How to Make Your PC Restart Automatically After a Power Outage

It's a rare office indeed that doesn't suffer power outages from time to time -- w

eather-related or otherwise -- but such events don't have to be as disruptive as they once were. Enter the trusty uninterruptible power supply, which today can not only shut your computers down safely, they can also start them back up again once power has returned. Mother Nature: 0; Tech: 1.

The 2013 Atlantic hurricane season is quietly underway. Kit is available, however, that can help mitigate potential office disruption as weather ramps up.

Uninterruptible power supplies are sophisticated battery-containing devices that supply backup power to desktop PCs during grid electricity outages, like in storms. You can pick up a UPS at office supply retailers, among other places. They're great to have because the battery lets you keep working during short outages, and they let you shut down a desktop computer normally in the event of a longer outage without losing data.

Sony's Lens Cameras Make Smartphone Photography Smarter

With shutterbugs snapping so many photos with their smartphones these days, camera makers are desperately seeking ways to stay relevant. One way to do that is to cater to the never-ending thirst of some phone snappers to boost the quality of their images. 

That's what Sony is up to with its new Cyber-shot QX series of lens-style cameras, which can connect to a smartphone for added functionality.

Sony introduced its QX10 and QX100 lens-style cameras on Wednesday. The devices, which look like very thin point-and-shoot cameras, can connect to a smartphone wirelessly and use the phone's display as a real-time viewfinder.

Sony Cyber-shot QX100 Premium Lens-Style Camera

Nismo Gizmo May Give Drivers Another Reason to Fiddle

Nissan has designed a smartwatch to go with its Nismo sports car that does everything from tracking the user's heart rate to monitoring the car's performance. Smartwatches could be yet another distraction for drivers, however. There must be careful evaluation before new products are made available to drivers, cautioned AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety spokesperson Bruce Hamilton.

Nissan on Monday unveiled a concept smartwatch that will connect drivers to their cars and provide them with real-time biometric data while tracking their progress across social media.

The Nismo Concept Watch will be created for drivers of Nissan Nismo cars.

It will be on display at the Frankfurt Motor Show, which runs from Tuesday through Sept. 22.

"It's still just a concept," remarked Daniel Matte, head of wearables research for Canalys'Appcessory Analysis Worldwide Service.

IBM bets $1 billion on Flash storage

IBM has introduced a new line of solid-state storage systems, Flash System, using technology from its Texas Memory acquisition he hard drive will soon be dead, at least for most uses in the enterprise, IBM is betting. The company is undertaking a major strategic initiative - and $1 billion in research - to make flash the prominent form of storage in most organizations.

IBM has launched a line of Flash-based storage systems, called Flash System, based on technologies IBM acquired when it purchased Texas Memory last year. The company will also open 12 centers around the globe that will help customers prototype flash systems as well as answer their questions about the technology.
A set of FlashSystems could be configured into a single rack capable of storing as much as 1 petabyte of data, capable of producing 22 million IOPS (input/output operations per second). Getting that same level of storage and throughput from a hard drive system would require 315 racks of high performance disks, Mills explained.

Thanks to technology developed by Texas Memory, the eMLC (enterprise multilevel chip) flash chips that these systems use have an average lifetime of 30,000 write/erase cycles, far more than the 1,000 to 3,000 cycles that consumer grade MLCs offer.
FlashSystem joins IBM's other flash and flash and disk hybrid storage systems, including the IBM Storwize V7000, IBM System Storage DS8870 and the IBM XIV Storage System.
With flash systems "You get a lot of storage in a relative small form factor, with very high performance level," said Steve Mills, IBM senior vice president for software and systems, speaking at a New York press conference Thursday.
At the presentation, Mills made the case that it would actually be more cost effective now for organisations to use all solid-state storage rather than hard drives, when all the data-centre costs are tallied.
"There is no question flash is the most economical solution to the business problem when the business problem calls for that class of technology," he said.
IBM estimates that enterprises spend about $20 billion each year buying and maintaining storage systems. "This market is as big as it is because it is an inefficient market. This will profoundly change. Inefficient markets never last forever," Mills said.
Not all systems would benefit from the use of solid-state technologies - only those where performance is a critical factor to operations, Mills stipulated. But performance is a factor across an increasing number of workloads, including transactional processing, analysis and general cloud computing, Mills said.
Increasingly, disk drives are becoming the bottleneck in many latency sensitive systems today, Mills explained. In the past 10 years, great strides have been made in improving the performance of processors, networking and memory, though hard drives have gotten only slightly faster. "It is a mechanical device," Mills said.
Traditionally, enterprise storage systems have relied on hard drives to store data. Because their data is written to a circular platter using an actuator arm that moves back and forth across the disk, hard drives take longer to write and read data than solid-state devices, which can write and read to any location equally as quickly.
To boost hard-drive performance, some organisations stripe, or span, data across multiple disks in order to improve performance, leaving most of each disk empty. This approach speeds system responsiveness because a drive's actuator arm doesn't have to travel across the entire disk to write or read data. But this approach drives up the costs because it requires more hard drives, as well as the associated cost of electricity, space and IT management to keep the disks running.
Solid-state disks have been available for more than a decade, though they have cost more than hard drives and still can't offer the full capacity of hard drives, on a per-disk basis. The prices have been declining, though, as more are used in consumer devices such as smartphones and cameras.

And Mills made the argument that the industry is seeing a tipping point, where flash disks can be just as inexpensive as hard drives.
Right now, generic hard drives cost about $2 per gigabyte, he said. An enterprise hard drive will cost about $4 per gigabyte, and a high-performance hard drive will run about $6 per gigabyte. If an organization stripes its data across more disks for better performance, the cost goes up to about $10 per gigabyte. In some cases, where performance is critical, hard-drive costs can skyrocket to $30 or $50 per gigabyte. A solid state disk from IBM runs about $10 per gigabyte and can be filled to capacity, so they actually are less expensive in many cases, Mills argued.
Also, other economical benefits accrues with using solid-state drives. One is that they consume less electricity. While today most IT managers do not have to worry about how much electricity their systems consume, this may be changing. One IBM customer who spoke at the presentation, Sprint Director of IT Operations Karim Abdullah, noted that his company has mandated that he cut electricity use of his operations by 1.5 percent month over month. Abdullah is using solid-state disks to cut power costs and improve system performance.

Analysts: PC Makers Have Plenty of Plan Bs

It's not as if PC sales were already setting the world on fire, thanks to the red-hot growth of mobile devices. However, the latest IDC tracking report was anything but a barnburner: Sales hit record lows worldwide, and despite a full quarter of Windows 8 on the market, Microsoft's new operating system had weak appeal. Better tactics and marketing are available to OEMs and Microsoft, however, including focusing on consumer niches, regional targeting and doing a better job touting Windows 8's benefits.

Worldwide PC sales plunged during the first three months of the year, the worst quarterly decline since 1994, according to research firm IDC. PC shipments have been declining recently thanks largely to the rise of mobile devices, but the first quarter of 2013 was as bad as it's been since IDC started tracking the market. PC makers shipped 76.3 million units around the world during the past quarter, a 13.9 percent drop from the same time a year ago.
HP barely kept its top spot on the PC manufacturer leader board, but its worldwide shipments declined more than 23 percent from last year. Lenovo nearly closed the gap with HP, and was the only major vendor to see shipments rise. It now has a 15.3 percent share of the global market, compared to the 13.2 percent share it had a year ago.
"Lenovo is doing well because their business model fits well in the low margin and high volume market," Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner, told the E-Commerce Times. "At the same time, they are able to maintain good quality brand recognition in the professional market."
The overall U.S. PC market was "dismal" during the past quarter, according to IDC, with quarterly shipments at their lowest point since the first quarter of 2006.
IDC did not respond to our request for further detail.

Patience on Windows 8

The most recent quarter was the first full one out of the gate for Windows 8, Microsoft's revamped operating system, but the makeover doesn't seem to have invigorated the market.