February 20, 2004

Fortune.com has an article on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Grand Challenge for Autonomous Ground Vehicles which is a $1 million race by autonomous vehicles from Barstow, Southern California through the desert to Las Vegas within 10 hours on March 13. This race would make a good Discovery Channel or SpeedVision show - assuming any of the vechicles actually moved a bit. 10:53:09 PM

A US District Court Judge has ruled against 321 Studios in its suit against the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), deciding that the company’s DVD X Copy and DVD Copy Plus software violates Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) provisions and aids in piracy of the Hollywood movies. The Electronic Freedom Foundation is dismayed by this ruling, EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn said "This court's reading of the statute in the 321 Studios case allows a ban on any tool that enables consumers to copy their DVDs." 10:35:07 PM

ATI Technologies and NVIDIA have unveiled details of their next generation graphic processing units this week at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco this week. Xbitlabs looks at ATI’s R420 chip and NVIDA has released a PR piece on its upcoming PCI Express based graphic cards, which is needed since Intel’s next chipset will not support the current AGP interface. 10:34:49 PM

Less Cost Equals Better? In subjective testing of compact digital cameras the Wall Street Journal’s Computer Tech Writer Walter S. Mossberg found that the 3.2 megapixel Konica Minolta Dimage Xg produced better pictures than the more expensive models tested which had higher pixel counts. It also had one of the two fastest start up times. The article does not suggest why the Dimage Xg had better picture quality, possibly the lens or JPEG processing algorithms played a role. 10:34:18 PM