Deep Tech

High-ranking Mozilla staff, believing they've lost a fight to keep patent-encumbered technology off the Web, have concluded it's time to change course and support H.264 video technology.

The H.264, a "codec" to encode and decode video for more efficient storage and streaming, is widely used in everything from video cameras to mobile-phone processors. However, it's encumbered by patent royalty payments that go against Mozilla's goal of fostering an open Web.

The patent issue led Mozilla to strongly endorse Google's alternative VP8 codec that's part of its royalty-free WebM project. But … Read more

As Adobe Systems prepares to release Creative Suite 6, it's in the midst of two major shifts: the addition of its Creative Cloud subscription and the addition of design tools using Web standards.

And we want to know what you think of the change.

In conjunction with Jefferies, a financial research and investment banking firm, CNET is conducting a quick survey about Adobe's Creative Cloud and embrace of Web standards. It's only nine multiple-choice questions long, so it's very fast and easy to fill out.

We'll be publishing results of the survey later so you can see if other people see things your way. If you are open to us asking you follow-up questions, you can leave your e-mail address at the end of the survey, but it's completely optional. Of course, you also can leave comments on this post. … Read more

HANOVER, Germany--CeBIT is a mammoth trade show that most people in the United States have never heard of.

It's a huge show, with more than 300,000 attendees--many of them ordinary consumers who show up on "family day" on Saturday, the last day of the show. CeBIT has waxed and waned over the years, losing some clout with the rise of Mobile World Congress and the shift of so much electronics manufacturing to Asia, but it remains a fixture of the European technology world.

Along with sections for personal computing, Internet companies, and IT services, you'll … Read more

HANOVER, Germany--I'm not sure exactly when overclocking computers became an end unto itself rather than a means to an end.

But I'm glad it has, just for the sheer entertainment factor of watching people take extreme measures to get their machines to run faster than they're supposed to. Plenty of techie types also are enthusiastic, judging by the throng at the CeBIT show here who gathered to watch No. 2-ranked overclocking expert Nick Shih in action.

Shih held the overclocking crown for 18 months straight. He knows his business cold, so to speak. To seriously overclock a … Read more

HANOVER, Germany--The future of cars--or at least one possible future of cars--is on display here at CeBIT.

The Robotics Innovation Center at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) is showing off an electric-car prototype designed to test new technologies.

For one thing, the car can lengthen itself and lower the profile of its podlike passenger compartment when it's time for fast driving, then shorten its wheelbase when it's time for tight-turning urban driving. For another, it can toe its tires in as much as 90 degrees, letting it rotate in place or drive sideways for painless … Read more

Don't like playing by Apple's rules? Tough beans.

Because for the foreseeable future, Apple's financial power and customer appeal gives it a powerful command over the industry--everything from component suppliers to programmers. That poses all kinds of problems, but it also means we'll be moving much faster into the future of computing--call it the post-post-PC era.

Yesterday's launch of the new iPad shows just how complete that power is. Sure, we'll still have Windows PCs, Android phones, and even MacBooks, but the iPad is on a steady trajectory that leads from entertaining toward essential. … Read more

HANOVER, Germany--SuperTalent showed off a forthcoming product at CeBIT, a PCI Express flash storage system that beats out conventional SSDs in performance but that doesn't cost as much as the company's existing PCIe products.

The RAIDDrive UpStream uses a SandForce controller to handle data-transfer speeds of 1GBps. That's roughly twice the speed of SSDs that, like the pokier but cheaper hard drives they typically replace, use the SATA interface.

The product should go on sale in weeks, said product marketing director Peter Carcione in an interview here. "I'm hoping the end of April," he … Read more

HANOVER, Germany--Who says robots don't have a sense of aesthetics?

Fraunhofer Institute showed off a robot that drew people's portraits here at the CeBIT tech show. It drew a big crowd, too--metaphorically speaking--with a steady throng watching its slow progress.

The robot actually didn't have a sense of aesthetics. Instead it had a camera, an algorithm to convert a digital photo into outlines, and an ability to draw those lines very precisely on a whiteboard.

Check the video below to see it in action. It's a thing of trigonometric beauty in its own way. … Read more

HANOVER, Germany--OCZ unveiled a new solid-state drive here, its higher-performance Vertex 4, and said it'll ship an SSD called the Lightfoot using the Thunderbolt interface later this year that'll be even faster.

Many SSD makers use a controller chip from Sandforce, but OCZ acquired a competitor called Indilinx, and its Vertex 4 uses the Indilinx Everest 2 controller. Where Sandforce gets a performance boost by compressing data, the Indilinx technology uses faster uncompressed links, said marketing director Joost van Leeuwen, speaking here at the CeBIT tech show where it unveiled the products.

The Sandforce-based Vertex 3 products can … Read more