Items tagged with Digital
As we wrote earlier, Wilmington, N.C. was getting to be the victim, er, volunteer city in a full-on digital TV experiment. What was the expectation? Well, the hope was that it would be a smooth transition, especially since Wilimington has a lower percentage of residents who would be affected by the changeover. But it sure as heck wasn't smooth, after the switch was thrown on Monday at 12 noon EDT.The test in Wilmington, where officials had made a concerted effort to get the word out about the switch, is a good indication that more education is needed. According to the Journal, by mid-afternoon roughly 74 calls had been placed to two TV stations, WSFX-TV, a Fox affiliate, and...
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Broadcom to Acquire Digital TV Business from AMD- Acquisition Expected to Bring Broadcom Scale, a Complete Product Line to Address All Segments of the Digital TV Market and Expand Tier One Customer Base -IRVINE and SUNNYVALE, Calif. — August 25, 2008 — Broadcom Corporation (Nasdaq: BRCM), a global leader in semiconductors for wired and wireless communications, and AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced that the companies have entered into a definitive agreement for Broadcom to acquire AMD’s digital TV (DTV) business.The acquisition of AMD’s DTV business is expected to enable Broadcom to immediately scale its DTV business, and, in conjunction with its existing products, to offer a complete product line...
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Watch out MP3, AAC, WMA, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis--there's a new digital audio format about to be introduced and it's creators are setting their sites on it becoming the new "de facto standard" for digital audio. The new format is called Music 2.0 and it will use MT9 as its file extension: "The distinctive feature of [the] MT9 format is that it has a six-channel audio equalizer, with each channel dedicated to voice, chorus, piano, guitar, base and drum. For example, if a user turns off the voice channel, it becomes a karaoke player. Or one can turn off all the instruments and concentrate on the voice of the main singer as if he or she is singing a cappella." The MT9 concept is the brainchild of South...
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Lite-On, the Taiwan-based electronics conglomerate, is selling its digital display business to another Taiwanese company, Wistron, for about $300 million. Wistron itself is a spin-off from Acer. Lite-On's Digital Display business unit generated NT$82.75 billion in revenues for the company in 2007. Wistron said it hopes to strengthen its LCD display product range and to raise its share in the market.Wistron, which specializes in system assembly, shipped 700,000 to one million LCD TVs in 2007, and aims to increase shipments to two million units in 2008, according to industry sources. Lite-On has had unit shipments of 8-9 million display products each year in the past, the sources said.Lite-On makes...
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As many of you are no doubt aware, all analog television stations in the U.S. are required to switch to digital broadcast systems by February of 2009. What exactly that means to the millions of TV-watchers with analog only sets, however, isn't quite clear to everyone and the amount of misinformation out there is amazing..."Did my TV screen just shrink? That's the question a lot of people will be asking after installing one of the converter boxes that will keep their older TV sets tuned in to over-the-air broadcasts after February 17, when most stations will switch from analog to digital transmission. The National Association of Broadcasters estimates that 70 million sets are in danger of losing...
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It has been a while since we’ve had anything to report on the Sony/Digital Video Distribution front, but it looks like it’s almost a reality.According to sources the long-awaited feature is nearly available. For their part Sony is, of course, keeping quiet. This could be due to negotiations or the fact that the service may not be quite ready from a technical and/or infrastructure standpoint."We don't have anything new to announce at this time," Sony spokesman Patrick Seybold said in an e-mail.But a Sony marketing executive said in a blog post last week that news could come soon."Ultimately the goal of the PlayStation Network service will be to break through the overwhelming clutter of digital...
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Western Digital is unveiling a brand new enthusiast-class hard drive today, the 10K RPM Velociraptor WD3000GLFS. Like the previous generation WD Raptors that came before it, the 300GB WD Velociraptor shares the aforementioned 10K RPM spindle speed, and they have the same 16MB buffer, reliability ratings, and acoustic and environmental characteristics as well. The WD Velociraptor sports a completely new design, however, that offers significantly increased performance, in terms of access times, IOPS, and data transfer rates. Click the link below and check it out...Western Digital Velociraptor WD3000GLFS 300GB SATA HD...
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Western Digital's Raptor line of high performance hard drives has been a long-time favorite of PC enthusiasts since its introduction several years ago. When WD's Raptors first hit, their 10K RPM spindle speeds allowed for much lower access times than the more common 7200 RPM desktop drives of the time, and overall relative performance was strong. Many users were put off by the relatively low capacities of the Raptor, which debuted at 36GB and topped out at 150GB, but they were still wildly successful amongst enthusiasts regardless.As time wore on though, Western Digital's competitors introduced faster and faster, high capacity drives, that began to out-perform the Raptor...
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Yep, if you are trying to sell a digital item on eBay, meaning something that can be delivered via email and such, without a physical item to be delivered, you can no longer, as of 3/31/08, use the auction format. You have to use a classified ad, which costs $9.95 to place, for a 30 day listing.We've pointed out more than a few times how digital goods muck up traditional markets that are based on the concept of scarcity, and it appears that eBay has come to the same conclusion. It's now banned the direct sale of purely digital goods from either its auctions or its direct sales offerings. Instead, those who want to sell digital goods need to put up a classified ad on the site, rather than...
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Just in case you missed the new link at the top of the page, we're writing this morning to let you all know that we've just posted a new article here at HotHardware in which we evaluate the features and performance of Western Digital's Caviar RE2 750 GB hard drive. Western Digital’s RE2 lineup is targeted at workstations and servers, which need lots of disk capacity along with top-notch RAID performance and long-life reliability. At its core, the RE2 lineup is identical to the SE16 lineup for the performance desktop, but the RE2 has a slightly different feature set, along with more robust MBTF (mean-time between failure) ratings and warranties. We test the drive...
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When it comes to 7,200 RPM desktop drives, there are few names in the industry that are quite as well respected as the Western Digital Caviar lineup. It’s a time-tested brand which has consistently held its own, in terms of raw performance, acoustics, and reliability. While the Caviar name once stood for a single lineup of drives, Western Digital has now branched out the Caviar name to different markets, slightly tweaking the feature sets to address different requirements. Beyond the standard Caviar drives, which are now targeted for the low-end market, we’ve got the Caviar SE and SE16 drives for the performance desktop market, along with the power-friendly Caviar GP...
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WD JOINS THE GREEN GRID WD Committed to Pushing Leading-Edge Hard Drive Technology to Reduce Power Consumption in Data Centers LAKE FOREST, Calif. — Feb. 05, 2008 — As a leading hard drive supplier to major enterprise, surveillance, consumer electronics and computing manufacturers worldwide, Western Digital Corp. (NYSE: WDC) announced the company has joined The Green Grid, a nonprofit consortium dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems. The Green Grid seeks to provide industry-wide recommendations on best practices, metrics and technologies that will improve overall data center energy efficiencies. The Green Grid does not endorse any vendor-specific...
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Western Digital is a big fan of text files, and assumes you are too. It has disabled the ability of its 1TB network-ready drive to share MP3, AVI, MPEGs... well, pretty much any audio or video file you could name. The "My Book World Edition" drive assumes the world is full of typists, I guess.Access to multimedia files is allowed only by the primary user registered on WD Anywhere Access, the remote desktop client embedded on the NAS device, said Brian Miller, director of marketing at Western Digital.Anywhere Access is based on the MioNet remote desktop client, which allows users to access, read, edit and share files on remote desktops. The Anywhere Access client allows remote users access...
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Today at HotHardware, we have one of the largest 2.5” hard drives on the market, the 250GB Western Digital Scorpio WD2500BEVS. At 5400RPM, it may not be the mobile speed king, but this 2.5" SATA hard drive offers a plethora of nice features, like an 8MB cache and WD's WhisperDrive and ShockGuard technology. Plus, the benchmarks might just surprise you about how well a 5400RPM mobile drive can perform. Click the link below and check it out... Western Digital Scorpio WD2500BEVS...
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Most of you probably already know that 2.5" notebook hard drives typically aren't as big or fast as hard drives found in desktop machines. In case you aren't aware, most laptops are sold with 5400RPM hard drives that range from 60GB to 100GB. In contrast, most desktops are currently sold with 7200RPM hard drives with capacities of up to 1TB. Just like desktop hard drives, though, laptop hard drives have gotten quite a bit bigger and faster over the last couple years. While desktop hard drives hit 1TB (1,000GB) a while ago, laptop hard drives recently reached 250GB. At least one manufacturer will have a 320GB laptop hard drive available soon, but that still doesn't get us anywhere near...
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It's coming, and it'll be here faster than you can think of it. The end of analog TV. On February 17th, 2009, all analog TV broadcasts in the United States will cease. Part of the transition process is a coupon program, whereby consumers will receive up to two $40 coupons for a digital converter box that will interface to their analog TV. And the delivery of these coupons will be managed by IBM. The Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) said that IBM will manage the government's DTV coupon program, which will subsidize the analog-to-DTV handoff in 2009. IBM's contract will be worth an estimated $119,968,468 over 25 months, according...
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If you are in the market for a high capacity hard drive, the Western Digital WD7500AAKS 750GB SATA HDD we’ve just evaluated here at HotHardware will be of interest. This drive is relatively affordable despite its size and it strikes a great balance between capacity and performance. Here’s a snip from the article... “We aren't sure why Western Digital waited so long to offer a drive bigger than 500GB, but we are happy to see the competition heating up. Plus, with storage prices so low right now, Western Digital's move seems rather smart. The company can offer its flagship drive...
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For several months, the battle for the biggest consumer hard drive was only fought by Hitachi and Seagate. First, only Seagate was in it with its 750GB hard drive using perpendicular recording technology. Then, Hitachi decided to skip 750GB and go straight to 1,000GB (1TB). Seagate has announced its 1TB hard drive, but we have yet to get one in our hands or see it in the retail channel. Recently, a new combatant finally stepped into the ring as well: Western Digital entered the fray with a 750GB offering. We aren't sure why Western Digital waited so long to offer a drive bigger than 500GB, but we are happy to see the competition heating up. Plus, with storage prices so low right now,...
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Compared a year ago, digital music sales are now double what they used to be. However, the research report by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) also said that the music industry as a whole continues to slump. Although digital music sales are still growing quickly, the growth has not kept up with shrinking CD sales. In fact, for seven consecutive years, global music sales have declined. From 2005-2006, sales figures dropped 5% from $19.6 billion to $20.7 billion. Perhaps what is happening is that digital music sales are becoming a substitute for CDs. However, the overall decline in music sales may lie in the fact that with digital music, consumers can mix and match...
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Here's what happens when you mix overly restrictive DRM technologies with the bureaucracy of cable companies, the MPAA, the FCC, ATI/AMD, and numerous other players. MaximumPC is working on a review of three home theater PCs for an upcoming issue, and while they were impressed with many facets of the machines, they came away disappointed in regard to ATI’s OCUR and the machines’ support for protected digital cable content. "Here’s a little background if you’re not familiar with OCUR. Following an FCC mandate, cable companies must now allow their customers to access their services using third-party equipment, as opposed to forcing them to rent a set-top box from the service provider....
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WD SHIPS 750 GB DESKTOP HARD DRIVES INCORPORATING NEW TECHNOLOGIES FOR COOL, FAST, RELIABLE PERFORMANCE New WD Caviar Hard Drive Implements Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) Technology LAKE FOREST, Calif. - June 4, 2007 -Western Digital Corp. (NYSE: WDC) today announced it is shipping in volume high-capacity 750 GB Serial ATA (SATA) WD Caviar® SE16 desktop-class hard drives. Ideal for data-intensive applications, high-performance computing and multimedia systems, the WD Caviar SE16 750 GB drives deliver high performance with 3 Gb/s transfer rate, 16 MB cache and Native Command Queuing (NCQ). "WD knows that there is nothing...
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New Matrox DualHead2Go Digital Edition Now Shipping Montreal, Canada, May 23, 2007 — Matrox Graphics Inc., the leading manufacturer of graphics solutions for professionals, is pleased to announce that the new DualHead2Go Digital Edition is now shipping. Part of our Graphics eXpansion Modules (GXM) product line, this external multi-display upgrade device allows you to connect two digital monitors to your notebook or desktop for an impressive, productivity enhancing, dual-monitor set-up. “DualHead2Go Digital Edition supports a wide range of resolutions for users interested in using two DVI monitors," says Caroline Injoyan, business development manager, Matrox...
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