Category: Uncategorized
eBay reaches settlement over Buy It Now lawsuit
eBay has just forked out some of its own hard-earned cash, buying three patents due to their ongoing lawsuit with MercExchange over the Buy It Now service.
MercExchange claims eBay was infringing on their patents, and filed a lawsuit against the company in September 2001, which has now been dropped reportedly.
“We’re pleased to have been able to reach a settlement with MercExchange. In addition to resolving the litigation, this settlement…
Robot dogs just as good as the real things in reducing the emptiness and loneliness of modern life
Researchers at Saint Louis University gave one group of old people in nursing homes a proper biological dog made out of bones and meat, then tried a robotic AIBO out to see how the old folks reacted to the two.
They were both, incredibly, received very similarly, with the oldie subjects bonding pretty much equally with the robotic and real doggies…
MySpaceTV to host endless Britney Spears videos thanks to deal with TMZ
Guess what, everyone? MySpace is still going!
And it’s still doing deals to cram yet more content onto its already bewilderingly packed and ramshackle pages, with news that it’s embracing the dodgy celebrity paparazzi scene.
TMZ, the famed gonzo celeb-stalking channel, will provide a few exclusive videos of something like Britney Spears GETTING OUT OF A CAR each week…
Microsoft hammered by EU anti-trust body again – handed record £680m fine
The European Union has just hit Microsoft a record fine of around £625m.
It’s in response to Microsoft charging “unreasonable prices” to developers for data on how to get their applications working happily on Windows. Naughty old MS was ordered by the EU in 2004 to start charging more reasonable fees for licensing out its patents – but clearly the EU thinks it hasn’t complied with that. Hence the cash windfall for Brussels…
Apple's iTunes is now the second biggest music retailer in America
Not sure what’s the most shocking part about this news – the fact that iTunes is so big, or the fact that it isn’t already the number one.
Second only to Wal-Mart (the American ASDA) when it came to shifting “product” during 2007, iTunes has also now overtaken Best Buy (the American Dixons) to shuffle up a place in the sales league. iTunes is not just a little thing hardcore Apple fans use any more.
Also, during 2007, the statisticians at NPD said legal…
Europe funding Bittorrent-like internet TV standard
You know Bittorrent? The evil scourge of the media world? Well, it’s being pursued by the EU as a possible standard for distributing TV online throughout Europe. Bittorrent’s going LEGIT.
The hope is to establish a Europe-wide standard for online delivery of telly, based around the Bittorrent format, which will provide access to stored archive material and streamed live events – and the P2P nature of it all will help stop the servers crashing on Eurovision night or when Manchester United plays Barcelona…
Up close with the Sony BRAVIA range: Part 1: Vision
Over the past few years, Sony has built a solid brand behind the BRAVIA name, with 45 TVs in the current range.
In this five part series, we’ll be taking a closer look at the technology behind the badge.
Today, we’re up close with vision, looking at how Sony ensures their BRAVIA sets display the best possible picture.
BRAVIA: Fully HD
All of Sony’s current BRAVIA TVs, except for the 15-inch portable set, are HD Ready. That is, they’re able to take and display at least a 720p signal, be that from a broadcast service such as Sky HD or Virgin Media, from a games console such as the PS3, or from a high definition disc such as Blu-ray.
Meridian reveals £8000 808.2 Signature Reference CD player
This is for people who used to insist vinyl had the best sound quality, but have now given up and decided to rebuy all those old Led Zep albums in CD format. To say it’s “high end” is a bit of an understatement.
The 808.2 player has a new kind of digital speaker connector – well, new to the audio world, at least – which uses standard old CAT-5 Ethernet cabling to hook it up to any of Median’s compatible DSP speaker range.
Powering the audio side of things is Median’s Resolution Enhancement System, which upsamples…
Every Dreamcast game ever made up for auction – it is your duty to enter the bidding war
Hopefully it isn’t necessary to explain to you the significance of SEGA’s Dreamcast. It was the best console ever, especially as Electronic Arts didn’t release any games for it so there was no FIFA/Madden/NHL to trudge through every year – just 100% SOLID GOLD SEGA and SEGA-approved arcade magic.
Anyway. One man has acquired an original copy of every Japanese Dreamcast game ever released. Which, to be fair, most gamers should’ve done themselves during the late 1990s and early 2000s.
But if you didn’t do your duty at the time – and therefore inadvertently contributed towards today’s dismal gaming scene – you can now make amends by buying every Japanese DC game in one bulk lot – for the never-to-be-repeated bargain price of $19,999.99.
Princeton XiaoClef2 USB key – with fingerprint reader to make it annoying and awkward to use
Two technologies. One of them is amazingly useful and we can’t imagine how we survived so long without one. The other is a fingerprint reader.
Fingerprint readers are great fun for 30 seconds. You set it up. It recognises your fingerprint. You half-smile in amazement that a technology first mentioned on Tomorrow’s World back in 1982 has actually become commercially available…
