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This bad boy isn’t your daddy’s USB porn drive (but maybe it should be). It’s the real deal for keeping your data safe and secure.

The IronKey USB flash drive is one of the most secure devices I’ve ever worked with, but simultaneously tries to be–and achieves being–among the simplest to interact with in achieving that security. The product, from the eponymous company IronKey, comes in capacities from 1 GB to 8 GB that encrypts data five ways to Sunday while achieving government certification as tamper evident. A secured, anonymized version of Firefox is also onboard. Prices start at $79 including a one-year subscription for anonymous browsing; an 8 GB drive is $299…

For starters, there’s hardware AES encryption on board the sleek metal drive: there’s no software to install on a host computer, and all encryption happens within the drive. This dramatically improves the security profile. Encryption keys are stored only on the drive, and only unlocked when a password you create at the time you initialize the drive is entered. (IronKey lets you back that password up on their secure Web servers with additional layers of authentication in case you forget it; accessing your account requires a digital certificate stored on the IronKey.)

Enter the password incorrectly 10 times, and the hardware fries itself. Likewise, if an IronKey is physically tampered with in an attempt to access the on-board flash memory directly, the hardware wipes memory as well. Their tamper-resistance has led to FIPS 140-2 Level 2 validation by the U.S. and Canadian governments–physical tampering must be evident–and they’re working on Level 3, which requires countermeasures to attempts to disassemble the hardware…

There are more stories every other day about this HD DVD war and “who will win?” I loved 300 but… I knew who was winning and who wasn’t. Reality has to settle in at some point as this stand is nowhere near as sexy or meaningful. OK. OK. I know the Giants recently defied great odds and beat the Patriots (I picked them to win by 3 btw : ) ) but this format “war” is ridiculous at this point, IMHO. Today, there are a couple more giants jumping to Blu-ray over HD-DVD: Best Buy and Netflix. The momentum has been growing for a while now and looks to be too fast to stop.

Best Buy, the largest U.S. consumer electronics chain, said on Monday it will recommend that consumers choose Sony Corp’s Blu-ray high-definition video format.

The decision gives Sony yet another victory in the battle with Toshiba Corp’s HD DVD to be the high-definition DVD format of choice.

Earlier on Monday, online video rental company Netflix Inc (NFLX.O: Quote, Profile, Research) said it would exclusively stock Blu-ray DVDs after some of the world’s biggest movie studios decided in favor of that format.

Best Buy said it believes consumers will benefit from the choice of one HD DVD format.

“Because we believe that Blu-ray is fast emerging as that single format, we have decided to focus on Blu-ray products,” Brian Dunn, Best Buy’s president and chief operating officer, said in a statement.

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Flash drives, or SSD drives, might be the wave of the future, but they’re still much to expensive to really be practical in today’s computers. Even though they save energy and are faster than their platter-based cousins, we just aren’t ready for the switch. They don’t have big enough capacities and their pricetags are astronomical.

Seagate knows that total acceptance of flash-based drives is still a few years off, but that isn’t stopping them from using the tech to improve their current hard drives. Their new hybrid drives are large platter hard drives that have an additional 256MB of flash memory built-in. This helps the computer boot up 25% faster and cut the power consumption of the drives by 50%. Pretty awesome, right? Well, in theory, yes. The problem is, Microsoft’s Vista doesn’t quite know how to handle the new drives despite Microsoft’s claims to the contrary. Until an update gets Vista’s act together, these drives can’t fulfill their true potential. Hopefully everything will be worked out soon and we can look forward to using these drives in the near future.

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Much of the focus was on Harpertown, a 45nm quad-core version of Xeon with 12MB of cache, running in conjunction with Stokley, which support a 1600 MHz front side bus. Intel will also be releasing Wolfdale, a dual-core version with 6MB of cache. Although Penryn is primary a shrink of the existing architecture, rather than a complete new architecture, the new chips do s have some new features, notably including more cache and support for the faster bus; as well as a new divider that is supposed to be faster, and new SSE4 instructions…

The Tech Report compared a 3GHz Harpertown Xeon E5472 (expected to be released Nov. 12) against a 2.5GHz AMD “Barcelona” Opteron 2360SE (expected by the end of the year) and found that the Xeon pretty much won all the tests. The Xeon beat the Operton by 4% at Specjbb (a server business logic benchmark), the new Xeon beat an older 3GHz Clovertown Xeon by about 10%; and the 2.5GHz AMD part by about 4%. On almost all the other tests, Harpertown does even better, ahead of Barcelona by 20 to 34% in real world applications (and more in some synthetic benchmarks I’m more skeptical about).

Anandtech has even more benchmarks, most showing Intel ahead by 27% to as much as 60% (though I’m skeptical of the later tests). But it shows AMD ahead on performance/watt (with a larger improvement the less work is being done), almost certainly because of the more efficient memory scheme.

Both Barcelona and Harpertown seem to have some headroom in clock speeds. AMD is only shipping 2GHz now, but has promised 2.5GHz for December; let’s hope it can eventually match the 3GHz clock that Harpertown will start with.

System builders who received samples a week or two ahead of today’s worldwide launch say they aren’t ready to issue benchmarks just yet. Nevertheless, sources tell ChannelWeb that the processor AMD calls “the first native quad-core” is faster than they had anticipated. They say three key advances are testing out as advertised — a tri-level memory cache hierarchy with fully shared L3 cache for all four cores, a floating point unit with 2×128-bit loads/cycle, and independent power supplies for each of the processor’s four cores and to the memory controller. The last feature distinguishes AMD’s quad-core product from Intel’s, in that it’s possible to idle one, two or three CPU cores for a workload to better manage power consumption.

CMP Channel’s Test Center last week received an engineering sample server equipped with dual Barcelona CPUs. After putting it through its paces, Frank Ohlhorst reports, “Those who have waited for the arrival of AMD’s next generation CPU won’t be disappointed.”

As far as pricing, AMD is remaining tight-lipped about how it plans to scale its new quad-cores against Intel’s or its own dual-core chips. Partners in the know say Barcelona will be “competitively priced.” Market watchers say it will have to be, given Intel’s recent slashing of its own quad-core prices down to levels nearly in line with its Core 2 Duo products.

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If you have set aside a cool US$1100 for your processor alone at the time of this review release, then you should take a look at the QX6850 I will be reviewing today.

With four 8MB cache supported independent processing on-die units blistering along at 3.0Ghz, this latest Core 2 Extreme processor release from Intel at 1333Mhz front side bus sets the bar of what a consumer available processor can reach at this time. The QX6850 is currently holding the performance belt and by what is seen developing in the market from the competition, the only thing that will be beating it will be the next quad-core release from Intel (which will be within about 6 months).

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Iomega has announced their new storage solution which goes into the NAS (Network-attached storage) category, so multiple computers have access to the data. It is named Home Network Hard Drive.

The new hard-drive is available in 3 different storage sizes: 320GB, 360GB, and 500GB. It can be accessed on a network mode thanks to the 10/100 Ethernet port, or you can simply use the USB interface and connect it to an unique computer.

Each drive contains a single 7,200rpm SATA-II drive with an 8MB cache.

While the 320GB and 500GB versions are already available, for $150 and $200 correspondingly, the 360GB version will only hit the shelves on late September.

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Finally, Western Digital is leading the hard disk industry in bring out energy saving hard disk, according to source, The GreenPower family will ship in capacities from 320 Gbytes to 1 terabyte and will use 40% less energy than other similar products.

The GreenPower drives only consume about 8.5 watts compare to Hitachi’s 13.5 watts, currently it is only available in 3.5 inch format, if Western Digital has the ability to further reduce the energy consumption and comes in a 2.5 inch format for the laptop, they have a winner.

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Valve has Informed us about their plans to deliver free games to all owners of ATI RadeonT graphics cards via Steam, a popular platform for the distribution and management of digital content.

Effective immediately, all owners of ATI Radeon graphics cards may receive a free copy of Half-Life 2: Lost Coast and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch via Steam, http://www.steampowered.com/ati_offer1a/. Steam will automatically confirm the presence of ATI RadeonT hardware and then enable immediate access to full versions of the games free of charge.

For added convenience to new purchasers of ATI RadeonT products, Steam will be included in all ATI CatalystT Software and Driver packages through early 2008.

And, as recently announced by AMD, customers who purchase the new ATI RadeonT HD 2900 XT will also receive, upon release via Steam, the highly anticipated trio of new games coming from Valve: Team Fortress® 2, PortalT, and Half-Life 2: Episode Two.

That’s a very good deal, we expect to see more Radeon users within the next few weeks.

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The people at HardOCP seem to think so. Judging from the article, ATI’s newest cards just aren’t what enthusiasts had hoped for as far as performance and quality. Sadly, I was also reading multiple reviews about the Dodge Avenger today and the outcome was just about the same, just swap a few words and tech terms around.

At the high-end the Radeon HD 2900 XT is based off of an ATI and TSMC proprietary 80nm HS processes and contains 700 million transistors. The Radeon HD 2900 XT will have 320 stream processing units and carry a core clock speed of 740 (742.7 MHz actual). Note that there are not separate clock domains; the streaming processors and the core (texture units and ROPs) all run at the same speed unlike the G80 which runs the shader processors much faster than everything else.

The texture units and render back-ends (ROPs) are separate units and there are 16 of both on the Radeon HD 2900 XT. There will be 512 MB of GDDR3 on a 512-bit memory bus clocked at 825 MHz (1.65 GHz) on the Radeon HD 2900 XT. This gives us 106 GB/sec of memory bandwidth available. Native CrossFire is back and fully supported with the Radeon HD 2900 XT.

“This sucker’s electrical, but I need a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 jigawatts of electricity I need” - Doctor Emmett Brown

OK, it isn’t that bad, but the quoted power draw is 215W at full load which is the highest power draw from any consumer 3D graphics card. For a single Radeon HD 2900 XT ATI recommends a 550W power supply. For CrossFire a 750W power supply is recommended. Power leakage is a reported problem with this GPU.