C'est décidé, Nec ainsi que Sanyo, Toshiba et Memory-Tech vont fonder un groupe qui sera officialisé et ouvert à d'autres fabricants à partir de l'été 2005 pour promouvoir l'HD-DVD, un format qui se présente comme l'éventuel successeur de l'actuel DVD et qui est opposé au Blu-Ray déjà organisé en consortium avec Dell, HP, Hitachi, LG, Matsushita, Mitsubishi, Pioneer, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, TDK et Thomson.

Nec a également annoncé la mise au point d'un chip contrôleur qui permettra de produire des graveurs HD-DVD 2x. Les premiers graveurs HD-DVD seront disponibles à partir de 2005.

Le lancement officiel de l'opération à été annoncé et permettra à terme à de nombreux étudiants de bénéficier d'un ordinateur pour le prix d'une boisson quotidienne ou d'un ticket de bus.

Cette mesure, dénommée "micro-portable Wi-Fi pour les étudiants", a été lancée par le ministre de l'éducation et devrait permettre à tous les étudiants de BTS, Université et d'IUT d'obtenir un PC pour une somme modique mensuelle, les mensualités s'étalant de 12 à 36 mois.

Cette action est soutenue par les principaux constructeurs de PC portables (Apple, Asus, Dell, FGI, HP, IBM, Nec, Sony et Toshiba) et par 6 banques qui gèreront les prêts. En outre 80 % des universités françaises devraient proposer un accès WI-Fi gratuit pour tous les étudiants.

Physicists at Imperial College London are developing a new optical disk with so much storage capacity that every episode of The Simpsons made could fit on just one. Speaking at the Asia-Pacific Data Storage Conference 2004 in Taiwan today, Dr Peter Török, Lecturer in Photonics in the Department of Physics, will describe a new method for potentially encoding and storing up to one Terabyte (1,000 Gigabytes) of data, or 472 hours of film, on one optical disk the size of a CD or DVD.

Physicists at Imperial College London are developing a new optical disk with so much storage capacity that every episode of The Simpsons made could fit on just one.

Speaking at the Asia-Pacific Data Storage Conference 2004 in Taiwan today, Dr Peter Török, Lecturer in Photonics in the Department of Physics, will describe a new method for potentially encoding and storing up to one Terabyte (1,000 Gigabytes) of data, or 472 hours of film, on one optical disk the size of a CD or DVD.

All 350 scheduled episodes of The Simpsons, totalling 8,080 minutes of film, could be easily stored on the new disk, dubbed MODS - for Multiplexed Optical Data Storage - by the Imperial College team.

The 1TB disk would be double sided and dual layer, but even a single sided, single layer, MODS disk could hold the Lord of the Rings trilogy 13 times over, or all 238 episodes of Friends.

MODS disks will not be the first to challenge DVDs’ domination of the audiovisual optical disk market. BluRay disks, which have five times the capacity of a DVD at 25GB per layer, are expected to be released towards the end of 2005 for the home market.

The Imperial researchers, working closely with colleagues at the Institute of Microtechnology, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, estimate that MODS disks would cost approximately the same to manufacture as an ordinary DVD and that any system playing them would be backwards compatible with existing optical formats – meaning that CDs and DVDs could be played on a MODS system. Dr Török believes that the first disks could be on the shelves between 2010 and 2015 if his team are able to secure funding for further development.

“According to our experimental results, we can optimistically estimate that we will be able to store about one Terabyte per disk in total using our new method,” said Dr Török, leader of the research. “This translates to about 250GB per layer, 10 times the amount that a BluRay disk can hold.”

The Imperial researchers and colleagues at Neuchâtel and Thessaloniki filed a patent covering their ideas in July 2004.

Under magnification the surface of CDs and DVDs appear as tiny grooves filled with pits and land regions. These pits and land regions represent information encoded into a digital format as a series of ones and noughts. When read back, CDs and DVDs carry one bit per pit, but the Imperial researchers have come up with a way to encode and retrieve up to ten times the amount of information from one pit.

Unlike existing optical disks, MODS disks have asymmetric pits, each containing a ‘step’ sunk within at one of 332 different angles, which encode the information. The Imperial researchers developed a method that can be used to make a precise measurement of the pit orientation that reflects the light back. A different physical phenomenon is used to achieve the additional gain.

“We came up with the idea for this disk some years ago,” says Dr Török. “But did not have the means to prove whether it worked. To do that we developed a precise method for calculating the properties of reflected light, partly due to the contribution of Peter Munro, a PhD student working with me on this project. We are using a mixture of numerical and analytical techniques that allow us to treat the scattering of light from the disk surface rigorously rather than just having to approximate it.”

Increasingly manufacturers are looking at miniaturising the size of optical disks, says Dr Török.

“Multiplexing and high density ODS comes in handy when manufacturers talk about miniaturisation of the disks,” he says. “In 2002 Philips announced the development of a 3cm diameter optical disk to store up to 1GB of data. The future for the mobile device market is likely to require small diameter disks storing much information. This is where a MODS disk could really fill a niche.”

Imperial College Innovations Ltd, the College’s wholly owned technology transfer company, managed and helped to prepare the patent application.

MSN Hotmail est un service gratuit de boîtes aux lettres électroniques qui compte à ce jour pas moins de 187 millions d'utilisateurs actifs. Hotmail propose depuis quelques temps la possibilité de consulter et d'envoyer des emails directement à partir de logiciel de messagerie comme Outlook via la technologie WebDAV (Web-based Distribued Authoring and Versioning) au lieu de passer directement par une interface Web, jugée moins pratique par de nombreux utilisateurs.

Microsoft a annoncé que l'utilisation du WebDAV sera bientôt payante. Les utilisateurs qui exploitent actuellement cette technologie devront passer à la caisse d'ici quelques mois. Microsoft explique que cela est devenu une obligation pour limiter les actions des spammers qui auraient développé des scripts WebDAV pour envoyer leurs publicités en masse.

NHK work actually on the next gen of HDTV, called UHDTV.

UHDTV can display 32 millions of pixels, for a resolution of 7680 x 4320. A classic nowadays TV can display only 200 000 pixels and a HDTV can do 2 millions of pixels. This new format can deliver 60 frames per second. The audio channels would be around 22.2, nothing less.

Drag clips and hit play to watch your edit : http://www.ministryofsound.com/eflyers/ericPrydz/remix/?ef=prydzVidRemix

Recognise the chorus but can’t remember where you heard it? Well, here’s the answer…

Hotly tipped to become the dance track of the year, Eric Prydz’s ‘Call On Me’ was originally a 1980s smash hit for Steve Winwood called ‘Valerie’. When Winwood heard the remix he thought it was so good he not only gave his permission to use the samples, he even re-recorded his vocals especially for the track!

The story of Eric Prydz the DJ and Producer also begins back in the 80s when Eric began to make music at the age of 9 in Stockholm, Sweden. After a developing a nasty habit of breaking and entering in order to “borrow” his school’s keyboards he soon landed himself in a Swedish reform school. Nevertheless, this set back merely strengthened his resolve and, buoyed by encouragement from influential friends such as Steve Angello, Prydz was soon producing tracks that found their way into the record boxes of some of the worlds most high profile DJs.

An armed group in Iraq has threatened to kill two Americans and a British man held captive unless female prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Um Qasr prisons are released within 48 hours.

In an exclusive video aired by Aljazeera on Saturday, the captives appeared blindfolded and surrounded by hooded armed men.

The captives appeared to be giving details of who they were, but their voices could not be heard clearly. They wore normal clothes and appeared to be in good health.

The captors described themselves as al-Tawhid and al-Jihad group, which reportedly has links with suspected al-Qaida operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

The US and British embassies in Iraq said earlier they were making their best efforts to get the three captives released.

Westerners targeted

US nationals Jack Hensley and Eugene "Jack" Armstrong and

British engineer Kenneth Bigley were seized by armed men early on Thursday from their house in Baghdad's upscale al-Mansur district.

All three work for GSCS, a United Arab Emirates-based firm that has won several building contracts in Iraq.

The kidnapping of the three men was the latest in a string of high-profile abductions of Westerners in Iraq.

Two French journalists were abducted almost a month ago while two Italian female aid workers, along with two of their Iraqi colleagues, were seized from their offices on 7 September.
[source: Al Jazeera]

Say NO to TERRORISM here, please : www.noterrorism.com

If you want to watch more than one hour of pure beauty, if you like water and sea, you may want to give a look to Deep Blue (Planete Bleue in French). Trust me, it's one of the most beautiful thing you'll see, in term of doco.
website : http://www.deepbluethemovie.com/

Andrzej Bartkowiak will now direct Universal Pictures' adaptation of the first-person-shooter video game. Director Enda McCallion was previously attached to the project. Lorenzo Di Bonaventura and John Wells are producing.
[source : Hollywood Reporter]

Wow.. I watch many movies. I am very very hard with them. But I rate it 9/10. I won't tell you more, go there, watch the trailer and the credits, then go to a theatre next to you and feel : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0338013/combined

Le président de France Télécom annonce une nouvelle initiative en faveur du haut débit. Voici les points principaux du communiqué de presse.

Pour conforter la place de la France, désormais dans le peloton de tête des pays européens en matière de couverture du territoire en Haut Débit, Thierry Breton, le Président de France Télécom, annonce que France Télécom offrira dès cette année le débit maximum permis par l’ADSL partout en France.

Thierry Breton a rappelé que 14 mois après le lancement de son plan "Haut Débit pour Tous", la fracture numérique a été considérablement réduite en France.

A ce jour, c’est désormais plus de 90% de la population française (villes et campagnes) qui a accès au Haut Débit. Ce chiffre devrait passer à 96% avant la fin 2005, faisant de la France l’un des pays les mieux équipés au monde et de la façon la plus équitable.

Le débit maximum permis sur chaque ligne ADSL en France est fonction de la distance du central téléphonique. Ainsi, plus l’installation du client est proche du central téléphonique, plus le débit maximum permis par l’ADSL sera important (en ADSL2+, qui sera déployé sur l’ensemble du réseau français dès l’année prochaine, le débit pourra dépasser les 16 Mbit/s). France Télécom entend ainsi donner à chacun de ses clients le meilleur du Haut Débit sur sa ligne téléphonique, là où il réside.

Avec cette nouvelle offre, les clients de France Télécom, qu’ils soient clients des offres Wanadoo ou de celles des fournisseurs d’accès tiers qui utilisent les offres de gros de France Télécom, pourront bénéficier du potentiel maximal en Haut Débit de leur ligne téléphonique.

Il paraît évident que cette annonce est une réponse aux offres de haut débit de fournisseurs d'accès profitant du dégroupage (Free en particulier). La concurrence a du bon !

Russian forces have fought Chechan separatists to end a school siege as naked and screaming children ran for safety amid chaotic scenes.

Tass news agency said Russian troops were in "full control" of the building in North Ossetia but explosions and machinegun fire continued long after the initial assault.

Tass said up to 200 people were taken to hospital. Witnesses saw bodies lying on stretchers. Russian TV reports said five hostage-takers had been killed.

Others were believed to have holed up in a house in the town after making their escape from the school where up to 1,500 adults and children had been held hostage since Wednesday.

An armed gang burst into the building during the first day of term in a raid that bore all the hallmarks of an attack by Chechen rebels.