Slashdot Mirror

Nom du Keyboard writes "Sharp Aquos brand televisions are making a big deal about their Quattron technology of adding a 4th yellow pixel to their RGB sets. While you can read a glowing review of it here, the engineer in me is skeptical because of how all the source material for this set is produced in 3-color RGB. I also know how just making a picture brighter and saturating the colors a bit can make it more appealing to many viewers over a more accurate rendition – so much for side-by-side comparisons. And I laugh at how you are supposed to see the advantages of 4-color technology in ads on your 3-color sets at home as you watch their commercials. It sounds more like hype to extract a higher profit margin than the next great advance in home television. So is it real?"

G3ckoG33k writes "An article at The Register Hardware describes how Hasselblad film cameras dating back to 1957 can be given a new life using a digital back to get images at a super resolution of 39 megapixels. From the article: 'The CFV-39 digital back allows you to get those cameras out from the last century and use the V-System cameras with their beautiful glass once again, it simply fits in place of where the roll film used to be. Hasselblads have never been inexpensive, but talk about a return on investment. Here is a manufacturer looking after a fiercely loyal user-base and along with it offering what could be seen as the ultimate green camera system.' Oh, by the way most pictures taken during the Apollo space program in the 1960s were taken with Hasselblad." Hasselblad's been making digital backs for quite a while now, but this one's very impressive in speed (and cost — "only" about $14,000) compared to earlier models.

MojoKid writes "Reportedly, Asus will be introducing the DR-570 color eReader by the end of 2010, but it won't be just another one in the crowd. In fact, it just might be a game-changer. The reader will supposedly have a 6" screen, but rather than using e-ink like every other reader out there, this one will utilize a color OLED screen. Word is the unit will last a whopping 122 hours on a full charge. It should also be able to run Flash applications, download books over 3G to Wi-Fi, and most likely surf the web, unlike any other reader out there." Asus will be rolling out two other ebook reader models this year as well.

Market watcher Gartner is claiming that by Q4 2012 Google's Android smartphone OS will have overtaken Apple's iPhone. Currently only the sixth most popular phone OS, Android is set to rocket into second place behind Symbian if the predictions are to be believed. The reason for the changing of the guard is that "many handset makers are betting their futures on Android, while Apple is just one company." 2012 rankings place Symbian at the top followed by Android, iPhone, Windows Mobile, and Blackberry."

Rob Hearn sends in a piece up at PocketGamer.co.uk on why Apple suddenly pulled Manomio's C64 emulator soon after finally approving it. (El Reg has coverage too.) "It was a glorious few moments for retro gamers when Manomio's C64 emulator was finally approved by Apple and released to the eager, nostalgic iPhone public. Then, calamity! It was gone again. Apparently some wily users figured out how to access the Commodore 64 BASIC system that was originally packaged with the emulator — something that Apple wasn't too happy with, given the nature of the interpreter's code. By setting the keyboard to 'always on,' launching a game and restarting BASIC, players got into the 'empty shell' of their C64 emulator."

N!NJA writes with the mention of a recent alternative energies rally where the Tesla Roadster managed to cover 241 miles on a single charge, with another 38 miles of juice still left in the battery. "That would give the Roadster a theoretical maximum touring range of nearly 280 miles — 36 miles more than Tesla itself reckons the car will cover on a charge. If the numbers stand up to official scrutiny, Tesla will hold the world record for the longest distance traveled by a production electric car on a single charge. Of course, it should be pointed out that the Tesla was driven by a company staffer doubtless practiced in eking out every last mile from a charge, and that the speeds averaged on the run were hardly blistering — 90kph (56mph) on the motorways, 60kph (37mph) on trunk roads and 30kph (19) in the mountain roads. Tesla reckon the average speed for the entire journey was 45kph (28mph)."

An anonymous reader writes "SD cards with a theoretical maximum capacity of 2TB are in development by Panasonic and the SD Association, it has been announced. The technology is called 'Secure Digital Extended Capacity', or 'SDXC', and Panasonic has announced it will soon show off a 64GB SDXC card. Using the new technology, read/write speeds are set to hit 300MBps. SanDisk and Sony are using the same standard to develop Extended Capacity cards in Sony's Memory Stick Pro and Memory Stick Micro range. SDXC utilises Microsoft's new exFAT file system — AKA 'FAT 64' — which first appeared in Windows Vista SP1, and has a theoretical file size limit of 16 exbibytes." Reader xlotlu adds a note about the "proprietary exFAT file system, which is available for licensing under NDA. There are currently no specific patents on exFAT, but its legal status is uncertain since it's based on FAT. The FAT patents have been previously upheld in court."

jeevesbond writes "The Register reports that Asus president Jerry Shen has revealed his company will be phasing out all sub-10" Eee PCs. According to Shen, the 'standard' netbook next year will be a 10" model with a hard drive running XP. Shen also said XP is outselling GNU/Linux on netbooks by a ratio of 7:3. This is somewhat contrary to news from the UK earlier in the year that GNU/Linux units were out of stock while XP machines sat unsold. Are Brits more open-minded than the rest of the world when it comes to choosing an OS?"

jeevesbond writes "The Register reports that Asus president Jerry Shen has revealed his company will be phasing out all sub-10" Eee PCs. According to Shen, the 'standard' netbook next year will be a 10" model with a hard drive running XP. Shen also said XP is outselling GNU/Linux on netbooks by a ratio of 7:3. This is somewhat contrary to news from the UK earlier in the year that GNU/Linux units were out of stock while XP machines sat unsold. Are Brits more open-minded than the rest of the world when it comes to choosing an OS?"

hardsky submitted thrilling news about everyone's favorite interconnect cable by saying "USB 3.0 is set to deliver data-transfer speeds of up to 5Gb/s, initially over tweaked connectors and wiring and, later, over optical links."

Fallen Andy writes "'The Register' has an article describing 'Limbo of the Lost' (developed by Majestic and sold in the U.S by Tri Synergy) which seems to have 'borrowed' copiously graphics assets from other games. Over at the GamesRadar forum there is a thread with some screenshots. Finally, this game has its own Wikipedia entry. Warning to all — move the soft drink away from the keyboard and monitor before you look at those screenshots. Blatant this is, very blatant indeed."

the_leander writes "The Register has pictures of the desktop version of Asus's Eee PC, reportedly called the 'Ebox.' It will be released early next month after it has been unveiled publicly at Computex in Taipei on June 3. It'll come equipped with the same Xandros Linux distribution as the Eee, though it's likely that Windows XP will be available also. But given the probable choice for CPU, Atom, ithe Ebox is unlikely to allow for the use of Vista, unless you're something of a masochist. It's expected to retail for $200-$300."

Pickens writes "The first commercially released personal music player capable of handling MP3 files was launched in March 1998 — the MPMan F10, manufactured by Korea's Saehan Information Systems with 32MB of Flash storage, enough for a handful of songs encoded at 128Kb/s. In the US, local supplier Eiger Labs wanted $250 for the F10, though the price fell to $200 the following year prompted by the release of the Diamond Multimedia Rio PMP300. The Rio was released in September 1998, but by 8 October had become the subject of a lawsuit from the RIAA which claimed the player violated the 1992 US Home Recordings Act. It was later ruled that the Rio had not infringed the Act because it was not responsible for the actions of its customers. Thanks to its lesser known name, the F10 avoided such legal entanglements, but at the cost of all the free publicity its rival gained from the lawsuit."

Alex Dekker writes "Sony's Mike Abary says in an interview, 'If [Asus's Eee PC] starts to do well, we are all in trouble.' Presumably by 'we' he means all the hardware manufacturers who sell over-priced, full-fat laptops. And he's not going to be too pleased when he sees the Linux-powered, sub-$200 Elonex One. Looks like what's bad for Sony may be good for the consumer." The CNet article mentions that a version of the Eee running XP is available in Japan now and will be coming to the US within weeks.

GamePolitics notes that the Register has a theory as to how Rockstar can get around Britain's Manhunt 2 ban: make it available as a digital download. "Downloaded games ... do not need an age-suitability classification, such as 15 or 18, because the Act, which mandates the BBFC's certification programme and forces retailers to obey the classifications, only covers physical products. A BBFC spokeswoman confirmed that if Manhunt 2 publisher Take-Two Interactive chose to sell the game online as a download then 'that would be legal and not contravening the Video Recordings Act'. She added that some games are already sold this way without a BBFC rating, but that most developers choose to have their games classified because selling a physical product is more profitable."

SlashRating^© 6*10^23 slashdottit! ^tm ransom1982 noted a new article on The Register that says "Not only are chip companies regularly releasing ever-faster microprocessors, but new research has revealed that modern CPUs actually lose megahertz over time." This makes it even more complicated to compare the performance of Intel and AMD CPUs since you have differing architecture, clockspeeds AND the year of manufacture to consider. Buyer beware!

symbolset notes that The Register is reporting that PCI SIG has released version 2.0 of the PCI Express base specification: "The new release doubles the signaling rate from 2.5Gbps to 5Gbps. The upshot: a x16 connector can transfer data at up to around 16GBps." The PCI-SIG release also says that the electromechanical specification is due to be released shortly.

srizah writes to mention that Toshiba plans to launch a 51 GB HD DVD, with a 1 GB advantage over Sony's Blu-ray disc. From the article: Toshiba has submitted a triple-layer, 51GB HD DVD-ROM disc to the standard's overseer in the hope the technology will be adopted as a standard by the end of the year. If approved, it allow the format to exceed the 50GB storage capacity of rival medium Blu-ray Disc. The HD DVD standard currently defines single- and dual-layer discs capable of holding 15GB and 30GB of data, respectively."

An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica and The Register are reporting the Apple Kernel 10.4.8 has been cracked using Apple's publicly available source trees. This is the first time Apple was hit by hackers again since Maxxuss silently left the scene.The funny thing about this is the hacker who cracked OSx has released his sources according to APSL. He told Ars Technica in an interview that he did this because he believes in freedom of information, but will this now harm Apple's opensourceness?" From the article: "Unfortunately, free and legal are not necessarily the same thing, and the EULA for OS X requires Mac hardware. However, there is an interesting comment on the blog, one that asserts the requirement of Mac hardware is a "post-sale" restriction. Such a restriction may not be applicable in certain countries, such as those of the European Union. Expect to see what Apple Legal thinks about that shortly."

vhogemann writes "It seems that the number of Linux PDA devices just keeps growing, the German based phone maker Road just announced an Qtopia based Linux Cellphone/PDA. The original article gives more details: 'Opening the clamshell device reveals a QWERTY keyboard and a 640 x 240 display — closed, the unit presents a 102 x 65 monochrome phone screen. The HandyPC contains the usual array of PIM and messaging apps, along with a viewer to read Microsoft Office files. It will ship with PC synchronisation tools, media player software and a web browser. It can even be used as a voice recorder.'" Rather than Nokia's 770, to me Road's phone more closely resembles Nokia's 9XXX series.

The Register has an answer for the problem of what to get the graphics buff who has everything, Nvidia's new 64x SLI GPU rig. While it doesn't come cheap, a mere $17,500, it will offer rendering at around 80 billion pixels every second and a combined resolution of around 148 megapixels. The new hardware is being targeted at content creators and people doing scientific modeling, and is due to ship in September.

Whiney Mac Fanboy writes "The Register is reporting that Apple has finally admitted to the 'high pitched whining' problems with it's MacBook line — but only to tell customers to contact AppleCare. From the article: 'MacBook Pro users have complained about numerous noises emanating from their machines since the Intel-based notebooks began shipping in February this year. Audible irritations reported by machine owners include whining sounds coming from the screen, from the body of the notebook, and from the area below the screen hinge when the laptop's running on batteries and both cores of the Core Duo CPU are enabled.'"

Sad Loser writes "The future of the mobile phone is here, or at least a bunch of Nokia-sponsored industrial design students' take on the problem. The BBC also has more pictures." Most of these designs are quite silly (a necklace with squeezable beads for an address book?) but at least amusing.

joe 155 writes "The Register is reporting that ' the PS3 will cost £425 in the UK - over $800'. SCE UK Managing Director Rat Maguire said: 'I don't think it's an expensive machine - I think actually, it's probably a cheap machine. If you think a Blu-Ray player by itself might be £600-700, and we're coming in at just £425, it's a bargain.' Can a console really be viable at this price?"

Brandonski writes "Apparently AMD allowed some flawed chips to slip through their detection grid. The problem affects only a small number of chips and only single core 2.6 and 2.8 GHz CPUs." From the article: "It is believed that the glitch is triggered when the affected chip's FPU is made to loop through a series of memory-fetch, multiplication and addition operations without any condition checks on the result of the calculations. The loop has to run over and over again for long enough to cause localized heating which together with high ambient temperatures could combine to cause the result of the operation to be recorded incorrectly, leading to data corruption."

microbee writes "The register is reporting that AMD is researching a new CPU technology called 'reverse multithreading', which essentially does the opposite of hyperthreading in that it presents multiple cores to the OS as a single-core processor." From the article: "The technology is aimed at the next architecture after K8, according to a purported company mole cited by French-language site x86 Secret. It's well known that two CPUs - whether two separate processors or two cores on the same die - don't generate, clock for clock, double the performance of a single CPU. However, by making the CPU once again appear as a single logical processor, AMD is claimed to believe it may be able to double the single-chip performance with a two-core chip or provide quadruple the performance with a quad-core processor."

An anonymous reader writes "The Register is featuring an article on Research In Motion's first 3G BlackBerry, due shortly for release in the UK via Vodafone. The big news is that it contains an integrated 3G data modem - meaning UK addicts will be able to connect from the device and their laptop (via USB/BlueTooth) at 3G broadband speeds. No EDGE so the US will have to carry on waiting, but for those in the UK and Europe, short of integrated GPS, is the BlackBerry 8707v finally the first example of mobile device convergence everyone has been waiting for?"

rgraham writes "The Register has a great opening line in a recent article, "Want the fastest Windows XP Core Duo notebook? Then buy a Mac. According to benchmarks carried out by website GearLog, Apple's MacBook Pro running Windows XP is a better Adobe Photoshop rig than any other Core Duo laptop on the market." GearLog ran the same tests that were run by PC Magazine with the Mac coming out on top."

diegocgteleline.es writes "According to The Register, Intel has begun shipping a power-efficient dual-core "Xeon LV" and claims that it consumes no more than 31 W running at 2 Ghz, with a 667 Mhz frontside bus and sharing 2 MB of L2 between the two cores. The new chip has "four times the performance-per-Watt of its existing 2.8GHz LV Xeon CPU", not surprising given how slow and power inefficient those CPUs were. While this looks like a move to make AMD shares continue yesterday's tendency, it looks like Intel is starting to catching up?"

illeism writes to tell us The Register is reporting that Sony and NEC are planning on merging their optical drive divisions. From the article: "Sony will be the bigger of the two stakeholders in the joint venture. It will own 55 per cent of Sony NEC Optiarc, to NEC's 45 per cent. Indeed, the JV will be run by Sony staffer Shinichi Yamamura, currently deputy president of Sony's Video Business Group."

20Pfhor7 writes "The English High Court has ordered Gizmondo Europe to be liquidated, according to The Register. Looks like parent company Tiger Telematics' funding plans haven't gone according as they'd hoped, and it may have to sell off its Gizmondo USA operation." From the article: "Tiger said it was considering its own future in the light of the High Court verdict, and of the liquidation of its game studios in Sweden and Manchester, England. For starters, it's now able to eliminate $72m of the $90m liabilities recorded on its balance sheet as of 30 September 2005. It said it was pondering the sale of the whole company, parts of it, or elements of the intellectual property it owns, 'including patents and game rights, and continuing operations in the USA'."

Spad writes "The Register is reporting that the Xbox360 is likely to remain scarce well into the spring, citing component shortages and a lack of manufacturing capacity. In an interview with USA Today, Circuit City said that due to the shortages they won't be promoting the console, as there's no point throwing resources at a product it can't sell. Microsoft had hoped to ship 2.75m consoles in the first three months, but are currently well short of that mark, having shipped a mere 600,000 units since its launch two months ago." Supply issues continue to harm the system's sales, moving back the Australia launch of the console until late March. Update: 01/27 15:19 GMT by Z : Despite these setbacks, Next Generation reports that Microsoft expects to ship their goal by the end of their fiscal year.