Filed under: Wireless, Networking

The same folks who brought us fire-proof plastic, air guitar clothing, and wireless air hockey apparently delivered a lot more of the WiFi technology we all utilize daily than was previously recognized. Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization has won a landmark case against Buffalo Technology, “under which it could receive royalties from every producer of WLAN products worldwide.” US patent 5487069 — which “encompasses elements of the 802.11a/g wireless technology that is now an industry standard” — was granted to the body back in 1996, and has subsequently been utilized in seemingly every piece of wireless kit ever since. Considering their recent victory, CSIRO’s pending cases against Intel, Dell, Microsoft, HP, and Netgear definitely have roots now, and if judges continue to rule in the Aussies’ favor, the big boys could be shelling out “hundreds of millions of dollars” in back pay to cover their wrongs. Ruh roh.

[Thanks, Phil]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Peripherals

Buffalo has got a new video capture device for those not content with recording from a single source at a time, with the PC-MV72DX/U2 offering both S-video and composite inputs — along with an integrated analog TV tuner — to bolster your recording options. If that’s not enough for you, it seems you can also daisy-chain up to ten of ‘em together connected to a single PC. Alternatively, you can hook one (or more) of these suckers up to a network attached storage device (otherwise known as NAS), such as Buffalo’s own LinkStation line of drives. Whatever configuration you go with, you’ll get your choice of MPEG-1/2/4 video at up to 720 x 480 resolution, as well as all the PVR and TV viewing functions you’d expect to come with a PC-attached TV tuner. Look for this one to hit Japan later this month for 24,360 Yen (just over $200).

[Via Akihabara News]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Storage

We say bring it, Buffalo, and your bigazz drives! Meet the new HD-QSU2/R5 DriveStations now with eSATA connectivity and either 1TB or 2TB configurations. Each model ships with four, 7200RPM SATA drives allowing ‘em to be conifigured in RAID 0/1/5 configurations. That’s up to 500GB more capacity than before with eSATA throwing the bits ‘tween the DriveStation and PC at 3x the rate of USB 2.0 — that’s over 100MB/s as tested under RAID 5. On sale starting mid-November in Japan (and likely abroad soon after) for about ¥83,580 (about $702) for the 1TB or ¥156,345 (about $1,312) for that biggie 2TB. Hmm, wonder if one of those new BitTorrent routers comes with eSATA? Er, was that out loud?

[Via Impress]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time

Filed under: Peripherals, Storage

Filed under: Storage

They’re not the first and most surely won’t be the last to join the club, but Buffalo has just added an 8GB thumb drive to their flash lineup. The RUF2-R8G-S manages to squeeze the gigs into a 0.75 x 3.6 x 0.55 enclosure, and promises 32MB/s write and 27MB/s read speeds over USB 2.0. No word on price, but we’re sure the Yen required will be many. Now how about a bit of 16GB action?

[Via Akihabara]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Filed under: Peripherals, Storage, Networking

What do you get when you cross a 250GB Buffalo LinkStation network attached storage (NAS) device with some custom home-server software, a multi-protocol peer-to-peer client that supports FTP, Kad, BitTorrent, Overnet, FastTrack, and eDonkey? Well, for one you get a small device -- not unlike the LamaBox  -- that can continuously download and seed your torrent data after you've shut down for the night, thereby keeping that ratio up and preventing you from getting booted from your fav invite-only tracker into the cold, harsh world of Scandieland downloads from less reliable anonymous sources. Do we sound like we know way too much about this stuff? Maybe so, which probably has something to do with the fact that we're a little stoked for Patoh's external RochiP2P 250, which should supposedly set you back €299 ($380 US) for the above features in that same familiar looking old Buffalo box shown here. Unfortunately it appears the Patoh uses desktop software to control all those torrents instead of a nice web interface, but we, um, never get our media online or do any torrenting ourselves, so what Patoh does or doesn't do with their products is really none of our concern. Ahem.

Filed under: Desktops, Storage

Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments