News about what is happening in technology today!

Ticketed to support a growing breed of high-performance and high-availability communications applications being used with more frequency and requiring increased storage capacity, Performance Technologies Inc. has launched the CPC5900 Storage Blade and CPC5910 Storage Expansion Blade as its new family of high-density storage blades.

Currently available, the CPC5900 blade is geared toward NAS (network-attached storage) and SAN (storage area network) environments and is equipped with two hot-swappable SATA (serial ATA) hard drives and an onboard PowerPC processor.

The new blade supports applications requiring full RAID 0,1, 0+1, 4, 5, 6 arrays that are establishing a firm foothold within application servers, storage appliances, embedded databases, and data-heavy logging tools.

The CPC5900 can serve as a PXE boot server as well, typically set in motion to auto deploy raw boards and Performance’s NexusWare OS environment, according to officials of Rochester, N.Y.-based Performance Technologies.

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You knew it was going to happen. There were already been pornographic titles announced for HD-DVD at CES, but Xbiz reports Digital Playground is the first adult film studio to publicly align itself with one of the next-generation disc formats - and they’ve picked Blu-ray.

Digital Playground, like many companies, realizes Blu-ray and HD-DVD are so similar and choosing between them hasn’t been simple. Ultimately, though, the promised install base from PlayStation 3 and Blu-ray’s security functions won them over. “They’e pretty similar in every other way,” Digital Playground co-founder Joone said. “We went with Blu-ray because storage and security are the main issues for us.”

Even Microsoft has said they may release a Blu-ray adaptor for Xbox 360 if the format prevails. They’re already planning an external HD-DVD disc drive for release later this year, though they haven’t nailed down any specifics since their announcement at CES.

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Nvidia Corp. launched two new nForce chipsets for the Intel market on Tuesday which trade a somewhat reduced feature set for a cheaper price tag.

The nForce4 SLI XE and nForce4 Ultra will be bought and integrated by motherboard manufacturers including Biostar, ECS, Epox, Foxconn, Jetway, J&W, MSI, and others, the company said. Prices for motherboards using the SLI XE will be about $100, Nvidia estimated, while the cheaper nForce4 Ultra will enable boards for about $89 or so.

The new SLI XE and nForce4 Ultra boards are expected by the end of January, Nvidia estimated. The nForce4 Ultra was designed for both the Intel Socket 775 infrastructure, or either the AMD Athlon 64 or 64 FX chips.

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‘If U.S. companies can go online to outsource their programming, why can’t U.S. computer students outsource their homework–which, after all, often involves writing sample programs?’ Wall Street Journal colummnist Lee Gomes asks. ‘Scruples aside, no reason at all. Search for “homework” in the data base of Rent A Coder projects, and you get 1,000 hits. (An impressive number, but still a tiny fraction of all computer students, the vast majority of whom are no doubt an honest and hardworking lot.)’ Some of the Rent a Coder users appear to be outsourcing their way through school, at low costs–probably less than $100 per assignment. The posting are, of course, anonymous, but Gomes traces one to a student at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, where an instructor tells him that Rent a Coder contributed to a problem of plagiarism last semester.

A test carried out by Pegasus Lab on account for Swedish magazine PC För alla showed that a normal PC keyboard was infected by more bacteria than a normal toilet seat. More specific it contained 33000 bacteria per square centimeter, compared to 130 on a ordinary toilet seat. The tests also showed occurrence of up to 3100 fungi per square centimeter.”