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Bill Gates keynote

January 8, 2007, 12:03 AM

Posted in: The show in-depth

Scott Fulton, BetaNews: While the P.A. system and the streaming video feeds worldwide played tracks from Pickin' on Pink Floyd: A Bluegrass Tribute (our Sharon Fisher picked out the tracks), about a thousand attendees, by Nate Mook's count, waited anxiously for Microsoft to announce whatever they were going to announce. Meanwhile, in the press aisles, Microsoft's handlers were passing out copies of releases stating what it is they were about to have seen after 90 minutes had passed. Ninety minutes later, it isn't as though the world had changed, but perhaps the CES show did. Maybe we're talking about Vista now more than we thought we would.

Terabyte HDDs

January 7, 2007, 5:29 PM

Posted in: Hard drives

There's fresh word from Seagate tonight on the specifics of its forthcoming 1 TB drive. Like previous Barracudas, it'll be a four-platter system, which will be Seagate's bone of contention with Hitachi GST - it's using a five-platter system. Both sides are claiming benefits, as Sharon Fisher discovered.

PlayStation 3

January 7, 2007, 5:12 PM

Posted in: Gaming consoles

PS3

Scott Fulton, BetaNews: Our senior CES analyst, Sharon Fisher, informed us this afternoon that Sony has told the Associated Press at CES today it has shipped one million PlayStation 3 consoles to North America. BusinessWeek is running that story this afternoon. The AP says this is about half of what the company had predicted earlier in 2006, although we had heard predictions of 3 million.

Blue-laser disc burners

January 7, 2007, 2:37 PM

Posted in: Computer components

Looking now at the latest information on how users will be able to make their own blue-laser discs, to join the dozens upon dozens that are already available...

802.11n

January 7, 2007, 2:36 AM

Posted in: WiFi networking


Scott Fulton, BetaNews: At last year's CES 2006, there was plenty of buzz about the impending 802.11n standard. And this year, it's the same buzz. Last May, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers refused to ratify the higher-speed "n" draft of the WiFi standard, after failing to resolve the issue of how newer channels that required wider chunks of spectrum were to co-exist peacefully with existing 802.11g equipment. Now, the leading proponent of the "n" standard on the table, Airgo Networks, has been acquired by Qualcomm, one of the biggest - and loudest - players in networking today. Qualcomm will now try to push the IEEE to ratify its revised standard, which it says has better accounting for interoperability. But both Qualcomm's decisions about how to pull that off, and the industry's decisions about whether to accept Qualcomm's methods, could change not only your wireless network, but every other wireless communications device next year.

Solid-state disks

January 3, 2007, 4:44 PM

Posted in: Hard drives

Samsung logo

Scott Fulton, BetaNews: With conventional hard drives breaking through to terabyte capacities, you might think that flash memory-based fixed components would have no breathing room left in computers. But with both Seagate and Hitachi GST acknowledging today the attractiveness of their forthcoming terabyte drives as bulk storage devices, it appears a window may be left open for the solid-state disk (SSD) after all. It might not replace the hard drive in desktop computers, though it could certainly supplement it, perhaps as the boot drive.

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