News Bits: 16GB USB Flash Drive, U. Miami Laptop Backup Service, Furry Laptop Covers

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Make your laptop hot and furry

Do you want a way to make your laptop unique? And how about rendering your laptop's cooling system useless in the process? Take a look at the furry Lapstyle covers. They are $25 each, although if your notebook runs hot already, then putting a fur blanket on your laptop isn't such a great idea.

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University of Miami provides laptop backup service to students

Atempo today announced that the University of Miami will provide a laptop backup service to its students powered by Atempo LiveBackup. Called &quot;myUMbackup,&quot; it was developed to take backup responsibilities off of students and provide data protection for the University's campuses. The UM currently has over 15,000 undergraduate and graduate students.

LiveBackup runs automatically and transparently in the background; it is nearly unnoticeable to students. The myUMbackup service does the following:

• Real-time, transparent backups - LiveBackup works quietly in the background.
• On and off-campus data protection - data protection is provided from any location.
• Self-serve file recoveries - students can easily retrieve lost or deleted papers and projects.
• Safe and secure central repository - backed up data is stored in safe and secure central data repository on campus.

Director of product marketing at Atempo, Marylise Tauzia, said in a statement that &quot;LiveBackup is designed to run quietly in the background for the end-user, the IT administrator and the network. By leveraging LiveBackup’s CDP technology, UM is running an innovative backup service that is transparent to the students and the network, and is easy to manage. These are critical elements that help keep the focus on enhancing the student experience, not on backup administration.&quot;

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Sprint launches 10 more markets, REV A coverage reaches 60M

December 12th - Sprint today announced that it has upgraded the Sprint Power Vision Network with a faster EV-DO Revision A technology in 10 additional markets. The Power Vision Network is currently the world's largest wireless broadband network, and covers over 180 million people. Today's launches occurred in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Detroit, Denver, Baltimore, Providence and New Jersey. The upgraded network now covers over 60 million people in 20 markets. Sprint passed their year-end goal of covering markets containing 40 million people.

Users of the Sprint Power Vision Network in the 20 upgraded areas should see significantly faster average upload speeds of 300-400 kbps; current EV-DO networks only reach 50-70 kbps. Average download speeds should increase from the current 400-700 kbps to 450-800 kbps.

Sprint currently offers the only EV-DO Revision A-capable USB modem, the Sprint Mobile Broadband USB Modem by Novatel Wireless Ovation U720. It plugs into the USB port of any compatible laptop. Three other Mobile Broadband cards are offered, and are compatible with laptops that have a Type II PCMCIA slot.

Sprint's Power Vision network upgrade is part of a $7 billion investment in its wireless and wire line networks in 2006. Additional information on Sprint's Mobile Broadband network can be found here: http://powervision.sprint.com/mobilebroadband/

Apple iTunes sales take a dive

Although Apple currently has 63% of the portable audio market with its iPod, the company saw a 65% decline in iTunes sales in the first half of 2006 according to Forrester Research. The average transaction size also dropped 17%.

For every iPod Apple sells, 20 iTunes songs are also sold; however, given the fact that iPods can hold hundreds and even thousands of songs, many believe consumers are looking at alternate ways to loading up on content.

Despite the decline in sales, Apple still made a profit on its iTunes store in its last reported quarter. iTunes will continue to remain a part of Apple's overall business.

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Corsair announces 16GB flash drive

In need of some serious storage? Corsair announced on Tuesday a 16GB flash drive. It is water resistant, and has enough space for users to store Windows and boot off of the drive.

According to Corsair, the drive has sustained read speeds of 22MB/s, and write speeds of 7MB/s. The 16GB Flash Voyager is available now for a cool $300.

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Non-Vista supporting hardware has manufacturers worried

Manufacturers of motherboards and VGA cards are worried over potential losses from their inventory of low-end, non-Windows Vista-supporting motherboards and graphics cards. Their key concern is that if they do not clear their inventory before the new operating system hits the market, prices of the products will plummet.

Non-Vista supporting video cards, such as the Nvidia GeForce 4 MX400 and ATI Radeon 9250, have fallen to US$35 and $30 respectively. Nvidia and ATI have reduced output for products that do not support Vista. Nearly all PC products on the market support Vista Basic.

Products that only support Vista Basic may see lessened demand, as consumers will want to get the full Vista experience.

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Adding a shag carpet on top of your laptop is about the dumbest thing I've heard for, well, at least today.

That's interesting regarding iTunes, I could only have assumed that would be a linear growth line for them. So if the recording industry says CD sales are down, and people aren't buying iTunes music at the same rate they were -- then where are people buying their music?

 

The Furry Covers = Stupid.

The 16gb USB Flash Drive is nice!

 

There are already a 32GB and 64GB flash drives out from what I have heard. They are just a little pricey at 1 and 2 grand apiece

 

Haha, and when your notebook explodes, you got fur to help it burn faster! Why not just make our notebooks out of wood? The person who thought up that idea must have no clue about heat management issues... even non-gaming setups will get hot under all that fur.

Edit: Just noticed there's one called "Fire Starter"!

 

Personally I like the name "Triple Panic", because of course with one of these on my laptop I would have to worry about:

1. Heat
2. Static electricity
3. My cat taking a liking to it

 

I never would of though I'd see furry laptop covers. Hah, they are all well named; Deadly Pink, Dare Devil, Fire Starter, The Beast, The Bear, and Triple Panic. All dark destructive sounding names. XD Not only are fluffy laptops the worst idea so far for laptops in the long sad history of bad ideas. But, what is up with the color they picked for the product. No animal sleek prints just solid colors that look like shag carpets as Andrew mentioned. I can see some frivelous lawsuits coming lapstyles way.

 

most people dont buy music. they download them for free, im sure people in this forum, other forums, or chatrooms dont pay for the music they download either.

 

There was an update today... .that story about iTunes is incorrect.

" A UK outfit called The Register and Bloomberg decided to dive in and highlight one finding of the report -- that iTunes sales had dropped in the first six months of this year. We got treated to wonderful headlines about iTunes sales "collapsing" and "dropping" and "plummeting" and so on. Now for the record, iTunes sales are not collapsing. Our credit card transaction data shows a real drop between the January post-holiday peak and the rest of the year, but with the number of transactions we counted it's simply not possible to draw this conclusion . . . as we pointed out in the report. But that point was just too subtle to get into these articles."

-Forrester

 

Rebours is right. A lot just don't buy them. Or maybe they went elsewhere (hey, there were lots of downloads for Windows Media Player 11, that came along with URGE from MTV ).

Maybe they went to Zune Marketplace...

 

It looks like the old "my computer crashed and I lost my paper" excuse is now on the endangered species list with that automatic backup that the University of Miami is using. Looks like you students will have to revert to blaming your dog.

But seriously, think about one of those shag-carpet laptop covers, paired with those laptop shaders covered a while back (the ones the Olympic judges used). You're talking about S-T-Y-L-E ;p.

 

I think those names were jokes by the way..

 

16 GB flash drives It would be so sweet to have a NON mechanical HD.
One of these days we will have a complete solid state laptop. All for under $500 of course

 

the furry thing has got to be one of the worst ideas in history of mankind.

 

Thats one big flash drive. However, I think I'll stick to my 80GB pocket external HD.

 

I'm not going for a flash drive more than 1gig
i've got four of them
lost one last year, which drove my sister crazy (it's hers)
my friend borrowed me and lost the next one
i forgot one in the washing machine for 2 times, now 90% of the times an archive file will corrupt
currently i'm using a Corsair 1GB, but i've just forgotten it in class today, luckily i checked my pocket and ran for it
btw, i've never bought any music , lI used to get a bunch from Limewire and Bit torrent, but later my HDD burned mysteriously, along with 6,000 songs

 

Haha a forum member stated:

- And my cat is gonna go crazy. Hahaha can you imagine that, the cat attacks the notebook because all that fur.

What a dumb idea indeed. Funny though.

Charlie

 

Fur on laptop: not a bad idea of you have some cruel intent. If you want to destroy someone's laptop then just buy this fur cover and give it to that person as a xmas gift. ;-P

 

It almost seems like the furry covers are either being misunderstood or misadvertised. They have to actually be sleeves, not meant to be used when the laptop is on.

 

eeeeeeek imagine one of those furry things on a prev gen Macbook Pro or how about one on a notebook with one of those burning battarys

 

Even if this is the case I still wouldn't want the fur to fall off and get stuck in the vents. I think I will pass on those.
Tim

 

my sister goes to Johnson & Wales university in Rhode Island. One of the services students can buy is a data backup program.