crookedvulture writes Slashdot has covered a bunch of new PCI Express SSDs over the past month, and for good reason. The latest crop offers much higher sequential and random I/O rates than predecessors based on old-school Serial ATA interfaces. They’re also compatible with new protocols, like NVM Express, which reduce overhead and improve scaling under demanding loads. As one might expect, these new PCIe drives destroy the competition in targeted benchmarks, hitting top speeds several times faster than even the best SATA SSDs can muster. The thing is, PCIe SSDs don’t load games or common application data any faster than current incumbents—or even consumer-grade SSDs from five years ago. That’s very different from the initial transition from mechanical to solid-state storage, where load times improved noticeably for just about everything. Servers and workstations can no doubt take advantage of the extra oomph that PCIe SSDs provide, but desktop users may struggle to find scenarios where PCIe SSDs offer palpable performance improvements over even budget-oriented SATA drives. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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New PCIe SSDs Load Games, Apps As Fast As Old SATA Drives
When you misplace a credit card, the first thing you usually do is cancel it in case it falls into the wrong hands. But it’s a hassle to wait for a new card and update your information. Discover cardholders can now get around this by temporarily freezing their cards instead of canceling them altogether. Read more… 
Last week, New York Times tech/style columnist Nick Bilton told the tale of two teens breaking into his Toyota Prius with a mysterious black box . Now we might know what it is, and you can get one for as little as $17. Read more… 
The practice of pricing fuel with a fraction of a penny is thought to have started around the 1930s. While we can’t be sure who was the first to price fuel this way, it seems to have become relatively commonplace across the United States all the sudden around the same time. So what happened? In short- taxes and the Great Depression. Read more… 
Nature doesn’t end at the borders of a city — it’s just transformed. That’s why scientists are finding new animal species in urban areas, where the ecosystems favor scavengers, hardy weeds, and junk-eaters. It probably comes as no surprise that the sprawling city of Los Angeles is home to its own unique fly species. Read more… 
rDouglass writes Open source music notation software MuseScore, and pianist Kimiko Ishizaka, have completed the Open Well-Tempered Clavier project and released a new studio recording and digital score online, under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0, public domain) license. Their previous project, the Open Goldberg Variations (2012), has shown its cultural significance by greatly enhancing the Wikipedia.org article on J.S. Bach’s work, and by making great progress in supplying musical scores that are accessible to the visually impaired and the blind. The recording has also received very positive early reviews by music critics. Over 900 fans of J.S. Bach financed this project on Kickstarter.com, where a total of $44, 083 was raised. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Pocket Casts has long been one of our favorite cross-platform podcasting tools , and there’s a new Android version out today with a Material Design overhaul and even more ways to cut down the amount of time it takes to burn through your podcast queue. You can also get statistics on the amount of listening time you’ve saved overall. Read more… 
The only thing that sucks more than spam are the greedy people who send it to you. That’s why the Department of Justice charging three spam kingpins responsible for one of the largest data breaches in history is so exciting. Finally, Feds are taking down the spam kingpins—or at least trying. Read more…