NYC

North Korea has already made its mark on the tablet market -- albeit a rather unimpressive attempt -- and even produced a supreme leader-approved OS, and now the DPRK is further proving its tech ambitions with the production of three different PC models. In a post published to  PCWorld  today, Martyn Williams reports on a March 10th state TV broadcast that revealed a North Korean factory where workers are busily assembling the machines by hand. According to Williams, the models in production include a desktop PC and a netbook-sized laptop, designed for educational use. The third variant, an enterprise laptop, boasts dual USB ports, internet connectivity, and two and half hours of battery life. That's about it in the way of specs, but from what we've seen, we doubt these machines are set for world domination. For a series of screen shots from the broadcast, check out Williams' blog at the coverage link below. Update : Surprise! The North Korean netbook, pictur...

There are SSDs and then there are SSDs -- the Texas Memory Systems (TMS) RamSan-70 is definitely the latter, packing 900GB of high-speed SLC NAND flash onto a single half-length PCIe card. Boasting an incredible 2GB-per-second sustained external throughput, this near-terabyte solid state drive is clearly overkill for most of us, considering that it's guaranteed to have a sky-high price (once details are released). Instead, the "900GB Gorilla," as it's come to be known around TMS HQ, is destined for high-end servers -- though we certainly wouldn't object to clearing out a slot in our desktop, if by some miracle we can afford this monster when it starts shipping in four to eight weeks. Computerworld Texas Memory Systems

It took 'em long enough, but it seems as if The Now Network has managed to snap up Motorola's Droid Pro... just seven months after Verizon Wireless did so. For whatever reason, Sprint's dubbing its version the XPRT, with the same 3.1-inch HVGA touchpanel, full QWERTY keyboard, 1GHz CPU and Android 2.2 loaded. It'll go for $129.99 on a two-year contract starting June 5th, but giving that the Pro hit the bargain bin long ago, we're having a hard time believing anyone will pony oup for Sprint's iteration. Moving right along, the Titanium gets off on the wrong foot by shipping with Android 2.1, and while it's hailed as the first iDEN device to combine Nextel Direct Connect and Eclair, the G'zOne Commando has somehow managed to show its brawn while stepping up to v2.2. For those interested nonetheless, there's a 3.1-inch touchscreen and a chassis that's built to MIL-SPEC 810G for dust, shock, vibration, low pressure, solar radiation, high temperature...

We've been keeping our eyes on Motorola's plans to sink its claws into the enterprise market for at least the past couple of months, and it looks like the company is ramping up its efforts with a rugged Android tablet fit for the workplace. A presentation provided to us by a helpful tipster outlines Moto's plans to be the "first physical embodiment defining Android for the Enterprise," with a Gingerbread-equipped tablet entering beta testing this October. As you can see from the slide above, the slate will sport both a 1.3MP front-facing camera and an 8MP rear-facing camera "with illumination and aiming" for barcode scanning. It's also carrying a dual-core 1GHz OMAP 4 CPU, 1GB RAM, 8GB NAND, a 7-inch LCD display, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, 802.11 a/b/g/n WiFi, and USB connectivity. It should also pack enough juice to supply five and a half hours of streaming video, and should be able to withstand a four foot drop, extreme temperatures, excessive dust, and...

Lest you thought HP's Windows 7 slate was for large businesses and its upcoming webOS ones were reserved for consumers, not so fast. In a video (embedded after the break for your viewing pleasure), HP touts Citrix running on its forthcoming Touchpad to show it can play nice with enterprises' IT departments, too. As with Chrome OS, Citrix Receiver runs inside the browser, letting people choose the desktop apps they want. Both platforms, it seems, are capable of running computer-aided design applications in the cloud, with HP showing a 3D model in AutoCAD eDrawings Viewer. The frame rate isn't as fluid as HP would have you believe, but getting started appears idiot-proof, thanks to some large, tap-able icons. In any case, with 80 percent of the Fortune 100 already deploying the iPad, it's wise of HP to woo corporate customers with webOS. Isn't that right, Microsoft? PreCentral ...

With over 300,000 devices activated per day, Android's clearly firing on all cylinders from a consumer standpoint, but much like the famed Cheez-It wheel, some would argue that the OS isn't quite mature enough for unabashed enterprise use. Being a corporation itself, El Goog's obviously been toiling around the clock to change that, and it's taking three major strides today. An updated version of its Google Apps Device Policy enables employees to secure a lost or stolen Android 2.2+ device by locating it on a map, ringing the device, and resetting the device PIN or password remotely via the new My Devices website. Furthermore, Apps admins now have an option in the control panel to "Encrypt Data on Device," which will now include requiring encrypted storage on Android 3.0 tablets. Finally, Google Apps Lookup is acting as a type of internal blackbook, allowing users to easily sift through colleagues and contact them through one form or another. So......

The internet is a mighty big place that's only growing larger each day. That makes it a perfectly unwieldy thing to measure, but the traffic it generates has nonetheless been subjected to a rigorous estimation project by a group of UC San Diego academics. Their findings, published online this month, reveal that in 2008 some 9.57 zettabytes made their way in and out of servers across the globe. Some data bits, such as an email passing through multiple servers, might be counted more than once in their accounting, but the overall result is still considered an under -estimation because it doesn't address privately built servers, such as those Google, Microsoft and others run in their backyards. On a per-worker basis (using a 3.18 billion human workforce number), all this data consumption amounts to 12GB daily or around 3TB per year. So it seems that while we might not have yet reached the bliss of the paperless office, we're guzzling down data as if we were. Check...

Someone deep down in Intel's development dungeons must be laughing a haughty laugh of disdain at us mere mortals getting excited about dual-cores in smartphones. The old Chipzilla has just turned out its 10 -core Xeon E7 processor family, which can work on 20 simultaneous computational threads courtesy of the company's Hyper-Threading knowhow. Needless to say, there aren't that many casual workloads that will ever properly harness such extremely parallelized prowess, but then Intel isn't really gunning for the Facebook crowd here anyhow. The new E7s are for those dealing with truly data-intensive tasks, meaning that Facebook itself would be a good candidate to buy up a few, provided it's tempted by such things as 40 percent performance improvements over the Xeon 7500 tied to dynamic power adjustment for increased energy efficiency. Pricing for the Xeon E7s starts at $774 and climbs up to $4,616 per 32nm chip, with the usual proviso that Intel won't...