Hard drive scarcity fears mount

The humble hard disk drive may become a more precious commodity in the coming months, according to analysts and Apple, reveals Cnet.

Apple CEO Tim Cook made this very clear this week in the company's earnings conference call, referring to the impact of the floods in Thailand.

“Like many others, we source many components from Thailand and have multiple factories that supply these components. There are several factories that are currently not operable, and the recovery timeline for these factories is not known at this point,” he said.

Steve Jobs said he wanted to destroy Android and would spend all of Apple's money and his dying breath if that is what it took to do so, writes the BBC.

The full extent of his animosity towards Google's mobile operating system is revealed in a forthcoming authorised biography.

Jobs told author Walter Isaacson that he viewed Android's similarity to iOS as “grand theft”.

Microsoft has announced record revenue for its latest financial quarter of $17.37 billion, a 7% year-on-year increase, but sales of Windows continue to disappoint, states V3.co.uk.

The Windows and Windows Live Division achieved revenue of $4.87 billion, but this represented just a 2% increase over the prior period, as PC sales continue to tumble.

Furthermore, the firm's Online Services Division, which incorporates the Bing search engine and various MSN services, lost another $494 million in the quarter, although this shows some improvement on the $558 million lost in the same quarter in 2010.

A defunct German research satellite crashed into the Earth somewhere in Southeast Asia yesterday, a US scientist said - but no one is still quite sure where, according to The Telegraph.

Most parts of the car-sized ROSAT research satellite were expected to burn up as they hit the atmosphere at speeds up to 280mph, but up to 30 fragments weighing a total of 1.87 tons could have crashed, the German Aerospace Centre said.

Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said the satellite appears to have gone down over Southeast Asia. He said two Chinese cities with millions of inhabitants each, Chongqing and Chengdu, had been in the satellite's projected path during its re-entry time.