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Rather than write regulations, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) released finalized guidelines for automakers to build cabin electronics into vehicle that will not distract drivers. These guidelines come after a comment period on a draft release by NHTSA last year.

NHTSA included its responses to comments and the new guidelines in a 281 page PDF made available on its Web site.

In justification of the new guidelines, NHTSA revealed that a recent test of distracted driving it conducted showed that texting doubled the risk of a 'near-crash' over attentive driving. While the test found that manually operating a … Read more

Western Digital announced on Tuesday the availability of its first solid-state hybrid drive, the WD Black SSHD.

SSHD is the new name for hybrid drives that combine both solid-state storage (used in solid-state drives) and regular platter-based storage (as found in regular hard drives) in a single standard box.

The WD Black is not the first SSHD on the market, but it's very different from the Laptop Thin SSHD that Seagate released just last month.

For one, the WD Black SSD is ultraslim, just 5mm thick (compared with 7mm for the Seagate drives), making it almost half the thickness … Read more

Google Drive and Gmail both experienced service disruptions today.

As of about 6 a.m. PT, Google's Apps Status Dashboard was updated to say that Google was investigating reports of issues with both services and would provide more information shortly.

And things got worse from there. Some 10 to 15 minutes later, the dashboard also showed disruptions affecting Google Documents, Google Spreadsheets, and Google Presentations.

The Google Apps Status Dashboard also reported a service outage this morning with the Admin control panel / API.

But even amid the complaints, by 6:30 a.m. PT, some users were saying they'… Read more

NEW YORK -- IBM today outlined its flash storage plan, which includes a $1 billion investment in research and development and a series of systems that will use solid-state drives.

With the move, Big Blue is the latest on the bandwagon to push Flash into the data centers. Developments like big data are pushing flash storage mainstream in the enterprise because companies need to tap into so-called hot data---information that needs to be used real time. Fusion-io, EMC, NetApp and other storage players have also formulated flash storage strategies.

At an event here, IBM's Ambuj Goyal, general manager of … Read more

Looking to upgrade your laptop? One great option is to replace your pokey old mechanical hard drive with a lightning-fast solid-state drive (SSD). However, they carry a much higher price-per-gigabyte: A typical 128GB SSD can run anywhere from $125-200, for example.

Ah, but what about a solid-state hybrid drive (or SSHD)? These clever units combine old-school platters with newfangled flash storage to deliver SSD-level performance along with HDD-level capacity -- and for a lot less than the cost of a pure SSD.

To wit: Amazon has the Seagate ST1000LM014 1TB solid-state hybrid drive for $119.99 shipped. (Out of stock? … Read more

If you are a podcast listener lacking in some direction if not organization, Podcast Gallery can help you get a handle on the various podcasts you watch or listen to. Head to the Podcast Gallery site and you'll be greeted with a selection of the most popular podcasts on the Web.

Click on a podcast listed and you'll get a reverse chronological listing of its episodes. For each episode you can listen or watch right in your browser (Podcast Gallery uses HTML 5; no Flash required), download it, or send it to Dropbox or Google Drive. Also for … Read more

It seems no one is immune from the lure of the cell phone. Not even pilots. Not even in midflight.

National Transportation Safety Board records show that the pilot of a medical helicopter sent and received texts before the helicopter crashed in Missouri, killing four people.

As Bloomberg reports, the helicopter was operated by Air Methods Corporation, an air medical transport contractor whose policy forbids its pilots from using their cell phones in flight. The company didn't respond to Bloomberg's requests for comment, according to the news agency. We've contacted Air Methods and will update this report … Read more

The dream of a solid-state drive that offers near 1TB of storage space without breaking the bank has just come true.

Crucial today announced the availability of the M500 SSD, its first terabyte-class drive, which comes in 120GB, 240GB, 480GB, and 960GB capacities and costs $129.99, $219.99, $399.99, and $599.99, respectively.

This is the first SSD on the market to offer close to 1TB at a cost close to that of most existing 480GB to 512GB SSDs.

According to Crucial, the M500 uses Micron's 20nm MLC NAND flash and Micron's custom firmware to deliver … Read more

STANFORD, Calif. -- Self-driving cars are expected to save lives: a vehicle driven by a human will experience, on average, a crash every 160,000 miles or so. It's only a matter of time, advocates say, before robots become better drivers than us.

That is, if the lawyers let them. Industry insiders are already fretting about a host of legal problems that could bedevil robot car makers once a sufficient number of their creations take to the roads. Product liability, tort law, negligence, foreseeable harm, patent encumbrance, and design defects are only some of the concerns.

"The longer … Read more