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I doubt they're that dependent. According to their 2013 earnings (going back a year in light of the article), 26% of their sales are in Energy and Infrastructure, 21% in Electronic Devices (which also includes televisions, tablets, storage, etc.), 19% Community Solutions (I have no idea), and 20% Lifestyle Products & Services (Small appliances, air conditioners, small audio systems, etc.). Just because they're not highly visible overseas anymore doesn't mean they don't make a ton of crap for the home market.

Mod parent off-topic / irrelevant. TFA is about Toshiba's Blade X-gale connector / form factor, not about Mini SATA or Micro SATA. If you RTFA, you can see that they are distinct products in Toshiba's SSD lineup. Note the 'Custom' in the 'Connector' column for the ones that we are talking about, while the mSATA ones list 'mini SATA' as their interface.

Looks like PCI Express x1

This link on Toshiba's web site suggests that it is a new connector design. They call it "Custom", although the same page also suggests the interface is still SATA 3G.

They exist. Leave it to Toshiba.

They're also not so bright that my SO's keeps me up if she wants to stay awake longer.

Yes, I use the low watts type, at my bedside too. the best part is that are cool enough, that the lamp fall and stays on, it will not burn the carpet or the bed cloths.

But the potencial is high with more bright bulbs like this one from Toshiba that are as bright as 40watt incandecent bulbs, in Japan it costs about $90:
http://www.toshiba.co.jp/lighting/ecology/index.htm
The 100watt type are bulkier and cost $130. And the light was similar to the incandecent ones as I see them in the shop.

This was released by Toshiba nearly a year ago. See this

This is the one I'd go for. Toshiba press release: "Toshiba to Launch Innovative Rechargeable Battery Business" dated 11 December, 2007. From Toshiba press release to slashdot in under 10 months. Impressive! It's pretty much the same thing, all the specs are in there like voltage, capacity, size, weight.

These batteries are already available, for example see:
http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2008_09/pr2401.htm

This is a prototype of a *laptop version* of the battery.

And I wonder why they aren't selling an add-on card for desktops?

Here.

See you next week on Slashdot's "HD-DVD is dead" discussion.

Rather than speculating, you could read the press release. This isn't "The Cell"; it's the SpursEngine. Completely different design. Sits on a standard PCI-E bus. Draws 10-20W in prototype.

Aha. Press release with details of the SpursEngine chip here.

The article's image seemed to be borrowed from this page.
<br>Although Toshiba 4S reactor is really small,not small enough to fit the described in Next Energy News.

http://www.toshiba.co.jp/nuclearenergy/english/business/reactor/pdf/newabwr01.pdf

It's not lithium - according to the Toshiba Press Release, they completely changed almost every substance in the battery. They also say it has a nominal cell voltage of 2.4V.

Disclaimer: IAAEVE (I am an electric vehicle engineer), so my analysis is biased toward vehicle applications.

According to the specs on their own website, the energy density for their modules is about 50 watthours per kilogram (24V * 4.2Ah / 2.0kg). At 50 Wh/kg they're barely competing with lead-acid batteries, and competing quite poorly with Nickel-metal batteries, which are near 100 Wh/kg and have proven safety and durability in vehicle applications.

Modern Li-ion cells (the ones that aren't even remotely pushing the safety envelope) are over 200 Wh/kg.

The Toshiba press release (http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2007_12/pr1101.htm) has specs for the battery. The attached graphs (http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2007_12/1101/SCiB.pdf) show the gravimetric energy density to be greater than that of the NiMH batteries used for hybrid vehicles but less than that of lithium-ion batteries used for mobile devices, which explains why they are aiming this at the industrial market rather than laptops.

The Toshiba press release (http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2007_12/pr1101.htm) has specs for the battery. The attached graphs (http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2007_12/1101/SCiB.pdf) show the gravimetric energy density to be greater than that of the NiMH batteries used for hybrid vehicles but less than that of lithium-ion batteries used for mobile devices, which explains why they are aiming this at the industrial market rather than laptops.

There is link the article that states the nominal voltage for a module is 24V: http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2007_12/pr1101.htmlink to toshiba's website

You must be mistaking with your precious HD-DVD supplier Toshiba.. It's their benchmarks:
http://www.toshiba.co.jp/tech/review/2006/06/61_06 pdf/a03.pdf

I doubt that the licencing is that much ($20). If it was then surely someone would just stick vlc or mplayer in a box with a drive and sell it for $10.

Yes, but that would be "under the table." Wiki says $20/player while another source shows min $4/player for the DVD spec alone. MP3, JPG, VCD, etc. support each have their own fees.

Here's another article on fees: http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20050120A2004.html Quote: "Xinhua Online cited the China Audio Industry Association (CAIA) as indicating that China produces 60 million DVD players and exports 45-50 million of them a year, with the exported DVD players subject to a royalty charge of US$20 per player."

Not convinced. Current electric cars have ranges of about 200 miles. Do you want to drive more than 200 miles without a toilet break? The recharge time ( currently between 1-4 hours for most models ) is a bigger show stopper. I don't think the energy required to produce the batteries matter either. It is dwarfed by the amount of energy needed to make the other materials in the car. As far as chemicals are concerned it is again small comapred to the rest of the car, and more importantly, contained. Spare for accidents you can send a battery back for proper disposal. You quote environmental concerns of its production, but that is not unique to batteries. Do you expect the construction of hydrogen fuel cells and storage schemes to have no environmental impact? We don't even know how we would store it, let alone what environmental problems would be involved.

Now, for hydrogen, you have tonnes of problems. The infrastructure needed to distribute it is daunting, the energy conversion efficiency is much less than batteries, there still is no viable way to store it in sufficient densities at a low cost. Sure, maybe some future technology will improve hydrogen storage, but by the same argument improvements in battery technology will increase battery performance as well. As I mentioned before, energy density is not as much of a problem as the recharge time. In other news, Toshiba has made Li-ion batteries that charge to 80% within a minute http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2005_03/pr290 1.htm. The thing is, suitable battery technology already exists. The main obstacle to wide scale adoption of electric cars is not technology limits, but competition from petrol. With increasing Oil prices, decreasing supplies, global warming, and expected improvements in battery performance it is only a question of time for the scales to tip. Sure, if you just look at the car maybe ( and note the maybe ) hydrogen might win out. But if you start to factor in infrastructure, energy losses in production and transportation, batteries win hands down. We already have a power grid, we don't have a worldwide hydrogen distribution system. Hydrogen has its advantages. I'd expect the aviation industry to be interested ( hard to power an airliner on batteries or recharge it every 200 km), but for cars I doubt it can beat a good lithium based battery in any area except energy density, and quite frankly that is not all there is to it.

I would like to see DVDs, en masse, released in a dual layer setup, where layer 1 is standard DVD (for backward compatibility), and layer 2 is the HD-DVD version.

It'd be more than dual layer -- a typical DVD is already dual layer. There are both single and dual layer versions of HD-DVD, but it memory serves, the "second layer" is accessed by flipping the disc rather than changing laser focus.

OTOH, that's mostly details -- from a technical viewpoint, been demonstrated and could be produced -- and at some point, probably will be. The real reason it's not being done is almost certainly financial. To sell, this combined format would need to be competitive with normal DVDs, but the disc is undoubtedly more expensive to manufacture. They want the opposite: instead of selling you a single disc at a reduced profit margin, they'd rather sell you a DVD and then later sell you an HD-DVD of the same content -- both with inflated profit margins.

Given that it's technically feasible, chances are it'll happen eventually -- but I'd bet it happens only when the market for SD DVDs starts to shrink to the point that it no longer justifies producing them separately anymore.

Then, in October, Toshiba said we'd have to wait until July 2007.

Then, in October, Toshiba said we'd have to wait until July 2007.

The original iPod hard drives (from the 5 and 10 GB models) had a very short guaranteed run time. That wasn't a problem for the iPod as a music player, or for occasional file transfer, since the drive was turned off 90% or more of the time. OS X likes to write to the home directory frequently, though, so "Portable Home Directories" (as they were known at the time) had the potential to wear out the iPod's hard drive very quickly (a matter of weeks or months).

It turns out that the ACTUAL run time to failure for those drives was typically much longer than promised, so lots of folks have had success with using them as "live" drives. I have no idea what the specs on the current generation of iPod hard drives are, but I'd bet they're considerably more durable.

Hey, what do you know - Toshiba has published the specifications for the original 5GB iPod drive online:
http://www3.toshiba.co.jp/storage/english/spec/hdd /mk5002.htm#relia

That page claims a "product life" of "5 years or 20,000 POH (Power-On-Hours)". 20,000 hours is just over 2.25 years of continuous operation. Given that you can get a 2-year warranty for an iPod through AppleCare these days, that doesn't sound like a very good risk.

I don't happen to have a copy of the original spec sheet we got with the first-generation drives, but my recollection is that the quoted life span was much shorter - short enough that warranty returns for worn-out drives was a real concern if they were kept running all the time, even with the shorter warranties offered at the time (anybody else remember 90-day iPod warranties?).

Of course, for Flash devices (like those in the Shuffle and Nano) the lifetime is specified in terms of a certain number of write operations, rather than total time "turned on". The expected lifetime for an iPod Shuffle used as a home directory is probably very very long - dozens of years.

Not true.... I can't find the exact date that production started, but this says production of the CPU ("Emotion Engine") started in Fall of 99. PS2 launched in Japan in March 00, that's at least 4 months of production to get 700,000 units. Now, with a more complicated system, Sony is claiming to be able to build 150% of the units in 75% of the time?

Good reply with many good points. The only thing I would add is to also thinkn about SED displays. It's basically flat screen technology using pixel sized CRT's. So great black, motion, and thin as well. Am not sure about yields but seeing as Toshiba's SED released this year *starts* at 50", I'm not too worried.

http://www3.toshiba.co.jp/sed/eng/index.htm

I still the electricity is the way to go. At least then, the process would be:

Fuel->Generator->Power Grid->Car

Instead of

Fuel->Generator->Power Grid->Hydrogen Refinery->Transport->Car

Seems to me the first one will be much more efficient, especially when Toshiba's new Lithium batteries are available (in 2008 I heard). As long as it only takes a few minute to "recharge" your car, I'm sure range won't matter so much.

This is really great. Because it runs on methanol, it's going to be fairly affordable (at least for short trips to places without any electrical power and potentially very easy to refill - Methanol is also sold as "Wood Alcohol" at your local hardware store. The only real question is the concentration. Most DMFCs (Direct Methanol Fuel Cells) need the methanol to be watered down. The best that I've seen are 99.5% (it had to use a means of recycling the water produced, as the methanol feed can't be more than 70% for electrochemical reasons otherwise) and 20-30%, however in research one generally is trying for 10% at best (I've done 3 work terms of research in fuel cell technologies - as a chemist). Usually at such high concentrations the methanol starts to seep across the polymer membrane, and cutting the voltage. It's one of the big problems with DMFCs, as having to dilute the methanol means that the reservoir gets bigger and more inconvenient. So they might not be too keen to let people mix their own...

Toshiba's fuel cell news is a little old, still, it's great that they're finally getting it out and available for the public. I'm surprised though that they're using one with so many moving parts - I would think that a microfluidics approach would work too. But personally I'd love to take one apart to see how they have their membrane electrode assembly with its proton exchange membrane

The question is going to be whether, like some inkjet printers, others will be able to make cheaper versions of the refilling cartriges. After all, they're just holding methanol and water - not very dangerous, or explosive, and the flammability is fairly low - but drink it and you might go blind. Their expressed concern in the article is smoking and fuming when overheating, but unless it's 100% methanol, or the cell had a very high power output (with lots of heat being generated), I couldn't see it being a problem. Even in the lab I've never seen methanol smoke - it just boils or evaporates very quickly.

One question to those who know more about computers than me: how much power does an average laptop use? I'm curious to work out what kind of efficiency they're getting with their cells.

> a screen would have to show different images depending on the angle

In theory you might be able to do that, using the same sort of principle as lenticular animations, with a holographic lens. For some applications you could get away with only doing it in two dimensions, so you show up clearly to anyone lying on the ground looking up at you silouetted against the sky, or anyone looking down at you from a staircase, but not to anyone with eyes at normal head level. Slightly more plausibly, you can be hidden from one particular person whose movements you track (using your magic nano-cameras) and show the image needed for their viewpoint only.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~nad/pubs/IBC99-Dodgson.pd f
http://kagakukan.toshiba.co.jp/en/02visual/newtech 101.html
http://www.opticsexpress.org/ViewMedia.cfm?id=8665 4&seq=0

making song files incompatible with any portable player other than an iPod.

Format is detailed here in japanese. Could not find an english language equivalent. Does Toshiba even sell their HDD recorders outside Japan?

Toshiba has been involved in the nuclear industry for years already. This page

shows their list of delivered units dating back to 1959.

According to this table, Toshiba has been building nuclear power plants business since the 1960s, and is currently the largest nuclear plant supplier in Japan. I suspect that they're fairly qualified.

Toshiba is certainly more than a consumer electronics company. The bullet train is one of theirs for example. They have a big presence in thermal and hydro power generation and also nuclear pressure vessels and other components http://www3.toshiba.co.jp/power/index.htm (link to Toshiba Industrial & Power Systems).

I speculate the Westinghouse acquisition buys them the scale and expertise to be prime contractor on more projects rather than a component supplier or subcontractor. This would give them more of the revenue from any one project and bring them up to par with their capabilities in other power technologies.

How about this?

Blender, check. Last I heard, they were still working on the reactor side of their product lines.

By the end of Q1 2006 (or thereabouts), we expect to see shipments of Mercury Computer Systems' Dual Cell-Based Blades; Toshiba's comprehensive Cell Reference Set development platform; and of course the Sony PlayStation 3.

http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000943061481/ http://news.techwhack.com/2182/041013-toshiba-unve ils-a-laptop-with-hd-dvd-drive-to-showcase-technol ogy/

So... a 1x read-only HD DVD drive vs. Pioneer's BDR-101A which reads and writes and is faster than 1x. Oh, and it's only just been shown in the past 2-3 weeks. Bravo!

http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2005_06/pr080 1.htm

Fair enough, you got me. They talk about mass production, but they don't put any timetable out for when they'll ramp up production. For a press release directly from Toshiba, it's sorely lacking in details you'd think they'd want to tell the whole world about.

http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/hardware/ne xt-gen-dvd.ars/2 http://forum.ecoustics.com/bbs/messages/10381/1451 10.html

An Ars Technica article written by someone who failed economics, and a press release touting HD DVD replication hardware by a Swedish firm. Not exactly what I was hoping for...

How is there aren't sites like blu-ray.com that have pictures of tons of HD DVD hardware and media? Why is this stuff so hard to come across? It's almost like... it doesn't exist.

Public demos of a *laptop* HD DVD drive enough for you?

http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000943061481/
http://news.techwhack.com/2182/041013-toshiba-unve ils-a-laptop-with-hd-dvd-drive-to-showcase-technol ogy/

And for HD DVD-R media:

http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2005_06/pr080 1.htm

On replication issues:

http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/hardware/ne xt-gen-dvd.ars/2
http://forum.ecoustics.com/bbs/messages/10381/1451 10.html

Nevermind the Toshiba (not IBM/Hitachi) 1.8-inch hard drives had existed for quite some time before Apple made the iPod. Hell, IBM/Hitachi's Microdrive (later used in the Mini) had been out for years. No one else saw their potential, so prior to the iPod the best you could get was a Nomad, which used 2.5-inch hard drives. After all, capacity was everything, right? Apple took a huge risk on a completely new and unproven product and bought their remaining stock. What is "anti-competitive" here?

As for your last paragraph, Microsoft's "superior engineering"? Nevermind that Apple's entire history back to the Apple II (and the Wozniak-designed controllers) has been about superior engineering, and Microsoft's has always been about purchasing/licensing/controlling other software and making it "good enough", all the way back to Microsoft BASIC.

Just read this Toshiba press release entitled "Toshiba's New Rechargeable Lithium-Ion Battery Recharges in Only One Minute" .

Take special note of item #3 .

Highlights:
1) Excellent Recharge Performance
The thin battery recharges to 80% of full capacity in only a minute. Total recharge takes only a few more minutes.
2) High Energy Density
Small and light, the new battery offers a high level of storage efficiency. The prototype battery is only 3.8mm thick, 62mm high and 35mm deep and has a capacity of 600mAh.
3) Long Life Cycle
A prototype of new battery (a laminated lithium ion battery with 600mAh capacity) was discharged and fully recharged 1,000 times at a temperature of 25 degrees centigrade and lost only 1% of capacity during the test.
4) Temperature
The new battery operates well in extremes of temperature. It discharges 80% of its capacity at minus 40 degrees centigrade, against 100% at an ambient temperature of 25 degrees centigrade, and loses only 5% of capacity at temperatures as high as 45 degrees centigrade after 1,000 cycles. These characteristics assure the wide applicability of the battery as a power source for products as diverse as hybrid vehicles and mobile phones.
5) Eco-friendly Battery
The new battery can quickly store energy produced by locomotives and automobiles. This speedy and highly effective recharge characteristic of the battery will support CO2 reduction, as the battery can save and re-use energy that was simply wasted before.

This is a press release about MS and Toshiba partnering up to promote HD-DVD: http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2005_06/pr270 1.htm

From TFA: "...the companies signed a cross-licensing agreement to promote the exchange of innovations developed by each company."

So maybe MS is trading Longhorn licenses for HD-DVD licenses with Toshiba. This is interesting because Toshiba helped develop the PS3 cell processer (right?).

I agree about the chicken and egg thing. The HD-DVD Consortium (Toshiba, Sanyo, NEC and Memory Tech) needs a huge product launch to gain acceptance. The 360 is just the ticket for American acceptance. Only thing is that HD-DVD is denfinately a higher cost than DVD. MS wants a $300 price point to stay close to mass market levels. They're already losing money on the console, I'm sure they can't afford to add $50 or so for the hardware alone, let alone lisences.

I doubt toshiba is giving completely free lisences to MS. It's probably discounted and even then limited to a set number of units (say, 1.5 million). A lot of R&D went into making HD-DVD.

Even if they got free liscenes at launch they'd still have to pay for hardware. Think 35-40 for HD over 10-15 for DVD. DVD is cheap and MS just wants a foothold. Nintendo is breathing down their backs with a low cost alternative that parents trust and Sony has a whole country's support behind it (3% of japanese stated they were planning to get a 360). If MS delays launch for HD-DVD, they're going to have compete against a shit-storm of marketing hype from Sony and Nintendo. Those two companies are simply too competitive for MS to delay.

HD-DVD will not make and appearance this winter. because the cost is simply too great. I'm willing to bet though that they offer an upgrade path for early adopters.

Any electricity which can be used to generate hydrogen can now be stored in batteries with a higher energy density than compressed hydrogen gas and yes, with negligible degradation. Go check out the state of the art in battery technology.

e.g.
http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2005_03/pr290 1.htm
http://www.sionpower.com/

You'll see them in mobile phones and laptops first. They'll make it into electric vehicles in a few years.

Generating electricity to produce hydrogen to produce electricity is, well, stupid.

Would you object to owning this as your next automobile? The future is bright, the future's electric. Remember you heard it here first.

How about 1min recharge li-nano batteries by Toshiba?

I believe this was featured here on /.
http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2005_03/pr290 1.htm

Seems like bullshit but perhaps if they incorporated this 3d display technology (as reported here) or at least have those screens on the market in a bundle with the console at launch there could be an outside chance Nintendo is this crazy. If those screens work well it could be an amazing experience, but many forces would be working against Nintendo even if they did adopt this 3D display technology. The commercialization of virtual interaction and 3d display? It certainly would fit the name of Revolution.

We're not talking holograms here

When reading a press release like this, it seems to be a common slip of the imagination to first assume a projected hologram instead of just a clever 2D trick.

It's not the reader's fault sometimes though. Marketing departments need to stop calling this kind of technology a "3D display" becuase it is not. They are a 2D display which do some fancy tricks to create the illusion of 3D within it's display perimiter.

And we are misled even further by bad examples. The images at the bottom of the page on the Toshiba site are not demonstrative of the technology being announced becuase they show 3D surfaces extending outside the perimiter of the display component, which is impossible unless you're projecting an actual hologram outside the surface of the display.

With this technology, the ray of light coming to your eye has to come from the display component, so it would be impossible to have something floating above it as is demonstrated in these pictures at the bottom of the page.

The images at the top of that page however are quite possible, since none of the 3d surfaces extend beyond the perimiter of the display.

The problem with these displays is that you won't get the 3D effect from an wide viewing angle because it will be ruined as soon as the "projected" 3D object hits the display's edge and tries to go outside of it. The more "depth" you add, the more likely this problem is to arise.

It's probably a fair guess that whoever made the images at the bottom of that page did not fully understand the technology or felt that a slight bit of misdirection would be harmless and boost the hype. But then again, that's marketing 101. =P

Here's a clue: you'll need an LM1881 sync separator, a 4053 bilateral switch {or preferably something with more bandwidth}, and either a PIC microcontroller or a stack of TTL chips. The 1881 has an output which tells you when the field starts, and another output which pulses on every line. You need to count off 20 or so lines {look at the picture signal with an oscilloscope to see where the real picture starts}, during which time you must output a dummy black level with artificial hsync pulses. {You can get a clean hsync output from the 1881; use this to turn on a transistor and pull the black level down to 0V. Your dummy black needs to be as close as possible to true black, otherwise the very top and bottom of the screen will be some shade of grey. But you'll have thought of that and wired in a potentiometer to adjust it}. Switch over to the unadulterated picture signal for about 270 lines. Then go back to your dummy black for the remaining {22.5 or thereabouts} lines of picture.

If you need adjustability, use a PIC with a decent number of I/O lines. Or try using an open-drain I/O line with a capacitor to 0V ..... pull it low to discharge the capacitor; let it float, allowing the cap to charge through a pot; and time how long it takes to begin reading high. The paddle controller inputs on the Atari 2600 worked exactly like that.

Or, you can get a proper time base corrector from a professional video equipment supplier. It'll probably cost you more than buying a load of original videos, though ..... :)