Tech News
for Thursday September 14th 2000
Microsoft
Windows Millennium now shipping.
Posted: 09/14/2000 Source:
N/A
Added by:
Kim Heise
I heard several stores where open at midnight
yesterday to begin selling Windows Me. Several web sites are posing reviews and
articles on the sequel to Windows 98SE.
Now all that is needed is the relevant drivers
for current hardware.
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Tech News
for Wednesday September 13th 2000
Handheld
makers ramp up for holidays.
Posted: 09/13/2000 Source:
ZDNET
Added by:
Kim Heise
Let's see some price drops and
a little less spending on advertising. The Palm IIIc (color edition) is outrageously
priced when compared to what you get with HP or Compaq's CE PDA's. I'm all for
the Palm PDA's (I own a IIIx myself) but would like to see more competitive
prices for what you get.
It's beginning to look a lot like a handheld
computing Christmas.
Handspring
Inc. is firing the first shot in what is likely to become the most
competitive -- and most critical -- selling season yet for makers of devices
like Palm
(Nasdaq: PALM),
Visors and Pocket PCs. Over the next few weeks, Handspring, Visor's maker,
will roll out its first national ad campaign in advance of the Christmas
selling season. The company will plaster ads outdoors on billboards, taxi tops
and bus shelters. In October, it plans to add full-page ads in newspapers and
magazines. The multimillion-dollar campaign's tagline: "Visor is."
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Study:
1.3 billion wireless Web surfers by 2004.
Posted: 09/13/2000 Source:
CNET
Added by:
Kim Heise
CNET discusses a study that
predicts 1.3 billion users will be surfing the web by 2004. I think by 2004 web
surfing will have changed so dramatically from what it is today but that the
numbers of wireless web surfers predicted still appears a little high. Let's
have this conversation again in 4 years....
Providing further evidence that the wireless
Internet market is growing, a new study suggests 1.3 billion consumers
worldwide will use a wireless Net access service by 2004.
According to Cahners In-Stat Group, a
market research firm, wireless messaging will drive wireless Net access use,
up from 170 million subscribers today. Cahners estimates the number of
wireless messages sent per month will reach 244 billion by the end of 2004, up
from 3 billion per month last year.
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House
vote could change Internet rates.
Posted: 09/13/2000 Source:
CNET
Added by:
Kim Heise
It's fairly obvious when the government
becomes involved in Internet or IT issues everything is going to go wrong. We
should ask "Mr. Internet" on how to solve this one?
WASHINGTON--Internet surfers
could face rate increases as high as 35 percent if a House bill being
considered today becomes law, though proponents say the legislation could end
up reducing Net access and phone rates.
When consumers dial up
their Internet service providers to surf the Web, that connection requires a
complex series of communications "handshakes." First, a customer's
local phone company--typically a Baby Bell like SBC Communications, for
example--connects the call placed by a computer user's modem to what is
typically a small regional phone company that has a relationship with the ISP.
The Baby Bell then has to
pay a fee to that regional phone company to connect the call, part of a method
called "reciprocal
compensation"--one of the results of telecommunications deregulation.
The bill being voted on in
the House Telecom subcommittee would eliminate that charge, on the belief that
some local phone companies have gone into business more to collect these fees
than to provide phone service.
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Space
Flight Bookings Web Site Opens.
Posted: 09/13/2000 Source:
eFront
Added by:
Kim Heise
Not sure what to do with the
extra money you have laying about? I can suggest forking over $93,000 for a trip
into space. A new web site has opened called http://www.realbuzz.co.uk.
which is taking bookings for space trips which should start sometime in the next
18 months.
For the first time, a Web
site in the UK is offering high-rolling travelers the chance to book their own
holiday in space.
Richard Baguley, a
spokesperson for Realbuzz.co.uk, the site offering the six-day excursions,
said that, while the service is a little tongue in cheek at the moment, the
moment technology for civilian trips into space becomes available, Realbuzz
will process the holiday reservation.
"It's a genuine
service. We're almost there in terms of having the facilities to offer
holidays in space," he said.
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Video
Accelerator Shootout.
Posted: 09/13/2000 Source:
PlanetHardware
Added by:
Kim Heise
If you are confused over which
video card to purchase for your PC then Planet Hardware has just the recipe for
you by comparing the current "cream of the crop". Video cards compared
are:
- ELSA GLADIAC GeForce2 GTS
64MB AGP: $384
- Hercules 3D Prophet II GTS
64MB AGP: $330
- ATi Radeon 64MB AGP: $340
- 3dfx Voodoo5 5500 64MB
AGP: $255
- Hercules 3D Prophet II MX
32MB AGP: $134
- NVIDIA GeForce2 Ultra 64MB
AGP: $500 (estimated)
The article doesn't overly
state much importance in the conclusion as to which card is the best overall but
simply gives a synopsis of the highlights on each product. It's up to the individual
consumer to decide what is most important.
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Tech News
for Tuesday September 12th 2000
Palm
finds a voice.
Posted: 09/12/2000 Source:
ZDNET
Added by:
Kim Heise
I'm hoping all the
"clone" Pilot OS based PDA's (such as Sony's new PDA) are going to
drive the price of the current models way down. The new Windows CE PDA's from
Compaq and HP are very impressive for the price and 3COM should do something
about the price. Then again 3COM could easily take as much time as they please
due to their overwhelming control on the PDA market.
Ladies and Gentlemen: More
bells and whistles for your PDA:
Palm Inc. confirmed late
Monday that it has licensed software from SpeechWorks International Inc. to
develop a calendar and contact-management application that allows users to
access Palm content by telephone.
Palm
(Nasdaq: PALM)
is the first handheld-computer manufacturer to make content accessible from
other devices such as a mobile phone. Earlier this month, Palm said it would
launch a personal digital assistant in Japan during the first half of next
year that will be capable of accessing the Internet through the nationwide
mobile-telephone network of NTT DoCoMo Inc. The new wireless personal digital
assistant will allow users to surf the Internet and handle e-mail.
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Sony
unveils pocket digital camera.
Posted: 09/12/2000 Source:
ZDNET
Added by:
Kim Heise
Just yesterday a
new startup announced a new digital imaging technology that has a much higher
resolution than the best quality "film strip" cameras. Refer to this
link below.
Sony just
announced a new high quality digital camera and ZDNET
has the latest scoop:
Sony Marketing (Japan) Inc., Sony Corp.'s
sales unit for the Japanese market, said on Tuesday it would launch a new
Cybershot DSC-P1 pocketable digital still camera on Oct. 20 at home and
abroad. Sony aims to sell 150,000 units per month worldwide, a Sony spokesman
said. The domestic selling price will be 99,800 yen ($940).
Sony's new pocketable digital camera is
equipped with a 3.34-megapixel charge-coupled device. It allows consumers to
transmit digital images, taken by the new camera, to color-LCD i-mode cell
phones from personal computers through Sony's network service called i-Jump.
Sony's i-Jump network service will start on Oct. 20 in Japan. The i-mode is
NTT DoCoMo's Internet-access cell phone.
It's inevitable that digital cameras will
overtake and crush "traditional" cameras and finally we are seeing
digital images exceed the quality of standard film.
TOP
Expo
promises beta of OS X, rumors of new laptops.
Posted: 09/12/2000 Source:
CNET
Added by:
Kim Heise
CNET posts some positive news
for Apple fans waiting for the much delayed OS X. If you are curious about the
new laptops you can read the full article here.
Apple Computer chief
executive Steve Jobs has promised
to unveil the beta, or test, version of the long-awaited operating system
Wednesday morning during a keynote address at Apple Expo 2000 in Paris. Jobs
may also unveil new laptops, but Macintosh fans not in range of the Eiffel
Tower will have to be creative if they want to find out what Jobs is saying.
<SNIP>
The new operating system,
which features a liquid-like user interface called Aqua and an open-source
core, has been eagerly awaited by Apple fans for some time.
In January, Apple promised
that Mac OS X would go on sale as a shrink-wrapped product by this summer and
would be bundled on computers by early 2001. In May, however, Jobs said that
the company would instead offer a public beta, or test version, of the OS this
summer and follow it with a commercial release by January 2001. Typically,
Apple has not charged for beta versions of its software. Apple maintains that
the revised timetable does not constitute a delay.
Last year, Apple delayed
OS X from late 1999 to early 2000.
TOP
3D
Image compression system developed.
Posted: 09/12/2000 Source:
LA
Times
Added by:
Kim Heise
Amongst all the news of
rioting, shootings and traffic problems - the LA Times managed to dig up
something interesting. I originally stumbled on this news article via
Ars-Technica.
In an effort to meet that challenge,
computer scientists at Caltech and Lucent Technologies Inc.'s Bell Labs have
teamed up to create the technology to transmit even high-resolution images of
three-dimensional objects at lightning speed.
The key is not faster modems or broader
bandwidth, but the way the data are acquired, encoded and compressed,
according to Peter Schroder of Caltech and Wim Sweldens of Bell Labs, leaders
of the project.
Their research could soon lead to "virtual
fitting rooms" where e-commerce customers can try on clothes and see how
they look from every angle while sitting in front of their own conventional
desktops.
That's only one of many applications for the new
technology known as digital geometry compression. Manufacturing,
entertainment, education, medicine and other industries are expected to adopt
the technology in the months ahead because it paves the way for
three-dimensional imaging that will allow inspection of an object from every
angle without clogging the transmission lines and filling up memory banks.
And here's the neat point: The primary cost is
at the supplier's end, not the client's. It won't be necessary to replace the
old desktop to take part in this major leap forward. But your local shopping
mall or a major manufacturer will have to invest in some fancy 3-D scanners.
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Intel
Postponed Its Celeron with 100MHz FSB.
Posted: 09/12/2000 Source:
OCWorkbench
Added by:
Kim Heise
Just remember this had not been
confirmed by Intel so keep it as a rumor for now until you hear otherwise.
According to an anonymous
mainboard manufacturer, Intel Celeron CPU featuring 100MHz FSB has been moved
from Q1 2001 to Q2 2001.
Here we are talking only
about desktop processors, because mobile Celeron will support 100MHz FSB from
the very beginning. So, this is another proof concerning the launching of
Intel Celeron with 100MHz FSB. Now we can build up a clear picture of the
situation with Intel Pentium III and Celeron processors for next year :
- Pentium III (Coppermine,
0.18 micron) will stop at 1.13GHz
- (max. 1.2GHz).
- Celeron with 100MHz
FSB will be
launched in Q2 2001.
- Pentium III family
will little by little shift to 0.13 micron technology in Q3 2001
(Tualatin, Almador chipset) and Intel
- Celeron with 100MHz FSB
will be manufactured with 0.18 micron technology.
- All Pentium III CPUs
will be manufactured with 0.13 micron and all Celeron CPUs – supposedly
with 0.18 micron technology.
TOP
GeForce2
Pro Specs.
Posted: 09/12/2000 Source:
VR-Zone
Added by:
Kim Heise
For sometime it had been
rumored that nVidia had a GeForce2 Pro up their sleeves but were keeping a tight
lid on it for marketing reasons. The GeForce2 Pro is not to be confused with the
just recently released GeForce2 Ultra.
Anyway, the VR-Zone has let the
cat out of the bag and posted some very interesting information regarding the
specifications on the GeForce2 Pro. No idea on the cost as of yet but you can be
assured it will not be cheap because the Pro retains the same internal clock
speed of the Ultra version which is priced at around $500 USD.
- 200Mhz Core Clock
- 460 Memory Clock
- 1600Texels/sec
- Up to 128MB DDR
- > 25MPoly/sec
- Hardware Anti Aliasing
- HDVP
- TV-Out/Video Modules
For those of you who are
wishing to compare the GeForce2 Pro to other current market competitors:
TOP
Tech News
for Monday September 11th 2000
Startup
claims digital photo breakthrough.
Posted:
09/11/2000 Source: ZDNET
Added by:
Kim Heise
I stumbled on this interesting
article while browsing ZDNET's news bursts:
Foveon says its new chip,
packed with 2.5 times more transistors than a Pentium III, will create an
image with 16.8 million pixels.
And here's more interesting
tidbits:
A startup founded by scientist Carver Mead
claims a breakthrough in the chips used to make digital cameras, a development
that could sharply drive down prices and help dislodge a rival technology.
Foveon Inc., a closely held company in
Santa Clara, Calif., plans to announce Monday that it has set a new image
standard for sensors constructed using a production process known as CMOS, for
complementary metal oxide semiconductor. That performance -- the ability to
create an image with 16.8 million picture elements, or pixels -- would mark
the first time that CMOS chips have reached parity with image sensors called
charge-couple devices, or CCDs, that have led the field for 30 years.
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Intel
to offer PC makers rebates for using Rambus memory.
Posted:
09/11/2000 Source: CNET
Added by:
Kim Heise
Let's face it: Rambus memory is
insanely overpriced and the performance over today's SDRAM is something to yawn
about. (About 5% performance gain over 133mhz SDRAM). Intel has invested so much
money into the Rambus debacle that the company is pushing hard to market the
product. It is possible Intel will be able to make Rambus come back into the
market spotlight - anything is possible when such a mighty "whale"
throws it's proverbial weight around the market.
During the fourth quarter, PC makers will
receive $70 for each Pentium 4 computer containing Rambus that they
manufacture and $60 during the first quarter of 2001, according to an
article that Inquest Market Research released today. The rebates will then
get phased out.
The plan is to ensure that manufacturers
will be able to sell Pentium 4 computers for as little as $2,500, said Bert
McComas, principal analyst at Inquest. The Pentium 4 is expected to emerge in
October.
TOP
Linux
on a wrist watch.
Posted:
09/11/2000 Source: IBM
Added by:
Kim Heise
Not sure how useful the Linux
watch is - which is developed by IBM. It appears to be one of those "can we
do it" developments. Can you just imagine using "vi" on this
little display? Take a look at the pictures here.
In the event you are curious
about the hardware specifications:
- Linux operating system
version 2.2
- X11 R6
- Size:
- Watch: 56 mm wide by 48
mm long by 12.25 mm thick (2.20” x 1.89” x 0.48”)
- Motherboard: 27.5 mm
wide by 35.3 mm long (1.08" x 1.39")
- Weight: 44 gms (approx. 1.5
ounces)
- Touch sensitive display
- 8MB Flash memory, 8MB DRAM
memory
- IrDA, Radio Frequency
wireless connectivity
- Rechargeable lithium-polymer
battery
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Casio
Wrist Camera.
Posted:
09/11/2000 Source: i4u
Added by:
Kim Heise
I was wondering when someone
was going to develop a camera that you wear on your wrist. Leave it up to Casio
to be the first on the market as the company has the knack for creating the most
"geeky" watches on the market - also referring to their MP3 wrist
watch.
The Casio Wrist Camera is
a Digital Watch with a digital Camera feature. The Digital Camera stores 100
pictures with a 120x120 resolution with 16 grayscales. It works basically like
any other simple Digital Camera. In Record mode the display of the watch shows
the live image the lens is viewing. The pictures can be viewed on the Watch
and transferred via infra red to a PC.
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D-Link
DHN-920 - 10Mb Phone Line USB Network In A Box.
Previously the home networking
solutions from Intel and 3COM only offered a measly 1mb speed via phone line LAN
connections. Now D-Link offers a much speedier 10mb connection via your USB port
and a standard phone line. Hot Hardware reviews D-Link's solution to home
networking. Here's a clip to wet your appetite:
The D-Link
DHN-920 USB Phone Line Network In A Box, is designed to work through an
available USB port and your existing phone line connections already available
at your residence or home office. What could be easier? Let's run
down the details of the package.
TOP
Millennium
OS upgrade not worth the risk.
Posted: 09/11/2000 Source:
Mercury
Center
Added by:
Kim Heise
On Thursday Microsoft will be
releasing Windows ME to the public and Mercury Center has posted a commentary
article on if the upgrade is worth it. I'm sure you can gather from the title
that the author (Mike Langberg) was left rather unimpressed.
Known by the cloying abbreviation Windows
Me, the new software is described as ``incremental'' rather than
``revolutionary'' by Microsoft representatives.
The increment is apparently so small that
Microsoft took the unprecedented step of cutting the cost of Windows Me after
saying in June the software would sell for the standard upgrade price of $89
that has applied to at least three previous Windows upgrades. In August,
Microsoft declared Me would sell for $59 to users already running Windows 98
or Windows 98 Second Edition.
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