1. The gesture computer interface from Minority Report
2. Mr. Fusion from the Back to the Future movies
3. KITT from Knight Rider
4. The sonic screwdriver from Doctor Who
5. Iron Man’s armor
6. The Green Lantern Corps power ring
7. The universal translator from Star Trek
8. The neuralizer from Men in Black
9. R2-D2 from Star Wars (obviously)
10. The matter compiler from Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age

1. Adobe Flash
2. OLED
3. USB
4. GPS
5. Multitasking
6. Keyboard
7. Camera
8. Verizon
9. 16:9
10. HDMI

• 72 per cent of users stuck with Microsoft Office
• 21.5 per cent chose a variant of Openoffice.org
• 2.7 per cent preferred Corel's WordPerfect Office
• 1.4 per cent used Apple's Iwork
• 0.3 per cent selected Softmaker Office
• 0.03 per cent chose Koffice
• 17.1 per cent didn't have any office application suite installed at all

Today AMD is releasing five new processors in their Phenom II & Athlon II lineups. Along with these new chips comes lower prices to existing products, most notably the Athlon II X4 630 (2.8 GHz) will replace the X4 620 (2.6 GHz) at the $99 retail price point! This means that AMD now has two quad core processors priced at $99 or less, and one quad core at only $119! Briefly, the new processors being released are as follows:

• Phenom II X4 910e - $169 (2.6GHz / 65W TDP / 4 Cores)
• Phenom II X2 555 BE - $99 (3.2GHz / 80W TDP / 2 Cores)
• Athlon II X4 635 - $119 (2.9GHz / 95W TDP / 4 Cores)
• Athlon II X3 440 - $84 (3.0GHz / 95W TDP / 3 Cores)
• Athlon II X2 255 - $74 (3.1GHz / 65W TDP / 2 Cores)

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The HTPC (Home Theater PC) market is a huge and highly competitive industry. New products are constantly coming out that offer more features and better performance. ASRock's ION 330 series of NetTop / Home Theater PCs are an excellent design that packs a lot of punch into a tiny footprint. The top of the line model, the ION 330HT-BD, features a Blu-ray drive for the ultimate home theater high definition experience!

The C300 is based on a new Marvell controller. It's the first consumer SSD to natively support 6Gbps SATA. The firmware and all of the write placement algorithms are developed internally by Micron and its team of 40 engineers. Micron tried using Marvell firmware in the past and quickly learned that it resulted in too much of a "HDD-like" experience (ahem, JMicron).

The Marvell controller features two ARM9 processor cores that operate in parallel. While they can load balance, one generally handles host requests while the other handles NAND requests.

Adjacent to the controller is a massive 256MB DRAM. According to Micron, "very little" user data is stored in the DRAM. It's not used as a long term cache, but mostly for write tracking and mapping tables.

The controller internally doesn't have much cache on-die. Not nearly as much as Intel, according to Micron. While the original X25-M only had a 512KB SRAM, Micron claims that the latest G2 controller has a 2MB cache on-die. Micron x-rayed the chip to find out.

The write placement algorithms are similar in nature to what Intel does. There's no funny SandForce-like technology at work here. Every time a write is performed the controller does a little bit of cleanup to ensure that the drive doesn't get into an unreasonably slow performance state. Unlike Intel however, Micron does do garbage collection while the drive is idle. The idle garbage collection works independently of OS or file system.

TRIM is supported but only under Windows 7. There are no software tools to manually TRIM the drive. Micron hopes that its write placement algorithms and idle garbage collection will be enough to keep drive performance high regardless of OS.

Cooler Master is at it again, this time they are launching a successor to the very successful CM 690 case. Today we will be looking at the CM 690 II. This is pronounced like, "six ninety-two". There are two models of the CM 690-II the regular and the advanced model. We will be reviewing the advanced model.

The move to 4K-sectors has been some 10 years in the making, as research in the late 90’s identified that 512B sectors made less and less sense as drives continued to get larger. At a time when hard drives were measured in megabytes, 512B sectors were a good balance between technical factors and a desire to keep wasted space at a minimum (you can’t normally put 2 files in 1 sector), but times have changed and hard drive capacities are several orders of magnitude larger.

The crux of the problem is that there are 3 factors that are in constant need of balancing when it comes to hard drive design: areal density, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in reading from drive platters, and the use of Error Correcting Code (ECC) to find and correct any errors that occur. As areal density is increases, sectors become smaller and their SNR decreases. To compensate for that, improvements are made to ECC (usually through the use of more bits) in order to maintain reliability. So for a drive maker to add more space, they ultimately need to improve their error-correction capabilities, which means the necessary ECC data requires more space. Rinse, wash, repeat.

Thermaltake has always been a big name in the enthusiast computer market. Today we will be looking at a new heatsink from Thermaltake with multi directional air intake and a unique quad heatpipe design. The Thermaltake V1AX combines aluminum, copper, and a quiet fan to replace your stock heatsink. Let’s see if it can handle the heat of an overclocked i7 920.

Seagate is finally getting in the game and, at least on paper, Pulsar appears to be in the class of Intel’s X25-E.

If Seagate can deliver on its promises, this should be good. Currently the enterprise SSD market is occupied by Intel, Samsung and a bunch of other contenders with unproven track records. Using Indilinx drives in a server environment is very tempting, but also potentially dangerous. There isn’t sufficient data out there today to say how long their drives will last under constant random writes. I tend to believe Seagate when they commit to Pulsar being a 5 year drive capable of over 6PB of random writes.