Ever wondered if other homes in your street are getting higher broadband connection speeds?  A new service, in the UK, aims to allow you to find out just that.

The idea being that you carry out a simple online speed test, and have your results displayed on a map for others to see.

From Trusted Reviews:

Last week we looked at AMD's brand new top-end graphics card the ATI HD 5870 and found it to be a seriously impressive piece of hardware. It doubled the performance of previous generation hardware (on a chip by chip basis) and came in at a reasonable price. However, knowing that the card I'm looking at today theoretically has 80 per cent of the performance but costs a third less, a full-on recommended for the HD5870 seemed a little over zealous. Well, now we're actually looking at said card so let's see if our presumptions were correct.

SSD Developer Fusion-io Admits: HDDs Have Long Lifespan Ahead

[10/13/2009 11:29 PM]   
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Steve Wozniak, the chief scientist of Fusion-io and a co-founder of Apple, said in an interview that although solid-state drives (SSDs) do offer a number of advantages over conventional hard disk drives (HDDs), they would not replace traditional storage based on the spinning media completely. In addition, Mr. Wozniak said that SSDs for PCI Express offered great benefits compared to SATA devices and thus would gain popularity.

“I don't see [SSD] kicking all spinning disks out. In computers we have so many tiers of storage for cost efficiency. Even when you have a hard disk drive it has its own cache built into it. Then we have caching systems in operating systems. Then we have different speeds of memory from your RAM to your L1, L2, L3 caches. […] It cost more money per bit to create NAND flash,”
said Steve Wozniak in an interview with Computerworld. [X-Bit Labs...] [Comments...]

Hulu Desktop is now available for Linux. Ars puts it to the test on Ubuntu 9.04. Although it's extremely resource intensive, it's reasonably acceptable for a beta.
By Ryan Paul | Last updated October 16, 2009 9:58 AM CT

Hulu Desktop was only available for Windows and Mac OS X when it launched in May. This week, the popular streaming video service has finally brought its experimental desktop player to the Linux platform. Installation packages are available for download from the Hulu Labs website.

I tested Hulu Desktop on Ubuntu 9.04 with Flash 10 on my quad-core desktop computer. The program is built almost entirely with Flash and obviously doesn't use any native widget frameworks. Adobe's Flash implementation for Linux is lousy, so I began my tests with relatively low expectations. As expected, Hulu Desktop is extremely resource intensive on the Linux platform. It uses significantly more memory and processor power than Totem when playing full-screen video content. Aside from occasional stuttering, video playback performance was adequate when I was not running any other resource-intensive tasks in the background. [ARS Technica...] [Comments...]

Microsoft today said it had recovered most of affected Sidekick customers' lost data. But this past weekend, like a doctor issuing a terminal prognosis,

Posted by Mary Hayes Weier @ 11:44:AM | Oct,15, 2009

T-Mobile told affected customers that their data "almost certainly has been lost." So, what changed between then and now?

The statement at T-Mobile's site comes from Roz Ho, corporate VP of "Premium Mobile Experiences, Microsoft Corporation." (Amusingly, there is no mention in the statement of the Microsoft subsidiary, called "Danger," that runs the Sidekick data service under contract with T-Mobile. Wonder if Microsoft's damage control experts have murdered the Danger name and buried it forever?) Ho wrote: "We have determined that the outage was caused by a system failure that created data loss in the core database and the back-up. We rebuilt the system component by component, recovering data along the way. This careful process has taken a significant amount of time, but was necessary to preserve the integrity of the data."

[Computer World...] [Comments...]

The first time a vacuum cleaner could be considered cool was when the Dyson vacuum hit the market

Shane McGlaun (Blog) - October 14, 2009 9:52 AM

Before that, all vacuums were pretty much the same. Dyson has announced a new product that blows instead of sucks.
The new product is called the Dyson Air Multiplier Fan and is available in 12" and 10" varieties. Anyone who has fans in their home or office knows that the blades get dirty very fast and cleaning them can be a big hassle.

The Dyson Air Multiplier Fan has no external blades and the device draws air into the upright cylinder portion of the fan via vents on the base. The air is then funneled out through a ring that sits atop the base. The cool air is blown out of vent hidden around the ring giving the illusion that the air is being blown at the person from nowhere. According to Dyson, the fan provides a better experience than traditional fans that product uneven air circulation and collect dirt on the blades.

[DailyTech....] [Comments...]

From TechRadar:

RIM has finally announced one of the worst kept secrets in the mobile phone world with the BlackBerry Storm 2, and we managed to bag loads of face time with the new device.

It's basically an update to the original Storm, which debuted to mixed reception last year, and the obvious differences are fairly subtle.

GT5 is due out March 2010, and will feature more than 950 vehicles, visual damage modeling, and an online multiplayer mode for up to 16 players.

In the meantime, take a look at some screenshots in the forum.

Let's say that you wanted to warn people that there are real risks in cloud computing - what would you do?

By Scott Bradner
October 14, 2009 12:02 PM ET

You could tell them that a feature of the cloud is that you cannot be sure of the reliability of other cloud participants, or maybe even know who they are. But who would pay attention to a Chicken Little crying that there is nothing holding the clouds up in the sky?

Now add that you want to be sure that the message was associated with a big company that seems to see cloud computing as its path to future riches. What could you do to be sure the message got through?

[Computer World...]

[Comments...]

Thirteen security bulletins address 34 vulnerabilities -- 22 of them critical

Oct 13, 2009 | 05:38 PM
By Tim Wilson
DarkReading

Microsoft today put security professionals on overtime with its largest-ever release of security patches -- 13 new updates that address some 34 vulnerabilities in Windows applications.
In its October security bulletin, Microsoft disclosed 22 critical vulnerabilities and 12 that were rated less threatening. The previous record was 31, which was set in June, researchers said. Included in the updates was a patch for the flaw in Server Message Block Version 2 (SMBv2), which was disclosed earlier this month. Exploits for that vulnerability already have been seen in the wild.

[Comments...]