LG Super-Multi N2A2 2TB NAS

Over the past few years we've reviewed a handful of NAS (Network Attached Storage) products and while most of them have been very impressive, they all shared one common pitfall: they were extremely pricey. So expensive in fact, that they're little more than a pipe dream for the average user. 

So when LG told us they had a new 2-bay NAS device that costs less than $250 with a pair of 1TB hard drives included, we sat up and took notice. 


As we have repeatedly discovered when dealing with NAS products, there is much more to consider than just storage capacity and price. These devices are highly dependent on the hardware and software that drives them and either can cause the product to be a complete failure. Realizing that, we're extremely eager to find out what makes the LG N2A2tick, let's take a closer look...

Software to predict 'March Madness' basketball winner

Fine, computers, you can beat us at chess and Jeopardy!, just please let us keep March Madness. With the US National Collegiate Athletic Association's basketball tournament starting today, contestants in the second annual March Madness Predictive Analytics Challenge are attempting to build software that can pick winning teams better than humans.

The contest pits machine against machine to find out which algorithm can correctly predict the outcome of the 64-team contest. Tournament brackets must be chosen entirely by computer algorithm, and no specific team-based rules, such as "always pick Duke over North Carolina", are allowed. All contestants are restricted to using the same data set - team and player statistics from the 2006 season until last month.

Contest organiser Danny Tarlow's own entry started out as a movie recommendation engine similar to those used on sites like Netflix. He says that predicting what movie a particular person would like to see is similar to predicting how well a basketball team's attack will do against their opponent's defence: both interactions are driven by unknown rules.

To predict the result of a basketball game, his algorithm chews through loads of regular season data and uses probabilities to find equations that fit the outcomes of each game. It then uses these equations to pick which teams will win in tournament match-ups. "The algorithm knows nothing about basketball or details about any team. It just sees the outcome of each game in the season, and it tries to discover latent characteristics that best explain the outcomes," he says.

Other entries range from using genetic algorithms to evolve equations that can pick winners to more straightforward attempts to boil down a team's strengths and weaknesses to a single number, then pick the team with the higher number in each match-up.

Last year's contest had 10 entries, including a "pace" bracket that simply picked the higher-seeded team in each matchup. Six of the entries did better than this baseline, one even predicting underdog Butler University's surprising ascent to the final four.

Tarlow hopes for a better performance this year, but is well aware of the difficulty of predicting the outcome of an entire basketball tournament. "There's clearly a lot of luck that goes into having a successful bracket."

We'll know how the software programs fare soon - the round of 64 begins today.

Defending against botnet attacks – by fighting back

Online malcontents who try to take down web servers now face a new kind of defence system that can fight back. A common attack known as distributed denial of service (DDoS) knocks websites offline by flooding them with traffic from a horde of infected computers, or botnet. Yuri Gushin and Alex Behar of the internet security firm Radware, based in Tel Aviv, Israel, say they have turned this attack back on its perpetrators.

Most current DDoS defences work by blocking connections from attacking computers or throttling data rates to let only a certain amount of traffic through. But these methods can't handle the larger attacks that are increasingly common. "Today's technologies are not cutting it," explain Gushin.

The pair's more sophisticated technique manipulates an attacker's connection in order to make botnet computers work harder. By intentionally ignoring part of the intended connection request they are able to trick the attacker's computer into making a very slow connection to the server as it continues to try to make contact. This lasts for around 5 minutes. When the attacking botnet computer is slowed down in this way it will automatically try to send new connection requests, badly affecting its performance. Eventually the botnet computers making the attack will be forced to give up, depending on the instructions given to them by the botmaster who launched the attack.

This approach proved successful last year, when Gushin and Behar helped defend against attacks perpetrated by Anonymous, the loose collective of internet activists that took up digital arms to fight for WikiLeaks. "We were able to really turn the tide on the attack," says Behar.

AMD: DirectX "getting in the way" of PC gaming graphics

AMD believes there is a lack of a great disparity between PC gaming graphics and console gaming graphics, despite the huge advantage the PC has over consoles in terms of hardware. Despite the hardware giant's great relationship with Microsoft, Richard Huddy, AMD's worldwide developer relations manager of the company's GPU division, blames the software giant.

"It's funny," Huddy told bit-tech. "We often have at least ten times as much horsepower as an Xbox 360 or a PS3 in a high-end graphics card, yet it's very clear that the games don't look ten times as good. To a significant extent, that's because, one way or another, for good reasons and bad - mostly good, DirectX is getting in the way.' Huddy says that one of the most common requests he gets from game developers is to "make the API go away."

This quote comes hot on the heels of a related statement from id Software co-founder John Carmack. While Huddy offers one perspective from the hardware side of things, and says that game developers agree with him, Carmack recently gave a different opinion from the game development angle. Despite being an OpenGL house, he stated that DirectX is a better API than OpenGL.

While Huddy said nothing about OpenGL, he clearly has not talked to Carmack. "I certainly hear this in my conversations with games developers, and I guess it was actually the primary appeal of Larrabee to developers – not the hardware, which was hot and slow and unimpressive, but the software – being able to have total control over the machine, which is what the very best games developers want," Huddy said. "By giving you access to the hardware at the very low level, you give games developers a chance to innovate, and that's going to put pressure on Microsoft – no doubt at all. Wrapping it up in a software layer gives you safety and security but it unfortunately tends to rob you of quite a lot of the performance, and most importantly it robs you of the opportunity to innovate."

AT&T to acquire T-Mobile for $39 billion

AT&T has announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire T-Mobile USA from Deutsche Telekom in a cash-and-stock transaction currently valued at approximately $39 billion. With all of the rumors of Sprint and T-Mobile joining up, this may be a little surprising, but strategically it makes more sense since the two carriers have similar networks.

The agreement has been approved by the Boards of Directors of both companies. Deutsche Telekom will receive an equity stake in AT&T that gives it an ownership interest in of approximately 8 percent. A Deutsche Telekom representative will join the AT&T Board of Directors. The deal is expected to close, pending regulatory approval, within the next 12 months.

While AT&T certainly wants T-Mobile for its subscribers, it's also clearly interested grabbing its (Long Term Evolution) network assets, improving network quality for both companies' customers, and gaining more of the limited wireless spectrum. With this transaction, AT&T is committing to a significant expansion of robust 4G LTE deployment to 95 percent of the US population to reach an additional 46.5 million Americans beyond current plans – including rural communities and small towns.

"This transaction represents a major commitment to strengthen and expand critical infrastructure for our nation's future," Randall Stephenson, AT&T Chairman and CEO, said in a statement. "It will improve network quality, and it will bring advanced LTE capabilities to more than 294 million people. Mobile broadband networks drive economic opportunity everywhere, and they enable the expanding high-tech ecosystem that includes device makers, cloud and content providers, app developers, customers, and more. During the past few years, America's high-tech industry has delivered innovation at unprecedented speed, and this combination will accelerate its continued growth. This transaction delivers significant customer, shareowner and public benefits that are available at this level only from the combination of these two companies with complementary network technologies, spectrum positions and operations. We are confident in our ability to execute a seamless integration, and with additional spectrum and network capabilities, we can better meet our customers' current demands, build for the future and help achieve the President's goals for a high-speed, wirelessly connected America."

RSA's SecurID hacked

RSA says hack won't allow "direct attack" on SecureID tokens Security firm RSA has been the victim of an "extremely sophisticated" attack that has resulted in exfiltration of certain private information, announced Executive Chairman Art Coviello in an open letter published yesterday. The company also filed a note with the SEC, warning of possible risks due to the attack. Since 2006, RSA has been part of EMC. Ars Technica

'Pruned' microchips are leaner and meaner If you had to use a commuting bicycle in a race, you would probably set about removing the kickstand, fenders, racks and lights to make the thing as fast and efficient as possible. When engineers at Houston's Rice University are developing small, fast, energy-efficient chips for use in devices like hearing aids, it turns out they do pretty much the same thing. Gizmag

AMD preparing 3.7GHz Phenom II X4 980 New details about AMD's roadmap continues to come. According to information we receive, AMD, Bulldozer processors in addition to the existing product range will continue to update. Quad-core 3.6GHz processor family as the fastest model running at 975 Black Edition model, the agenda, the AMD Phenom X4, 3.7GHz, running at 980 Phenom X4 Black Edition model also prepared. DonanımHaber (translated)

AT&T shames unauthorized phone tetherers, gives ultimatum AT&T has begun cracking down on smartphone customers—particularly iPhone users—who have been secretly tethering their smartphones to their laptops without paying for a tethering plan. The company sent text messages to the offending users, followed up with an e-mail, that says they've been identified as taking advantage the feature without paying up. Ars Technica

Dell offers unlocked Streak for $99 with purchase of a new PC Dell's Streak 5 tabletphone hasn't held our interest much lately, even with Android 2.2 on board, but Dell's got a new deal that may be too good to pass up. Engadget

Analysis: Is Anonymous a real political movement or a lame gag? The mysterious hackers of Anonymous have been more busy than usual this week. But are they a legitimate movement or a bad joke? TGDaily

Radiation dose chart This is a chart of the ionizing radiation doze a person can absorb from various sources. xkcd

Widespread freezing issue with 17-inch MacBook Pro 2011? Apple forum

"Mario" - SXSW 2011 Film Bumper YouTube (embedded below)

The best new desktops for business

For a business buyer of desktops there are five major concerns: performance, energy, space efficiency, budget and support. Different businesses will have specific requirements from their desktop PCs; this article will look at performance and low power PCs suitable for businesses.

The performance category is most important to CAD, computer aided design, graphical work such as photo and film manipulation and publishing as well as any other role requiring large amounts of memory and processing power on the primary machine of the user. Some roles such as programming require powerful desktop PCs to compile code quickly to allow testing but this can be a shared processing core while the work is done on less powerful machines. In the performance segment the new Sandy Bridge processors are a major step forward for desktop PCs and are now becoming available once more following the recall of the first batch which had issues with port deterioration. On-chip graphics help; if a separate graphics card is not required then costs are lowered and maintenance is easier and with some language extensions it is possible to take advantage of the additional processing cores in the Sandy Bridge graphics to carry out many more calculations. Apple’s iMac is a powerful machine with Apple’s strong appeal for visual designers and artists, powered by a 3.06 GHz dual-core Intel Core 2 Duo processor with an ATI Radeon HD graphics card; it’s a fast all in one machine. Alternatively for a Windows PC the Dell XPS 8300 offers an extremely powerful machine at a good price, available for £560 not including VAT it sports the most powerful of the new Sandy Bridge line up in its unoverclocked form, the i7-2600, a quad core 3.4 gigahertz chip with some built in over-clocking ability for single threaded tasks as well as temporary overclocking of the whole chip to use the latent heat capacity of the heat sinking. This is combined with a useful 4 gigabytes of RAM and up to 4 terabytes of storage.

Low power desktop PCs are the choice of many environmentally conscious businesses both to save money though the significant power savings, especially through the use of power-efficient data centres where computation per watt is becoming the name of the game and to demonstrate their commitment to the ideas they are making in their mission statement. As the demand has grown in this area there are a number of good options available and it is only set to improve, in a big way in fact, as mobile phone processors which are designed from the very beginning to use minimal power are becoming powerful enough and the operating systems mature enough that they are beginning to migrate into laptops and desktop computers. Current market options include the tiny Fit PC2i, barely larger than an external hard drive, it can drive a widescreen display via DVI and has built in Wi-Fi, USB ports and a microSD card reader with an Intel Atom Z530 1600 MHz chip to do the processing, along with 2 GB of RAM and a 160 GB hard disk. Power use ranges from 6 Watts at a low CPU usage level up to 8 Watts at full power. The price is quite steep for the product, between £245 and £545 not including VAT. Visually it is striking and extremely space-efficient, it will have an impact on anyone who sees it but is expensive for what you get. More powerful but still energy efficient desktop computers come in the form of Lenovo’s Blue Sky desktop computers. Able to run on as little as 45 Watts on either an AMD Athlon 64 bit dual core or an AMD Sempron with hard drives from 80 GB up to 750 GB and 4 GB of RAM they are fully powered desktop computers that take little space at a size similar to that of a phonebook that also have a low speed fan for quietness, making them ideal for crowded environments.