2006/05/22

Firmtek ships SATA PC Card

The card and an enclosure for two SATA drives costs $279.95 but they will be available seperately at a later date.

This gives a laptop the ability to use SATA disks for storage.

New .tel domain approved by ICANN

Telnic has been awarded the contract to run the .tel domain, which is being run out of London.

Visit www.telname.com to monitor the status and when registratons will become available.

Microsoft Offer Pro-Design Web tool

Microsoft is trying to break into the domination of Macromedia's (now Adobe's) Dreamweaver by launching a professional web publishing tool as part of their Expression (known as Web Designer).

This has been built form the ground-up and will replace Frontpage.

MS has also released updates to Interactive Designer, qhich is similar to Flash, and Expression Graphic Designer, which is like a combined Photoshop and Illustrator.

MS Media Player 11

Microsoft has released version 11 of it's Media Player (in beta).

This is more in-line with Apple's iTunes. At the same time MTV are launching their Urge music download service which will have 2 million tracks available.

MS have the marketing clout to make a dent in Apple's domminance, assuming the beta works.

MS have also made public their beta for the new Live Messenger (it was until recently a restricted beta) which supports VoIP and VoIP/PSTN integration.

ADM launches new mobile processors

AMD has launched a new range of processors for mobile. based on the Turion with two cores (X2). They come in a range of speeds and will work with a range of graphics and other chips (compared to Intel's Centrino platform - where Intel force builders to use only Centrino parts).

Intel are launching new mobile chips in August Core 2 Duo which will be 64bit, but AMD's chips are 64bit now.

This can only be good for consumers as the battle between Intel and AMD will drive prices down.

Open Source Non-Linear Editing

Jahshaka is a new open source NLE package that runs on MacOS X (both Intel and PowerPC) that uses OpenGL and OpenML for rendering. It's also available on Windows and Linux platforms.

It uses the Trolltech cross platform libraries so the same interface works across all the supported platforms.

If the project takes off it could be a threat to traditional packages like Apple's Final Cut (and Express) and Adobe's Premiere range.