TeaCurran writes with this mildly ranty objection to the most recent Mac OS X update; several friends who have made the leap on their MacBook Pros have various other complaints, too, including system slowdowns that resemble crashes (except that their pointers still work) and recurring black screens for some configurations (with or without the kernel panics TeaCurran mentions) — what's been your experience? “Apple OS X Lion shipped with new NVidia video drivers that are causing anyone with a mid 2010 Macbook Pro to get a kernel panic every 5-10 minutes. Apple knew about the issue before shipping lion, hasn't responded to the issue, and is censoring posts in their support forum that mention words like 'boycott' and 'petition.' NVidia has responded that the drivers are the responsibility of Apple so they won't deal with the issue. How a major hardware manufacturer can ship such a faulty product without getting much press about it is completely beyond me.”

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OS X Lion Ships With Faulty NVidia Drivers

Peter Eckersley writes “The Netalyzr research project from the ICSI networking group has discovered that on a number of US ISPs’ networks, search traffic for Bing, Yahoo! and sometimes Google is being redirected to proxy servers operated by a company called Paxfire. In addition to posing a grave privacy problem, this server impersonation is being used to redirect certain searches away from the user’s chosen search engine and to affiliate marketing programs instead. Further analysis is available in a post at the EFF.”

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Widespread Hijacking of Search Traffic In the US

Enterprise hardware company Smart Modular Technologies has announced a line of SSDs that appear to wipe the floor with pretty much everything out there. It comes in capacities from 200GB all the way to a current record capacity of 1.6TB. And not only is it the biggest single SSD available, it also is the fastest, using a Serial Attached SCSI interface to achieve (they claim) 1000MB/s read speeds and 500MB/s writes.

The interface is actually specced at 6Gb/s (~750MB/s, theoretically), so there might be a small amount of shenanigans going on here, but those are still monster speeds. Even the best consumer-grade SSDs only do about half that right now. And it fits in a 2.5″ form factor, too.

Smart is also touting their “Guardian Technology,” some on-drive tech that helps extend the life of the drive and, presumably, keep the data in order so it can be read off at those incredible speeds.

No pricing was given for the Optimus line, though it is described as being “cost-effective.” I’m guessing it’s going to be expensive as hell, but we may see some trickle down of this speed over the next year or so.

[via Geek.com]

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1.6-Terabyte Smart Optimus SSD Reads A Gig Per Second

Michael Kukla is the artist to thank for these brilliant explorations of sculptural dematerialization via both wood and marble.

kkleiner writes “People Power 1.0 is an open and extensible cloud-based platform that allows you to monitor up-to-the-minute household energy usage from an iPhone or Android smartphone. Part of the growing Internet of Things, People Power 1.0 brings energy monitoring to the common household. It works through your house router to connect to the Internet and send data to your smartphone. Or you can measure energy consumption from individual devices with People Power’s GreenX Powerstrips.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Monitor Household Energy From Your Smartphone