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Well, according to NE asia's may edition, the USPTO is going reexamine forgent's patent (at the behest of The public patent foundation. But that's really kind of besides the point 'cause all of MS's products are going to come under patent attacks.

There's just too many software patents out there (and too many broad ones) for MS to work their way around all of them, forgent will just buy up some company with a patent on entropy encoding & turn around & sue MS.

If jpeg patents are MS's fear, a new image format is only going to buy them a little time, but if DRM is their goal, it makes perfect sense.

According to various sites, eg. http://neasia.nikkeibp.com/neasia/003549 ,
Japanese players will not limit HD output over component cables. There is
supposedly also Japanese legislation banning this.
Anyone have any info about this?

Pass me some of that holiday nog! Optical drives weren't standardized until Windows98 hit the scene.

I don't think you need any more nog. "In about 1992, the first documentsdescribing the ATAPI interface were published."

I have never needed a driver for a CDROM on Windows 9x, including Chicago betas. In other words, before Windows 95 even came out, let alone Windows 98. This is because I don't have a proprietary CDROM. Before the ATAPI drives, I had SCSI (Amiga, Mac.) However, before Windows 95 even came out, there were ATAPI drives (corresponding to the original standard from the SFF folks) and there were several of them. Take a look at the older dates on oakcdrom.sys sometime, by way of example.

You need to chiggy check yoself before you wiggy wreck yoself... er, too late.

http://neasia.nikkeibp.com/pop_image/mag_content/2 0051027180049/ta_fig2.jpg

from: Asakawa, Naoki, Holography Accelerates towards Terabyte Discs, Nikkei Electronics Asia, E Asia NOV 2005 Issue

Agreed. Now, one way to make CRT better, might be to replace the single electron gun (or three for color), with an electron source for every pixel......

This is what SED displays are all about. Much better than these shitty LCD's IMO. http://neasia.nikkeibp.com/neasia/001588

Difficulty to knock over :)

I'm wondering if it's true since, clearly, HD-DVD isn't a codec, it's a disk format. The HD-DVD spec currently supports two codecs, H.264, and VC-9.

Current Blu-ray tech uses MPEG-2, but they're talking about putting MPEG-4 and/or VC-9 support in as well. Notice that both specs are still evolving.

A pretty interesting article on the current status of both formats and their codecs is here.

Of course, I suppose with multi-wavelength-laser tech, Blu-ray could read other formats... but at what cost? Sony might indeed want Blu-ray-only players out there...

I've been pondering the security implications of this stuff lately.

Most of the places I've worked over the past few years use RFID based access controls.

If I scanned someone's security badge with my wrist watch, then went home and programmed another RFID to match it, I would get access to controlled areas...

that this is not an LCD screen. It's electronic paper. The characters actually look like they're written on a piece of paper rather than behind a piece of plastic on an LCD. The display quality far exceeds that of any mobile device and (gasp!) even computer monitors.

Here are a few links to high-res pics:

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/attachment.php?at tachmentid=306

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/attachment.php?at tachmentid=324

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/attachment.php?at tachmentid=307

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/attachment.php?at tachmentid=308

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/attachment.php?at tachmentid=309

In midst of all this talk about books, I think everyone knows what Japanese people with really use this device for:

http://www.nikkeibp.com/neasia/image2/200877_04032 5nby1.jpg

Case in point. 'nuff saif.... :-p

Personally I hope someone hacks the device in such a way that you can create/upload your own e-books. I'm sure someone would have to make an open-source BBeb(BroadBand E-Book) that's compatible with the device.

Anyone up to the task?

When I RTFA, I noted a related story on the new Compact Flash 4GB Microdrive and found a randomly chosen supplier with more specs and claims that these are in stock now. Just think, a DVD worth of data on a single CF card. Now I can start taking all my digital pictures in RAW format.

It's a shame your introduction isn't quite a good "sell" of the quality of the article, for example I quote:

16x is without doubt the next target for recording speed, but there are a variety of technical issues to be overcome first. These can be broadly categorized into three areas. The first is improving the recordable DVD drive, which includes challenges such as boosting laser diode output and signal processing IC speed (Fig 3). The second is improving the media, by developing a recording layer with higher sensitivity and a wide recording power margin. And the third is adjusting the interface between the first two: the write strategy.

Other people should go see the site, here's an HTML link to make it more interesting.

EPSON already released something far better...
http://neasia.nikkeibp.com/wcs/leaf?CID=onair/asab t/news/275239

There is an interview about the latest 3D phone here: page(EN)

Also check out this page, which has a drawing explaining how this works: page(JP) (I guess - it is in Japanese :)

As Sharp also has the Zaurus I'm waiting for a mobile phone with a 3D screen, running linux, and with a full keyboard - perhaps something similar to the C-760, only narrower. Oh, and dual 2mp cameras for taking 3D pictures.. (Sharp already has a 2mp mobile, so why not two of them.)

It might not fly in the US (lots of features = expensive), but I bet it would sell in Europe.. My mobile (a nokia 9210) is still retailing for 1000$ + without a subscription here.

A preceeding article mentions the 2.4 Gb Magicstor already in production with 3.6 Gb on target this year and 4.7 next year. The same article predicts that 0.7 inches will be the next big standard if some barriers are passed.

If Cornice or some other company bought Ritek's Microstor is unkown to me (it seems to have been related to dataplay developers too) but it's clear that there is a shortage of good brand names for this product. The Press release for Magicstor was hilarious, promptly stating that the company GS Microdrive released a harddrive called Magicstore, showing a picture of the HD with MICRODRIVE written all over it and stating that this is the company's name not the brand name since Microdrive is a trademark of IBM (Hitatchi Storage) ((Sorry lost the couldn't find the pressrelease again on nikkeibp.com))

Well, nevermind. Funny to see that about seven to eigth years ago, everyone thought that HDDs had come to an end and that storage capacity per square centimeters is increasing even faster than Moore's Law.

Probably, HDDs will win over Flash as new IC processing technologies are getting exponentially expensive and HDD more and more power concious.

I should have studied magnetics instead of IC processing.

• 
  Dr. Karl-Heinz Strassemeyer said ...
  IBM does not sell their own linux distribution.
  IBM does not ship Open Source software with patents.
  IBM only submits patches to the Linux kernel after they are cleared for any patents.
  IBM does not do distributions because the risk of infringing a patent that way is too high.
  IBM does not use Linux in embedded systems because the kernel could contain hidden patents.
  

funny to find a link to a 2.4GB 1-Inch drive article .... at the bottom of the slashdot linked article!

NE asia online

omron technics

According to this, it's about an hour.