Toshiba denies agreement on high-def DVD standard

Sony and Toshiba are within a week of agreeing a common standard for high-definition DVD technology, according to Japanese business newspaper Nihon Keizai Shimbun. A new format will combine software from Toshiba's HD-DVD technology and the disc structure from Sony's higher-capacity Blu-ray. Toshiba, however, said that there is no truth in the report. ...more

And also today (20-August-2001), for the record...

Here, in brief, are some of the day's other stories. Chris Smith for Ofcom? Ex-Culture Minister, Chris Smith, is being tipped to be the first chairman of the new communications regulator Ofcom. Already the suggestion has been attacked by Conservatives as an overtly political appointment. ...more

LaCie announces faster back-ups

LaCie has announced a new AIT tape drive capable of backing-up or archiving 200Gb of compressed data onto one tape. The AIT3 drives have twice the capacity of existing AIT2 drives and double the transfer rate, reaching a maximum of 24Mb per second. The drives are back-compatible with AIT1 and AIT2 media, so no existing back-ups will be redundant. ...more

Blu-ray discs to adopt same DRM as rival HD-DVD

Blu-ray discs will employ the same digital rights management (DRM) anti-copying technology as the rival HD-DVD format, the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) has revealed. The discs, recorders and players will use the Advanced Access Content System (AACS) to prevent unauthorised disc copying. The BDA said that AACS' support for future 'usage models' based around home networks and the Internet was a major factor in its decision. ...more

IBM ups the ante on Enterprise systems

IBM has launched a new top of the range mainframe class machine that, it claims is almost three times as powerful as the previous z900 series. The capacities of the machine are fair mind boggling. The company claims the z990 benchmarks at 9,000 MIPS (million instructions per second) on 32 processors It can scale up to process 450 million e-business transactions/day while clustered z990s can handle up to 13 billion transactions/day. ...more