Set-top boxes could bottom out, thanks to Sony, NCTA deal
Thursday, May 29th, 2008
That sound you hear may be the death knell for the set-top box/dust magnet in your home entertainment center. Sony and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association have announced an agreement that will place the cable companies’ technologies inside future Sony TV models. This will allow consumers to dial up ALL their cable channels, access video-on-demand and use interactive services without having to find a place for a steaming-hot cable box near the TV.
The nation’s largest cable companies - Comcast, Time Warner, Cox, Charter, Cablevision and Bright House - are on board, and the pressure is now on Samsung, LG and other big-screen makers to follow Sony’s lead. The NCTA says they’re welcome to do so.
You may be happy about one or two less cables cluttering up the space behind your TV, but you also may be concerned about any cable cards you’ve received from your local provider, or that handy digital video recorder in your current rented set-top box. The NCTA is being a little stingy with full details on the agreement but is assuring customers that cable cards will still work and video recording will still be offered. But in what form? The NCTA says Tivos will work with the new TV’s; but will some of the new Sony models also have built-in hard drives for recording? Will the cable companies still be offering separate DVRs for rent?
We also don’t know when to expect the new TVs to hit the big-box stores. But it’s clearly a digital coup for Sony, a victory for space-conscious consumers and validation of the cable companies’ strategy of building out services like VOD. Let’s just hope they don’t use this as validation for yet another rate hike.
Read [Associated Press via Wired News]
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It’s only just barely made it out into the wild, but DigiTimes is now reporting that ASUS has already stopped taking orders from resellers for its 8.9-inch Eee PC 900 in anticipation of the now imminent launch of the Atom-based Eee PC 901. That word apparently comes from some unspecified “industry sources,” who also claim that the Eee PC 900 was only ever a “transitional product” to begin with, which ASUS pushed out the door with a plain old Celeron M processor in order to get an 8.9-inch model out ahead of its competitors. Certainly a reasonable conclusion to draw, but a quick glance of online retailers shows that there’s still plenty of Eee PC 900s out there for the taking if you’re not sold on this whole Atom thing.
There hasn’t exactly been much mystery surrounding this one, but Crave’s UK arm has now gotten word straight from ASUS that the company will indeed be launching its new Eee PC 1000 series laptop at Computex in Taiwan next Tuesday and that, yes, it will a 10-inch model. This one won’t actually be available for sale until November, however, at least in the UK. Unfortunately, ASUS apparently isn’t quite ready to confirm if the laptop will be Atom-based or not, but everything certainly seems to be pointing in that direction.
It’s far from the first supercomputer created with the help of some gaming hardware, but this rig built by a group of researchers from the University of Antwerp is certainly impressive enough in its own right, with it employing four of NVIDIA’s high-end GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics cards (which combined pack eight GPUs) to help develop new computational methods for tomography. Dubbed the FASTRA, the system also packs an AMD Phenom 9850 processor, 8GB of RAM, and 750GB hard drive, all of which is powered by a 1,500W power supply (and tastefully lit up with some blue LEDs). That apparently lets ‘em do calculations that previously took an hour in just a few seconds, not to mention finally get a decent frame rate in Crysis. Be sure to check out the video after the break for a thorough (and more entertaining than it should be) overview of the system.
