Rather odd timing, given some recent developments in the Apple camp, but Microsoft Research has just surfaced some of its incredibly wild multitouch mouse prototypes. Each one uses a different touch detection method, and at first glance all five seem to fly in the face of regular ergonomics.

Ten layers, plenty of space

TDK Corp seems to be keen on sending the Blu-ray packing, as the company developed a 10-layer optical disc with capacity of 320GB, where each layer is capable of storing up to 32GB of data. Just for comparison, Blu-ray discs can store up to 25GB per layer.

Apparently, the more layers the medium has, the weaker the signal gets, so expanding optical drives by introducing more layers requires improved transmittance, something that TDK effectively tackled by enhancing the composition of used materials.

In both price and performance

The charismatic CEO of OCZ technology Ryan M. Petersen has told Fudzilla that he expects SSD to overtake mechanical drives in in terms of price, capacity and of course performance.

The manufacturing roadmaps for SSD storage devices should enable three to four bits per MCL cell in late 2011 or early 2012 and this should be the point when SSD should catch up mechanical HDD drives in storage and price.The performance is already on SSD side.

The Radeon HD 4870 1GB sure dropped to $150 pretty quickly, didn’t it? The Radeon HD 4890 really isn’t all that far behind at $190 (as low as $170 with mail-in rebates). So, for the Radeon HD 5850 to be a success at $259, it’d better be appreciably quicker, right?

Nvidia has its own high-end bruisers around the same price range, too. A GeForce GTX 275 at $210 is mighty tasty. And a GTX 285—the company’s fastest single-GPU board available—isn’t bad at $330 or so given its single-GPU flagship status (less than $300, after some of those rebates).

Seems that non-modded consoles are having issues. We have been getting some reports from the Wii faithful that the 4.2 update is causing problems for Wii units. We suspected that these were illegally modified Wii consoles that were causing the grief, but a closer look at the complaints seems to suggest that some Wii consoles that are not modded are being bricked by the update.

At least Best Buy’s CEO thinks so. Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn is sounding a bit more upbeat and optimistic about the holiday season with current comments that he made. At a recent media conference in New York Dunn was quoted as saying “consumers are back out spending again” and, of course, this is good news.

A new set of nForce motherboard drivers is ready for download.
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We love the HD 5870s and that's a problem for ATI because we expect to feel that same kind of passion for the HD 5850. If we don't there will be heck to pay, heck I tell you. Today marks the day of our first HD 5850 landing in our labs. The first company to make it out of the gates? Well, it was the same one that made it out of the HD 5870 gates, Sapphire.

Nvidia Corp. has demonstrated one of the first products based on its newly-announced Fermi architecture. The first card, which pictures appeared on Japanese PC Watch web-site, based on the graphics processing unit (GPU) known as G300, GT300 or NV60 is apparently not a GeForce, but Tesla, which is designer for high-performance computing or simulation market.

Holographic storage involves holograms, images of data, being stored in layers in a CD-sized disk's recording surface. The images are created by two laser beams and read by a laser beam. GE's researchers at its Applied Optics Laboratory managed to shrink these images, calling them micro-holograms. They achieved this to the point where the images were also reflective enough - 200 times more so than before - to be read by optics that could be used to read existing optical formats. A CD-size disk could store 500GB using this technology, with 1TB and greater capacity potentially possible in the 2011/2012 period.