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You can dock just about any of those old drives into this simple device. Stick a USB transfer cable into one end along with the power-cable, and in one of the other ends, you can connect a 3.5" IDE hard drive, or a laptop 2.5" IDE drive, or even a miniscule 1.8" IDE hard drive! But, why stop there? You can connect a SATA drive, too! How about an optical disk drive? We've got it covered. Blu-Ray, DVD, CD, writeable, rewriteable... it doesn't matter! We're drive agnostic with our USB to SATA/IDE Combo Kit. Now your old drives have a brand new life. Or, if you're the handy type, you can keep this one device handy to recover data from a drive in a dead computer. You won't have to haul several different devices - just this one! Features Connect USB 2.0 ports to any IDE or SATA drive: 3.5" IDE 2.5" laptop IDE 1.8" micro IDE 3.5" SATA 2.5" SATA Optical drive that supports standard IDE or SATA connectors* AC Input: 100-240v/50-60hz DC output: 5v/12v Supports Windows (98se and up) or Mac OS (8.6 and up) Includes power supply, molex y-splitter, USB cable and drive dock * Some "slim-line" optical drives use a modified SATA connector that won't fit. Your mileage may vary.

Last week as part of its glitzy annual conference in Long Beach, California, TED awarded its $1 million prize to Sugata Mitra to support his wish to build a "School in the Cloud," a self-organized learning environment based on his "Hole in the Wall" and "Granny Cloud" research. Next week Pearson, the largest and most powerful education company in the world, will publish Dale Stephens' book Hacking Your Education: Ditch the Lectures, Save Tens of Thousands, and Learn More Than Your Peers Ever Will, a personal experience narrative and guide about dropping out of college and making it in Silicon Valley.

CAVE2™, the next-generation large-scale virtual-reality environment, is a hybrid system that combines the benefits of both scalable-resolution display walls and virtual-reality systems to create a seamless 2D/3D environment that supports both information-rich analysis as well as virtual-reality simulation exploration at a resolution matching human visual acuity.

"Climate change could severely reduce the areas suitable for wild Arabica coffee before the end of the century. That is the conclusion of work by a UK-Ethiopian team published in the academic journal Plos One. It supports predictions that a changing climate could damage global production of coffee - the world's second most traded commodity after oil. "

IT professionals will increasingly act as data managers as the role of application manager becomes superfluous, according to a report called Technology Vision 2011, from IT services firm Accenture. In addition, the coming years will see IT decision-makers choosing platforms that are best able to manage soaring volumes of data as opposed to platforms designed to support applications. Read more: http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2024987/management-accenture#ixzz1rlnYqkgY  Computing - Insight for IT leaders Claim your free subscription today.

There's been a movement afoot to boycott Elsevier journals. It's started over in the mathematics community, led by Timothy Gowers, a serious mathematician indeed. The objections to Elsevier are the ones you'd think: high prices, unsplittable bundles of journal subscriptions for institutions, and their strong support for legislation like the Research Works Act.

Gamers angered at the "bleak" ending of Mass Effect 3 have campaigned for an alternate conclusion - and raised more than $70,000 (£44,000) for charity.

The Horto Domi combines vermiculture, geodesic domes, moisture sensors, and Arduino open hardware controllers in an automated backyard food growing system for the everyperson. The project team is looking for supporters on Kickstarter so they can do more R&D and make the plans available to the public for free. Soon you could have a pod of robotic food growing domes in your backyard turning out bushels of fresh veg. Then again, maybe a food growing robot takes the joy out of growing your own?

The American Journalism Review has just published a searing condemnation by Washington Post contributor Paul Farhi of the state of education journalism, much of which, it contends, reinforces a narrative that the U.S. school system is failing -- a narrative supported by "self-styled education reformers," but refuted by the experiences of many parents asked to rate their local schools. I've railed against this before in the context of tech blogs' treatment of education, and while the AJR piece doesn't address technology specifically, I would argue that the narratives of failing schools certainly fuel much of the growing business of ed-tech.

Reproducibility is a key part of science, even though almost nobody does the same experiment twice. A lab will generally repeat an experiment several times and look for results before they get published. But, once that paper is published, people tend to look for reproducibility in other ways, testing the consequences of a finding, extending it to new contexts or different populations. Almost nobody goes back and repeats something that's already been published, though. But maybe they should. At least that's the thinking behind a new effort called the Reproducibility Initiative, a project hosted by the Science Exchange and supported by Nature, PLoS, and the Rockefeller University Press.

A flyer designed by the FBI and the Department of Justice to promote suspicious activity reporting in internet cafes lists basic tools used for online privacy as potential signs of terrorist activity.  The document, part of a program called "Communities Against Terrorism", lists the use of "anonymizers, portals, or other means to shield IP address" as a sign that a person could be engaged in or supporting terrorist activity.  The use of encryption is also listed as a suspicious activity along with steganography, the practice of using "software to hide encrypted data in digital photos" or other media.  In fact, the flyer recommends that anyone "overly concerned about privacy" or attempting to "shield the screen from view of others" should be considered suspicious and potentially engaged in terrorist activities.