Welcome to Techno Forum

Linksys, a division of Cisco Systems has unveiled its ‘Connected Home’ concept in India, introducing products ranging from Wireless Printers, IP cameras, gaming adaptors, wireless-G Music Bridge and Wi- Fi routers.
The Linksys Connected Home Concept is designed to allow various systems and devices in a home, to communicate and integrate with each other, so people may share multimedia anytime, anywhere at home. For example, the Linksys Music Bridge (WMB54G) lets users wirelessly stream Internet music services and music from PCs, onto their Home entertainment center. The gaming adapter will allow users to connect their gaming consoles to their PCs, while the Internet cameras will enable users to send live video via the Internet, anywhere in the world. The print server will allow users to share a printer without running wires from one room to another.

According to Linksys, “With broadband penetration in India breaking new barriers everyday, the connected home is fast becoming a reality for the average Indian. The solution overall is cost effective as well. A wireless router can cost between Rs 4000 to Rs 6000 depending on the range needed. Most notebooks would have built in wireless capabilities, and each PC would require a wireless adapter, costing Rs 2000 or so. With LinkSys products, various gadgets can be connected in the home network, depending on different needs.”

The pricing for the Linksys Connected Home products is listed as below:Wireless-G Printer Server (WPS54G): Rs 6,600Wireless-G PTZ Internet Camera (WVC200): Rs 19,900Compact Wireless-G Internet Video Camera( WVC54GC): Rs 8,900Wireless-G Gaming adapter (WGA54G): Rs. 5,900Wireless-G Music Bridge (WMB54G):5900

Linksys also unveiled three wireless routers — The Linksys Compact all in one Wireless-G broadband router with a wireless wireless access point which allows users to connect Wireless G (802.11gat 54 Mbps) and Wireless B(802.11 at 11 Mbps) devices to the network. It also features a built-in 4 port full duplex 10/100 switch to connect wired Ethernet devices together. The router function ties all these together, to let users share a high speed cable or DSL connection.

The next product is the Three-in-one Wireless-N Broadband Router. The access point built into a router uses the latest wireless networking technology, Wireless N (draft 802.11N). By overlaying the signals of multiple radios, Wireless N’s “Multiple–In Multiple-Out” (MIMO) technology multiplies the effective data rate. The MIMO technology uses signal reflections to increases the range and reduce ‘dead spots’ in the wireless coverage area.With wireless–N, the farther away you are, the more speed advantage you get. Wireless N technology is backward compatible but when both ends of the wireless link are Wireless N, the router can increase the throughput by using twice as much radio band, offering speeds up to 12 times as fast as standard Wireless G.

Linksys also enables easy setting up of wireless network via its SecureEasySetup (SES). The system enters complicated configuration settings automatically eliminating the need to manually enter them. Linksys says “Configuring a system is more because an encrypted channel of communication is established between the router and access point. This eliminates any possibility of a hijacker intercepting the codes.”

The Linksys wireless access point with push button SES lets users connect Wireless G (802.11b)devices to wired networks, so users can add PCs to the network without using cables.

DAMMIT LIVED up to it’s name today with a bunch of media related launches, some interesting, some so DRM infected as to be useless. Of the four, there are some high points though.

First lets got to mobile where they expand the Live! brand to notebooks with the stunningly named AMD Live! notebook PC. It does what it says, it is a sticker on a box that probably carries a marketing incentive. See Viiv for more details there.(1)

Next up is the Home Media Server, basically a NAS box running Windows home media server. This one is really neat tech, it is an appliance that lets you store your files, stream them around the house, and theoretically do all those things you want to do with your media. The problem is that it is so DRM infected as to be worthless.

No, it is worse than worthless, the problem is that when you pull your media into things like this, it is next to impossible to do anything with them any more. If you have the DRM’d media center extenders, hey great, it may work, but that is your problem. The example they held up was an HP home media server, what a negative value that box brings.

The next bit is the AMD home cinema, basically a media center PC prototype that is an all in one media center system. Rather than getting all the parts in different boxes and hoping that it works, the home cinema rolls a lot of it into a single box and theoretically simplifies installation.

Since it is media center saddled, it has the full compliment of DRM technologies waiting to remove your rights. Luckily, I don’t think AMD adds to this happy mix, so you can’t fault them too much. It is a reference box PC with an OCER card, other than the DRM, nothing you can’t do on your own.

Last up is an ATI announcement, but they don’t technically exist, so it is an AMD product now. It is the ATI TV Wonder Digital Cable Tuner, available January 30. This one is so bad as to hurt humanity as a whole, but not out of line with other things in it’s class.

Basically it is a tuner that the cable companies approved of. It only works with Vista, hence the 1/30 launch date, because you can’t use it without having DRM baked into your infrastructure. You will lose many rights if you are dumb enough to buy this one folks.

It allows you to put your PC into the evil that is the cablecard infrastructure, basically you spend money to screw yourself. What a great combo, buy two, the kids of the Warner execs need a new Porsche after sitting through a stern talking to over downloading music, fund them now.

The announcements from today sadden me. Like Intel, AMD does not have the guts to stand up to this mess, and we all pay the price. Intel was spineless, AMD is spineless and late to the game. Four products, one a label, three are negative values and dangerous. Great.

Source: THEINQUIRER

PLATTER SPINNER Seagate thinks that it will be able to create a 300 TB hard-drive by 2010.

According to Joystick, Seagate boffins are apparently working on a hard-drive which uses heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) techniques.

The boffins think that this will mean that they can shove 50TB of data into a single square inch of drive space, or around 300TB of information on a standard 3.5-inch drive.

This means that you can stuff the entire Library of Congress onto your hard-drive without any compression.

Being a gaming magazine, Joystick points out that this means that you could store 6,144 50GB Blu-ray disks or the entire Library of PS through PS3 games that could ever be created with room to spare. Of course there is no guarantee that anyone will be using Blu-Ray or the PS3 by 2010.

Source: THEINQUIRER

INTERESTING sleuthing over at news.com where Stephen Shankland has been peering at plans for the International Solid State Circuits Conference in February. The scoop: IBM’s Power6 is now expected to ship with over 5GHz clock speeds.

As Shankland has said, Power6 had been pegged in the 4-5GHz range but documents now suggest numbers north of 5GHz. Of course, we all know clock speeds are far from being the be-all and end-all of processor performance but the Power architecture has taken plenty of knocks in the past for not keeping up, most notably from Steve Jobs. Way back in 2003, Jobs promised hard-core Apple folks that the IBM chips would be at 3GHz within 12 months. The failure to hit that spot is seen by some as a contributory factor to the eventual Intel switch.

Source: THEINQUIRER

Toshiba’s latest HD DVD player gets pushed back slightly.

Toshiba’s HD-XA2 HD DVD player is slightly off schedule according to the folks at Engadget HD. The player was first scheduled to make an appearance in the last week of December, but has instead been delayed until January 3. That is when the first wave of shipments are expected to take place according to “DTV Tivo Dealer,” a retailer on the AVS Forum.

The HD-XA2 would mark Toshiba’s second “Generation 2” HD DVD player to hit the US market. The first was the HD-A2 which started showing up on retail shelves earlier this month. That player retails for $499, features HDMI 1.2 support and outputs at 1080i.

The HD-XA2 on the other hand retails for $999, supports HDMI 1.3 and will initially offer support for 1080p/60. A firmware update is scheduled to be released sometime in February which will enable 1080p/24 support.

Source: DAILYTECH