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found at The Tech Report:

http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/2005q2/opteron- x75/index.x?pg=1/

Yeah, but it's all windows, windows, windows. Sadly, the same is true for the Tech-Report.

I did not say that added stability was actual but if you want to see some references to chip set related problems okay.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q270715/
http://www.overclockers.com/tips59/
http://www.tech-report.com/news_reply.x/929/
http://www.beowulf.org/archive/2002-October/008407 .html
http://pcbuyersguide.com/hardware/motherboards/VIA -Problems.html

I do not think that any of these problems are current but they did or do exist. While Intel motherboards are almost never the fastest or most feature rich they do tend to be super stable. I like AMD. I plan on using AMD in my next server and I use use AMD at home for most of my boxes. I do not think that AMD is any less stable than Intel but that the combination of an Intel CPU and motherboard has a track record of stability that AMD + a non AMD chipset lacks. If you read my post you would understand that I am saying AMD needs to make a chipset and motherboard so it like Intel can be a one stop shop. There motherboards should be reference boards. Not the fastest, not the most cutting edge, but super stable.

There is a section of the server market where stablity is the number one metric and an Intel CPU on an Intel Motherboard has earned the reputation as the ultimate in stablity in the x86 market. If you want to see really stable look past the x86 to the Sparc and Power lines. For stability they make the x86 look like... Well the x86.

But if you're naive about the net and you go online maybe once a month...then you're a raw piece of meat in a pool full of sharks.

I am one of those naive that really don't have a clue what hardware review sites to trust. My comfort is that I am probably far from alone, in this matter.

To assist me and other naives(sp?), please join this silly poll and review the following sites (regarding credibility) with a scale ranging from 1 to 10, where 1 is "No credibility at all" and 10 is "Perfect credibility, these guys wouldn't post a biased review for world domination":

About PC Hardware Reviews
Ace's Hardware
Anandtech
Ars Technica
Beyond 3D
Cnet Reviews
Dan's Data
Dev Hardware
Extremetech
Firingsquad
[H]ard|OCP
Hardware Analysis
Hardwarecentral
Hardwarezone
IT Reviews
OcPrices
Overclockers.com
ProCooling.com
The Tech Report
The Tech Zone
Tom's Hardware
TrustedReviews
Viperlair
Xtreme Resources

If you know only a few of them, give your opinion on those.

Maybe someone with the right facilities could set up an independent poll?

I'm positive. I rarely encode over 192kbps VBR these days, but i recall i tried it with 320kbps files and they were indistinguishable to me. Only once i encountered listeneable artifacts (with classical music, Bach), and it was little glitches on high-pitch sounds. Though i think the unit was clipping.

The headphones output of the thing (Sony MZ-R70, an oldie) drived headphones nicely, with good bass which is usually my beef with portable audio. As a line-out driving a preamp, it sounded excellent.

You do not have to patent an invention.

But in this case you risk that someone else patents your invention and threatens to sue you over your own ideas - even if you published them before the patent was filed.

Sound ridiculous? It has happened in a prominent case.

Well, something close was made and produced commercially with the Kenwood label for a couple of years on CD-ROM drives. Zen Research developed what they called "True-X" technology which was their attemp to help debunk all the ridiculous leap-frog marketing of touted drive speeds which we all know was, at the time, less fact than fiction. Very few drives actually reached their advertised speeds and even fewer could actually sustain those claimed speeds over the entire surface of the disc. "True-X" technology developed by Zen research basically took the one laser and split it into multiple beams that would read different tracks of the disc, effectively keeping transfer rates consistent across the entire disc. Having owned several of them, I can testify to the superior speeds they offered over other typical drives of the day, reliability of the units themselves aside. While they still never seemed to actually sustain their advertised speeds either, they were much closer to actual advertised speeds than everything else on the market, and by a long way! Old reviews: http://tech-report.com/reviews/2000q3/kenwood72x/i ndex3.x http://geek.com/hwswrev/hardware/cdrom/kw52xcd.htm Granted all reading and writing was done on one side of the disc, but I wouldn't be surprised if we see that same approach utilized in products in the future since as the ammount of data per disc keeps going up and up, the time taken to read/write that data will as well barring different technical approaches such as your suggested dual head drives. I can speculate at possible reasons why we haven't seen muti-head/sided drives en masse to date, but as I am not in the field, it is just that, speculation. I would imagine that you would effectively almost double the manufacturing costs? I would see split optical methods as a much more realistic and cost effective solution rather than increasing the number of read/write heads. For all I know though, current drives could already be using variations of this method already, but judging from benchmarks of drives I have owned since, that is highly unlikely as the myth of "claimed" drive speeds seems to just be continuing its legacy of hype and half-truths. I am but an egg...

Mine is the MZ-R70 (blue model), which has remote, recording capabilty (from line or digital), all aluminium casing and built as a tank. The only feature missing is USB-recording, but i usually plug it to my CD deck and let it cut the tracks automatically ("Synchro-REC"). I bought it second hand a couple of years ago and it's still going strong.

Here's a nice review for it.

It can also play for more than 11 hours with a single AA rechargeable.

You're comparing how products perform under a specific test that you have devised. (which ideally, is similar to your production environment).

Tuning can have a dramatic difference in performance, and unless you're familiar with all of the products involved, it's impossible to get the best performance out of each one.

The original poster is talking about where one of the systems has been modified so it is not a default install, and specifically customized before being sent to the testor, so that they will perform better. (like with ATI's Quake 'optimization').

As another example, there were some folks trying to get higher rankings in SETI@home, who would return bogus results -- as that was faster than actually performing the calculations. If someone knows that the results won't be checked for accuracy (or can't), and only for time, they can boost their rankings dramatically.

• http://www.3dcenter.de/artikel/2001/10-24_a.php
• http://tech-report.com/etc/2001q4/radeon-q3/index. x?pg=1

And to stop this guessing, here is proof:
http://tech-report.com/onearticle.x/6278

Out of the blue, he heard from Gabe Newell, the managing director of Valve Software, based in nearby Bellevue, Wash. Valve is developing what gaming experts anticipate will be a blockbuster video game, Half-Life 2, but it is also creating an online distribution network that it calls Steam. Because of Mr. Cohen's expertise in just that area, Valve offered him a job. He moved to Seattle and started work in October.

"So perhaps this Pentium 4 architecture with its ridiculously deep pipeline wasn't such a great idea after all?"

It is not that deep pipeline is bad in itself; the point is, the decision to build the pIV that way was slaved to the use of MHZ as a marketing tool. That, in itself, drove the chip design in a way that essentially banned it from the laptop market, which in turn drove the design of the pentium-m , a.k.a. Centrino.

Now Intel itself is at a fork in the road, because Prescott is also geared towards higher frequencies, which means it will probably be hotter still.
Now, I do not know how much money Intel sunk in the prescott design, but if it is serious in building this new Centrino derivative processor, all this money will be washed away; and if Intel tries to keep this processor one step behind Prescott in performance, it risks a royal Chewing up by AMD.

UltraSparc IV: 66 million transistors
Pentium IV Prescott: 125 million transistors
Power4: 170 million transistors

So how many transistors are in the TR-1?

4

For everything else, there's vacuum tubes. (Or diodes, depending on your radio set.) :-)

Look at the numbers, and read the benchmarks.

You'll find that with the same memory (DDR200) a single opteron has higher memory bandwidth than the PIV and that moreover this bandwidth scales linearly in MP settings with the number of processors, whereas the Xeon's remains constant.

AMD calls this hypertransport.

The 200 dollar video card became midrange when the top GPUs passed CPUs in total transistors.

"All told, NV40 weighs in at 222 million transistors, roughly double the count of an ATI Radeon 9800 GPU and well more than even the largest desktop microprocessor. To give you some context, the most complex desktop CPU is Intel's Pentium 4 Prescott at "only" 125 million transistors. Somewhat surprisingly, the NV40 chip is fabricated by IBM on a 0.13-micron fabrication process, not by traditional NVIDIA partner TSMC." source: The Tech Report

In any case, no language is fixed.

French comes pretty close to being fixed. The French government is very protective of their language. Does anyone have a link for when they banned the use of the term "hard drive'?

I have the link for when they banned e-mail.

LK

There are fundamental problems with all of these types of devices-- they 1) don't let the body handle momentum naturally and 2) don't stimulate the vestibular system in a way that is consistent with the visual or proprioceptive (the body's sense of where its limbs are) cues.

1) Momentum: On a 2-D treadmill, the omni-directional treadmill is supposedly fast enough that it allows for running. But when you are running and then change direction quickly, your body will lean into the turn to counter its momentum. Doing this on the treadmill will make you fall over. Someone once described it as "running on a slippery ice cube".

2) Vestibular cues: Our body can sense motion even without visuals or body movements. This is why some flight simulators have motion platforms [://www.simlabs.arc.nasa.gov/vms/motionb.html]. One post above said that the treadmill should reduce motion sickness because it provides body motions as well as visuals. But a treadmill doesn't cue the vestibular system. One theory of motion sickness is that it results from a mismatch of visual and vestibular cues. In the back seat of a car, your visual cues say you are still (relative to the inside of the car) but the vestibular system says you are moving. Similarly in a IMAX theater or while playing an FPS on a big screen, your visuals say you are moving but your vestibular system says you are still. Knowing how you are moving is critical for maintain balance and even surviving. The mismatch in visual and vestibular cues interferes with your ability to balance, and that's why dizziness results.

Luckily, one can fool the vestibular system, much as we can fool the visual system. Techniques include "wash-out" on motion platforms, electrical stimulation, and Redirection. Wash-out is where the motion platform moves the user to simulate the virtual motion, but then sneaks her back to the center of the room at an acceleration that is below what her vestibular system can detect. The shifting tiles look like a fabulous idea, and I wonder if one could implement a form of wash-out on those tiles.

Links

• Nasa Ames VMS motion simulator
• http://www.simlabs.arc.nasa.gov/vms/motionb.html

  Sphere http://www.vr-systems.ndtilda.co.uk/sphere1.htm2-D treadmills

  Omni directional treadmill http://www.movesinstitute.org/darken/publications/ ODT-UIST97.pdf

  Torus treadmill (great video) http://intron.kz.tsukuba.ac.jp/vrlab_web/torustrea dmill/torustreadmill_e.html

  Redirection http://www.cs.unc.edu/~eve/rdw/

One more thing, the problem with, as one post suggested, implementing VR in a huge wide open space (like a desert) is tracking. The computer needs to know where your head is and in which direction you are looking, very accurately and quickly, so it can draw the virtual scene from your perspective. By accurately, I mean with millimeter precision, and by quickly I mean it must update the images within tens of milliseconds of your head moving. If you focus your eyes on your figure at arms length, then rotate your head right and left, the reflex that moves your eyes to keep them locked on your finger is called the VOR (vestibular ocular reflex). It can react to head movements in 10 milliseconds.

When there's Half Life 2 and ATI.

Not just Intel, AMD did the same thing back when the first athlons came out.
They aren't ripping the customer off. The customer decides they will pay X amount of $ for Y performance. The chip dealer agrees to sell you a chip guaranteed for that performance. You got exactly what you paid for, if you happen to get something that is potentially better, consider yourself lucky.
There are a number of reasons companies do this.
- If their yields skew a little towards the high end, they may run out of mid-level chips to meet demands, so they sacrifice some of the high-end ones to meet the difference.
- Quality. Remember those old 5 1/4" floppys, some were double sided, some were single sided. You just put a notch in the single sided floppy and you had instant double sided. 99% of the time it was fine, but the other 1% you could have data errors or bad sectors on that other side.
- Mass Production. Its cheaper to have one design and disable the unneeded/untested parts. 64-bit is on existing prescott chips just disabled. Does it work 100%? maybe, maybe not. Intel may not have been comfortable with it, so its disabled until they do more testing. The only reason its there is because its potentially cheaper to just flip a switch and turn it on if the design is good.

If by reliable components you mean reliable powersupplies, there are a few brands which are well known to be high quality and reliable.

Antec is considered to be the top end for reliability and performance. They contain seperate transformers for the different voltage rails. I have 3 Antec powersupplies in my computers. All have worked great.

Enermax is another maker of very beefy powersupplies. I've got one and haven't had a problem with it.

There's bad news, though. 50% premium? No. Try 200%, if you're used to those shitty $30 powersupplies. A 380W Antec will set you back somewhere in the region of $90. It's worth it, though. Cooler powersupply, cooler system, increased stability due to lower temperature and solid voltage.

Some reviews at Tech-report and AnandTech should give you some baselines to look at.

The feature side of the equation is a lot easier to handle, as Intel has lavished all the features a techie could dream about on the new chipsets. High-Definition audio, Matrix RAID, a new bus with a bright future, and an 8GB per second bidirectional graphics slot are a few of those features that come to mind.

Example: two SATA drives RAID-0: Write Speed: 2x, Read Speed: 2x RAID-1: Write Speed: 1x, Read Speed: 2x

Somewhere in this story, I found a post with a a link that explains this is a software problem:
Notice that they're quick to point out the problem isn't likely a hardware issue. There should be plenty of bandwidth on the AGP bus, but graphics chip makers don't seem to have written their drivers to handle transfers from AGP cards to main memory properly.

Then they run some tests and conclude:
That means even if you can render high-quality images at 30 frames per second, you won't be able to get them out of the graphics card at anything near that rate.

CD Sales were still rising in 1999 and 2000. IIRC, 2000 is their 'record year' for sales and profit which coincides nicely with the height of the Napster phenomenon. 2001 was the first year their sales dropped, and they then reported it as 'due to piracy'. 2001 interestingly saw only a 4.1% drop in sales revenue despite a 10.3% drop in units sold.

That's right, thanks to their price fixing they not only didn't drop prices to compete, they raised prices in a recession and then blamed piracy for their losses.

File-sharers after all, were a convenient boogeyman to keep investors from pushing for actual competition.

One wonders if they'll be pressured to keep up the attack on their scapegoat while their numbers continue to rise.

Sorry to reply again. Just wanted to thank you actually. A quick google after about 5 mins revealed this.

You are 100% correct although it was comparing with WinME I doubt 98 will be much different. An interesting note is Win2k is WinXP are the same in performance.

That is the Rome MP3 player. Tech Report Review

In the good old days, a problem encountered by one console gamer would likely be replicated by others. This, however, is not the case anymore. Dual-layer DVDs are known to cause problems on both consoles that facilitate them - X-Box and Playstation 2. Unfortunately, these problems don't affect everybody, so the reviewers could've just assumed that they were the unlucky ones.

Tech Report stolen story

And modded "interesting" at that...you don't even need a benchmark to understand why a 1GHz Ezra isn't as fast as an AMD K6/2-550. On an Ezra, the FPU runs at half the speed of the CPU. The Nehemiah(sp?) doesn't have that handicap. Even so, instructions like cmov haven't been implemented.

Here's an old review. The VIA processors aren't built for speed; they're built for low power consumption. In that department, they're great. They're also relatively cool, temperature-wise.

I've got a machine based on a 1GHz Ezra; it's really not as bad as it sounds. Not a stellar machine, but it's got better performance than the K6-2 it replaced (but not a whole helluva lot better, especially when there's lots of floating-point math involved, for the reason stated above) and it doesn't require insane cooling techniques.

I was burned by these drives. When it happened, I received the full PR bull from IBM. In deciding to purchase those drives (and my first foray into building a workstation myself), I relied on information attesting to how great the drives were from Tom's Hardware site. After purchasing, installing, and using the drives for a few months, using the drives to back up to each other, the first drive failed with the often mentioned screech of death. As soon as that happened, I shut down and made plans to backup drive #2. Installed drive #3 after setting it up on another computer, and booted up. During the backup from drive #2 to drive #3, wtf? drive #2 fails. (No analysis please, read the Tech-Report posts in the links below prior to offering analysis).

Many months of recent work, plus several years of archived work from earlier computers down the drain.

After that experience, and the info I learned from Tech-Report and Inquirer, and Storage Review and elsewhere, it became abundantly clear that there were problems with the drives. And after the full press runaround by IBM, I learned my lesson. I have the article numbers from Tech-Report embedded in my mind. No bookmarks are necessary.

Did it become abundantly clear to the tech review sites? Some sites, it seems, are more equal than others (mandatory Planet of the Apes ref). Some sites correctly posted about the problems, even on their earlier glowing articles. Other sites either ignored the issue, or just don't have the time to look at old articles. But they were still using the 75 GXP and 120 GXP drives in the gear they were using to benchmark other hardware. I pointed this out to some, and most changed their setups, and one site owner actually told me that hardware is expensive, and he couldn't afford to buy new drives to replace the drives.

I also pointed this out to Tom's Hardware. What did I get the first time I pointed this out to other sites? A response, and in every case but one (drives are too expensive), they added a disclaimer to their reviews, or they changed their testing setup. What did I get from Tom's Hardware the first time? Silence. The second time? Silence. The third time? Silence. The fourth time...get the picture?

Some sites can do a decent job of reviewing hardware, and be critical of hardware when it counts, without worrying about biting the hand that feeds them free review hardware. They usually do this without trashing the hardware too severely, saying it's a "good choice" for limited uses, but this other hardware "may be a better choice"...you know the drill if you've seen enough sites. The problem is the newbies don't, and they rely on what they read (like I did, and like others I know did) to heavily influence their purchasing decisions.

Consumer Reports buys everything they test to remove any bias issues. With all the millions Tom's Hardware guide has made, shouldn't Tom's Hardware be purchasing hardware they test instead of possibly softballing and sticking their head in the sand while their readers make critical buying decisions based on their reviews?

Don't take my word for it. Look at the Tech-Report links in the slashdot story above, and look at their links to other sites. Check the story dates. This was all over the news and the web by the time my second link to Tech-Report hit the web. Now go and check Tom's Hardware on this issue. A year after the first Tech-Report story hit, I saw nothing on Tom's Hardware. I'd be surprised if there's anything there now on it. If there is, check the date. See how long it takes for Tom's Hardware to reveal the truth.

Now the Tom's Hardware fanboys with mod points can mod away. In the meantime, those newer to building their first systems should read my post and use it as a dose of reality, and keep it in mind when reading future articles on hardware review sites. Not to disbeli

I was burned by these drives. When it happened, I received the full PR bull from IBM. In deciding to purchase those drives (and my first foray into building a workstation myself), I relied on information attesting to how great the drives were from Tom's Hardware site. After purchasing, installing, and using the drives for a few months, using the drives to back up to each other, the first drive failed with the often mentioned screech of death. As soon as that happened, I shut down and made plans to backup drive #2. Installed drive #3 after setting it up on another computer, and booted up. During the backup from drive #2 to drive #3, wtf? drive #2 fails. (No analysis please, read the Tech-Report posts in the links below prior to offering analysis).

Many months of recent work, plus several years of archived work from earlier computers down the drain.

After that experience, and the info I learned from Tech-Report and Inquirer, and Storage Review and elsewhere, it became abundantly clear that there were problems with the drives. And after the full press runaround by IBM, I learned my lesson. I have the article numbers from Tech-Report embedded in my mind. No bookmarks are necessary.

Did it become abundantly clear to the tech review sites? Some sites, it seems, are more equal than others (mandatory Planet of the Apes ref). Some sites correctly posted about the problems, even on their earlier glowing articles. Other sites either ignored the issue, or just don't have the time to look at old articles. But they were still using the 75 GXP and 120 GXP drives in the gear they were using to benchmark other hardware. I pointed this out to some, and most changed their setups, and one site owner actually told me that hardware is expensive, and he couldn't afford to buy new drives to replace the drives.

I also pointed this out to Tom's Hardware. What did I get the first time I pointed this out to other sites? A response, and in every case but one (drives are too expensive), they added a disclaimer to their reviews, or they changed their testing setup. What did I get from Tom's Hardware the first time? Silence. The second time? Silence. The third time? Silence. The fourth time...get the picture?

Some sites can do a decent job of reviewing hardware, and be critical of hardware when it counts, without worrying about biting the hand that feeds them free review hardware. They usually do this without trashing the hardware too severely, saying it's a "good choice" for limited uses, but this other hardware "may be a better choice"...you know the drill if you've seen enough sites. The problem is the newbies don't, and they rely on what they read (like I did, and like others I know did) to heavily influence their purchasing decisions.

Consumer Reports buys everything they test to remove any bias issues. With all the millions Tom's Hardware guide has made, shouldn't Tom's Hardware be purchasing hardware they test instead of possibly softballing and sticking their head in the sand while their readers make critical buying decisions based on their reviews?

Don't take my word for it. Look at the Tech-Report links in the slashdot story above, and look at their links to other sites. Check the story dates. This was all over the news and the web by the time my second link to Tech-Report hit the web. Now go and check Tom's Hardware on this issue. A year after the first Tech-Report story hit, I saw nothing on Tom's Hardware. I'd be surprised if there's anything there now on it. If there is, check the date. See how long it takes for Tom's Hardware to reveal the truth.

Now the Tom's Hardware fanboys with mod points can mod away. In the meantime, those newer to building their first systems should read my post and use it as a dose of reality, and keep it in mind when reading future articles on hardware review sites. Not to disbeli

16 pages, but they're properly labeled and you can always jump to the conclusion.

Linkie

Tech-Report Prescott Review
accelenation Prescott Review
Ace's Hardware Prescott Review
Gamers Depot Prescott Review
HardTecs4U
Hexus
K-Hardware Prescott Review,
Legit Reviews Prescott Review
LostCircuits
MBReview Prescott Review
VR-Zone
X-bit labs Prescott Review
XtremeSystems Prescott Review
Extreme-tech Prescott Review

Why can't I buy a motherboards without a serial port, a parallel port, two ps/2 ports, and a line-in audio port?

You can, its called a ABIT legacy-free motherboard :)

I just hope that whatever IT is, is better than the last thing that was going to change the world. Although, the jury may still be out, I hardly think This little beauty has or will.

Yes, the AGP -> main memory transfer rate of most video cards is abysmally slow, because it's not something that's needed for gaming. Maybe newer cards have changed, but I don't see why they would. background article

AKA as "The only real skill we have is installing hardware and clicking on the 3DMark 2003 icon"-reviewers.

The world is full of them. The only decent sites seems to be The Tech Report and Ars Technica who actually try to test the gear on something other than WindowsXP.

They lost that suit, but I can understand that it may have destroyed them financially.

VIA chips that support "3DNow!" instructions instead of SSE instructions also run floating-point instructions at half the clock rate of the CPU.

VIA chips that support SSE instructions run floating-point instructions at the CPU clock rate. The "Nehemiah" CPU is the first of these. The Eden-N is a descendant of Nehemiah.

Here is VIA's press release on the Eden-N.

Benchmarks are the tool of the Devil, but here are a set from a review of the VIA EPIA M1000 motherboard.

Here is a review of subjective use of a 1 GHz Nehemiah.

Not to mention NVidia's earlier actions surrounding "driver enhancements" wouldn't make them suspicious.

Don't single out nVidia for this. You must have a short or selective memory. Remember the Quack 3 fiasco?

Bottom line is, any company's going to do whatever they think they can get away with to sell more cards. Doesn't make nVidia any more evil than ATI.

Toms Hardware
FiringSquad
Tech Report
Gamers Depot
Beyond 3d

Tech-Report did a review of various RAID controllers last year.

In addition, VIA's KT600 provides Serial-ATA RAID 1 (mirroring) capability through the southbridge. There are also a large number of nforce2 boards that use Silicon Images Sil 3112A controller.

Previously on slashdot there was a story about an article from The Tech Report that is really helpful regarding making a decision about IDE RAID card price/performance. From examining the article, it is obvious that 3Ware comes in with a better card for the money.

...IBM GXP deathstar drives, for many months to possibly even over a year, after everyone else exposed these drives for what they are, and after they were given a heads up on more than one occasion to pull their head out of the sand.

...IBM GXP deathstar drives, for many months to possibly even over a year, after everyone else exposed these drives for what they are, and after they were given a heads up on more than one occasion to pull their head out of the sand.

...IBM GXP deathstar drives, for many months to possibly even over a year, after everyone else exposed these drives for what they are, and after they were given a heads up on more than one occasion to pull their head out of the sand.

Any readers not already aware of the deathstar gxp drives designed and manufactured by IBM, and now a Hitachi/IBM product, should check out the links.

And immediately after reading the articles, should backup, get one or more new drives by another company who stands behind their products, and use the current deathstars as additional swap drives if you can afford losing the drive, or just dump it.

And you should seriously question any hardware articles you read from any tech review site who has intentionally kept their head in the sand on this issue, even after being alerted to the issue at the height of the storm.

Are you listening, t**?

It can automatically encrypt data. And it can "compress" the data physically (as opposed to logically) by burning smaller pits using "GigaRec".

One pressumes that you can't actually read such discs in the vast majority of CD drives out there, so this isn't going to be that useful a feature. Shame, as you could presumably fit more than two hours of VCD-quality MPEG1 on a disc this way (80% more data, a normal disc would only allow about an hour and twenty minutes.), more than enough for the vast majority of movies.

Hm? Both. The headline only mentions the compression, while the article text mentions both - note that he talks about how this drive magically squeezes a GB of data on a 700 MB disc.

It's both. RTFA.