Evening Tech Reading - tech
(hx) 02:33 AM CET - Nov,19 2002
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- Last Great Meteor Show for Decades Tonight - Tuesday morning may be
the last chance until 2099 to see a truly spectacular meteor shower,
scientists say. You'll have to be up and outside by
4:30 a.m. CST (around 5:30 a.m. EST or 10:30 UT) to see it though.
In ordinary years, sky gazers watching a meteor shower might see about ten
meteors per hour. This year, however, scientists expect a full-fledged meteor
storm. Astronomers at the European Space Agency (ESA) are predicting that
Europeans might see 3,000 per hour. Night owls in North America can expect to
see a few hundred an hour, estimate. Visit NASA's web site for estimates of
best viewing time by location,
http://leonid.arc.nasa.gov/estimator.html
- Pirated Harry Potter DVD debuts in Malaysia at $3 - Available on
the
street at just $3, pirated DVD versions of "Harry Potter and the Chamber
of Secrets" went on sale in Malaysia the weekend the movie made its worldwide
debut.
- Microsoft loses 120 $ per sold Xbox - Among Microsoft's other
businesses, the home and entertainment division, which includes the Xbox games
console,
lost $177m in the quarter on revenues of $505m. Salomon Smith Barney
estimates it loses about $120 on each console it sells.
- Nvidia GeForceFX(NV30) Coverage -
Tom's Hardware |
AnandTech |
TheRegister |
Beyond3D |
NVNews |
HardOCP
|
FiringSquad |
Guru3D |
Bjorn3D |
Hexus. In addition, NVIDIA has also released
four Demos and
two
Videos for the GeForce FX launch.
- Nextel juices up BlackBerry device -
The $500 BlackBerry 6510 is the first pager of its kind that can use
cellular telephone networks powered by the Integrated Dispatch Enhanced
Network (IDEN) standard, which Nextel uses in its cell phone network.
BlackBerry already makes pagers that use the world's most popular cell phone
standard, Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) as well as a
proprietary network run by Cingular Wireless. The 6510 is the first BlackBerry
pager to feature "Direct Connect," which turns phones into walkie-talkies that
can communicate instantly over long distances. The pager will be available in
select areas starting Dec. 2 and nationally beginning January, according to
Greg Santoro, a Nextel Communications vice president.
- Files reveal how FBI hounded chess king - He was the ultimate cold
warrior, humbling the mighty Soviet chess establishment through his own genius
and a pounding ambition to be the greatest player in the world.
Now 59, Bobby Fischer has become a reclusive, anti-Semitic expatriate.
Efforts to interview him for this article were unsuccessful. He has been seen
in Japan, Hungary and the Philippines. In a Philippine radio interview on
Sept. 11, 2001, he applauded the terrorists' attacks and said America should
be "wiped out." Chess experts have analyzed Fischer's games in astonishing
depth. Even the offhand games he played blindfolded have been exhumed and
published like lost works of literature.
- Wrist PDA with PALM OS - Ever since the comic book hero Dick Tracy
first strapped on his amazing wrist radio six decades ago, science fiction
fans have eagerly anticipated the day when such fantastic gadgetry
might become reality. Now, thanks to the
Wrist PDA with PALM OSR, their wait is finally over.
- HP iPaq h1910 Preview - Old-timers in the Pocket PC game aren't
giving up the value market to newcomers Dell and ViewSonic without a fight.
The h1910, the first PDA from now-merged HP and Compaq to depart from the
traditional iPaq exterior, comes at a nonthreatening $300. The smallest Pocket
PC PDA we've seen,
the h1910 measures a mere 4.5 inches by 2.8 inches by 0.5 inches and weighs
only 4.2 ounces. But it was the display that really won us over. On the
preproduction unit we played with, the 16-bit (65,000-plus colors), 240x320
backlit display produced vibrant colors and crisp images.
- Ricoh Announces 4x DVD+RW/+R Drives and Media -
The new
internal 4x speed DVD/CD drive boasts the highest DVD recording speed and
allows 4.7GB of data to be burned onto a 4x DVD+R disc and a 4x DVD+RW disc in
less than 15-minutes. Ricoh also announced its entry into the notebook
computer market with an industry first low-powered, slim-line drive. Ricoh has
scheduled to ship drives and media during 1Q of 2003.
- AMD runs 64-bit MS Windows OS on K8 -
AMD is showing off a prototype 64-bit Windows OS running on its upcoming
64-bit Opteron processors. OK, so it's jam tomorrow, but the fact that AMD is
showing this in public means that tomorrow is not too far away. The demo
units can be seen in action at Comdex Fall, Las Vegas which opens for business
today, and at Supercomputing 2002, which also kicks off in Baltimore today.
- Over 70 million wireless gamers in the US by 2007 - According
to a new study from IDC, the number of total American unique wireless gamers will
climb from nearly 7 million in 2002 to 71.2 million in 2007.
- Agere demos 162Mbps wireless LAN chip - Wireless LAN
specialist Agere picked opening day at Comdex to announce prototype wireless
LAN chips capable of
transmitting data at 162Mbps in the 5GHz band occupied by emerging 802.11a
kit. That's three times faster than the theoretical maximum throughput of
current 802.11a equipment (54Mbps) or almost 15 times the theoretical top
speed of existing 802.11b kit (11Mbps).
- Who Needs a 2 Sheep Burner?! - CD Freaks' Future Proof made
pretty
interesting post on their
Clone CD forum
- NeroROBO -
NeroROBO is
designed for duplicators and NeroNET is a network-capable extension of Nero
burning ROM, which can be used in an IP-capable Intranet. The Nero AAC codec
is fully compliant with MPEG-2 AAC and MPEG-4 AAC, and features 16-448 Kbits/s
bit rate, constant and variable.
- LAME v3.93 - LAME
3.93 is out! This new version features: Bit allocation for pre-echo
control improved for single channel encodings; Substep noise shaping;
Optimizations by changing data structure; Noise shaping model 2 fix; Nspsytune
FIR filter clean up; Fix small psymodel bugs; Portability fixes for Tru64
UNIX; some fixes in the DLL; Fixes for channel scaling in mono mode; Some
optimizations and a faster log10 function; Some tag related fixes in the
direct show filter and in the ACM codec; Fixed a mono encoding bug found by
Justin Schoeman; Update to autoconf 2.53, rewrite some configure tests;
Determine gcc version even with gcc 3.1; Compile shared libs on BeOS (and
perhaps other arches); Ultrasparc switches for gcc 3.1; Portability fixes for
SunOS 4.x.;Some fixes for VBR.
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Updated:12:40 AM CEST Jun,21
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