Data Recovery in the Event of a Hard Drive Failure

According to Amazon, You Don't Own It Even If You Buy It! According to a news report, Amazon removed some electronic versions of George Orwell's books from the kindle store, and deposited a refund in accounts of people who had previously bought them. 

What's a kindle? It's the wildly popular handheld reader that can download and store newspapers, books, and virtually anything else originally published on paper. Owners of the Kindle can get their favorite newspaper or book, store it on the device and read it at their leisure. Convenient AND environmentally friendly (for a fee, of course). 

Apparently the publisher of the Orwell books (one of the books was the famous 1984) changed its mind about publishing electronic versions and pressured Amazon to remove the books from their store AND remotely delete versions on individuals' Kindle devices. While Amazon did reimburse those who had previously purchased the books, it does raise the question, "Do you ever really own the book in the first place?" 

This is akin to your favorite bookstore taking your favorite paperback away and giving you a "store credit". I really feel sorry for the people halfway through the book! That's just mean! 

To Your Success, 

 Tim

With barely one month passing since the arrival of 128GB thumb drives, Kingston steps up to the plate by releasing a thumb drive capable of 256GB of storage! That's right, it's not a typo. This is a 256 GB thumb drive! Although it's not available in the United States as of yet, the street price is estimated to be around $900 US. So I wouldn't rush out and get one just yet, but I would expect the prices to drop rapidly once its been on the market for awhile. 

Just how much is 256GB anyway? Well, to put it in perspective, Kingston says that's enough space to hold: 

 365 CD's (~700MB each) 

54 DVD's (~4.7 GB each) 

 or 10 Blue-Ray Disks (~25GB each) 

This is more storage than most DVR players hooked to Televisions at the present. Oh, and in case you are wondering how many photos it can hold, that's over 230,000 photos saved in the 3 megapixel format. 

Will this barrier be surpassed? In a word, yes! We just don't know if it will be as quickly as the 256GB barrier. 

 To Your Success, 

 Tim

The BBC is reporting that Etisalat, a United Arab Emirates telecommunications firm, sent a text about an update to Blackberry users, suggesting it would improve performance. Those who downloaded and installed the application, found their battery life reduced, and their cellphones crashing. 

RIM, the company that makes the Blackberry, announced that this was an unauthorized update, and in an official company statement said, "Etisalat appears to have distributed a telecommunications surveillance application... independent sources have concluded that it is possible that the installed software could then enable unauthorised access to private or confidential information stored on the user's smartphone.", and "independent sources have concluded that the Etisalat update is not designed to improve performance of your BlackBerry Handheld, but rather to send received messages back to a central server". 

Wow, spying on its own customers? If you can't trust your cell phone company, who can you trust? Be careful out there. 

 To Your Success, 

 Tim

Today, Microsoft has officially RTM'ed, or Released To Manufacturing the new Windows 7 Operating System. Not a huge deal really, but there is one fact worth noting. 

With RTM complete, this means there will be NO changes to the specifications of the hardware required to run Windows 7. According to Microsoft, this is the first major Windows release that does not require double the specs of the preceeding Windows OS. Hopefully, a sign of things to come from this software giant. 

Look for Windows 7 to be available to the public in October (I guess it takes a while to make all those pretty DVD's with holograms!) 

 To Your Success, 

 Tim