It’s a story tailor-made for the fear-mongering subset of news media. This week, a pair of gentlemen lured an unsuspecting virgin iPhone to a malicious website and — with no other input from the user — stole the phone’s entire database of sent, received and even deleted text messages in under 20 seconds, boasting that they could easily lift personal contacts, emails and your naughty, naughty photos as well. Thankfully for us level-headed souls, those gentlemen were Vincenzo Iozzo and Ralf-Philipp Weinmann, security researchers performing for the 2010 Pwn2Own hacking contest, and their $15,000 first prize ensures that the winning formula will go to Apple (and only Apple) for further study. Last year, smartphones emerged from Pwn2Own unscathed even as their desktop counterparts took a beating, but this makes the third year in a row that Safari’s gotten its host machines pwned. That said, there’s no need for fear — just a healthy reminder that the Apple logo doesn’t give you free license to click links in those oh-so-tempting “beta-test the new iPad!” emails.

iPhone SMS database hacked in 20 seconds, news at 11 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 25 Mar 2010 02:36:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink TUAW  |  ZDNet  | Email this | Comments

So, all this storage talk has gotten you excited about upgrading your laptop’s crappy old 120GB drive? It’s about time, dammit.

Traditional hard drive have never been cheaper, and the advent of flash-memory based SSDs—that’s solid-state drives—delivers a storage upgrade path that actually deliver solid, real-world benefits that you’ll notice every single day. SSD-equipped PCs boot faster and are quicker to load applications. In fact, the only bad thing about SSDs is their cost—a 128GB solid-state drive can cost upwards of $400.

So what’s the right storage solution for you? Read on, and I’ll tell you what you need to know.

Option 1: The Cheapskate

SSDs sound pretty sexy, but you’re running an old machine—say an Athlon 64—and you’ve got an immediate problem. Your porn collection has filled your old 500GB drive. You need more space, stat, and there’s no reason to shell out more than your PC is worth for a 128GB SSD. Lucky for you, terabyte drives are cheap—$90 at Newegg for an awesome drive. There are a few key specs to watch out for when buying a hard drive for use as your system drive. The speed that the platters spin at has a direct correlation on the performance of the drive. Faster platters = faster data transfer. For an inexpensive, mainstream drive, that means you should be looking at 7200rpm exclusively. The number of platters is also relevant. The fewer platters there are in the drive, the faster the drive will be. For those reasons, I recommend Seagate’s 7200.12 series 1TB drive. At $90, it’s cheap, fast, and reliable.

Total Capacity: 1TB
Total Cost: $90

Option 2: The Budget-Conscious SSD Shopper

Today, the 128GB SSDs sit in the sweet spot for price to performance ratio. However, smaller SSDs don’t necessarily sacrifice anything in terms of performance, just capacity. (The brand of controller used and configuration of the memory are much more important to SSD performance.) So, if you want to scrimp, you can buy a smaller SSD for Windows and your applications, and pair it with a traditional hard drive where you store your large files—like your music and video files. If you want to get really tricky, you can even use symlinks—special links that are invisible to applications but are between files or directories—so that your applications don’t even realize your files are on different drives.

While Intel’s mainstream 160GB SSDs cost about $500, the 80GB retail version comes in right around $220, and even includes a mounting kit, so it will slide into your 3.5-inch drive bays (most SSDs are 2.5-inch drives, sized for laptops and servers). That’s not a ton of capacity, but it’s more than enough if you just want to install Windows and your applications. You’ll need to install games and store your media on a secondary drive, but for that you can use an inexpensive traditional drive, like the Seagate 7200.12 1TB. And, the quick boot and speedy application load times are more than worth the hassle. One caveat, when buying Intel SSDs, make sure you get the second generation drives (they’ll have G2 in the model number). The first-gen models don’t support TRIM, which is an important feature for maintaining the drive as you use it. We’ll talk about TRIM in a moment.

Total Capacity: 1.08TB
Total Cost: $310

Option 3: Handy Laptop Upgrade

While it’s definitely tempting to put a speedy SSD in your laptop—after all quick load times and a complete lack of moving parts does sound spiffy—if you use your portable machine like I do, you’d probably rather have some extra space. Lots of extra space. That’s why I recommend the Western Digital 640GB Scorpio Blue drive. It’s a 5400RPM drive, but its balance of price to space is excellent, and it shouldn’t eat through your battery too quickly. When you upgrade the hard drive in a notebook, you need to know what height drive your computer can accommodate. The easiest way to find out is to look in Device Manager (in Windows) or in System Information (in OSX) and see what model drive you have currently. Then Google that model number to find out thick your current drive is. Anything that size or smaller should fit. At 9.5mm, the Scorpio is a perfect upgrade for my MacBook Pro.

Total Capacity: 640GB
Total Cost: $99

Option 4: Balls to the Wall

What’s a truly nutty storage solution? How about a pair of 160GB SSDs paired with 2TB of the fastest traditional hard drive in the world? While there are some faster SSDs out there, they’re either based on untested controllers or have had problems in the past. When dealing with bleeding edge, we’ll take reliable and slightly slower in some situations over speedier with a chance to lose our data, which is why we recommend a pair of 160GB Intel’s X-25MG2’s running in RAID0, paired with a speedy and spacious 2TB Western Digital Black drive. This gives you 320GB of storage on the RAID, more than enough space for Windows and all your applications and games, plus an extra 2TB for your music, videos, and… yes… your porn collection. It’s the best of both worlds, but with a pair of $500 SSDs, it’ll cost you!

Total Capacity: 2.380TB
Total Cost: $1280

The Care and Feeding of SSDs

There are a few things you need to know about SSDs, before you shell out big bucks for one. First, because of the way flash memory works, either the operating system or a vendor-provided piece of software needs to do some occasional housekeeping to keep write speeds up. If your drive supports the TRIM command—as the second-generation Intel SSDs I recommended do—Windows 7 will take care of the scut work for you.

If you’re running XP or Vista, you’ll need to manually run the Intel SSD Optimizer every few weeks or months, whenever you notice write speeds slowing down. It’s part of the Intel SSD Toolbox. Unfortunately, the SSD Optimizer doesn’t run on RAID arrays, so it’s a bad idea to RAID your SSDs, unless you’re running Windows 7.

You should prevent defragmentation programs from running on SSDs—they’re not necessary and can actually degrade performance. Windows 7 will automatically disable defrag, but you’ll need to turn it off manually in XP or Vista.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to properly maintain an SSD on OSX today. OSX doesn’t support the TRIM command and there aren’t any OSX-native tools for Intel drives. The only way to restore like-new write speeds on a Mac is to backup your drive, format it, then restore from your TimeMachine backup. If you frequently write large files, you’ll definitely notice the performance hit. For that reason, it’s not a great idea to buy a SSD to upgrade your MacBook Pro today.

Will Smith is the Editor in Chief of Tested, a new site for people who love technology. Recently at Tested, he’s talked about Apple’s first netbook, shown you how to disassemble a Flip camera, and tested condoms to see if they make good waterproof cases for gear.

Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.

With not so much as a hint of fanfare (and a very loose definition of “coming soon“), Amazon has quietly unleashed its Kindle app for Mac. The 22MB file is for Intel-based machines only, OS X 10.5 and above. Nothing too fancy, it does exactly what you’d expect in terms of functionality… and not much else. What else is there to say? Time’s a-wastin’, hit up the source link to download.

Kindle for Mac now finally available originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 00:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink TUAW  |  Amazon  | Email this | Comments

This article was written on May 22, 2008 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

Mac only
When on a Windows computer one of the things I always did was make the Taskbar twice the normal height. The reason I did that was because it would then show the date in addition to the time, which is something I use quite regularly. Sure I could have hovered my mouse over the time to see the same information, but that often took more time than was necessary.

So naturally when I got my Mac I was surprised to see that I couldn’t do something similar with the Menubar. There is a checkbox in the time configuration options so that you can add/remove the day of the week, but there’s no setting to add the current date. Being the geek that I am I begun a quest for someway that I could get this, and as it turns out there’s a rather simple solution. The best part is that it requires no additional software! Here’s what my end result looks like:

Notice how the Menubar shows the date without needing to be clicked? Cool, huh? Here’s how you can add the date to the Mac Menubar clock:

1. Go to System Preferences -> International -> Formats, and click the Customize button listed in the Dates section.
   
2. Now you’ll want to build the format of the date that you want shown next to the time. To change between the different different date formats use the arrow located next to each element, or drag and drop elements from the lower section to add more of them:
   
3. Now you need to copy and paste the elements by highlighting everything in the contents of the box, and then pressing Command+C to copy it. Once you have the elements copied press CANCEL:
   
4. Now click the Customize button located next to the Times section in the International settings. Make sure you switch the Show option to Medium, and then paste in the formatting where you would like it to appear. Remember, you can add spaces, punctuation (hypens, slashes, semicolons, brackets, etc…) by simply typing them in where the should appear. After you are done formatting press OK.
   
5. You should now see the date in the Menubar located alongside the time (no restart is required). If you don’t, you may need to change the Show option in Step 4 to Long and paste in the formatting elements from Step 3 again. One of those two styles should work for you. When all is said and done you should see something like this:
   
6. Note: By changing the time format you might noticed that the day of the week is automatically shown in the Menubar. If you don’t want this just go to System Preferences -> Date & Time -> Clock, and uncheck the Show the day of the week option.

I do want to point out that there could be some adverse affects from manipulating the Menubar clock in this fashion, such as an application showing the date and time where it would only show the time before. That will only happen, however, if the application uses the Medium time format that you altered in Step 4. I’ve found that most programs, such as iChat, use the Short format when doing things like timestamps though so they really aren’t affected.

This might not be as simple as checking a box, but I was actually surprised that I didn’t have to go diving into a system file to adjust the setting. It’s not optimal, but it definitely works. This is a must-have tweak in my book!

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

Related Posts:

Your Week in Review with Sunday’s SummaryCheck out the Top 10 Strangest Clocks!Citizen Manufactures A Bendable ClockYour Week in Review with Sunday’s SummaryHelpful Tip: Display Mac Menubar Underneath Your Mouse

NPD: Mac sales up 39 percent in January and Febuary as iPod sales rebound originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Mar 2010 19:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Fortune Brainstorm Tech  | Email this | Comments