Science and technology news blog

To a technical person, stats mean everything when shopping for a PC. And that is why a review is very important. Wize.com is a site the provides PC Desktop Reviews on branded PCs. Say, for example, I want to buy a Hewlett Packard HP Pavilion M7780N Media Center PC w/ 2.13GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor (5584792) P, the site has 60 reviews, both user generated and expert.

Wize.com also provides full specs for the PC in question and it also has a shopping comparison list for different retailers. There is a “Wize Rank” for each product that can be part of your shopping criteria. How does it work? WizeRank’s proprietary technology collects reviews and ratings for hundreds of thousands of products from tens of thousands of sources on the web. This includes huge, comprehensive sources, such as Amazon.com and Cnet, and smaller niche sites, such as Digital Camera Magazine, Popular Photography & Imaging Magazine, and Shutterbug for digital cameras (to name just a few). The list of review sources is constantly growing as they continue to add independent sources of trusted content.

Once the data is collected and normalized, the WizeRank algorithm uses proven statistical methods to rate each product in our database. Read more about their ranking process in the WizeRank white paper.

Wize.com does not just stop at PCs, it also has video games, computer systems, cameras/camcorders, various electronics devices, and tons of other products. A definite “must look” website that could help finalizing your shopping needs.

In what could be considered as a massive blow to the momentum that Blu-ray was generating, both Paramount and Dreamworks have announced exclusive support for HD-DVD. In the following press release from Viacom, both Paramount and Dreamworks have officially announced that they will be releasing their high-def content on HD-DVD only:

Paramount Pictures, a unit of Viacom Inc. (NYSE: VIA and VIA.B) and DreamWorks Animation SKG (NYSE: DWA), each announced today that they will exclusively support the next-generation HD DVD format on a worldwide basis. The exclusive HD DVD commitment will include all movies distributed by Paramount Pictures, DreamWorks Pictures, Paramount Vantage, Nickelodeon Movies and MTV Films, as well as movies from DreamWorks Animation, which are distributed exclusively by Paramount Home Entertainment.

This is definitely a major shock to the Blu-ray camp as until now, Paramount and DreamWorks were supporting both the formats.

The Compact Disc has crossed 25 years in its illustrious life. The format that revolutionized how we listen to music, watch movies and save data has come a long long way since it was born. It was August 17, 1982 and an assembly line in a suburb of Hanover, Germany began pumping out a modest collection of laser-encoded palm-sized discs, officially paving the path for what would later become the most popular album format.

According to Philips, the first CD was ABBA’s The Visitors, an album that is now available on iTunes.  CD players were brought to the market in Germany for the 1982 holiday season, by which time nearly 150 albums were already available.  The format made its way to the US the following spring.

And these days when we talk of next-gen tech that includes HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, the underlying technology is still based on what was created 25 years ago by Sony and Philips.

Recent reports have suggested that listening to Apple’s iPod in a storm is a naughty thing to do and Mother Nature punishes you by giving you the biggest shock of your life, quite literally. Here is a report that will make you shudder from head to toe:

The man had burns along his chest and neck where his earphone wires lay. The insides of his ears also were burned—and then the ear buds conducted the current into his head.

The full article can be read here. Makes you wonder what if that was me. I could not even sleep properly, I can’t even listen to my iPod now for a few days, just imagining if this were to happen to me.

AMD’s Barcelona processors are going to re-ignite the processor wars. AMD’s entire future depends on the performance of its new Quad-core range of processors. Since the launch of Intel’s Core processors, AMD has taken a huge beating and all its market share gains in the last few years has been evaporated thanks to Intel’s superior processors. However, come August and AMD will launch its counter-attack with its “native” quad-core processors.

AMD calls it quad-core processors native because it has 4 cores on one die. Intel’s quad-core offering at the moment is two dual-core processors joined together, or in AMD’s words “Stitched” together. On paper it would seem that having 4 cores on a single die would quite obviously be better than having 2 dual-core processors. However, in real world applications its all a different story. AMD seems to be a victim of its own theory. For years, Intel has always had the edge when it came to clock speed, but AMD always had the edge in performance. This time around though its Intel that has the edge in performance in the dual-core products from both the companies.

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AMD’s Barcelona processors are going to re-ignite the processor wars. AMD’s entire future depends on the performance of its new Quad-core range of processors. Since the launch of Intel’s Core processors, AMD has taken a huge beating and all its market share gains in the last few years has been evaporated thanks to Intel’s superior processors. However, come August and AMD will launch its counter-attack with its “native” quad-core processors.

AMD calls it quad-core processors native because it has 4 cores on one die. Intel’s quad-core offering at the moment is two dual-core processors joined together, or in AMD’s words “Stitched” together. On paper it would seem that having 4 cores on a single die would quite obviously be better than having 2 dual-core processors. However, in real world applications its all a different story. AMD seems to be a victim of its own theory. For years, Intel has always had the edge when it came to clock speed, but AMD always had the edge in performance. This time around though its Intel that has the edge in performance in the dual-core products from both the companies.

(more…)

Samsung on March 7 shipped what it called the “world’s first hybrid hard drive” to the commercial marketplace, but it will get an argument from Dynamic Network Factory, which started shipping its own hybrid storage hard drive on Feb. 1.

Hybrid hard disks combine a standard disk drive with solid state—usually NAND flash-based—random-access memory in a design that is energy efficient.

Samsung’s MH80 Series hybrid hard drive is offered in 80GB, 120GB and 160GB capacities, said a spokesperson for the company, which is based in Seoul, Korea.

The MH80 hybrid hard drive is currently shipping to select OEM customers and will soon be available in retail and commercial outlets, the spokesperson said. Details on pricing and availability will be released soon, the spokesperson said.

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TiVo together with Amazon.com, Inc. today announced that “Amazon Unbox on TiVo” is now available to more than 1.5 million broadband-ready TiVo subscribers. This availability follows a recent successful beta-testing period with a small group of TiVo subscribers. This unique service offers TiVo subscribers the best way to find their favorite movies and TV shows from the thousands that are available on Amazon Unbox, download and watch them right on their TV.

Also today, TiVo and Amazon announced the addition of Sony Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. (MGM) to the list of studios offering content through Amazon Unbox on TiVo, which also includes CBS, Fox Entertainment Group, Lionsgate, Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios Home Entertainment, and Warner Bros. Entertainment.

To celebrate the launch of this new service, TiVo and Amazon are offering $15 in free movie and TV show downloads to anyone who signs up for the Amazon Unbox on TiVo service by April 30, 2007.

Amazon Unbox on TiVo provides an easy solution for renting or purchasing thousands of movies and thousands of TV shows. For example, consumers can get caught up with the Oscar buzz by renting or purchasing the “must-see” Oscar-winning and nominated films and having them sent directly to their TV via their TiVo. Additionally, TiVo subscribers can easily find award-winning actors’ and directors’ previous movies through Amazon Unbox or through their broadcast programming via TiVo’s exclusive WishList searches.

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Intel will demonstrate on Monday an experimental computer chip with 80 separate processing engines, or cores, that company executives say provides a model for commercial chips that will be used widely in standard desktop, laptop and server computers within five years.

The new processor, which the company first described as a Teraflop Chip at a conference last year, will be detailed in a technical paper to be presented on the opening day of the International Solid States Circuits Conference, beginning here on Monday.

While the chip is not compatible with Intel’s current chips, the company said it had already begun design work on a commercial version that would essentially have dozens or even hundreds of Intel-compatible microprocessors laid out in a tiled pattern on a single chip.

The chip’s design is meant to exploit a new generation of manufacturing technology the company introduced last month. Intel said that it had changed the basic design of transistors in such a way that it would be able to continue to shrink them to smaller sizes — offering lower power and higher speeds — for at least a half-decade or more.

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Fiber-optic networks transmit massive amounts of information quickly, but the signals weaken as the data-carrying light travels long distances. Now, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said they’ve overcome a major obstacle in harnessing the full power and speed of the light waves.

It promises to solve a problem that’s long plagued fiber-optic networks: Light waves gradually weaken over distances as they become polarized, or randomly oriented horizontally and vertically. The tools available to fix it are expensive to deploy on a massive scale.

The MIT researchers reported in a recent edition of the journal Nature Photonics that they’ve devised a solution that utilizes the mass-production capabilities of standard silicon chips.

It’s a promising development as bandwidth-hungry video puts a strain on networks and consumers demand seamless transmissions.

Like polarizing sunglasses that block light waves oriented in different directions, the MIT researchers created a clever device that splits the light beams as they pass through a circuit. The device then rotates one of the polarized beams, before both beams are rejoined on their way out of the circuit, retaining the signals’ strength.

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A Vancouver-area company is set to publicly demonstrate its new quantum computer next week in what may be the first time the paradigm-shifting technology leaves the research laboratory.

D-Wave Systems Inc. of Burnaby, B.C. plans to show off its commercial quantum computers at the Computer History Museum on Feb. 13 and at the Telus World of Science museum in Vancouver on Feb. 15.

Quantum technology could revolutionize the computer industry by allowing systems to simultaneously perform multiple calculations where traditional computers would have to perform them one at a time.

Such a system would be governed by the rules of quantum physics, as opposed to classical physics laws such as mechanics, gravity and Einstein’s theory of relativity. Quantum mechanics rule particle interactions below the atomic scale, where the conventional laws of physics break down.

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AMD announces availability of new AMD Opteron processor models in both highly efficient and mainstream thermal envelopes. AMD has expanded the breadth of its low-power solutions with AMD Opteron processor Models 1218 HE, 2218 HE and 8218 HE. Designed to offer high performance-per-watt at 68-watt maximum thermal design power, these processors are suited for energy-conscious customers looking to reduce power and cooling bills and to achieve greater density in the datacenter. AMD Opteron HE processor models now include three 1000 Series models, bringing the benefits of reduced thermals over previous AMD Opteron 1000 Series processors to entry-level server customers while preserving the enterprise reliability they value.

All of the new processors feature AMD PowerNow! technology which is designed for reduced system level energy consumption, with multiple levels of lower clock speed and voltage states that can reduce processor power consumption by as much as 75 percent during idle times.

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AdventNet is certainly bent on giving Google a run for its money. Its Zoho line of online apps—which includes a word processor (Zoho Writer), spreadsheet (Zoho Sheet), wiki (Zoho Wiki), and presentation package (Zoho Show)—is one of the few free office suites that has the potential to give apps such as Google Docs & Spreadsheets any competition. The latest addition, Zoho Notebook, a collaboration and note-taking tool, could go beyond Google and challenge Microsoft’s OneNote.

Zoho Notebook is described online as letting you “create, aggregate, and collaborate on multiple types of content online.” The idea is to give users one place to assemble a variety of information: text, line drawings, images, Web pages, video, RSS feeds, and other media. It’s Microsoft OneNote on an Ajax diet.

Notebook has a lot of potential for people who like working online and especially those who want to share. You could, for example, create an online notebook that contains a spreadsheet with your project budget, the text of your latest report, an image of your sample product with some flaws circled, and a video of your engineer explaining what went wrong.

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Seagate has found yet another use for its tiny hard drives. Their hope is that starting this summer, you’ll be able to tote 10 GB of data with you wherever you go—accessible through your cell phone.

The company’s showing off the technology at the DEMO 07 conference, under the moniker DAVE (Digital Audio Video Experience). DAVE products are promised to be about the size of a credit card and less than 0.5’’ thick.

Now why would you want to attack something that size to your cell phone? Actually, you wouldn’t. You’d connect to the DAVE device through Bluetooth, or possibly Wi-Fi. Files would be accessed through a small Java application on the phone. Think about it—you’d be able to keep all your data in your pocket, but be able to access it at any time with a few button presses.

Seagate expects the first 10 GB DAVE devices to sell for about $150 this summer, with 20 GB devices to follow. The question that remains is, whatever will you do with all that data always available at your fingertips?

Researchers have created an ultradense memory device the size of a white blood cell that has enough capacity to store the Declaration of Independence and still have space left over. The accomplishment represents an important step toward the creation of molecular computers that are much smaller and could be more powerful than today’s silicon-based computers.

“It’s the sort of device that Intel would contemplate making in the year 2020,” said James R. Heath, the Elizabeth W. Gilloon Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and co-author of a paper on the research. “But at the moment it furthers our goal of learning how to manufacture functional electronic circuitry at molecular dimensions.”

The 2020 date assumes the validity of Moore’s law, which states that the complexity of an integrated circuit will typically double every year. Current memory cell size is .0408 square µm, so Moore’s law assumes that the electronics industry will achieve a device density comparable to the Heath team’s memory circuit in about 13 years. Manufacturers currently see no way to extend the miniaturization beyond the year 2013, according to reports.

Heath’s group manufactured the memory circuit in a cleanroom facility in their labs at Caltech, and the molecular switches were prepared by J. Fraser Stoddart, the University of California, Los Angeles’ Fred Kavli Chair in Nanosystems Sciences, and his group. Stoddart and Heath are pioneers in molecular electronics—using nanoscale molecules as key components in computers and other electronic devices.

“Using molecular components for memory or computation or to replace other electronic components holds tremendous promise,” said Stoddart, who also directs the California NanoSystems Institute.

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