Digital Age

How do you like the sound of taking one machine, and having two people logged into it simultaneously? Sounds pretty neat to me

With Intel

Video card giant NVIDIA has extended the capabilities of its SLI technology, allowing hardened gamers to use up to three graphics cards inside their PCs.

The technology promises a 2.8x performance boost over a single-card system. According to NVIDIA, a three-card box will give you resolutions of up to 2560 x 1600 at 60 frames per second.

To take advantage of this video processing power, your PC will have to be equipped with an NVIDIA nForce 680 SLI motherboard and three GeForce 8800 GTX or Ultra graphics cards.

This hardware is capable of providing an eye watering 110 gigatexel-per-second texture fill rate. This translates into smooth flowing video images and extremely detailed backgrounds and characters. The cards also undertake antialiasing which involves smoothing the edges of objects by modifying the transparency of certain pixels.

The result, says the company, is a gaming experience that is hard to beat. Whether you're mowing down monsters with a nail gun or plotting the overthrow of a rival country, having this sort of graphics power at your disposal will make the task even more immersive.

With an eye firmly on the rapidly growing market for mobile devices, chip giant Intel has announced a new SSD device that can store up to 16GB in a space the size of a small coin.

The Z-P140 comes in 2, 4, 8 and 16GB models and weighs just 0.6 grams - about the same as a drop of water. Samples are in the maket already and full production is expected to begin early next year.

Z-P140: in a greatly magnified state!The new drives are part of Intel's Menlow chipset which has been designed from the ground up for use in mobile internet devices. Such devices have traditionally been limited by factors such as power consumption and storage capacities. Switching to SSDs addresses both these challenges.

The Z-P140 uses an industry-standard PATA interface and is significantly smaller than a hard drive with similar storage capacity. With no moving parts it is well suited to applications where devices can expect to receive their fair share of bumps and jolts during use.

Intel quotes read times of 40 megabytes per second and write times of 30 MB/s for the drives. Power consumption is rated at a miserly 1.1 miliwatts when idle and 300 mW when operating.

No pricing has yet been announced for the drives.

Why don't tech companies just say what they mean? As a journalist, I'm sick of receiving essentially dishonest announcements from big tech companies.

Take, for example, Optus' press release announcing its cable speed upgrades, which stated:

"Optus has announced a speed upgrade on its Optus Cable Network. New and existing customers on the MyHome Broadband Cable and Optus

As the annual Macworld silly season approaches we here at APC thought it was a good time to put together our 'what's going to happen at Macworld' checklist.

If you follow the Mac-web you've no doubt read about the many different theories flying around about what Macworld will bring, and if we're lucky we might even get another Macworld Bingo from Ars Technica.

With that in mind two of my Mac-using colleagues, David Flynn and Dan Warne have helped pull this piece together. If you've got some ideas of your own please contribute in the comments. Also, we'll revisit this after the keynote which takes place on Jan 15th (16th local time) to see how right or wrong we were.

Could this be the new form MacBook Pro? (photo: Gizmodo)

or is this it? (photo: www.noheat.com)
Before the list however just a few thoughts I've had recently about why I don't think this Macworld will be anywhere near as exciting as last years where the iPhone was released.

Apple has a history of launching great products and then slowly improving them over time. This year we saw the announcement then launch of the iPhone, the Apple TV and Leopard, the fifth iteration of OS X.

For any tech company that's a lot of new 'stuff' and you just have to look around at the amount of competition against Apple to see how hard it actually is to develop products that customers really love.

Let's be clear. At this point, six months out from the launch of the iPhone you can see it's a revolutionary device.

In the smartphone segment, it has already captured more market share than all Symbian and Windows Mobile devices combined (and that's just in three months) and as the worldwide launch continues I expect to see that go higher.

Do we even need to mention the iPod? It's still the market leader in all digital music player categories and combined with iTunes is the only music player you'd seriously consider for yourself or your mother (unless of course you need a radio or WM support).

Most people I know have got more than one, and I'm talking about people who don't even like technology. They just want a music player that works and is easy to get music on to.

Despite Apple's shifted focus on music and gadgets, the Mac continues to gain momentum at a rate some say is three times higher than the market average. Even if you loathe the Mac platform you've got to admit that Macs are popping up in more and more places.

Look for the Mac to start infiltrating the corporate world in 2008 — perhaps not as a standard corporate desktop, but at very least, as a way of giving some staff a more enjoyable workplace.

With the best bundle of native Windows support, good looks, standardised specs and competitive pricing Apple is a lot more appealing to hardline corporate IT departments than it was a few years ago.

While the release of Leopard revealed a few glitches it's fair to say it's been much better received than Vista. Leopard offers more of the same stability that users have come to expect from OS X and offers great features like Time Machine for silent, automated backup, and Quickview to easily view a document without opening the associated application.

Combine Leopard with iLife '08 and you've got the best platform for doing everything outside of the office (and some would argue in the office too). With Microsoft Office 2008 coming out in January Mac users will again be able to read and write to the new MS XML document formats as well.

Room for improvement?

So I think it's fair to say that Apple are firing on all cylinders. But still, like any business there is always room for improvement, and by focusing on this area I think we'll get a better sense of what's going to come out of Macworld.

The most obvious 'problem' product in Apple's portfolio, according to the pundits, is the Apple TV. Launched at Macworld 2007, the Apple TV has met with a whimper of apathy from the public and has yet to revolutionise the way we watch TV in an equivalent manner as the iPod and iPhone have changed their respective categories.

However the take I got from my brief encounter with Apple execs in November was that the Apple TV is tracking as they predicted, and in relative terms has sold more units than the iPod had ten months in to its own life cycle.

Will Apple TV lose its 'hobby' moniker?

Still, it's easy to see how Apple could improve the Apple TV. Add support for other codecs like DivX and the product might be an instant hit - possibly at the expense of people buying legitimate content from iTunes.

However, Apple isn't stupid — it knows that part of the early success of the iPod was its ability to play MP3 files — the format most commonly used for downloaded, pirated music. If Apple had forced people to convert their whole music collection to AAC before transferring it to an iPod, the iPod would have gone the same way as Sony's attempts at portable digital music players did.

There's talk that Apple will add movie rentals to iTunes, but even if that's the case, don't expect them to come to Australia any time soon.

iPhone generation 2?

Then there's the iPhone. Despite the relatively easy availability of hacked iPhones for use in Australia, lots of people are holding out on buying one until it's got 3G support and built-in GPS but I think those features are at least another six months away.

One things for sure, Microsoft Office 2008 will be out here on Jan 31.

Apple knows that the iPhone is better than anything out there at the moment so certainly won't be rushed in to releasing anything until the technology is mature and the feature set makes sense. With the imminent SDK just around the corner the iPhone as we know it is here to stay for the short term.

That said, it's obvious by how frequently iPod models are turned over that Apple is well aware that the consumer electro

nics market thrives on 'new' stuff, so it's entirely possible that Apple will surprise us with some sort of iPhone update — even if it's a significant software refresh rather than hardware.

So, with all that in mind here's our list with a percentage score of how likely things are to actually happen. Comments are always appreciated, so let the speculation begin!

Toshiba's grunty new 128GB flash driveIf you're buying a new notebook computer next year, the chances of it not having a hard drive just got stronger.

Rapid capacity advances in flash memory capacities have removed the biggest reason to stay with conventional platter-based hard disks - capacity. Add reliability and falling prices and you've got a compelling argument to make a move.

Early in the new year Toshiba will start shipping a new range of solid state (SSD) drives with capacities of 32, 64 and 128GB. The NAND-based devices will have write speeds of 40 megabits-per-second and read speeds of 100 megabits-per-second.

The first models will be in a module form, however the company says later next year they will begin shipping them in 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch form factors. They will also be compatible with Serial ATA-300 connections.

Prices are yet to be announced, but 128GB flash products from other manufacturers sit around the $US4000 mark, so, although there are hopes that pricing will eventually drop to be comparable with hard drives, don't expect to see a 128GB flash drive in the rumoured ultraportable MacBook Pro.

Toshiba has been able to pack such massive capacities into the drives by using so-called Multi-level cell (MLC) technology that allows data to be stored in more than one layer with the device. Conventional flash storage uses just a single layer.

Flash memory offers significant benefits for notebook users. As well as being more resistant to bumps and shocks, it also requires much less power than a conventional spinning disk.

The new Toshiba storage drives will be publically displayed for the first time at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January. Volume production is expected to begin during the first few months of the year.

The telcos have finally cut prices, and now Dell and Toshiba are offering built-in wireless broadband from the likes of Vodafone and BigPond in their notebooks - including 13 notebooks in Dell

Buoyed by the success of its earlier offerings, LG has unveiled two new DVD drives that further blur the line between the two competing high definition recording formats.

The Super Multi Blue drives combine Blu-ray and HD DVD capabilities in a single unit, meaning consumers don't have to lock themselves in to one of the format camps. This is an attractive thought as the battle for the hearts and wallets of next-generation DVD fans is far from over.

LG's latest dual-format high-def driveThe Super Multi Blue GGW-H20L can write Blu-ray discs (BD-R) at speeds of up to 6X and conventional DVD+/-R discs at speeds of 16X. It can also read HD-DVD ROM discs at 3X speeds.

The other model, GGC-H20L, can play both Blu-ray and HD-DVD discs, but can only write conventional DVD and CD formats, albeit at an impressive 16X speed.

At the heart of the drives is LG's innovative Optical Pickup technology. This development allows the drives to play both competing high-definition formats and write Blu-ray discs. It can also handle conventional DVD and CD formats.

Both internal drives are now on the Australian market. The GGW-H20L retails for $999 while the GGC-H20L is priced at $799.

Interestingly a new industry report released this week shows Blu-ray has cornered more than 95 per cent of the home entertainment hardware and software markets.

Released by GfK Marketing Services (in association with Blu-ray fan Sony) it says the format has secure a 95.2% market share, leaving just 4.8 per cent for rival HD-DVD.

Dell