Nick Farrell the Inquirer, Friday 9 November 2007. 11:21:00

Don't need no juice

HARDWARE maker Fujitsu Siemens has come up with a monitor which does not need any power to run in stand-by mode. With the UK set to ban stand-by mode because it is a waste of lecky, Fujitsu Siemens have hatched out a plan which means that its monitors will not suffer. Using the technology, a relay cuts off the mains power whenever the video stream stops. Capacitors store enough charge to flick the relay back when the signal returns and solar panels provide enough power to maintain zero consumption mode for up to five days. If you have not switched on after that time you will need to press a regular power button to bring the machine out of standby....

Andrew Thomas the Inquirer, Friday 9 November 2007. 11:11:00

Sony boss tries to sound upbeat, fails

SONY BOSS Howard Stringer, reckons that the Blu-ray disc format the company has developed as the successor to the DVD is losing ground to the Toshiba and Microsoft-backed HD DVD. Players for HD DVD are currently selling for half the price of Blu-ray ones in the US. Back in August, HD DVD got a vote of confidence from Paramount when the movie giant announced it would not be releasing its high definition catalogue on Blu-ray. "We were trying to win on the merits, which we were doing for a while, until Paramount changed sides," Stringer told AP. In a rather unconvincing statement, the Sony CEO maintains that it doesn't really matter if Blu-ray follows Betamax on the train to the gulag: "It doesn't mean as much as all that," he sobbed, adding that he believed there had once been a chance of bringing the two rival technologies together in a single format before he became CEO and he 'wishes he could travel back in time to make that happen'....