Mark Hachman

Seagate Technology Ltd. has brought its desktop Barracuda drives into the ninth generation, adding a half-terabyte model and 3-Gbit SATA technology to its lineup. The Barracuda 7200.9 drives, as theyre known, have begun shipping in 40GB to 500GB capacities, with cache sizes ranging from 2MB to 16MB. Manufacturer suggested pricing will be $61 for a […]

LONDON—A report prepared for and endorsed by the British Screen Advisory Council promotes widespread digital rights management programs to manage content, while advising shrinking the “window” between theatrical and DVD releases. That position was echoed Thursday by the United Kingdoms Culture Secretary, Tessa Jowell, in a speech scheduled to be delivered to an intellectual-property and […]

PARIS—Without a keynote announcement to satiate attendees, visitors to Apples Paris Expo had to be content with a number of smaller disclosures. On display were a number of iPod accessories, including a bondage-esque little number for the iPod nano, compliments of Tunewear. Elsewhere, however, hardware and software designers adopted the Apple aesthetic to develop add-ons […]

PARIS—A startup on Tuesday unveiled plans at the Apple Expo here to build a distributed supercomputer cluster that could use some thousands of Apple Computer Inc.s Xserve servers. The high-performance network will be installed along Europes Internet backbone, startup Omneta plc. said. According to Omneta Chief Technical Officer Tony Clark, the startup, Apple and the […]

PARIS—Apple Computer Inc. upgraded its .Mac and Backup service on Monday, adding enhanced local support for the French and German markets. Apple added a .Mac “Groups” feature that allows like-minded individuals to share content and interests. The company also announced Backup 3.0, which allows subscribers to the .Mac service to incrementally back up their files […]

Seagate Technology purchased Mirra Inc. Wednesday afternoon, adding storage appliance technology for the home and small office. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but were not materially significant. Mirras 34 employees will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Seagate, effective immediately. The acquisition gives Seagate a NAS and wide-area-storage solution for the home and […]

Freescale Semiconductor will be required to supply microprocessors to Apple Computer through 2008, according a regulatory filing issued late Friday. Apple Computer Inc., which said in June that it would shift the design of its personal computers from the PowerPC to an Intel-designed X86 microprocessor beginning in 2006, currently uses the Freescale chips to power […]

The government of Taiwan said Monday that it plans to bar the use of VOIP as a condition of issuing licenses for WiMax spectrum. Specifically, the governments DGT (Directorate General of Telecommunications) of the MOTC (Ministry of Transportation & Communications) plans to prohibit the selling of telephone numbers to WiMax operators, according to the Chinese […]

The Blu-ray Disc Association said Tuesday that it has settled upon the AACS rights-management system to secure its discs, together with an additional identification and update scheme. Both the competing Blu-Ray and HD-DVD formats will use the Advanced Access Content System, which was specifically designed for next-generation optical discs. However, the Blu-Ray group will also […]

The groups competing to propose a standard for a faster flavor of Wi-Fi have agreed to join forces, IEEE officials have confirmed. For months, the two leading standard proposals—TGnSync and WWiSE (World-Wide Spectrum Efficiency)—have been at a stalemate, neither being able to garner 75 percent of the votes, which is needed to move forward in […]

Advanced Micro Devices said Wednesday that the company has successfully removed lead from its microprocessors to meet European environmental regulations. AMD said that in early July it began selling versions of its Opteron, Athlon 64, Athlon 64 X2, Athlon 64 FX, Sempron and Turion processor families that meet the lead-free RoHS regulations, about a year […]

A new build of the Vonage Web site is preventing users from accessing their voice mail accounts from the Web. Other users also began reporting problems logging into their Vonage accounts beginning Wednesday. Users trying to access their voice mail on the Vonage site were met with the message, “No voice mail boxes found for […]