September 28, 2005
Japan's Toshiba Corp. said on Tuesday it had developed the world's first PC able to read HD DVD discs, a next-generation disc format it is promoting over a rival standard pushed by Sony Corp..
Toshiba and Sony, leading rival camps, have waged a three-year battle to have their different standards adopted for the next-generation of DVDs, which promise much greater capacity for high-definition movies reports Reuters.
Toshiba, along with NEC Corp. and Sanyo Electric Co., has been promoting HD DVD, while Sony and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., the maker of Panasonic brand products, have been developing a technology known as Blu-ray.
September 26, Intel and Microsoft announced their support for HD-DVD. The need for a new standard is apparent. People are buying High-Definition television sets, and as should be immediately obvious to anyone who has seen the same video displayed side by side in standard-definition and high-definition format reports ZDNET.
Toshiba, said the PC would be introduced in Japan in early 2006. It is still considering the timing for an overseas launch.
The PC will be equipped with a slim, read-only HD DVD drive produced by Toshiba Samsung Storage Technology, a joint venture between Japan's second-largest electronics conglomerate and South Korea's Samsung Electronics.
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E Ink Corporation, today announced that it will offer samples of electronic paper displays through the AM-100 EPD Prototype Kit, enabling prototyping across a wide range of display applications. The high-resolution display in this kit is bright, high-contrast, thin, lightweight, viewable from all angles and able to operate with dramatically less energy than liquid crystal displays (LCDs).
This is the first high-resolution developer kit that contains a graphical electronic paper display. E Ink's EPD technology offers the bright, bold look of ink-on-paper and is ideal for mobile devices because it can be read in any lighting condition, including direct sunlight, and at any viewing angle - just like paper. A resolution of 170 pixels per inch (PPI) and the capability of displaying four gray levels give this 6" diagonal display text quality with the clarity of newsprint. Once updated, the display image remains visible without energy, so the power draw of the display is reduced by up to 99% compared to traditional LCDs.
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September 26, 2005
Sunday, China imposed new rules on Internet news sites in another step to regulate web sites in the country. "The State bans the spreading of any news with content that is against national security and public interest," the official Xinhua news agency said in announcing the new rules, which took effect immediately reports Washington Post
The news agency did not detail the rules, but said only "healthy and civilized news and information that is beneficial to the improvement of the quality of the nation, beneficial to its economic development and conducive to social progress" will be allowed, Xinhua said.
China's population of Internet users has surpassed 100 million and is the world's second largest after the United States, which has 135 million.
China has a dedicated band of cyber police who patrol the Internet with the aim of regulating content. Postings that criticize the government or address sensitive topics are quickly removed.
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September 25, 2005
Rockstar has announced that it will release Grand Theft Auto 3, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in a single package on the Xbox this fall.
Rockstar Games, also announced Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Special Edition for the PlayStation 2 computer entertainment system, which will include on DVD The Introduction and Rockstar's debut documentary film, Sunday Driver.
The feature-length movie Sunday Driver will be available in the fall exclusively on the Universal Media Disc (UMD) format used by Sony's PlayStation Portable (PSP) entertainment device. Rockstar also will ship an exclusive "Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories" game for PSP on October 24.
Produced by Rockstar Games, "Driver" is an all-access documentary film that chronicles the Compton/Watts chapter of California's low-rider car club, the Majestics. Directed by Carol Strong, the film focuses on a community working together to build the ultimate customized vehicles while struggling to legitimize their lifestyle under close scrutiny of the authorities reports Reuters
The publisher also licensed Walter Hill's 1979 classic film "The Warriors" and will release it on UMD on October 3, as well as turning the intellectual property into an M-rated game that ships October 17.
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September 21, 2005
Three authors filed suit against Google yesterday contending that the company's program to create searchable digital copies of the contents of several university libraries constituted "massive copyright infringement," reports New York Times
Last December, Google struck a deal with libraries at three American universities - Harvard, Stanford and the University of Michigan, as well as Oxford University and the New York Public Library for Google to make copies of all of the works in those institutions that are no longer protected by copyright .
The Google Print site, works by typing the name of an author, a book title or a word or phrase into a Web search box at http://print.google.com/..
The plaintiffs, who are seeking class-action status, also include the Authors Guild, a trade group that says it represents more than 8,000 published authors.
The Author's Guild said its primary purpose as the nation's largest organisation of book authors was to advocate for and support the copyright and contractual interests of published writers.
"By reproducing for itself a copy of those works that are not in the public domain, Google is engaging in massive copyright infringement. It has infringed, and continues to infringe, the electronic rights of the copyright holders of those works," it said.
The lawsuit said Google knew or should have known that copyright laws required it to obtain authorisation from copyright owners of literary works to create and reproduce digital copies for its own commercial use.
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Search Giant Google, confirmed on Tuesday it has begun a limited test of a free wireless Internet service, called Google WiFi. The software is available from certain Google Wi-Fi locations in San Francisco. It's not clear how expansive Google Wi-Fi will be as a network -- the company won't comment about its future plans. But whatever areas it eventually covers, Google Wi-Fi will likely be free and supported by ads reports Information Week
Google spokesman Nate Tyler said the current test is limited to two public sites near the company's Mountain View, California, headquarters -- a pizza parlor and a gym -- located in the heart of Silicon Valley.
"Google WiFi is a community outreach program to offer free wireless access in areas near our headquarters," Tyler said.
"At this stage in development, we're focused on collecting feedback from users. We'll determine next steps as the product evolves," he said.
Tyler said the project was started as part of a Google engineer's "20 percent time project."
The Google Web site has several references to Google WiFi but provides few details. One page (http://wifi.google.com/faq.html/) refers to a product called "Google Secure Access," which is designed to "establish a more secure connection while using Google WiFi."
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September 16, 2005
A Massachusetts teenager was sentenced to 11 months' detention at a juvenile facility for a string of crimes that include the online posting of revealing photos and celebrity contact numbers from Paris Hilton's phone reports Washington Post.
In February Private telephone numbers of celebrities including Christina Aguilera, Devo Aoki, Fred Durst, Jermaine Dupri, Vicki Gotti, Stephen King, David Lachappelle, Avril Lavigne, Lindsay Lohan, and Vin Diesel spread like wildfire on the Internet after the hacking. The 17-year-old boy pleaded guilty to hacking into the cell-phone account of hotel heiress. As an adult, he will then undergo two years of supervised release in which he will be barred from possessing or using any computer, cell phone or other electronic equipment capable of accessing the Internet.
The teen also pleaded guilty to making bomb threats at two high schools and for breaking into a telephone company's computer system to set up free wireless-phone accounts for friends.
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September 15, 2005
Search Giant Google, Inc. has unveiled a new tool to search web journals or blogs. Google will index all blogs that publish feeds that automatically tell readers when they are updated. It will also gather data about blogs that tell other indexing sites about the entries they have made. According to indexing site Technorati there are more than 17 million weblogs which cover any and every subject reports BBC. As well as searching via the dedicated blog search page, Blogger users will be able to look up other blogs via a special box on the web-journal writing site.
Writing on his company blog Dave Sifry, founder and boss of Technorati, welcomed Google to the blogosphere and said the move was a "validation" of the blog writing phenomenon.
The new tool, unveiled Wednesday can be found at blogsearch.google.com
"There really has been a need for a world-class search product to expose this dynamic content to a worldwide audience," said Blogger founder Jason.
The appearance of the new Google tool, which catalogs the latest blog postings by looking at the Web feeds they generate, also makes it more likely that two other tech powerhouses and fierce rivals, Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp., will develop a similar feature.
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