Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the web has been awarded a knighthood. He is credited with inventing the World Wide Web just over 10 years ago. He will be recieving the Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the New Years honours list.
Party like it’s 1999
December 23, 2003 By Leave a Comment
After many tech companies scaled back their company Christmas party during the downturn of 2001 and 2002, the parties are back in ’03 with a new sense of optimism. Suddenly, the tech industry parties are back, and while not as extravagant as the ones of the last millenium, they show a loosening of the purse-strings [...]
First Running Robot
December 18, 2003 By Leave a Comment
Sony has demonstrated the first “running” robot. Well, it’s more of a jog, but still pretty cool. It is the first robot to be able to manoever with both feet off the ground. It’s brain knows enough about physics and inertia to calculate where it will be when it hits the ground again. The robot [...]
Hard Drives getting smaller
December 15, 2003 By Leave a Comment
Toshiba has released a nickel-sized hard drive for mobile phones, PDA’s or MP3 players. The disk is just 0.85″ in diameter and can hold 2 or 3 Gb of information. Imagine one of these in your Digital Camera. Better yet, your video camera with a Firewire connection. Who needs tapes?
It’s official! P2P Downloading is Legal!
December 14, 2003 By Leave a Comment
Friday’s decision by the Copyright Board of Canada futher clarifies the 1999 ruling on Private copying, having a profound impact on the current campaign by the RIAA in the US to halt P2P sharing. The 1999 ruling introduced levies on blank analog and digital media such as cassette tapes and blank CD’s, compensating the artists [...]
HDMI Standard on the way
December 11, 2003 By Leave a Comment
In the next year you’ll be hearing about HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) which aims to cut down on the clutter of wires behind your television set. The cable standard transmits uncompressed digital audio and video between your DVD player, A/V Reciever and your Television set. It also allows communications between devices so that settings can [...]
Realtime vehicle registration saves a tow
December 8, 2003 By Leave a Comment
When a New Jersey patrolman pulled over Sean Leach last week for an unregistered vehicle, a quick-thinking Leach saved himself several hundred dollars in towing charges. Leachs’ car registration had expired. While the officer was writing up the ticket, he got onto his cellphone and called a friend. He gave his friend his registration number [...]
The perfect cellphone
December 3, 2003 By Leave a Comment
MyOrigo is in the pre-production stages of developing my perfect cellphone. The “mydevice” is a tri-band GSM with GPRS cameraphone, with built-in PDA functions such as address books, calandar, and the usual applications. What sets mydevice apart from the rest is the user interface. It incorporates a motion sensor, so switching the the 176×320 display [...]
5MP in a tiny package
December 2, 2003 By Leave a Comment
Sony has released the new Sony DSC-T1 digital camera. What’s the big deal? It’s a 5 megapixel camera that is just 91mm x 60mm and only 21mm thick. Despite the small size, they still manage to fit in a huge 2.5″ display. You’ve gotta see some of the pictures on the DP Review site.
Handheld Sampling
December 1, 2003 By Leave a Comment
The Virgin Megastore in San Fransico will be rolling out “the most high-tech music retail environment” on Wednesday. Customers will be given a customised iPaq PocketPC to carry around the store with them. Customers browsing the music selection can simply scan in the bar-code of any CD, and the iPaq will connect wirelessly to download [...]
Sounding like a broken record
December 1, 2003 By 2 Comments
The Society of Composers, Authors, and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN) is now asking the Supreme Court of Canada to ask ISP’s to pay a royalty to them for the music downloads of their customers. Again, the question comes up of whether the ISP’s are responsible for the content that goes through their networks. They [...]