Similarly, the Green Button team at the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institute of Standards and Technology is working collaboratively with industry to enable millions of residential and commercial energy customers to securely download and share their own energy usage data in a standardized human-readable and machine-readable format directly from their utilities.

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So if you pop in a DVD "infected" with Protect DVD-Video, it can't be read by Windows Media Player, Media Center Edition, or any DirectShow-based software, thanks to a Universal Disc Format that tricks your machine into believing that the IFO file is zero bytes long.

ENGADGET: Protect DVD-Video prevents discs from playing on your PC

But Uni-Creation has taken the reverse approach here by stuffing a tabulation machine on top of a multi-format memory card reader.

ENGADGET: Uni-Creation's All-in-1 memory card reading calculator

So, if you were hoping this machine would be as adept at playing back video files in any 'ol format you throw at it, like the x86 version of Windows is, you're bound for disappointment.

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The IIPC has set a single format, making it more likely that future historians will be able to find a machine to read the data.

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