Category: Platforms

Coming to a PVR Near You: Hitachi’s 400gb hard Drive

Snappily titled the Deskstar 7K400, the drive is currently under test by equipment manufacturers hoping to use it in their products, and could be incorporated into PVRs late in the year. The 400gb drive is available with a PATA or newer SATA interface and spins at 7200 rpm, pretty much the standard these days. The drive uses 3.5” platters, so won’t be suitable for mobile devices. Currently, the highest capacity 3.5” drive is around 250gb.

Hitachi hopes the drive will give it a bigger role in the consumer electronics market due to the rapid growth of PVRs, hard disk recorders and media hubs in the home. Last year Apple bought 730,000 units of hard disks from Hitachi’s competitor Toshiba, so obviously they’re keen to see some of that business in future.

400gb translates to about 400 hours of broadcast television, or about 45 hours of HDTV. Or nearly a year’s worth of MP3s.

Apple’s hard drive future

School Bans Camera Phones

West Lothian Council has banned mobile camera phones from all 11 secondary schools and 66 primary schools in its area. The council stated misuse of the cameras as its motivation for the ruling – images can be used for bullying or more sinister purposes, though the council has yet to receive any complaints involving the phones.

The Gartner Group estimate that soon 80% of phones sold will feature cameras, and this is causing security problems in companies, as well as personal security issues. Many companies simply do not have the infrastructure, staff or budget to protect their business and employees from misuse of digital camera phones.

Information Week reports on Gartner

BBC News

Recycle Your Computer

A report from the UN University recommends more effort is made to recycle computer hardware as every PC, from production to disposal, uses huge amounts of natural resources.

The UN report states that producing a PC system (base unit, monitor etc.) requires 240kg of fossil fuel, 22kg of other chemicals and 1.5 tonnes of water. This incredible figure then needs to be multiplied by 130 million, as that’s the number of PCs that roll out of factories every year.

BBC Breakfast picked up on the news and produced a rather confusing report based on it: they seemed to think that UK computer firms could take old motherboards and produce refurbished computers from them after a bit of recycling. Recycling electronic components is extremely difficult and produces large amounts of toxic materials, requiring specialist facilities which are often in developing countries.

So what can you do?

  • Since there is no real provision in many countries to collect and properly recycle PCs, reuse is often the easiest and most effective option.
  • Donate old PCs to charities or clubs. Even if your PC is getting on a bit it, can be still be used. Remember how fast it seemed when you first got it out of the box? Reinstalling the operating system and giving the hard drive a good clear out really makes a difference. Other operating systems like Linux can make good use of older PCs’ hardware.
  • Don’t dump your PC at a landfill – as we’ve said, the components contain highly toxic metals and chemicals. For this same reason, don’t burn it either – you’ll release poisons into the ground and atmosphere.

Only about 10% of electronic devices are recycled currently. To address this, the European Union has legislation coming into place in 2005 which will promote recycling by organising proper “take back” services and drop-off points for equipment – though expect the cost of a PC to go up by about US$50 as a result. Small price to pay, we say.

Computer Aid (UK, France and Spain) Digital-Lifestyles.info’s choice

Donate a PC (UK)

Metech PC Recycling (US)

Europe’s Recycling Marketplace

Disposable Computer Arrives

With the same memory capacity as the BBC Micro and based on Radio Frequency ID (RFID) technology, researchers have developed a paper board computer with 32kb of memory and basic processing and communication capabilities.

The device has many applications in data collection and processing – self-tracking courier packages, passports, pharmaceutical dosing, interactive books … the list is endless. As it incorporates a high standard of encryption, transactions with the device can be secure and authenticated. Current projects for the Cypak computer include providing tamper-proof packaging for the Swedish Post Office and pharmaceutical monitoring with a Swedish university.

The computer is based on “printed” sensors and can be incorporated in a wide range of products, and is priced at about US$1.

Cypak

TechWeb on the computer

Scientific Atlanta Planning Games Console

In what’s beginning to become a crowded market, Scientific Atlanta have announced that they are working on a games console. No specifications have been released yet, but the company claimed the device could compete with current games consoles from Sony and Nintendo. Chief Executive James McDonald said their new product would offer “the same performance you get out of those game boxes.”

Scientific Atlanta do not expect their Explorer hardware to be available to buy on the high street but will instead be installed by cable operators in subscribers’ homes. Games will then be downloaded to the box on a pay-per-play or perhaps a “buy outright” charging scheme.

Set top box builders and suppliers are working on ever more sophisticated hardware to compete for the coveted space under your television – getting the most compelling media gateway into millions of homes is worth a lot of revenue.

It will be interesting to see how the new console compares with Infinium Labs’ notorious Phantom console, summarised here a few weeks ago. What content will be available for Scientific Atlanta’s new console? It’ll need a lot of software to be able to compete with the systems already in the market, and with the potentially huge library of adapted PC games available to the Phantom.

Also allegedly about to emerge is the DISCover Console – a PC based system that boasts of the simplicity of a console. It allows users to play games simply by dropping the disk in the DISCover’s drive, rather than having to install and configure each game. The DISCover may cause problems for both Infinium and Scientific Atlanta based on the technology they eventually use: their website claims “‘DISCover® technology is protected by U.S. Patent No. 5,721, 951: a “home entertainment system for playing software designed for play in home computers.’ No one can manufacture a game console that plays PC games without infringing on this patent.”

Scientific Atlanta

DIScover, Not console yet, but you can buy a nice hat.

The Phantom still sleeps

Hewlett-Packard making strides in DRM

HP has licensed content protection technology from Intel and has developed a new copy protection technique with Philips.

Hewlett Packard has licensed a copy protection system from Intel that prevents video from recorded as it travels between devices, such as between a video card and TV.

HP is also working with Philips to develop a technology that will allow users to make legal and protected recordings from digital broadcast sources, such as from cable, in accordance with the new FCC broadcast flag rules.

Reuters

Yahoo Brings Audio and Video Together in Searches

Google is trialling an image search function, AltaVista had an image search for years before it added its video and MP3 search functions – now Yahoo is looking to bring it’s own powerful multimedia search engine to the internet.

Yahoo will be kicking off with some great content, including the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library and audio files from National Public Radio.

The company is looking to make money by charging commercial content providers for including their material in its database; non-commercial entities can submit their content free.

Microsoft are working on their own multimedia search engine, and that should be interesting given how much they like tampering with search results to suit themselves – try doing a search for Xfree86, an open source window system for UNIX and UNIX-based systems on MSN.

Google Image Search

AltaVista – useful, but different media types are not searchable from the same page

XFree86 on MSN

Sony: PSX, PSP, PS2 Will Connect

Speaking in the Mainichi Daily, the president of Sony Computer Entertainment Japan confirmed that the forthcoming PlayStation Portable (PSP) will have connectivity features with the new PSX home media centre, and the venerable PlayStation2.

Fumiya Takeno went on to say that Sony would be using the PSP’s Universal Media Disk (that’s right – yet another media format) to bring new, and as yet not elaborated upon, experiences to users: “I’m planning to create software that no-one is even thinking of right now – something free from the existing concept of ‘a game’”.

But how will this connectivity manifest itself? As the iLink/IE1394/Firewire connector has been dropped from the PSX and later PS2s, the only hardware options left are either using the optional ethernet adapter on PS2s or one of the two USB1.1 ports.

GameSpot

Sony news at Mainichi Daily

New Sony Products Shown at Open House

Sony’s Open House event this year covered all the key consumer devices – from HDTV recorders, and new Handycams to extremely desirable PDAs with more bells and whistles than a bus load of Morris dancers crashing into a flute factory.

Sony are going for integration even more than usual – HDTVs have integrated card readers for cable users, Clié PDAs and VAIO notebooks feature even sharper cameras and better wireless access than before, and MP3 support filters into products where there was previously only ATRAC.

More details from DVD Format

ATi’s HDTV Wonder Card

Featuring Ati’s NXT2004 Digital Modulator chip, already found in many set-top boxes, ATi’s HDTV Wonder card will include support for analogue, digital and high definition television services. The card will come bundled with PVR software allowing users to fill up their hard drives considerably faster than before: a 250gb disk should store about 30 hours of HDTV content, contrasted with 200 hours of standard definition TV.

With the release of the DirectTV’s HDTV TiVo in the next few weeks, HDTV fans at least in the US will finally be able to record and archive programmes with ease.

HotHardware’s preview of the card

DirectTV’s HD products