Overnight news roundup: 28-29 November

Apple's Boot Camp solution will work only with Leopard in the New Year.

In a move that could spell trouble for the company if consumers don't react well, Apple will not allow users to access its Boot Camp dual-boot solution unless they upgrade to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard once the New Year rolls around.

Since its inception, the popular Apple solution that allows users to run Windows and Mac OS X on the same hard drive has gone through a number of changes that has ultimately brought it to its current support for both Windows Vista and Leopard.

Boot Camp was never a Tiger product

But according to Apple, Boot Camp was always designed with Leopard in mind and it was released earlier on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger to work out issues and find any bugs before its final release for Leopard.

"We hope you've enjoyed the opportunity to preview an exciting new feature of Mac OS X Leopard," Apple said in email to current Boot Camp beta testers on Wednesday. "With the introduction of Leopard, the Boot Camp Beta program has ended."

The Boot Camp beta will expire on 31 December and Apple has indicated that users can upgrade to the new Boot Camp free of charge once they have Leopard installed.

Google Maps adds feature that will find you

Google has unveiled a new feature in its Google Maps application, which will allow phone users to make it mimic a real GPS device. According to the company, the new feature called My Location, pinpoints the exact location of a mobile phone and will highlight it on a given map on the device.

So far, the application is in beta and it works with all versions of the Blackberry, Symbian Series 60 and Windows Mobile devices. iPhone support has yet to be announced.

And the rest...

If you have ever wanted to lift your HDTV into your ceiling, but never found a viable way to do it, you might be in luck. According to a company called Chief Manufacturing, its new system known as the Automated Ceiling Lift "will make your TV like a drop-down projection screen." Amazingly, it can handle sets up to a 61-inch HD TV or up to 86kg. Pricing and availability are still unknown.

Rambus, a relatively well-known memory maker, has announced that it will produce a 1TB per second computer memory chip under the auspices of its very own Terabyte Bandwidth initiative. The improved memory will be able to attain about 16 times the speed of current DDR2 memory and so far, the company is unsure of when it will be made available.

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