A-DATA goes SSD crazy, shows off 128GB 2.5-incher

Friends, the age of SSD is upon is, and there's no better evidence than the upcoming 128GB 2.5-inch drive from A-DATA, which hooks up via SATA II, totally schools PQI's offering, and makes all your wildest dreams come true. A-DATA was showing this drive off at CES behind closed doors, along with a 64GB 1.8-incher and a most impressive 32GB ExpressCard. Mass production and availability is due for late Q1 and early Q2, and while there's no word on price just yet, with the way flash drives have been trending lately, we're hoping for good news when these hit the streets.

Sony's Core 2 Quad (yes, quad) Vaio R Master: answers "who's your daddy?"

Looks like Sony is first from the gate with a consumer PC wrapped around Intel's new Core 2 Quad processor. Damn straight Jack, Sony's Vaio R Master split-tower, flagship desktop now sports Intel's beefiest of consumer procs: the 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad Q6600. That, on top of a Blu-ray Disc drive, up to 3GB of DDR2-667 memory and 3TB of SATA disk, and nVidia Quadro FX 1500 graphics makes this one smokin' fast box. Only thing is, a fully spec'd -- and we mean fully -- model VGC-RM900CPS with 24-inch, 1920x1200 LCD will set you back ¥995,800 (about $8,241) when these hit Japan February 10th. Still interested?

HD DVD Turns It Up To 51GB With Triple Layer Goodness

We don't know what we were expecting the specs on the AppleTV to be—nothing extraordinary, we're sure—but what we see now is kind of deflating. The ATV has a 1.0GHz Pentium M-based chip which is down-clocked for a 350MHz bus and has 2MB of L2 cache. Not the type of powerhouse you'd want to hack and put Linux on. The peripherals aren't that impressive either. There's a 40GB, 2.5-inch PATA hard disk, an nVidia G72M with 64MB of DDR2 RAM, 256MB of 400MHz DDR2 main system RAM, and 802.11n compatibility (it works with Airport Extreme). We suppose the meager specs are why the machine costs only $299, but it makes us wonder how well it'll handle Apple's 1080 HD trailers.

College student creates paper-based storage system (no, not that kind)

24-year-old Sainul Abideen thinks he's come up with an alternative to CDs and other data storage options that'll allow for greater storage capacities and be cheaper and biodegradable to boot, using a fancy printing technique he's devised to cram loads of data onto a plain old sheet of paper. The trick is to first convert the data into a so-called "Rainbow Format," which is made up of various geometric shapes that can be densely printed onto a sheet of paper; that can then be read by a computer or other device using a Rainbow Card Reader. From the sound of it, the system appears to be somewhat similar to QR Codes and other newfangled bar code-type technologies currently in use in parts of the world other than here, but Abideen's "Rainbow Versitile Disc" can apparently store far more amounts of data than those -- between 90 and 450GB, according to The Arab News. Demonstrations of the technology, however, seem to have only shown much smaller amounts of data being Rainbowfied, including a 45 second video clip and 432 pages of "foolscrap" being stored on a four-inch square piece of paper. Still pretty darn impressive if you ask us, and it sure looks a heckuva lot better hanging on a wall than a CD.