Earlier this month, Hitachi announced a major breakthrough in hard disk technology, using perpendicular recording (writing data vertically instead of horizontally) to cram up 10 times more data on a disk. They even made a cool little flash musical that you should definitely if you haven’t yet. And now Seagate, Toshiba, and Fujitsu are going this way too. Seems like good news to me if we can have 300Gb the size of an iPod mini (for the price of an iPod mini) sometime soonish…

Via Engadget

Tech-On! reports that the Cell microprocessor jointly developed by Toshiba, Sony, and IBM, can simultaneously decode 48 SDTV format MPEG-2 streams. At the “COOL Chips VIII” in Yokohama a few days ago, Toshiba presented a demo movie in which 48 MPEG-2 streams stored on a HDD were “read, decoded and projected to a 1,920 x 1,080 resolution display divided into 8 x 6 cells, each of which showed a different video fitted to the cell size”.

They add that “of the eight synergistic processor elements (SPE) featured by the Cell, six are used for decoding 48 MPEG-2 streams and one is used for scaling the screen. The remaining SPE can be used for a completely different processing”. Which, Gizmodo noted, will allow Sony to follow their plan to putting a Cell processor inside each and every Playstation 3.

In October sales of home electronics in Japan accounted for US$ 1.4 billion, a fall for the third month in a row in comparison with 2004.
According to the Nippon Electric Big-Stores Association who reported the statistics, the sluggish sales was due to the earthquake in Niigata and the heavy typhoos that hit Japan in October. DVD player and TV sales increased, but sales of video cameras and PCs are fell.

Tired of dealing with many types of portable storage media? Yokohama-based company Corega has developed a USB2.0 multi-card reader that can handle 10 different type of storage cards. The multi-card reader is 90×52x17 mm and weighs 56 gram. It comes with a 1m cable to connect to the USB-port of your MAC or PC.
The following storage media are supported: compactFlash, micro-drive, smartmedia, SD memory-card, mini SD card, multimedia card, memory-stick, memory-stick duo, memory-stick PRO, and the memory-stick PRO duo. The price is attractive as well: JPY 2,205. Once, it will become available in December, we will rush to Akihabara to buy one.