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Back in the days when mechanical hard drives with spinning platters were the norm, you could simply hand your old hard drive to a deserving relative or friend as an upgrade, get a thank you, and call it a day. It’s not so simple with today’s solid-state drives.

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By now you've probably heard about OLED, or organic light-emitting diodes. LG and Samsung both revealed potential models at this year's CES, with the LG winning CNET's Best of CES Award.

Make no mistake, this is the most important advancement in TV technology in over a decade, and a vast improvement over both LCD and plasma.

Here's why.

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LEVA is proud to announce the Call For Entries for the 20th Annual Shield Video Awards competition, the only video competition designed exclusively for public safety professionals. Entries must be post-marked no later than Friday, July 3, 2009, and be received by July 10, 2009. Winners will be announced at the Shield Awards Banquet on November 20, 2009, during the 20th Annual LEVA Training and Development Conference in Ft. Worth, Texas. Visit www.leva.org for entry forms and further information.

This fall, CDFS will hold its first elections to the Board of Directors.  There are a total of 13 Board seats.  The current Board has decided to hold staggered elections such that approximately 1/2, or a total of 6 Board seats, will be up for election in the Fall of 2012, and the remainder up for election in the Fall of 2013.  This system has been designed to help CDFS maintain stability and continuity through leadership transitions.

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An Adobe Systems tool that lets older software handle raw images from newer digital cameras is about to leave behind Apple's PowerPC-based Mac era.

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Windows 8 will introduce a slew of interesting features, but will they benefit you?

Upgrades, system migration, support headaches -- IT folks are probably dreading the next major Windows rollout. Yet Windows 8, which is scheduled to move to the beta stage in late February and will likely launch in the fall, does offer several compelling new features for both IT and end users.

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Hewlett-Packard has recalled about 162,000 lithium-ion batteries used in its HP and Compaq laptop computers. The announcement, made late last week by HP and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), adds additional battery packs to a recall program announced just a week earlier.

Full story:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/229105/hp_recalls_laptop_batteries.html

Someday very soon, if you stroll through Piedmont Park, travel the Downtown Connector, hit one of the bars or restaurants in Midtown or visit the Georgia Dome or Philips Arena, you'll have an invisible companion: the Atlanta Police Department.

This spring, the department will open a video integration center designed to compile and analyze footage from thousands of public and private security cameras throughout the city. Images from as many as 500 cameras in downtown and Midtown are expected to be flowing into the center by mid-summer.

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I was out in Indianapolis briefly yesterday to teach a couple of sessions during the LEVA LEVEL 2: DIGITAL MULTIMEDIA EVIDENCE PROCESSING course, which is wrapping up another great week of DME training for law enforcement professionals today at UIndy. Such a great learning environment with a truly talented instruction and support staff. Many thanks to LEVA, the other instructors, assistants, and yet another great group of students who made me feel right at home.

Congrats to everyone and safe travels home. Have a great weekend!

If you live in the world of digital forensics, you see hard drives of all form factors and ages (along with plenty of dust bunnies). You also likely wipe and re-purpose hard drives quite regularly. You know more acronyms than your typical teen textaholic, and you went out and celebrated with friends when Serial ATA was released, because you were sickened by the old master/slave relationships associated with IDE/PATA drives. So why do we still see jumpers on SATA drives? Rest assured my friends, it has nothing to do with a master/slave relationship.

Earlier today Julieanne Kost, Principal Digital Imaging Evangelist at Adobe, shared a link to a new Photoshop FAQ document regarding video card usage in Photoshop via her blog. I found the new help document very interesting, and thought some of you may as well.

Photoshop GPU FAQ

Tragic events like the bombings in Boston can overwhelm public communcation networks. Make sure the appropriate folks in your agency are familiar with and participating in the Government Emergency Telephone Service (GETS) and Wireless Priority Service (WPS) programs, so that their calls are prioritized over calls to the local pizza place.

The DME Resources site will be unavailable periodically due to scheduled maintenance throughout this coming weekend, April 11th & 12th. The site may be unavailable for hours at a time as core upgrades are implemented and tested.

As always, should you have any questions or concerns please feel free to contact me. Thank you for your valuable time and continued participation!