Cebit 2008 -- Part 2

Moar info and pics from the show floor -- check this article frequently, more updates are planned

Time is of the essence here, because I'm due at the Haymarket stand, but here's a whole stack of stuff. Check back in later for more info and pics.



Who says Core2 Duo has to march technology forward? Here's a Core2 Duo board with an ISA slot! Hooray for old-school tech!



The guy who was demoing this and does hard drive recovery says you don't need a clean room to fix hard drives. A bold claim that we'll be interviewing him about later.



HDMI in one end, two runs of network cable out, and the same again in reverse on the other end. They're powered, so it may be active and you may get beyond the terrible 20m point in HDMI where signal to noise in the twisted pair standard used in HDMI cables craps out on you. Perhaps.



A NAS with four hard drive bays and an E-sata input on the back. You can get RAID or JBOD through the network, but the dude displaying it wasn't sure if the USB ports on the front could be accessed through the network. They'll support printers though. Handy.



Via's not dead! I want to see these in tiny little media centres. The two on the top jhave PCI-e slots and are made for "Gaming" (even though the processors are 1.8 GHz, Via, and are soldered to the board and hence can't be changed) and the bottom two have loads of multimedia connections on them, most notably Component. The bottom ones also do hardware WMV 9, MPEG 2 and 4 decoding (although we didn't get an answer about whether MPEG 4 part 10, better known as H.264, X.264 and the other implementations of the awesome decoding standards based around it were included in the MPEG 4 naming terminology).



You can also go REALLY small with Via. For size reference, that's a VGA output and network port at the top left.



A tragic waste of a beautiful rackmount solution. That's my mate Arthur doing his impression of Ceiling Cat on the right.

I have a few more images, but need to dash off to our stand. I'll check back in later and addmore information and tidy things up a bit.

Back to the show floor!