Tuesday, September 28, 2004

Toshiba has big plans for a small drive. Toshiba Corp. plans to begin commercial production of its 0.85-inch hard disk drive before the end of this year, the company said on Tuesday. [InfoWorld: Top News] I'm glad to see Toshiba is still very much on the cutting edge of Hard Drive engineering and design. They are pushing Hitachi, Fujitsu and now Seagate to continue to innovate and compete at every level of the Hard Drive market. Yes, there's not as many here as there was a while ago. But consolidation has not resulted in a monopoly by any of the manufacturers. So they have no choice but to continue to compete and that's how Apple trumped everyone with the iPod's little hard drive. Toshiba had a product that NO ONE else had and Apple designed it right into their newest product. The rest is history. 9:58:00 PM    comment []

The Moog Synthesizer Makes a Comeback. A growing number of contemporary musicians and techno enthusiasts have reignited interest in the Moog, which can synthesize any sound imaginable. By By DAVID BERNSTEIN. [The New York Times > Technology] Dr. Moog is one of those people like Doug Englebart, Ray Kurzweil, Dean Kamen, Bob Metcalfe who all pursued something they were interested in and tore out broad stretches of NEW territory. My hat is off to the guy, and I'm so happy to have read in th is article he got back the rights to use his name on his new company. That's a truly heart-warming thing to see, and he's making profits again selling new items that he's designed and invented. I hope Bob Moog never gets bored, never loses his energy and always finds a reason to get up in the morning. We've all benefited from his drive to to build new things and who knows? Maybe we will benefit one more time again. 9:52:29 PM    comment []

EDIROL unveils R-1 WAVE/MP3 recorder/player. EDIROL today announced the R-1, a portable 24-bit WAVE and MP3 Recorder/Player suitable for a wide r... [MacNN | The Macintosh News Network] I have a soft spot in my heart for Edirol. Ever since I first discoverd the UA-1 digital USB interface and stuck it on our sound recording workstation in our Public computing lab, I knew we had a revolutionary product. That price point was nowhere near any competitor, everyone else was hundreds of dollars higher than Edirol. So now I'm really glad they're jumping into the solid state sound recording market. If this product sampled at 48Khz instead of 44.1Khz, I would buy it today just because it has the Edirol brand name on it. Even though the Creative Jukebox series are just as well endowed from a spec standpoint. That interface is perfect, simple enough for anyone to record with it in 10 minutes of playing around with it. Such is not the case for the Creative MP3 player/recorders much LESS Sony MiniDisc recorder/players. 9:45:21 PM    comment []

UC Berkeley slows speed of light to improve networking. Optical fiber can deliver data fast, sometimes too fast. Slowing light might make some networking bottlenecks vanish. [CNET News.com] Hopes for Optical Networking remain high, hopefully optical switching will still one day provide the speed benefit everyone hopes for. But now there's some innovations occuring on the semiconductor to optical front to govern the speed of the light beams to such an extent, there are fewer collisions and fewer slowdowns on the paths between hosts. This particular announcement is NOWHERE near a marketable product due to the physics involved. But, hey! Maybe were on the road of pulling a full 20 Terbytes of bandwidth out of all that fiber!? 9:38:55 PM    comment []