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Samsung chart comparing SSDs to HDDs. Samsung also makes hard disk drives.

Dell’s Ultra drive has approximately 20 percent better read/write performance over more conventional SSDs, according to Avi Cohen, managing partner at Avian Securities. And Dell gets its SSDs from sources other than just Samsung, including STEC and Micron Technology, Cohen believes.

Dell Latitude E4200

Intel is getting into the SSD performance grade act too. The chipmaker offers Extreme SSDs and mainstream SSDs.

(Credit:
Samsung)

Dell pre-announced the high-performance Samsung Ultra SATA-II solid-state drive in February. The SSD is able to read data at 100 megabytes per second (MB/sec) and write it at 80MB/sec, 60 percent faster than SATA I drives, according to Samsung.

The SSD options on the E4200 come in two flavors, standard or “Ultra”.

Hard disk drives are getting scarcer by the week in the ultraportable notebook market. Dell has officially started selling its new 2.2-pound Latitude E4200 this week with solid-state drives as the only storage option, accelerating a trend in ultraportables away from hard disk drives.

The new SATA II SSD can resist up to 1,500 Gs of shock in a half millisecond compared with a shock resistance rating of 300 Gs in 2 milliseconds for a typical HDD, Samsung said.

(Credit:
Dell Computer)

MLC allows drive makers to build higher-capacity drives at lower cost but is neither as fast as SLC nor as inherently reliable.

Extreme SSDs offer faster write speeds of up to 170 MB/s, while mainstream drives are rated at up to 70 MB/s, according to Intel.

The popular ThinkPad X301 also comes with solid-state drive options only.

The new SSDs will “leave traditional notebook hard drives in the dust,” Dell said when it announced the option. “Our labs benchmarked this drive in a Latitude notebook and saw a 35 percent overall system performance increase over a standard 2.5-inch 5400rpm notebook hard drive using SYSmark ‘07. That’s even more impressive when you realize that the difference between standard 5400rpm and performance 7200rpm drives (in the same generation) is 10 percent on average,” Dell said at that time.

The 80GB and 160GB Intel SSDs for the mainstream notebook market are based on multilevel cell (MLC) technology, while the Extreme 32GB and 64GB for the enterprise market are based on single-level cell (SLC). In 2009, Intel expects to have MLC drives with capacities up to 320GB.

Regular or ultra? Consumers will now have at least a couple of performance options when they order solid-state drives on the newest ultraportable notebooks from Dell.

SSDs are generally much faster than hard disk drives at reading data (which is what computer users spend most of their time doing). SSDs are becoming popular in ultraportable notebooks because they have advantages crucial for small laptops: they weigh less, generally use less power, generate less heat, and withstand shock better.

“We will outsell the iPhone,” he told the newspaper.”We will outsell the BlackBerry.”

Bach also touched on entertainment issues, including Microsoft’s backing of the now-largely extinct HD DVD format, pointing out that many consumers say they can’t see a substantial picture quality improvement with next-generation discs.

And can we expect to see the company embrace Blu-ray in the next version of its Xbox game console?

“The business model for browsing on a phone has not gotten itself completely clear yet,” he said. “In the PC space, the way people monetize the Internet is through advertising. Now in the phone space, we believe that advertising will be a part of that experience, but it’s a different form factor.”

“It’s about browsing. It’s about music. It’s about video. It’s about e-mails, text messaging, and photos.”

Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices Division, told the San Francisco Chronicle in an interview published Sunday that the company has no plans to put up a
Zune phone to compete with
iPhone.

He went on to say that the phone itself is just one component of smartphones’ success.

“There is nothing to even talk about right now with regard to the next generation. That is so far out that there isn’t anything to talk about.”

On the topic of mobile browsing, Bach also addressed the issue of the lack of advertising success in mobile Web browsing, saying that it’s still a work in progress.

On the eve of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, where a new iPhone is rumored to be unveiled, the man who is charge of developing
Xbox, Zune, and Windows Mobile began his question-and-answer session with the paper by touting the success of Windows Mobile.

Robbie Bach, president of Entertainment & Devices Division.

“You have to look at how fundamentally compelling the difference is between a progressive scan DVD player and the picture that it can produce and what you get on a high-definition player. The reality is there is some difference, but most people look at it and say, ‘I am not going to pay extra for that.’”

“We don’t make phones ourselves. We don’t have any plans to make phones ourselves,” the told the paper. “Our focus is on the belief that a phone is a very personal thing. Different people want different types of phones. We think that is going to continue, and we think Windows Mobile is in a great position to service all those different opportunities.”

However, CrunchGear is reporting that a tipster with “close friend who works at Microsoft” said they were told that Microsoft will try to upstage Apple on Monday with the announcement that an Blu-ray Xbox 360 will be available by the Christmas holiday shopping season.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

An Infineon spokesman declined to comment on anything iPhone related, but said he would check into whether the particular chipset used in the iPhone 3G had been used in other phones. Apple has refused to acknowledge any issues with the iPhone 3G.

(Credit:
CNET)

Richard Windsor of Nomura published a research note (spotted at GigaOm) Tuesday singling out the iPhone 3G’s chipset, made by Infineon, as the probable culprit for the reception problems we reported on Monday. The dropped calls, service interruptions, and abrupt network switches experienced by iPhone 3G users reminded Windsor of similar complaints five years ago, when 3G phones were first launched in Europe.

A financial analyst believes Apple’s
iPhone 3G reception issues may be the result of some faulty chips.

The problem for Apple is that if Windsor’s theory is correct, that would mean a firmware upgrade is unlikely to solve the problems, he wrote. The problems might be confined to a certain build of iPhones, or a certain batch of chips, but “this shows the risk of not going with a tried and tested solution.”

The 3G reception problems that iPhone 3G owners have experienced might be chipset-related.

“We believe that these issues are typical of an immature chipset and radio protocol stack where we are almost certain that Infineon is the 3G supplier,” Windsor wrote. “This is not surprising as the Infineon 3G chipset solution has never really been tested in the hands of users. Some people will not experience these problems as it is only in areas where the radio signal weakens that the immaturity of the stack really shows.”

(Credit:
Cameesa)

The shop currently has three shirts that have gotten over the funding hump. Meanwhile, the upcoming pool is filled with a handful of really good-looking designs that can be sorted by date or what needs the most funding. Because of the slim selection I’ll still likely stick to places like Neighborhoodies which pumps out 200 new designs every month, and Shirt.Woot.com which has a new shirt every day for $10 shipped. Neither of those have nearly as cool of a business opportunity for the buyers, though.

It’s no secret I’m a fan of Web T-shirt shops. This time last year I rounded up 20 different online shops that specialize in selling the cotton wonders, but few of those were as interesting as Cameesa.

Designs have 31 days to get funded, and any investors who fund a failing design get their money back. If a design is completely funded, the 20 benefactors get the first run of the shirt and a small cut of future sales. The designer gets $500 and a free print of his or her shirt. From then on, anyone who comes by Cameesa can freely purchase that shirt like they would any other shop–seeding the dividends to the initial investors.

Artists and shirt investors can make a buck or two off a hot design with Cameesa, a crowd-funded online T-shirt shop.

Like many online T-shirt operations, everything on Cameesa is designed by freelancers who submit their stuff with the hopes of making a buck and getting some recognition. These designs (once approved by human editors) go into a pool where shoppers can pick out a shirt they want; the only catch is that they’ve got to invest in it so Cameesa can scrap together enough money to get it printed.

In the letter (PDF), the Democratic politico says he wants Comcast and other broadband providers to “volunteer” to take actions “surgically directed” only at child pornography and “not at any protected content.” (He’s targeting Usenet, the venerable pre-Web home of thousands of discussion groups that go by names like sci.math, rec.motorcycles, and comp.os.linux.admin.)

CNET News intern Holly Jackson contributed to this report.

“It’s a shakedown racket, pure and simple,” says Jim Harper, a lawyer who is director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute. “These companies know that the New York attorney general can cause them millions in legal bills and PR damage, and they’re paying for protection. ‘Nice ISP you’ve got here. It’d be a shame if anything happened to it.’”

If a private-sector lawyer tried that, he might be prosecuted on extortion charges. But for New York’s top prosecutor, it seems to be business as usual.

That might be laudable, if it were true. But Cuomo’s ham-fisted pressure tactics already have led Time Warner Cable to pull the plug on some 100,000 Usenet discussion groups, including such hotbeds of illicit content as talk.politics and misc.activism.progressive. Verizon Communications deleted such unlawful discussion groups as us.military, ny.politics, alt.society.labor-unions, and alt.politics.democrats. AT&T and Time Warner Cable have taken similar steps.

Yokubatis did confirm on Tuesday that he has been contacted by and has had conversations with the New York attorney general’s office.

The latest company to be honored by Cuomo’s personal attention is Comcast, which received a two-page letter on Monday threatening “legal action” on child pornography grounds within five days, if its executives failed to agree to a certain set of rules devised by the attorney general.

That might be a good short-term response. But over time, it may encourage more attorneys general to play Net censor, especially if they come to view broadband providers as compliant, off-the-books sources of revenue. This seems to be Cuomo’s opinion; his press release said Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint will pay “$1.125 million to fund additional efforts by the attorney general’s office and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children to remove child pornography from the Internet.”

(Credit:
Office of the New York Attorney General)

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, has campaigned against Usenet.

The odd thing about round three in Cuomo v. Usenet is that Comcast has a minuscule presence in the Empire State, which has been sewn up by rivals Verizon and Time Warner Cable. The company’s own figures put its market share at a mere half of a percent of the state’s broadband subscribers, and only because Comcast serves communities in Pennsylvania and Connecticut that spill across state borders.

After that unqualified success in “surgical” targeting, Cuomo took aim at AOL. On July 10, Cuomo lauded AOL for agreeing to “eliminate access to child porn newsgroups.” What that press release didn’t mention was that the Time Warner unit actually had eliminated all Usenet newsgroups in January 2005.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has found a novel way to shake down law-abiding broadband companies: accuse them of harboring child pornography and threaten to prosecute them unless they do what he wants. That might just happen to involve writing Cuomo a hefty check.

Comcast is no slouch in the child porn fight: it helped organize an industry-wide agreement last week with 45 attorneys general. But what was good enough for the National Association of Attorneys General was not good enough for New York; we’re told that Cuomo was one of the handful of officials to withhold his signature.

Ronald Yokubatis, Giganews’ chairman and a native Texan, said he couldn’t grant a full interview by our deadline today. When we talked to him last month about the earlier stages of Cuomo’s campaign, Yokubatis labeled it “fascist crap, ignorant” that came from “Demorats.” He added: “We welcome the New York attorney general to the battle against child pornography.”

Like its rivals, Comcast seems unwilling to publicly confront a state attorney general, who would surely claim to be trying to protect the children. Spokesman Sena Fitzmaurice said on Tuesday that Comcast’s lawyers are evaluating Cuomo’s request and that the company may enter into an agreement with New York “substantially similar to the agreements they announced recently with AT&T and AOL.”

What makes Cuomo’s quixotic campaign doubly inexplicable is that Comcast doesn’t actually run its own Usenet servers. It outsources that to a third-party provider based in Austin, Texas, called Giganews.

Unfortunately, what Cuomo is doing–sources say the attorney general himself is working the phones–is likely prohibited by the First Amendment. Governmental efforts at censorship must be narrowly focused, and censoring 100,000 newsgroups because 88 may have illegal images fails that test. Courts have ruled that if a government official delivers a credible threat of prosecution, the target may ask a judge to clear things up through what’s called a declaratory judgment.

Cuomo’s response: “I commend the companies that have stepped up today to embrace a new standard of responsibility, which should serve as a model for the entire industry.” (By that standard of responsibility, an entire library should be burned down if a single obscene book happens to be found on its shelves.)

What Cuomo wants the broadband providers to do is sign a so-called code of conduct, which has not been made public. This follows Cuomo’s efforts to impose a code of conduct on student loan providers and home lenders (based on the theory that prosecutors, not the New York legislature, should be regulating businesses).

“There is so much personal information on them: a mother’s maiden name, what they died from,” said Helen Purcell, recorder for Maricopa County, which covers the state capital, Phoenix.

Digital copies of death certificates have been removed from the Web site of Maricopa County in Arizona because they could be used for identity fraud, The Arizona Republic
reported on Wednesday.

Copies of recorded death certificates can still be viewed but request forms require an applicant’s name, address, phone number, and notarized signature.

The County Recorder, which archives real estate records online, requires that death certificates be recorded when a property owner terminates a joint-tenancy deed after another owner has died.

The county had received complaints from people about the posting of the information for years and removed them last month, she said. The state has one of the highest identity fraud rates in the country.

But for all those followers, there just may be a few who don’t feel sufficiently networked with the candidate. For those who want to be in-the-know about all things Obama–like his VP choice–a millisecond before millions of others, the candidate reminds us to sign up for his text message alerts.

By Twitterholic’s last count, Obama stands at 56,661 followers, compared with Rose’s 56,442. Obama also has the second highest number of friends on Twitter–59,338–according to Twitterholic, which calculates individual statistics for each Twitter user a couple of times a day. The candidate’s Twitter page offers up such rousing tidbits of news as “Holding a town hall on economic security in St. Petersburg, FL.”

Sen. Barack Obama has already proven himself to be the most popular presidential candidate on the Internet, what with his more than 1.3 million Facebook supporters and lofty aims of 2 million online donors. Now the presumptive Democratic nominee is not only outshining other politicians on the Internet, but also the very stars of social networking–Obama has just overtaken Kevin Rose’s spot as the most followed person on Twitter, according to Twitterholic.

This isn’t a new idea by any means, but TripSay does have some good things going for it. For one there’s simple linking to media publishing services you’re already using like Flickr, YouTube and Blogger. I’ve seen some travel sites come through and attempt to steal away that conversation from popular blogging tools with their own solutions, so it’s worth a kudos for any site that recognizes the mass market will go with what their friends are using.

To expand on that, there’s also an “expert” section. Similar to Yelp’s idea of “Elite” members, TripSay premier users have more gravitas than new users based on their past interactions on the site, either in submissions or discussion.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Also useful is the new groups feature. Groups let members join up and share places that have exceptionally good offerings in a particular interest. For example, the freeskiing group has compiled a list of some hot spots around the world which can be cross referenced with each recommender’s likes and dislikes. That way if you’re a newbie skier, by checking out someone’s recommendations you can make sure their skiing habits don’t tend to require a helicopter.

The service is currently in private beta, but we’ve got 500 invites for Webware readers. To get yours just shoot an e-mail to info@tripsay.com with the subject line “Webware.”

Find places to go based on your travel tastes with TripSay.

This afternoon TripSay, a travel site that’s currently in private beta is opening up to a larger group of testers and launching a few new features. The service will help you figure out places you should go on your vacation based on a calculator that will narrow down the results based on your budget, lingual ability, and comfort zone for going off the beaten path. You can also plug in your interests, and add ratings of places you’ve already been.

All of this information is taken and mapped out for you while being combined with what other TripSay members have put in as their favorites. The idea is that you can browse around other people’s experiences and begin to plan out your own escape from the working world.

Yes, I’ll be one of the first in line.
Yes, but I’m going to avoid the launch rush.
No, I’m not interested.

Click here for CNET News’ complete iPhone 3G coverage.

Most of the other 25 percent plan to get the lower-end 8GB model, though a few people told me they still hadn’t made up their minds (they still have an hour, after all) and one said he planned to buy one of each. But since these are the most hardcore of hardcore iPhone fans, it’s likely that this 3-to-1 breakdown won’t have any bearing on mainstream sales.

View results

News.com Poll Apple’s latest and greatest
Will you buy an iPhone 3G?

Another thing: People seemed to be pretty clueless when they were asked whether they knew if they would have to pay an additional $200 for the phone. Some existing AT&T customers aren’t eligible for the subsidy on the phone and will have to pay up, but almost everyone in line seemed to be unaware of this distinction.

Meanwhile, a kid near the front of the line is repeatedly yelling “INVISIBLE SHIELD!” Please, somebody get him an iPhone and get him home.

I attempted to talk to a few orange-T-shirt-clad Apple Store employees, who were happily chatting it up with people waiting in line, but the employees quickly reverted to the company’s standard “clam up around the press” protocol and suggested I track down company publicists before I could learn exactly how many Apple reps were there on hand at the store.

NEW YORK–In an informal poll of random people waiting in line for the
iPhone 3G outside the Fifth Avenue flagship store, it looks like roughly 75 percent of these uber-early-adopters plan to purchase the higher-end 16GB iPhone.

Sinofsky did suggest that the company wants to be more open at some point as it tries to create a product that serves the needs of a customer base as broad as Windows does.

On the plus side, Windows engineering boss Steven Sinofsky did at least put a date to when he would share some more details.

In an interview with CNET News in May, Sinofsky did disclose a few details–namely that it would use the same driver model and basic kernel approach as Windows Vista and that the company wanted the whole thing on the market by January 2010, three years after the mainstream release of Windows Vista. Microsoft also showed in May a glimpse at a new multi-touch interface that will be part of Windows 7.

“We strongly believe that success for Windows 7 includes an open and honest, and two-way, discussion about how we balance all of these interests and deliver software on the scale of Windows,” he wrote. “We promise and will deliver such a dialogue with this blog.”

Microsoft is launching its
Windows 7 blog, but it still doesn’t have much to say.

“The Professional Developers Conference (PDC) on October 27 and the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) the following week both represent the first venues where we will provide in-depth technical information about Windows 7,” Sinofsky and Windows Core operating system head Jon Devaan wrote in a posting on Thursday. “This blog will provide context over the next 2+ months with regular posts about the behind the scenes development of the release and continue through the release of the product.”

One thing that should be pointed out, Microsoft has said that it is engaging much earlier and deeper with computer makers as part of the Windows 7 design process. From what I’ve heard from PC manufacturers, this has been true so far. “It’s like night and day,” one PC company executive told me.

Sinofsky acknowledged that Microsoft continues to say less than many people would like, but repeated his standard line that the company doesn’t want to share details until they have reached a certain level of concreteness.

Microsoft had already said that Windows 7 would be on the PDC docket in some manner.