contains two so-called Williams Tubes, each handling 1,024 bits of memory adding up to 2,048 bits--roughly one quarter of the 1,024 bytes it takes to add up to a single kilobyte. (There are 8 bits in each byte of memory, bringing the 706 to a mere 256 bytes.) In other words, we were optimistic about the 706's capacity. The crazy machine in the picture held only one-quarter of a kilobyte of memory.… Read more

SanDisk on new XQD memory card format: 'Meh'

In a decision inauspicious for XQD, SanDisk is skipping over the new memory card format for high-end cameras.

"At this time, SanDisk has chosen not to productize the XQD format," SanDisk spokeswoman Wendy Vlieks told CNET News late yesterday.

The ringing non-endorsement is particularly notable since SanDisk helped create the format in the first place.

The comment also means that XQD--developed by the CompactFlash Association (CFA) as a successor to CF cards--currently lacks support from the two top-tier flash card makers. The other, Lexar, was noncommittal about XQD last week: "As a leading CFA member, Lexar has … Read more

The future of data storage (infographic)

Data storage has long been a function of Moore's Law. But researchers at IBM say it's time to throw that equation out the window and start from the atomic level rather than waiting for the limits of physics to be halted at the same place.

This infographic, created by IBM, demonstrates the future of information storage.

IBM Research Atomic Scale Magnetic Memory

IBM creates data storage at the atomic level

SAN JOSE, Calif.--With a discovery that could some day fundamentally alter the scale of mass data storage, nanotechnology researchers at IBM say they have found a way to store a bit of information in as little as 12 magnetic atoms.

That's a radical improvement over today's storage devices which, IBM argues, require about a million atoms to hold a bit of information. For those keeping score at home, IBM's discovery could mean storage could one day be possible at 1/83,000th the scale of today's disk drives.

And while the IBM researchers behind the … Read more