Maxtor SATA II Drive w/ 16mb Buffer
 

That is cool. I would like to new 10,000 RPM Western Digital Raptors with this SATA II. Hopefully, Maxtor will put out something to compete with WD's 74 GByte Raptor, which goes for about $200. This little drive hauls ! My coworker works on disk drives uses two in Raptors in RAID0 as a boot drive. His motherboard chipset (nVidia nForce3) supports SATA without using the PCI bus Risky, but FAST.

I mistakeningly interpreted the figure "1/1.8" as meaning one and one-eighth inches. This new trend in mixing fractions and decimals to express CCD sizes in what are actually bastardized fractions, is mathematically incorrect and, I believe deliberately confusing. If you used fractional expressions like that on a math test, you'd get an "F".

When a camcorder manufacturer specifies that a model has a 1/4.8th-inch CCD, they're just hoping that many people won't realize that it's actually only
.21 inches and will think instead that it's larger than the 1/4th-inch CCD on the previous year's model. If they insist on going with CCD sizes that can't be expressed by common fractions, why don't they just use pure decimals? A dual expression of, for example,
.55 inches/13.8mm would be best for international products.

Steve McDonald

Actually the whole CCD size issue is more complicated than this. The sizes are not really diagonals of the CCD's, but go back to the vacuum tube days when camera tubes were designated by the diameter of the cylindrical glass tube. The active image area was quite a bit smaller than this (a rectangle within the circle). When CCD imagers cam into use the first ones were sized to correspond to the active image area of a 2/3" cylindrical tube, hence the term 2/3" CCD. Now there never was such a thing as a 1/4" or 1/3" vacuum tube sensor so these sizes just represent the manufacturer's concept of how big the active image area of a 1/4" or 1/3"vacuum tube would have been if it existed.

According to an article I recently read, a 1.25" vacuum tube had an image diagonal 21.4mm, a 1" tube had a 16mm diagonal, and both the 1/2" and 5/8" tubes had 8mm diagonals. Modern camcorder chip sizes include 1/3" CCD's with 6mm diagonals, 1/4" CCD's with 4mm diagonals and 1/6" CCD's with 3mm diagonals.

Hot new Intel Chip????
 

Two days ago in my local paper (Arizona Republic) in the business section there was an article about a new super chip set being announced by Intel that is supposed to be available this week. The article did not name it or give specs, it said:

1. Giant leap forward in graphics processing, can run full res HD TV in your living room and other programs and monitors at the same time.
2. Major improvements for video editing and gaming.
3. First big step towards Intel’s goal of making the PC the heart of a home’s entertainment center.
4. Not a new processor, works with P4, it is a new chip set.

Has anyone heard anything about this?

Steve

Is this it? - Tom's Hardware Guide: Intel's 775 Launch Mixes Ambition With A Strong Aftertaste

Lots of manufacturers (nVidia, ATI, Via, etc.) are offering motherboard chipsets for AMD and Intel microprocessors.
This Intel chipset is an incremental, not monumental, step
forward.

Now, this Intel part should help reduce the cost of
big TVs :

http://www.intel.com/design/celect/technology/lcos/

Compact Fuel Cell
 

Could have implications for DV cam batteries.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...oshiba_company

Toshiba's methanol fuel cell
 

Though, this article doesn't comation enough information to
accurately convert the specs to camcorder battery units of
milliAmpereHours. Someday, we will kiss those big bricks
and recharge anxieties goodbye.

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0406/04062401toshibafuel.asp

"Toshiba's methanol fuel cell"

It will certainly be some time before we see fuel cells used in digital cameras but it's worth noting that development fuel cells is accelerating. Toshiba today announced a small methanol fuel cell which weighs just 8.5 g (0.3 oz) and can produce 100 mW of power. Toshiba describe this new unit as "small enough for integration into a wireless headset for mobile phones, but still efficient enough to power an MP3 music player for as long as 20 hours on a single 2cc charge of highly concentrated methanol. The new fuel cell outputs 100 milliwatts of power, and can continue to do so, non-stop, for as long as users top up its integrated fuel tank—a process that is as simple as it is safe."

Press Release:

Michael,

That review on Tom’s hardware is what the republic was talking about. However Tom's review is reality based. It is beyond me why a major newspaper would make it sound like this was the biggest advance in many years. I wish I still had the article so I could quote it. They made it sound revolutionary.
I have a P4, 3.2 Extreme Edition and a 800 FSB on my system and am very happy with it, the article made it sound outdated already.

Steve

The new Grantsdale/Northwood (915/925) chip sets have some nice built in features, but the big addition is PCI Express. This allows bidirectional high speed data transfer from the graphic card, and will be key for enabling useful coprocessing on the GPU.

There isn't much software out there that takes advantage of this yet, so it's more of a future benefit. The current tests show the new chipset/processor combos to be only slightly faster than the old.

Eliot

The new site does not work as well with Opera and other non-mainstream-browsers as the old page did. You do have to look at the page with Microsoft Internet Explorer and most of the things work... but still, it's quite a shame! :-)