Toshiba to debut first HD DVD Recorder

Toshiba, the company that has pushed the HD DVD standard has announced that it is to launch the world's first HD DVD Recorder in Japan next month. The new RD-A1 player combines a recordable HD DVD along with a 1Tbyte hard disk. Toshiba says it can record and store up to 130 hours of high-definition broadcasts on its hard disk and record up to 115 minutes of high-definition content to a 15Gb single-layer HD DVD-R disc, and up to 230 minutes to a 30Gb dual-layer HD DVD-R disc. ...more

High-definition TV promised for Freeview this summer

The UK's four terrestrial broadcasters will offer Freeview digital viewers in London their first taste of high-definition TV this summer with a series of trial programmes. They are looking for 500 volunteers in the capital to test the service, known as DTT HD, which will include games from the World Cup in Germany. 'This trial will allow us to evaluate the technology and give us valuable insight into viewer attitudes to HD, helping to show the possibilities for HD broadcasts over DTT post-switch-over,' said Simon Fell, the controller of emerging technologies at ITV. ...more

Douglas Adams dies at 49

The sad news from the weekend is that author Douglas Adams died of a heart attack on Friday at his home in Santa Barbara. Famous for his Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy series of books, which were spawned from a radio show and were later turned into a TV series and computer game, Douglas Adams was also famous for his championing of the Apple Macintosh brand of computers, owning the very first computers to be imported into the country. A new computer game version of the Hitch-Hiker's Guide is currently being developed by Pan Interactive and will be previewed at this week's E3 show in Los Angeles, with a release scheduled for the first quarter of 2002. ...more

US considers banning DRM rootkits

US government officials are considering introducing legislation if companies continue to distribute copy-protection measures that compromise computer security. The Department of Homeland Security's Border and Transportation Security Directorate warning followed the discovery last year that Sony BMG employed two different types of digital rights management (DRM) on music CDS sold in the US and both installed rootkit software on PCs that made them vulnerable. 'We need to think about how that situation could have been avoided in the first place,' said Jonathan Frenkel at the RSA computer security conference. ...more

Odessa draws up new charting tool

The Ukrainian company Odessa is launching its ConceptDraw diagramming package in the UK. For drawing flow charts, technical drawings, office plans, or sketching out designs such as for Websites, it can also be programmatically extended by its own version of Basic. Compatible with Macs (it is a Carbon application for OS X) as well as Windows, ConceptDraw V diagrams are exportable to a range of formats, including, HTML, XML, JPGs, PDF, PowerPoint and Flash. ...more