On what many Americans consider a day of change, here we go again with more of the same: a massive data breach involving Heartland Payment Systems, a credit card payment processor, that was announced on Tuesday. First, the good news: no merchant data or cardholder Social Security numbers, unencrypted personal identification numbers (PIN), addresses or telephone numbers were involved in the breach. Neither was any check processing data. Now for the bad news: since they were alerted to suspicious activity by Visa

After unveiling HyperSpace earlier this month, Phoenix Technologies and ASUS are announcing a partnership which will help accelerate the adoption of HyperSpace. Through the agreement, ASUS will incorporate HyperSpace into its next generation notebooks, though no specific models were detailed. Additionally, the company did not indicate if its netbooks, some of which already run a quick-booting Linux environment, will run HyperSpace. However, according to jkOnTheRun, HyperSpace will ship on a variety of ASUS models,

Pandora’s free Internet streaming radio service just got a little less free. Well, it still doesn’t cost you anything, but it is no longer commercial free. Pandora made the following announcements on its Twitter feed today: “Yes, for those asking, we have implemented a few audio ads. Not to worry, they won’t be frequent or long. We gotta pay those bills. :)””So you know, we did not take on audio ads lightly. We try to be extremely respectful of your listening experience, & promise to be prudent.”If you are

Google has certainly made a name for itself with its free products, most notably its popular search engine and Gmail services. Now, many are speculating that Google is working on a product called Google Drive, or Gdrive. Essentially, Gdrive would be online storage with the capacity to hold the entire contents of your hard drive. It could also enable cool tricks down the road, like the ability to boot your computer from an online drive using a Google operating system. Gdrive would be a cloud-based storage and

The ability to drive big displays now comes in a small package with the release of the NVIDIA Quadro NVS 420, the industry’s only low profile professional graphics solution designed for maximum display real estate with a small form factor (SFF) computer. Featuring NVIDIA nView display software and support for four 30-inch displays at 2560×1600 high resolutions, business professionals can maximize productivity through increased desktop real estate and easy to use display management tools.Built to meet the needs

Qualcomm Acquires Handheld Graphics and Multimedia Assets from AMD— Technology and Resource Assets to Strengthen Qualcomm’s Leadership Position in Mobile Multimedia — SAN DIEGO and SUNNYVALE, Calif. — January 20, 2009 — Qualcomm Incorporated (Nasdaq: QCOM) and AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced that Qualcomm has acquired certain graphics and multimedia technology assets, intellectual property and resources that were formerly the basis of AMD’s handheld business. The acquisition enhances Qualcomm’s multimedia

Talk from the Tech Industry: Letter from Intel to the Incoming Obama CTO Thank you to the thousands of men and women who participated in Intel’s survey last week at CES. As I blogged about earlier, the survey looked to stimulate broad support for Intel policies, asking you what the top priorities should be for the incoming Obama administration’s chief technology officer (CTO) in four areas where technology plays a key role: education, environment, health and Internet broadband.As President-Elect Obama gets sworn

There’s an old saying in the insurance business: If you have enough money, you can purchase insurance for just about anything–that’s something that Lloyd’s of London has been doing for years. YouPlayOrWePay.com is no Lloyd’s, but it is now offering insurance for something that until now seemed to be uninsurable: your World of Warcraft (WoW) downtime. YouPlayOrWePay.com doesn’t actually call it “insurance,” but instead refers to it as “third party compensation”–which is also another way of saying that this

Intel X25-M SATA 80GB MLC SSD @ Benchmark Reviews and other reviews from around the web can be found by visiting our forums!

In early September, 2008 Intel released their mainstream series of solid state drives. In its initial offfering Intel brought two drives to market, the X18-M and the X25-M built respectively on the 1.8″ and 2.5″ form factors. The initial capacity of these drives was 80 GB and recently a 160 GB version was released. Solid State Drives are rapidly changing the computing landscape, and many enthusiasts are using SSD technology in their primary systems to help boost performance. Benchmark Reviews has tested nearly all of the products available to the retail market in this sector, and several have done quite well while others fall flat. It used to be that performance was the largest hurdle for mass storage NAND Solid State Drives, followed by stability, and later price. In this review, we will give a thorough overview as well as benchmark test the linear bandwidth performance of the ! Intel X25-M 80 GB SSDSA2MH080G15E solid state SATA drive and compares it against the top competition.

When Windows Vista first hit the scene, it was quite a departure from Windows XP. It had been a while since a major desktop operating system release from Microsoft, and consumers along with many businesses, were slow to adopt. Add to that the new and sometimes cumbersome security features, plus reports that Vista was slower as a gaming platform, and you had an equation for low initial adoption. Even as service pack 1 was released adoption was still less than stellar, prompting Microsoft to launch new marketing