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29/10/2004

Review: BuffaloTech Fully Customizable NAS shell (Kuro Box)

http://www.tomsnetworking.com/Reviews-171-ProdID-KUROBOX.php

"The Kuro Box (KB) from Buffalo Technology (actually a new division called Revolution by Buffalo) is being marketed as a 100% open source based Network Storage Appliance that can be easily extended. The Kuro Box ("Kuro" is Japanese for "expert" or "specialist") is the the first in a line of products aimed at VARs, resellers and just plain folks who like to customize their own computer gear."

Web TV Start-Ups Show Programs Outside the Box

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/washpost/20041028/tc_washpost/a2165_2004oct27

"Akimbo has raised more than $12 million in venture capital for a service it hopes will do for Internet movies what Apple's iTunes did for digital music. Trouble is, the service requires you to buy a $230 box and doesn't offer much video yet -- only about 300 programs out of the more than 2,000 it plans to put online by the end of the year. It's not exactly on-demand, either; you have to download each show from the Internet to the Akimbo box before you can watch it.

The box contains an 80-gigabyte hard drive for storing up to 200 hours of programs. It plugs into your Internet broadband connection (via cable or DSL) and TV. Shows are copy-protected, so you can't move them to portable devices or share them online. Akimbo does make downloading painless, though, with a well-designed programming guide that appears on the TV screen and lets you select shows with a remote.

Akimbo has signed deals with 60 content providers so far. Not everything is included in its $10 monthly fee; some channels carry a premium and others are pay-per-view.

Many of Akimbo's content providers also are signing up with rivals, such as Dave Networks Inc., an Atlanta firm that plans to release a new service on Nov. 15. DaveTV is among several firms trying to use peer-to-peer technology to accelerate downloads and reduce transmission costs."

Come to Daddy

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20041028.html

October 28, 2004
Come to Daddy
How Ken Schaffer's ME2TV (or Something Just Like It, But Cheaper) Will Change Television Forever
By Robert X. Cringely

"But what blew me away this week when I saw a demo of TV2ME in Schaffer's cluttered New York apartment was the quality of the image. Sending live TV over the Internet is a very difficult thing to do, especially over distances like that from Moscow to New York. There are live TV feeds from Moscow available today, and they look terrible no matter how much bandwidth you have. But Schaffer's feed, running at an average of 384 kilobits-per-second, looks like TV. When you change channels to any of the 60 or so on the Moscow cable system, it takes about 10 seconds to rebuffer, and then you have TV. Amazing!

To put this achievement in perspective, I have running in my home in Charleston both Windows and Linux-based PVRs that play through Hauppauge Media MVP set top boxes. This is a Hauppauge WinTV250 PVR capture board running on a fast AMD system with half a gig of DDR RAM and a 125 gig 7200-rpm disk drive. All components are matched and from the same manufacturer, all video encoding and decoding is done in hardware, network connections are all Ethernet, AND I CAN'T WATCH LIVE TV OVER THIS NETWORK. I can easily access my vast collection of pre-recorded Dragon Tales, Caillou, and Arthur episodes, but live TV bombs out even though I'm capturing and sending at two megabits-per-second over a two-hop network no more than 60 feet long.

Ken Schaffer, on the other hand, is capturing at 384 kilobits-per-second using hardware encoding only on the sending end (the receiver is software-only) and he can watch perfectly viewable television that has run through 20+ hops from Moscow or Bangkok or any of a number of other cities where he has friends and customers.

Given that he has no way of guaranteeing Quality of Service, I think this performance is amazing. But given his track record, I can't discount the demonstration. Like his wireless mikes, Schaffer attributes the quality to how he preprocesses the video signal before it enters the MPEG-4 encoder chip. I don't know what he does, but it seems to work."

28/10/2004

BareBook 1556-G portable presque en kit

http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/Un_ordinateur_portable_vendu_presque_nu.htm

"Sa particularité est d'être vendu presque nu, celui-ci n'étant accompagné que d'une carte mère Intel 855GME. Les autres composants sont donc à rajouter, à savoir le processeur (Pentium M), la mémoire, le disque dur et le périphérique optique."

26/10/2004

SOYO Mini DRAGON 651 Review

http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.cfm?articleid=173&catid=3

"The memory controller supports a single channel of 64-bit DDR333 memory, making it more affordable to upgrade than a modern dual-channel DDR400 monster. Along the same lines, support for 400 and 533MHz front side bus Pentium 4 processors gives the Mini DRAGON a definite 3.06GHz ceiling.

The chipset's integrated graphics core is certainly nothing to write home about. It does provide acceptable 2D quality, but 3D performance is dismal at best. Fortunately, a combination of IEEE 1394, USB 2.0, and integrated 10/100 Ethernet give the platform comprehensive connectivity, adding appeal as an Internet appliance or vehicle for multimedia playback."

20/10/2004

Skype prepares video over internet service

http://www.vnunet.com/news/1158847

"Niklas Zennstörm, Skype chief executive and co-founder, said today that the company was currently testing a video-over-IP service.

"We can easily develop new services on top of Skype," he said. "One is video and we are expecting to deliver something next year.""

19/10/2004

Un forfait Ozone payant ? Oui mais quel forfait !

http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/Un_forfait_Ozone_payant_Oui_mais_quel_forfait_.htm

"Ozone, un FAI axé sur le Wifi, proposera début Janvier un forfait haut débit incluant les communications téléphoniques illimitées.

A condition bien sûr de disposer d'un récepteur Wifi, le forfait sera de 2Mb en download ET en upload, ainsi que des communications illimitées basées sur la Voix sur IP (VoIP), le tout pour 18€ par mois. "

BlackBerry 7270 first to feature VoIP and WLAN support

http://www.mobiletechnews.com/info/2004/10/18/114658.html

MobileTechNews
Posted: 18-Oct-2004 [Source: RIM]

"Research In Motion (RIM)is demonstrating a new BlackBerry Wireless Handheld(TM) today at the Gartner ITXPO Symposium that operates on 802.11b networks and incorporates both voice and data capabilities. The BlackBerry 7270(TM) will be the first BlackBerry(R) handheld to feature VoIP and WLAN support."

18/10/2004

Evesham e-box Media Center 2005 PC

Evesham e-box Media Center 2005 PC

"The single tuner meant that you couldn't record one TV programme while you watched another, seriously limiting the versatility. With twin TV tuners, this problem is negated and Evesham has gone the whole hog and installed twin DVB tuners from Black Gold."

Price £1056 inc. VAT

12/10/2004

ScanZOOM: Can I get a price check?

http://www.engadget.com/entry/8276386751773718/

"Scanbuy has just properly released ScanZOOM, a software app for cameraphones that let’s you comparison shop by snapping a picture of a product’s barcode and then automatically pull up price information from PriceGrabber and Amazon. Only 16 phones supported at the moment (the Treo 600, Nokia 6600, 6620, 7650, 3650, and 7610, and Sony Ericsson P800, P900, and P910 are on the list)."

Moore Medio - Media PC

http://www.trustedreviews.com/article.aspx?page=1659&head=3

£2,000

Lite-On 851S
Sapphire Radeon 9600 Ultimate.
2 160Gb SATA hard disks.
TV tuner
Netgear WiFi adapter
Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 sound card.

"The digital TV tuner is good to see and means that you can watch all the Freeview digital channels as well as the standard five terrestrial ones. Reception proved to be very good, even in problem areas like the TrustedReviews offices in Bracknell. The Netgear WiFi card is also a very welcome inclusion, since it's vitally important for a media PC to have a wireless connection. Let's face it, you're not likely to have your broadband connection in your living room, so you need to be able to connect somehow, especially if you want to download EPG data."

11/10/2004

Un logiciel d'échanges "privés" met en émoi les studios de cinéma américains - Actualités - ZDNet.fr

http://rss.zdnet.fr/actualites/internet/0,39020774,39177191,00.htm

Par Philippe Astor
ZDNet France
Lundi 11 octobre 2004

"Un nouveau logiciel "peer-to-peer", dont une préversion a été rendue publique en début de semaine dernière, suscite quelque inquiétude du côté d'Hollywood. Grouper, c'est son nom, permet de constituer des communautés virtuelles de trente personnes, qui peuvent s'échanger des photos, des vidéos et de la musique. Un logiciel doté, par ailleurs, d'un module de messagerie instantanée.

Ses deux auteurs, Josh Felsher et David Samuel, ont pris garde de ménager la susceptibilité de l'industrie du disque américaine, en limitant les possibilités d'échange des fichiers audio à une écoute en "streaming": il s'agit donc d'une diffusion directe de la musique stockée sur l'ordinateur des autres membres de la communauté, en excluant toute forme de téléchargement. Ce n'est pas le cas, en revanche, en ce qui concerne les fichiers vidéo."

06/10/2004

K!TV | Logiciel TV - TV Software

K!TV | Logiciel TV - TV Software

"K!TV utilise la technologie EPG pour vous faciliter la vie. Grâce au logiciel NextView intégré, vous pouvez à tout moment vous renseigner sur l'heure de vos programmes, lire les résumés des films, etc... A chaque changement de chaîne ou quand vous le voulez, K!TV vous affiche le nom et les heures du programme en cours."

Sony VAIO Type X "Super TiVo" Launches

http://www.gizmodo.com/archives/sony-vaio-type-x-super-tivo-launches-022727.php

"A Pentium 4 at 3.60GHz comprises the heart of this beefy PVR, with 1GB DDR and 1TB (4x250GB RAID 0) of storage standard—welcome to the future, where you can simultaneously record up to seven programs at once and store so many of them that you'll likely deplete national bon-bon supplies."

05/10/2004

Time to RAID PVRs, says Silicon Image

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/04/si_steelvine_launch/

"Silicon Image is looking to make dumb consumer storage devices a little smarter with the introduction of a new processor that adds sophisticated technology for protecting data to systems like Tivo.

The company is using the fabled system-on-a-chip concept for its new SteelVine design. This basically lets a chip handle storage functions such as RAID, disk striping and making many disks look like one. Consumer device makers could plug the chip into their storage systems - media appliances or PVRs (Personal Video Recorders) - and give customers a bit more data protection.

"Once you put a disk drive in those devices, the reliability of the device goes down significantly," said Steve Tirado, president of the storage division at Silicon Image. "That's means consumers could face some of the things they don't like about PCs. So we're providing a way to add storage in a reliable manner.""

Homechoice wakes up and smells the coffee

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/28/homechoice_wakes_up/

"Tucked away in London, Homechoice can be considered the grandfather of television over a telco’s telephone line. Back in the early 1990s it created ideas like time shifted viewing, which it called “replay TV” long before anyone had ever heard the word TiVo. Even though after 8 years of offering VoD and IP TV services the company has managed to attract only just over 3,000 customers, by next year it believes it will blossom into a full triple play and begin the long journey out of its London roots to the rest of the UK, and probably a public quotation."

Start-up delivers movie downloads

http://news.zdnet.com/2110-9588_22-5395970.html

By Jim Hu CNET News.com October 4, 2004, 4:04 PM PT

"A start-up based in the Boston area is trying to use peer-to-peer technology to legally deliver movies onto consumers' hard drives. The company, called NetCableTV, is offering technology that lets people download movies off a network of other customers' computers instead of from a central server."

04/10/2004

PalmOne unveils 256MB Flash drive T5 PDA

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/04/palmone_tungsten_t5/

The Register
By Tony Smith
Published Monday 4th October 2004 08:42 GMT

"The unit incorporates 256MB of Flash, of which 215MB are available to the user, 55MB for on-board memory, the remaining 160MB configured as an internal storage card. The PDA now includes a new file browser application, PalmOne Files, which is pre-set to be activated from of the buttons on the case.

PalmOne is pitching the T5 not only as a PDA but as a highly portable external hard drive, allowing users to carry around important documents wherever they go. The USP over regular Flash drives is the ability to view, and in the case of Microsoft Office documents, edit those files as well as carry them.

It's a novel idea and one that crucially paves the way for the incorporation of hard drives into PDAs. That will better position the platform as the worlds of the mobile phone, PDA and portable entertainment device, from the iPod to the Microsoft Portable Media Center, continue to coalesce."