Courtesy Intel

But Intel discovered a hiccup with the new drives, asking retailers to put all deliveries on hold, and to actually pull the X25-Ms from their respective store fronts. William George of Puget Systems narrates what happened:

After several hours of waiting on Intel’s tech folks I am now pleased to be able to relay to our customers the status of the Intel drives. There is a defect in the units which causes data corruption if – and only if – a password is set on the drive in the system BIOS… and then changed or disabled later. Initially we were told this might require a complete reworking of the drives, and that those we had gotten in were effectively unusable, but Intel was able to work out a firmware fix for the problem. That won’t be available immediately, but should be showing up in about two weeks.

Ultimately not a big disaster—especially since Intel was able to catch the problem relatively quickly, probably before customers were able to discover it for themselves.

In any case, for those who already have an X25-M, George was helpful enough to share a link to the updated firmware, available here.

Source

More about the new SSDs: Intel’s new 34nm SSDs cut prices by 60 percent, boost speed

Post from: The Gadget Blog

I’m sure this will piss off a lot of Chinese. I can only imagine the reaction of online gamers who find access to their MMORPG cut at their local net cafe. But I’m pretty sure some savvy users will find ways around the block. Some enterprising programmer must be working on software to fool the government’s watchdog.

Now, I’m not familiar with computing realities in China. But if retailers like Dell or HP sell computers with bloatware, that’s something the Chinese government should definitely ban. Bloatware has long plagued new computer users, who’ve suffered from decreased performance and slowdowns caused by marketing-oriented pre-installed apps, and who’ve most likely struggled through a complete OS reinstall to clean up their brand new toys.

Which leads me to another question: what will stop users from reformatting their new computers, preinstalled with the government software, and starting from scratch? Has China actually reconfigured its gateways to allow access only to those running the software?

Foreign manufacturers retailing in China are definitely confused. Manufacturers have complained about the directive’s vagueness. They do know what the end result should be, but unsure about its implementation. “The wording may be intentionally vague, but the message is clear: we have no choice in the matter,” complained one anonymous computer executive.

In any case, some people see the required proliferation of this filtering software as a step back. I for one see the total, absolute end of computer bloatware as progress. I’d be willing to actually pay a bit more to free manufacturers from marketing deals which “force” them to pre-install bloatware. What about you?

Post from: The Gadget Blog