I am looking to make contact with any Vietnam veterans who were serving in Company D, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, 11th Infantry Brigade, 23rd Infantry Division in early 1971 when that Company was deployed near Duc Pho.
Day: June 17, 2004
Seagate’s 400gb Hard Drive
Last month I mentioned Hitachi’s annoucement of a 400gb hard drive. Now Seagate has announced its own 400gb hard drive. This one’s a three-platter drive (as opposed to the four-platter Hitachi model), with a 16mb cache. It will be interesting to see head to head performance comparisons, but as I’ve said before, the continually declining costs of large-scale storage is just amazing.
Seagate is also apparently going to start selling a 100gb USB-powered hard drive in the consumer market. I hope they get that out soon as I’ve almost filled up my SmartDisk FireLite 80gb drive and would prefer to buy a 100gb portable drive rather than another 80gb one.
No word yet on pricing for either model.
Source:
Disc Drive Leader Seagate Increases PC Hard Drive Capacities to 400GB, Unveils New Portable and Pocket External Drives. Press Release, Seagate, June 14, 2004.
Octopuses Prefer 1 Arm Over 7 Others
Nature has a summary of a fascinating find mentioned at the 41st Animal Behavior Society meeting, Oaxaca, Mexico — octopuses favor one of their 8 appendages over the other. According to Nature,
Most octopuses have a favourite arm, zoologists have discovered. This is the first time they have been found to show any bias when choosing which of their eight limbs is right for the job.
The creatures use their trusty first-choice appendage when exploring a new nook or cranny, says Ruth Byrne of the University of Vienna in Austria. She presented the discovery on Sunday at the annual meeting of the Animal Behavior Society in Oaxaca, Mexico.
. . .
What’s more, the creatures tended to deploy favoured combinations of one, two or three arms when manipulating objects, said Byrne, and used them in particular orders. In studies of eight octopuses, the researchers observed only 49 different combinations of one, two or three limbs, from what they calculated to be a possible 448.
Researchers also have a good idea as to why octopuses end up favoring one or a small combination repeatedly — 92 percent of the octopuses they studied had a preferred or dominant eye. Byrne believes that the octopuses favor the limb(s) closest to the dominant eye.
Source:
Octopuses have a preferred arm. Michael Hopkin, Nature, June 15, 2004.