Samsung, Seamless Internet, OQO, and Black Diamond demo tiny PCs OR Tiny
At CES 2007 in Las Vegas, ZDNet Executive Editor David Berlind rounds up the ultra mobile PC (UMPC) category. The miniature PCs are a popular theme at the show because they offer most of the power of a regular notebook or desktop in a very small device.
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Ars Technica reports that the first HD DVD movie has made its way onto BitTorrent, showing that current DRM efforts to prevent illegal sharing of copyrighted content are still futile and fighting an uphill battle. From the article:
"The pirates of the world have fired another salvo in their ongoing war with copy protection schemes with the first release of the first full-resolution rip of an HD DVD movie on BitTorrent. The movie, Serenity, was made available as a .EVO file and is playable on most DVD playback software packages such as PowerDVD. The file was encoded in MPEG-4 VC-1 and the resulting file size was a hefty 19.6 GB."
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Learn to modify your Tivo or DVR to show Caller ID on your TV when you get a phone call, store over 5 times more recordings than a standard dvr, transfer files to and from your PC and more...
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A new version of TVersity Media Server has been released. TVersity allows you to stream pretty much any media (music/pictures and video) format to your Xbox 360 (with on-the-fly transconding to WMV for videos) from a Windows 2000/XP machine (MCE not required). If you have a 360 please digg up and spread the good word.
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Temecula, California's KZSW Television could be the first local TV station to take its local news beyond the station's 30,000 viewers and into the world wide audience of YouTube.
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circletimessquare writes
"The New York Times has a sobering article about the rapidly accelerating pace of glacial melting across the arctic, focusing on the discovery of new islands and the fact that this is occurring far faster than climate scientist's models predict. What were called Nunataks or 'lonely mountains' in Inuit, trapped in the ice, only a few years ago, are now in the open ocean by kilometers. Off of Greenland, what was known previously as peninsulas have been revealed to be islands as the ice retreats. Dennis Schmitt, a modern day explorer and discoverer of one of these new islands and fluent in Inuit, has named it Uunartoq Qeqertoq: the warming island."
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Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, the duo that brought the world Skype and Kazaa, have chosen a name for their new online-video start-up.
The two want people hungry for Internet entertainment to roost at Joost.
Company executives had referred to the new company for months by the codename "The Venice Project." They chose Joost because they like the ring of it, according to a spokeswoman. The word doesn't have any meaning in Danish or Swedish--Friis' and Zennstrom's respective native tongues.
The plan, according to Joost CEO Fredrik de Wahl, is to offer studios, cable stations and anyone else who wants to distribute high-quality video over the Internet, a fast, efficient and cheap distribution method. To do this, the company will rely on the peer-to-peer technology that helped Friis and Zennstrom build Skype and Kazaa.
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The PCI SIG, overseer of the PCI Express add-in card standard, has finalised version 2.0 of the base specification. The new released doubles the signalling rate from 2.5Gbps to 5Gbps. The upshot: a x16 connector can transfer data at up to around 16GBps.
PCIe 2.0 remains compatible with PCIe 1.1, until now, the latest version of the specification, so older cards will be able to operate in machines equipped with the new version. Intel is expected to release its first PCIe 2.0 supporting chipsets, members of the 'Bearlake' family, next quarter.
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shadowmage13 writes
"Hollywood privately admits that DRM is not really about piracy. From the article: 'In a nutshell: DRM's sole purpose is to maximize revenues by minimizing your rights so that they can sell them back to you... Like all lies, there comes a point when the gig is up; the ruse is busted. For the movie studios, it's the moment they have to admit that it's not the piracy that worries them, but business models which don't squeeze every last cent out of customers.' You can take action on Digital Restrictions Management at DefectiveByDesign of the Free Software Foundation, Digital Freedom, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation."
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How do you make chips more powerful? Take stuff out, according to a new proposal from Hewlett-Packard.
Researchers from HP Labs plan to publish a paper this month that outlines how it may become possible to substantially increase the performance of certain types of chips, and reduce their power consumption, by replacing the communication wires inside chips with an overhead grid of tiny nanowires.
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Sun Microsystems has updated its Solaris operating system with a feature that lets its newest Sparc-based servers run multiple copies of the Unix variant in separate partitions.
The feature, called Logical Domains, or LDoms, is in Solaris 11/06, the company plans to announce Tuesday. As reported, the feature catches Sun partway up with Unix server rivals Hewlett-Packard and IBM, and augments a technology that lets administrators divide a single copy of Solaris into several separate "containers."
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