MPEG LA, LLC, world leader in alternative one-stop patent licenses, today announced that several patent holders in MPEG LA’s MPEG-2 Patent Portfolio License have filed separate patent enforcement actions in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and Landgericht Düsseldorf against Lenovo Group Limited, Lenovo (United States) Inc. and Lenovo (Germany) GmbH (collectively, “Lenovo”) for infringing patents essential to the MPEG-2 digital video compression standard used worldwide in digital television broadcasting and DVD.

According to the complaints, Lenovo offers in the United States and Germany products, such as desktop computers, laptop computers, Blu-ray Disc® drives, DVD drives and software, which use patent protected MPEG-2 methods without having entered into licenses with the individual patent holders or a portfolio license that includes these patents offered by MPEG LA.

The suit seeks, among other things, monetary damages and an injunction prohibiting Lenovo from using MPEG-2 patents in its products and from offering, marketing, or importing them.

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Fusion-io, the leader in solid-state architecture and high-performance I/O solutions, today announced the ioDrive Duo, which doubles the slot capacity of Fusion-io’s successful PCI Express-based ioDrive storage solution. The new ioDrive Duo is the market’s fastest and most innovative server-based solid-state storage solution.

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With the ioDrive Duo, it is now possible for application, database and system administrators to get previously unheard-of levels of performance, protection and capacity utilization from a single server. Performance for multiple ioDrive Duos scales linearly, allowing any enterprise to scale performance to six gigabytes per-second (Gbytes/sec) of read bandwidth and over 500,000 read IOPS by using just four ioDrive Duos.

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Apricorn, (www.apricorn.com) the leader in personal storage, announced today the 240GB capacity enhancement for the Aegis Mini, making it the largest capacity 1.8” external drive available on the market. Small enough to slip in a shirt pocket, Aegis Mini is an ultra-portable 1.8-inch external drive with USB 2.0 or FireWire connection. With added capacity, users can now hold up to 60,000 songs, 50,000 photos or 300 hours of video, a 50 percent increase in capacity from its 160GB predecessor.

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Smaller than a deck of cards and weighing in at a mere 3.7oz, Apricorn’s tiny portable drive offers simplicity and convenience. Its compact design centers around a 16-point omni-directional shock-mounted 1.8” hard drive, protecting the drive from the rigors of travel. With extremely low power demands the Aegis Mini is able to power on a single USB connection, helping to conserve notebook battery life and ensuring that the drive powers on all notebooks, including newer more power efficient models.

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AMD 790FX Motherboard Shootout @ HardwareZone
ASRock N7AD-SLI Motherboard @ Virtual-Hideout
Asus P6T Motherboard @ Rbmods
Asus VH242H 23.6" Widescreen LCD Monitor @ HotHardware.com
Corsair TX850 850W Power Supply @ ThinkComputers.org
Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR3-1600 6GB Kit @ BCCHardware
GIGABYTE GA-EX58-UD3R Ultra Durable 3 Motherboard @ Futurelooks
Icy Dock MB664UEB-1S USB/Firewire 3.5-inch External Hard Drive Enclosure @ ThinkComputers.org
Revoltec FightMouse PRO and FightMat PRO2 @ TweakPC.de
Thermaltake SpeedQ Heatsink @ High Tech Reviews
Toshiba Portege R600 Notebook @ InsideHW
Tritton AX Pro Precision Gaming Headset @ HardwareLogic
X-Spice Croon 850W PSU @ High Tech Reviews

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In response to the growing demand for high-quality Network Attached Storage (NAS) by budget-conscious small office/home office (SOHO) users, Verbatim® Americas, LLC, a world leader in digital storage solutions, announced today two new higher-capacity Gigabit NAS hard drives.  Verbatim Gigabit NAS desktop hard drives now offer capacities of 1TB and 2TB for easy file sharing between any PC and Mac® desktop or laptop system on the network.

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With Gigabit Ethernet connectivity for file sharing, Verbatim NAS users can free up space on their personal computers while enjoying fast access to high-capacity, centralized storage and the ability to easily share music, photos, videos and data files. Efficient and versatile, Verbatim Gigabit NAS hard drives can also be used as a home entertainment server to stream movies to their TV through their UPnP/DLNA media player or stream music to any computer running iTunes®.  And for additional savings, instead of purchasing a printer for each individual, a single USB printer can be added to the drive’s USB host port that everyone on the network can use.

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Today LaCie announced three new ways to carry digital content – LaCie itsaKey, iamaKey and PassKey USB key drives, design by 5.5 Designers. The inventive, compact key-shaped design conveniently fits in a pocket or on a key ring. The itsaKey and iamaKey store up to 8 gigabytes of flash memory. Alternatively, the PassKey has a built-in microSD card reader, which allows you to use your memory cards as stylish and handy USB keys.

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Resilient to the rigorous treatment that often befalls common keys, the three USB keys are built with sturdy metal, making their surfaces tough and dependable. Additionally, the Gold SIP connector on the iamaKey is both water- and scratch- resistant, making it one of the thinnest and most durable flash drive choices on the market.

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Seagate, teaming with microprocessor manufacturing leader Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) at the Everything Channel Xchange Conference in New Orleans this week, today unveiled the world's first public demonstration of next-generation high-speed data transfer - Serial ATA 6Gigabit/second - for bandwidth-hungry desktop and laptop PC applications including gaming, streaming video and graphics multimedia.

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The Serial ATA (SATA) 6Gb/second storage interface will deliver the highest performance - burst speeds of up to 6Gigabits per second - for all PC applications, maintain backward compatibility with the SATA 3Gb/second and SATA 1.5Gb/second interfaces, and use the same cables and connectors as previous SATA generations to ease integration. The third generation of the mainstream storage interface for desktop and notebook computers also enhances power efficiency and improves Native Command Queuing, a SATA feature, to increase overall system performance and data transfer speeds of mainstream PC applications but especially applications with heavily transactional workloads such as scientific modeling and forecasting, and engineering design and simulation.

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Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., a world leader in digital consumer electronics and information technology, today announced its new EcoGreen F2EG hard disk that delivers a massive 1.5TB of capacity with 500GB per disk. With increased recording density and reduced number of disks, the EcoGreen F2 drive is more power efficient by supporting a capacity up to 1.5TB with 3 disks.

samsung ecotriangle.jpg“Lower platter count means less power to start the motor, less power to continuously spin the motor and a lighter head-stack which takes less power to seek,” said Andy Higginbotham, director of HDD sales and marketing for the Samsung Semiconductor Storage Division. “With fewer heads and disks, the F2EG hard drive has a lower probability of head-disk failures, enabling customers to build more reliable systems.”

As hard disk capacity increases from an increased number of disks, so does power consumption. However, Samsung’s F2EG drive offers low power consumption by using EcoTriangle™, a low-power, low-heat, low-noise operation technology. With its advanced design and fewer components, the F2EG drive is 40% lower in power consumption in idle mode and 45% lower in reading/writing mode than competitive drives. Samsung’s Eco-Triangle™ technology offers more energy efficient and high performance hard drive options to manufacturers of home media PC, external HDD, set-top box, and personal NAS.

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A-DATA Technology Co., Ltd., a worldwide leading manufacturer in high performance memory products, today announced it has launched the highest capacity of SSD in the industry at CeBIT 2009, the 512GB XPG 2.5” SSD. The 512GB XPG 2.5” SSD is designed for notebook and PC enthusiasts seeking for both fast transfer rate and high capacity SSD.

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The 512GB XPG 2.5” SSD delivers fast transfer rate up to 230MB/s and 160MB/s read and write. Adopted standard high speed SATA II interface and equipped with a tough but lightweight case. Up to 512GB capacity, is the highest capacity SSD offer to the market, designed for notebook and PC enthusiasts seeking for both fast transfer rate and high capacity SSD.

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IEEE, the world's largest technical professional society, announced today that it will be granting its prestigious IEEE Milestone Award to Royal Philips Electronics  for its contribution to the development of the Compact Disc (CD) on March 6th 2009. The award coincides with the 30th anniversary of the historic demonstration of the first CD prototype codenamed "Pinkeltje" on 8 March 1979.

Despite the recession of the early 1980s, Philips and Sony invested and planned for the successful commercial introduction of the Compact Disc in 1982. The CD was the first ever digital mass consumer product to find its way into almost every consumer's home. Since its introduction in 1982, over 3.5 billion audio CD players, 3 billion CD-ROM drives and an astonishing 240 billion CD discs have been sold.

"The compact disc was a revolutionary new concept that fulfilled a great consumer demand for a robust, high quality compact audio medium," says John Vig, 2009 IEEE President and Chief Executive Officer. "By leveraging research advances in optics, mechatronics, microelectronics, digital signal processing and error control coding, a unique platform was created that has really changed the audio as well as the computing world."

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