Thursday Newspaper Review - Irish Business News and International ...

Review PC Satellite TV: The Irish Independent reports that house prices are falling rapidly across Ireland, the latest house-price index reveals. Only the capital is holding up in the property market and prices in the commuter-belt counties around Dublin plunged 1.8pc last month alone.House prices in this region were down 3.6pc in the first four months of the year, which would represent an annual fall of 11pc.Fears of a slump in the property market grew yesterday after the permanent tsb/ESRI house price index showed prices nationally fell 1.3pc in the first four months. This was combined with a small increase in Dublin prices and a 1.5pc fall in the rest of the country - with the biggest drop in Dublin's commuter belt.

They've got their eyes on the housemates

Review PC Satellite TV: Forget the bedroom antics and cringe-worthy dialogue of participants in Channel Ten's Big Brother reality show for a minute. Now think about managing 49 video cameras, a live auditorium, two control rooms, three live broadcasts plus editions of two nightly TV shows.Add 100 technical staff, two film crews, two storylines, two video streams, four giant LCD screens displaying footage from 10 cameras each and you have an idea of the challenges facing Ben Steendyk, project manager, and Michael Eveleigh, technical manager of the Cutting Edge company.It's probably a good thing they've grown fond of the polarising live-in reality show. "I think you have to become a fan when you work here. You watch these people living their lives, you get involved," says Mr Steendyk.

Technology review

Review PC Satellite TV: Blu-ray discs can hold 50 gigabytes of data, making a regular DVD seem cramped. They can also make life easier for digital photographers, video editors or anybody else who needs to stash big files on a recordable disc. For those who don't want to drag around an external Blu-ray drive with their Macintosh laptops, Fastmac recently released an internal slot-loading Blu-ray drive that replaces the DVD drive.Fastmac's Blu-ray drive works with several recent Macintosh laptop models, as well as the iMac and Mac Mini desktop systems. A list of compatible Macs and full technical specifications are at www.fastmac.com, which is also an online store.Several third-party programs, including Roxio Toast 8 Titanium and Adobe Premiere CS3, can actually do the Blu-ray disc burning on the Mac once the drive is installed.

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