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Intel finally announced its own SATA solid-state drive for notebook and desktop clients, and our secured lab has become a feeding frenzy of folks geeking out on the X25-M, just one of the SSD drives Intel introduced Tuesday at its Developer Forum in San Francisco.

The mainstream SSDs will come in 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch models and both will use standard multilevel cell NAND flash memory that will hopefully translate to a lower cost-per-bit for the consumer.

As of the time of this announcement, Intel hasn't released pricing. We're crossing our fingers that the company will eventually … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Intel is working on future technology that is capable of understanding human behavior and pointing people to the appropriate course of action.

Mobile devices of tomorrow will be smaller, yet equipped with more powerful computing capabilities, and enjoy platform-wide power efficiency, Mary Smiley, Intel's director of emerging platforms, told the media here on Monday, or "Day Zero," of the Intel Developer Forum.

A key feature of such devices will be sensors that provide the ability to understand the world of the users, as well as the "situational awareness" to provide inference and guidance.

"… Read more

Earlier this month, I traveled to Denver for Denvention 3, the 66th World Science Fiction Convention. I first attended Worldcon in 1977, when it happened to take place in Miami, where I was living at the time.

Since then, I've been to 15 more Worldcons, including in Denver. (I've been pretty lucky--the Worldcon has been held in my home state six times.) I've also been to four North American Science Fiction Conventions (NASFiCs), which are held in the United States when the Worldcon is overseas.

A good fraction of the attendees at a Worldcon are San Francisco-based professionals--writers, agents, editors, publishers, artists, and others. Along with some of the more well-known fans, they participate in panel discussions on a variety of topics. These panels are my favorite part of the Worldcon.

This year, it seemed that there was a panel on issues related to e-books and electronic publishing in virtually every time slot. I went to several of these sessions. It seems to me that there's a serious conflict between the preferences of some professionals and… Read more

When the Centrino 2-equipped ThinkPad X200 waltzed into our Labs and demonstrated not only impressive performance but also jaw-dropping battery life, we wondered when our other favorite ThinkPad, the X300, would be spruced up with Intel's latest components.

Turns out, we didn't have to wait long. Today Lenovo announced the ThinkPad X301, a component refresh to its popular 13.3-inch laptop. The new version will incorporate an ultra-low-voltage Core 2 Duo processor that's expected to be unveiled at the Intel Developer Forum this week. The ThinkPad X301 will also come equipped with DDR3 RAM, which (combined … Read more

When the Intel Developer Forum kicks off Tuesday in San Francisco, the theme of low power will be high on the agenda of topics.

The headliner at IDF this year is indisputably the upcoming "Nehalem" Core i7 processor. Though the new microarchitecture is replete with esoteric technologies like QuickPath (for faster chip-to-chip communication) and on-chip memory controllers--things that end users can't readily relate to--better power efficiency is something every consumer gets because it results in better battery life.

"(Nehalem) is pretty subtle because it's a change in microarchitecture. A lot of the changes aren't … Read more

Socialmedian is a new Web 2.0 conversation service that does a decent job of repackaging concepts that users of Digg and Twitter will find familiar. I fear it's a bit too similar to other existing services to break into the mainstream, but there are some concepts and experiments on the site that make it work, at least for its devoted early beta users.

The site has been in closed alpha testing until now, but it is scheduled to open up to all tonight.

On Socialmedian, you either join or create topics you're interested in, such as "… Read more

NEW YORK--It's time to stop waxing philosophical about how this thing called "new media" is shaping American elections and time to focus on the real tech issues, like broadband policy.

We talked about bloggers in 2004, we talked about YouTube in 2006, and the 2008 version of the conversation (social media) has already worn out its welcome. Instead, as the sentiment of the Personal Democracy Forum conference here overwhelmingly indicated, it's time to redirect the tech-politics spotlight to what really matters.

We've already learned the basic lessons about the digital campaign trail. Ask nicely for … Read more

NEW YORK--Lawrence Lessig, Stanford University law professor and co-founder of the new Change Congress project, gave the audience at the Personal Democracy Forum conference a brief history lesson on Tuesday morning. His message: government corruption is nothing new.

On a massive display screen, he loaded up a portrait of legendary New England statesman and eventual Secretary of State Daniel Webster, whose professional conflicts of interest would have been enough to make even the most lukewarm of political bloggers cringe.

"Bribery wasn't even a crime in our Congress until 1853. The 19th century was a cesspool of this kind … Read more

NEW YORK--Economic and policy problems have placed a few potholes in front of the fast-growing clean-technology business.

Forecasts for clean-technology adoption all point upward these days, buoyed by high double digits growth rates in sectors like wind and solar power over the past several years.

But a panel of financial experts here at the Renewable Energy Finance Forum on Thursday detailed several challenges to scaling clean technologies beyond their current niche status of about 2 percent of energy in the U.S.

"The fundamental drivers have never been better," said Michael Liebreich, the CEO of New Energy Finance. &… Read more