Friday Evening Tech Reading - tech
(hx) 12:38 AM CET - Nov,29 2003
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- Cyber-pirate back to harass Hollywood -
A hacker famed for defeating Hollywood in a cyber-piracy trial has
rejected allegations he has illegally unlocked a code that enables
unauthorised copying of music files from the internet. Jon Johansen, a
20-year-old Norwegian computer programmer who was cleared of piracy charges in
January, has developed a source code for copying music and posted it on the
internet less than a week before he is due to appear in an Oslo appeals court.
Johansen's code allows users of Apple Computer Inc's new iTunes online music
store to break digital rights management (DRM) technology that prevents people
copying files downloaded from the service. On an internet site named "So Sue
Me", Johansen said critics had "failed to understand that by buying into DRM
they have given the seller complete control over the product after it's been
sold", calling them "clueless about copyright law".
- Launch agreed for Euro tech-crime team -
The agency,
dubbed the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA), will
co-ordinate information sharing between European member states on cyber-crime
issues. ENISA, which will begin operations in January 2004, will work with
business and the public to minimise the effects of viruses, hacking and online
surveillance, and collaborate with industry to promote more constant security
standards.
- ABO aims to out-compress JPEG - A Singapore company claims to have
developed
a technique of compressing files far smaller than what conventional methods
can achieve and what's more, to do it without losing information. The
method, dubbed Adaptive Binary Optimization (ABO), can help hospitals compress
and manage medical images, aid film distributors archive and transmit movies
and even make faxes and scans smaller for faster travel across networks, claim
its makers.
- Windows 95, 98 get system restore - Waycam Technologies, a
Lincolnshire-based security specialist, has
launched a set of data recovery tools that protect PCs from accidental or
malicious data loss by creating a "protected area" on the system hard
drive and using it to record all changes made by the user. Waycam's
Goldensoft’s Recovery Series is designed for small businesses and home users
who want to add another layer of protection to their data. The system is
similar to that provided by Windows XP's System Restore utility, which allows
a PC's configuration to be "rolled back" in case a conflict arises, but
Waycam's utility can be used with all versions of the Microsoft OS made after
Windows 95.
- Sony's all-in-one PSX console available on Dec 13 in Japan - Sony
Corp confirmed that it would start selling the "PSX" - an all-in-one
entertainment system that includes a hard disk drive (HDD) and DVD recorder
plus a PlayStation 2 console -
on December 13 in Japan.
- China Gets Playstation 2 Soon - Earlier today, Sony Computer
Entertainment announced that
China will receive Playstation 2 units starting December 20th. The machine
will sell for 1,988 Yuan ($240) in China, unlike the $179 price in the United
States, the company stated in a report. Two games will be available at launch
and have a price of 168 Yuan. The two launch titles were not revealed.
- Xbox makes gains as Japanese price cut bites - Microsoft's
Xbox has had its most successful week to date this year in Japan,
capturing almost seven per cent market share following a price cut to the
hardware and the launch of a Project Gotham Racing 2 bundle deal. Although
that market share still represents well under 8000 units sold in total, it's
still a massive gain for the console - which generally languishes at under one
per cent market share in this territory. The price cut which caused the boost
was a drop from €129 Euro to 113 Euro.
- Casio using a-Si technology for OLED displays -
Casio has used amorphous silicon (a-Si) technology to produce an OLED
(organic light-emitting diode) display at 30% lower production costs than
required by LTPS (low-temperature poly-silicon) OLEDs, the Nikkei Sangyo
Shimbun reported yesterday. The company has conducted test production of a
2.1-inch, 260,000-color active-matrix (AM) OLED panel of 160×128-pixel
resolution and only 1.2mm thickness. It plans to launch large-size OLED TVs in
2006 or 2007.
- The Elta 8883 MP4 DivX player -
The Elta
8883 MP4 supports advanced compression methods of the MPEG-4 Advanced
Profile, which are partly used by DivX Pro and newer versions of Xvid: Global
Motion Compensation (GMC), Motion compensation for quarterpixels (QPel),
B-Frame support, Post-processing, Data Partition (DP), Error Resync Marker
(RM), Due to the fact that the chips from Sigma and ESS do not support all
these features, Elta is using a different, but currently unknown chip for
their drives. It supports media of type CD, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD, DVD-R, DVD-RW,
DVD+R and DVD+RW and among support for playback of DivX and Xvid, it is
capable of playing the usual formats like Audio-CD, MP3, OGG, DVD, VCD, SVCD
and even DVD-Audio. The only thing missing is SACD.
- Coolermaster Premium Thermal Compound - Bryan at Overclockers Club
has completed
a review on the Coolermaster Premium Thermal Compound. "We've taken a
look at several different thermal compounds over the last couple years, but
all of those have been product made by Arctic Silver or NanoTherm. Today we'll
break that trend and take a look at a product by company that you probably
don't associate with Thermal Compound, CoolerMaster. Those of you familiar
with CoolerMaster probably know them from their heat sinks like the XDream,
Aero 7+, or perhaps even their Neon Case Fans, today we'll get to know their
Premium Thermal Compound (PTC)."
- AOpen Aeolus GeForceFX 5950 Ultra - Hexus.net has posted
a review of AOpen Aeolus GeForceFX 5950 Ultra. "It's quiet, nView 3.0 is
excellent, the 2D quality was the best I've ever seen in isolation using my
Sony G400 monitor and it should be comparatively cheap. Radeon 9800XT's are
quicker, but FX 5950 Ultras make a decent case for themselves. Overclocking
was a highlight too."
- TDK DED+440N External DVD Writer -
The external model bodes well for consumers who needs the occasional
portability and also for those who have absolutely no idea on how to
install an internal writer. Whichever the reason, the USB 2.0 connectivity
located at the rear end of the unit will provide for a hassle free
installation. A word of caution though, this unit requires a USB 2.0 port to
work, the bandwidth of a USB 1.1 port just doesn't cut it if you want to
unleash the full potential of the drive. So do make sure your PC, be it a
desktop or notebook has a USB 2.0 port before you invest your dollars into
this product.
- Sony Ericsson GC79 WLAN + GPRS card - Sony Ericsson isn't the first
to market with a PC Card that allows a notebook to connect to the Internet
across a cellular network, but its
GC79 has the novelty of also providing an 802.11b adaptor in the same
card.
- Kyocera Finecam SL300R First Look - Thanks to an innovative,
parallel-tasking signal processor technology called RTUNE (sourced from NuCORE
Technology), the SL300R ($380) performs better than many high-end prosumer
digital cameras in terms of speed. Power-on time is less than a second, and
the shutter delay is barely perceptible. Most impressively,
the SL300R can shoot continuously at 3.5 frames per second (or capture video
at 30 fps) until the memory card is full—no stopping after a few frames to
let the camera process the images.
- Gigabyte combines Wi-FI, USB Flash drive - Gigabyte has a
novel idea for fans of go-anywhere computing: a
USB Flash drive that features a built-in Wi-Fi adaptor. The GN-WLBZ201
offers 128MB of Flash storage accessible using any OS that supports USB
storage devices. The device sports a fold-up antenna module with activity
lights
- How to Override the License Server Discovery Process in Windows Server
2003 Terminal Services -
This
article describes how to override the license server discovery process in
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Terminal Services.
- How to make your XP Professional machine an MP3 server - The
Crucible have published
a new
guide for turning your XP Professional machine into an MP3 server.
- Editorial on The NVIDIA nForce3's Unlocked PCI Bus - Adrian's Rojak
Pot let us know he has posted
an
editorial on The NVIDIA nForce3's Unlocked PCI Bus.
- Stable 2.4.23 Linux Kernel - Marcelo Tosatti has released
the final
2.4.23 stable Linux kernel (download),
three months after 2.4.22. This latest kernel includes a number of changes,
including the removal of the OOM (out of memory) killer among other
significant VM updates.
- Bart's PE Builder 3.0.22 -
Bart's PE Builder helps
you build a bootable Window CD-Rom or DVD from Windows XP or Windows
Server 2003 very suitable for PC maintenance tasks. It will give you a
complete Win32 environment with network support, a graphical user interface
(800x600) and FAT/NTFS/CDFS filesystem support. Very handy for burn-in testing
systems with no OS, rescuing files to a network share, virus scan and so on.
- Threadmaster 1.12 -
ThreadMaster
Monitors Threads and handle high CPU utilization on a per application
basis. This function is primarily indented for Terminal servers hosting
multiple users. ThreadMaster can also be used when running multiple virtual
machines on the same server, to limit each virtual machines CPU usage.
- AIDA32 v3.88 -
AIDA32
is a professional system information, diagnostics and benchmarking program for
Windows platforms. It extracts details of all components of the PC.
- AMD N-Bench 3.0 -
N-Bench
is a Benchmark program that is capable of CPU performance and displaying
3D graphics. It consists of a "Demo mode" that plays back beautiful 3DCG
movies and a "Benchmark mode" that measures CPU performance.
- Fresh Download v6.40 -
Fresh Download (download)
is an easy-to-use and very fast download manager software that turbo charges
downloading files from the Internet, such as your favorite software, mp3
files, video files, picture collections, etc. Unlike any other similar
utilities, this software is 100% free, no charges, no banners in the software,
no spyware.
- Media Player Classic version 6.4.7.0 - A new version of Media
Player Classic is available for download (WinXP/2k
~
Win9x/ME). It supports DirectX 9 and VFW drivers for capture. It supports
viewing through ActiveX controls of Real and QuickTime files.
- K-Lite Codec Pack 2.20 final -
The K-Lite Codec Pack contains a collection of codecs and related tools.
Codecs are required to encode and decode (play) audio and video. The basic
version contains all the codecs that are needed for playing most movies that
can be downloaded from the Internet. The full version has some extra codecs
which are used less often and includes a media player. There are three options
for playing XviD content. The first option is to use the DivX Pro decoder
(recommended). The second option is to use the XviD decoder.
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Updated:03:04 PM CEST Jun,20
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