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Today’s topics include EMC’s CTO speaking out about the company’s Dell merger, Samsung will build Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 system on a chip, Seagate has launched its first 10TB Helium filled hard drive, and Mozilla is discontinuing its Persona password security services.
An EMC executive is disputing the idea that the company’s acquisition by Dell will reduce innovation or distract it from R&D efforts. In a post on EMC’s blog, CTO John Roese said the combined company will build on EMC’s legacy of innovation through investments in R&D, acquisitions and startups, and that going private will open up even more opportunities. Rivals have been playing up the idea that the challenges posed by a merger of two top-tier tech companies will distract them from their businesses.
Samsung’s chip manufacturing business will be building Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 820 chip. Samsung Electronics officials on Jan. 14 announced the second generation of its 14-nanometer FinFET manufacturing process technology, which the company will use for its Exynos 8 Octa processor and other foundry customers. Among those other customers is Qualcomm and its Snapdragon 820 ARM-based system-on-a-chip. The processor is expected to begin appearing in premium smartphones starting in the first half of this year.
On Jan. 13, Seagate unveiled its highest-ever capacity enterprise hard drive, a 10TB helium-filled model that competes directly with similar drives manufactured by HGST and Samsung. Because it is filled with helium instead of air, the 3.5-inch Seagate Enterprise Capacity HDD inherently has less drag on its internal components, enabling them to run cooler and with less power than standard hard-disk drives. Being helium-tight also enables it to be a lot less affected by external influences, such as flooding.
Mozilla is finally and officially closing its Persona Web authentication system after coming to the conclusion that the technology was not being adopted. Using and storing passwords securely has always been a challenge on the Internet.
The promise of Persona was to make Web authentication easier than users needing to remember a separate log-in for every Website. With Persona, a verified user email that is securely stored by the browser is all that is needed to get access to a site. The challenge is that both Websites and users needed to support and use the mechanism, which never really happened.