Alex Reid

Seagate and Western Digital, the largest hard disk drive (HDD) manufacturers in the world, both announced that they will reduce warranty coverage on some of their hardware in the new year.

The two companies produce the hard drives in most major computer brands, and both companies recently bought out their competition (Western Digital bought Hitachi, and Seagate bought Samsung’s HDD business) making them the two largest HDD companies in the world.

It is believed the recent monsoon floods in Thailand are reason as the floods have crippled industry component factories. Thailand is the world’s 2nd largest producer of hard disk drives accounting for approximately 25% of the world’s production. The floods have impacted the industry greatly with pundits predicting a shortage and a price hike for hard drives in the coming year.

Seagate’s warranties for internal desktop and laptop drives will be reduced from five years to one year. Seagate warranties for hybrid drives will be trimmed from five years to three years. Warranties for Seagate’s external drives and enterprise-oriented drives will remain unchanged.

Western Digital warranties for the Caviar Blue, Caviar Green and Scorpio Blue hard drives will be reduced from three years from two years.

Overall, the maximum life warranty will be three years.

Seagate’s new warranty policies will become effective on Dec. 31, and Western Digital’s changes will begin Jan. 2, 2012. Hard drives bought before those dates will retain their original warranty policies.

The reason I’m writing this post is because this upset means a lot for the future of data use, as there is a growing demand for disk space – cloud or not – and this lack of supply will drive up the cost of HDDs. It may, hopefully, push other technologies such as flash storage.

Today, after 12 years, the company that sparked a revolution in how we purchase music online, is no longer.

Rhapsody, the largest on-demand music service in the United States, bought its assets, intellectual property and subscribers last month from parent company Best Buy for an undisclosed sum and a minority stake.

The acquisition nearly doubles Rhapsody’s subscriber base. They had 800,000 subscribers in July 2011 and at the time of the purchase, Napster had 700,000 subscribers.

Napster started in 1999 and almost immediately were being sued for distributing music for copyright infringement. It took two years for the service to be shut down by court order, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Napster finally declared itself bankrupt in 2002 and sold its assets to German media firm Bertelsmann for $85 million. However an American bankruptcy judge blocked the sale and forced Napster to liquidate its assets, and it was sold to Roxio who in turn sold it to Best Buy in 2008 for $121 million.

Interestingly, when Napster was shut down, Rhapsody was started and will be celebrating their 10-year anniversary this Saturday (December 3rd). There’s also talk there might be a Napster documentary in play.

Car accidents are a leading cause of death, especially for younger people.

In 2005, the UN said that the number of road traffic deaths and injuries would exceed the damage wrought by HIV by the year 2020. The World Health Organization (WHO) predicted that that road traffic injuries will rise to become the fifth leading cause of death by 2030.

Most of all, it’s human error that often causes accidents.

Nevada became the first jurisdiction in the world to allow autonomus vehicles on public roads last month. For the past few years, DARPA has been driving (no pun intended) towards driverless vehicles (think robot soldiers), and Google was behind the lobbying so that they could test their driverless project, which won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge.

Sebastian Thrun on Google’s driverless car (Youtube).

Google wouldn’t say why they choose Nevada, and while it could be that the Google founders like Burning Man, the state is known for its testing grounds – nuclear weapons and rocket cars.

Google has ben testing a fleet of seven vehicles, consisting of six Toyota Prii and an Audi TT. Their software drives the vehicles at the speed limit it has stored on its maps and maintains its distance from other vehicles using its system of sensors. The system provides an override that allows a human driver to take control of the car by stepping on the brake or turning the wheel, similar to cruise control systems already in cars. (source)

Most auto technology already uses sensors and cameras, but most of the advances available have simply been corrective or assisting technologies like the “Lane Keep Assist” ability of the 2010 Toyota Prius that uses a camera to detect lane markers and automatically steers the car toward the center of the lane.

Google says they’re just playing around with the idea, and no matter the commercial value of such an idea, the social benefits alone in preventing car accidents, by drunk or other human error, is an idea beyond worth merit.  I see this as a positive alternative for drunk drivers, but chauffeurs might be out of work soon.

Safety is the sell here, and it may still be simply an assisting program, but even with the risk of computer error, I see huge potential for this to revolutionise the auto market and save lives.

Somehow I suspect the built in GPS sytem will be Google Earth.

WikiLeaks has a pretty sweet Mastercard Parody video going around these days, soliciting funds for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s personal legal and security costs.