Science and technology news blog

From a European’s perspective, the announced launch of Zune for the end of 2007 is apparently not an event to make you anxiously shiver or rejoice.

A recent announcement made by Jason Reindorp, marketing director for Zune at Microsoft, indicates that the Redmond behemoth plans to introduce its… MP3 player (I would have said iPod-killer but that’s not the case) in Europe by the end of this year.

Reindorp also said that the Zune managed to grab since its launch about 10.2 percent market share in the U.S. in the 30 gigabyte MP3 player category. That seems pretty impressive considering the short period (although I do advise you to take Reindorp’s allegations with a grain of salt) and is in accordance with the company’s forecast for the first half of 2007: 1 million Zune owners by June. Alexa.com also reports that Zune.net, the official site where you can find out about Zune and buy songs or download short videos, has made it to the 5,711th place, which indicates that it has between 50,000 and 100,000 visitors per day, but is now way below the peak registered in November (and apparently dropping).

Reindorp, quoted by Reuters, said at the annual music industry Midem Net conference in France “”You couldn’t get a more entrenched competitor. But we feel really good about the first steps that we’ve taken.”

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Hitachi Data Systems claims to have increased the performance of its storage by 20 percent with a new TagmaStore storage system.

The Adaptable Modular Storage 1000 (AMS1000) array has 32 logical cache partitions as well as support for iSCSI , network-attached storage (NAS) and Fibre Channel . It also can be used to migrate data across tiers of storage without disrupting operations, the company said.

It features RAID -1, 1+, 5 and 6 data protection and 4Gbit/s Fibre Channel connectivity. The AMS1000 joins the AMS200 and AMS500 in Hitachi’s family of midrange arrays.

Customers can intermix 73, 146 and 300GB Fibre Channel drives with 500GB Serial ATA drives and will scale from 1TB to over 200TB of data. It can serve as back-end storage for Hitachi’s Network Storage Controller NAS gateway or the high-end Universal Storage Platform.

The performance increase is due to its use of multi-processing technologies, the company said. Prices start at around $80,000.

The PCI Special Interest Group announced Monday (Jan. 15) they have completed work on the base spec for PCI Express 2.0, doubling serial signaling rates on the interconnect from 2.5 to 5GHz.

The base spec should pave the way for silicon support for Express 2.0 as early as this fall by companies including Advanced Micro Devices, Intel Corp and NVidia. Because the SIG chose 5 GHz signaling, chip makers are generally able to use serializer/deserializers (serdes) that have already been proven in communications applications up to 6.25 GHz.

However, the SIG did not mention work on a separate electro-mechanical spec for adapter cards and motherboards. That effort seeks to ensure that existing PC boards will support the higher signaling rates, a potentially bigger challenge for the PC industry that runs on tight margins and lean costs. The board standard was running a few months behind the base spec in completion when the PCI SIG held its annual meeting here in June.

The 5GHz version of Express will initially be adopted for graphics whose performance is typically limited by I/O throughput. Some graphics designers may use the fast channels for unified memory systems that use one pool of DRAM to support both system and graphics memory.

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It’s not hollywood, or even the video game industry setting the tone for the next generation format. Nope, its porn setting the tone.Reports from the adult industry exhibition in Las Vegas suggest that all the major adult movie studios are standardizing on HD-DVD, citing the lower costs of production as the primary driver.

Giving HD DVD a boast is a rumor that Sony is banning Blu-ray disc manufactures from accepting adult content.

If this is true, it’s Beta vs VHS all over again as Porn was a huge factor in VHS winning the VHS/Beta format wars even though many people don’t like to acknowledge it.

VHS might not have won with out the adult film industry adopting it, and it appears to be the same senario with the new HD DVD and Blu-ray war.

Time well tell.

Supporters of the two rival next-generation disc formats are slugging it out this week at the Consumer Electronics Show, with HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc predicting victory in the quest for a unified high-definition standard.

HD DVD is banking its prediction of success in large part on the arrival this year of low-priced players from China and other Asian countries. The Blu-ray camp, meanwhile, believes the PlayStation 3 rollout, together with overwhelming studio and consumer electronics support, will boost software sales to such a degree that HD DVD will have no choice but to throw in the towel.

“Game over,” quipped Buena Vista Worldwide Home Entertainment president Bob Chapek, a leading Blu-ray supporter.

Both camps held lavish news events at CES. At the HD DVD event Sunday, the North American HD DVD Promotional Group said that as of Friday, more than 175,000 HD DVD players had been sold in North America. That figure includes computers with HD DVD drives as well as Xbox 360 game consoles with the HD DVD add-on.

Toshiba, which so far is the only consumer electronics manufacturer to produce dedicated set-top HD DVD players, said it will ship this spring a new 1080p unit, the $599 HD-A20, that will offer consumers the highest resolution possible. Toshiba also said it has developed a triple-layer 51GB disc that can hold up to seven hours of high-definition content. The new disc is seen as a reaction to Blu-ray’s dual-layer 50GB disc.

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Samsung said that it has created the first LCD panel that can produce independent images on each side of a mobile LCD display. Samsung’s new double-sided LCD can show two entirely different pictures or sets of visual data simultaneously on the front and back of the same screen. Other conventional double-sided LCDs can only show a reverse image of the same video data.

This new development will replace two display panels with one, thereby reducing overall thickness of mobile products by at least 1mm. 

The breakthrough LCD product makes use of Samsung’s new double-gate, thin-film transistor (TFT) architecture. TFT gates are electronic components that convert the necessary voltage at the pixel level, which controls the liquid crystal alignment needed to reproduce on-screen images. Samsung’s new double-sided LCD has two gates that operate each pixel instead of one, so the screen on the front can display different images than the one on the back. The double-sided display makes use of Samsung’s proprietary Amorphous Silicon Gate (ASG) technology, which accommodates the increased number of TFT gates without increasing the size of the driver integrated circuits. Driver-ICs typically increase in size when more TFT gates are used. 

The new Samsung mobile display requires only one backlight, while competitive double-screen LCDs require two. One side of the panel operates in a transmissive mode, while the other operates in a reflective mode. By using a unique reflective design that utilizes the light trapped in the opposing screen’s transmissive mode, the reflective mode does not solely rely on external light sources such as the sun. 

The double-sided, dual image LCD’s efficient use of light to display images in both transmissive and reflective modes promotes slimmer, more cost-effective products. 

The new double-sided LCD is 2.6mm thick and 2.22” wide, with QVGA (240×320 pixel) resolution, and has brightness values of 250 nits for the front and 100 nits for the rear display. It will be exhibited at the Consumer Electronics Show, which opens in Las Vegas on January 8.

So LG has announced their dual-format HD DVD/Blu-ray player? Fantastic. Time Warner goes so far as to create dual-format discs? Pop open the bubbly. But you know something? It didn’t take long for my initial feeling of elation to give way to 100% certified organic bile.

Absolutely none of this was necessary. Remember DVD, the little media format that could (and turns ten in a few months)? It seems like ancient history now, but it took some time for the various companies to agree on a single format back then. While it’s something of a cliché to mention the Betamax/VHS videocassette format war these days, in the mid-1990s Sony had only just closed up the Betamax shop. I’d like to think that, with Sony still smarting, retailers unhappily clearing out excess Betamax stock and Betamax owners angrily trying to figure out what to do with their machines and tapes, the companies realized things go a lot smoother when everyone agrees at the outset.

It’s hard to argue with the result. The DVD format was adopted pretty quickly and has gone on to remake the movie and home video industries; and we’ve now gotten to the point where DVD utterly dominates the home video landscape.

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DailyTech reported yesterday that Samsung developed a new 50 nanometer 16Gb NAND flash memory chips that provide 100% faster read speeds and 150% faster write speeds. The announcement sparked a lot of interest from consumers looking for larger and faster offerings than Samsung’s current 32GB Flash SSD drive.

SanDisk today entered the SSD fray with a 32GB drive of its own. The 1.8” SanDisk SSD Ultra ATA 5000 drive uses patented TrueFFS flash management technology and has a 2 million hour MTBF. The drive has no moving parts, so it is completely silent and weighs less than traditional 1.8” mobile hard drives. The drive also consumes 0.4W of power when active, versus 1.0W for a traditional mobile hard drive.

When it comes to performance, the SanDisk SSD Ultra ATA 5000 offers sustained reads of 62MB/sec and can complete random reads at 7300 IOPS (512-byte file size). The drive can boot Windows Vista Enterprise on a notebook in 35 seconds and has an average access time of 0.12 ms.

“Once we begin shipping the 32GB SSD for notebook PCs, we expect to see its increasing adoption in the coming years as we continue to reduce the cost of flash memory.  When these SSD devices become more affordable, we expect that their superior features over rotating disk drives will create a new consumer category for our retail sales channels worldwide,” said SanDisk CEO Eli Harari.

SanDisk leveraged technology from its acquisition of M-Systems in developing its new SSD drive. SanDisk gained a wide portfolio of 1.8”, 2.5” and 3.5” SSD drives when it acquired M-Systems.

SanDisk’s new SSD Ultra ATA 5000 drive is currently available to OEMs and is expected to add $600 to the price of a new notebook computer in the first half of 2007. That figure is expected to drop as the year progresses.

LG Electronics said it plans to release a next-gen DVD player that can handle both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats and perhaps finally bring an end to the debate and confusion over the dueling standards.The new player will be formally unveiled at next week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and will go on sale in the U.S. in early 2007, according to LG. It is expected to be the first commercially available player capable of handling discs in both HD DVD and Blu-ray formats.

The Korean-based consumer electronics giant said more details, including pricing and availability, will be released at the show.

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To connect to a high-speed wireless network from a car, consumers pretty much have been limited to one choice: rigging a laptop computer with a special modem and subscribing to a pricey, and sometimes temperamental, wireless service.

But Autonet Mobile, a start-up wireless technology company based in San Francisco, was expected to announce this week that it had reached an agreement with Avis Rent A Car System to provide an optional wireless access point — better known as a Wi-Fi hot spot — to Avis customers in the United States by March. For an additional $10.95 a day, Avis will issue to motorists a notebook-size portable device that plugs into the power supply of a car and delivers a high-speed Internet connection for passengers.

For now, the service is intended for business travelers. But Autonet sees its service as appealing to families traveling with children, although its unit is expected to cost $399 — about twice as much as current cellular card technology — plus $49 a month for service.

A mobile Wi-Fi hot spot that lets laptops and other hand-held computers link to the Internet without cables represents an important step toward what technology experts call the “connected car” — a vehicle in which passengers’ devices and the car’s essential systems are always online.

“I think this is a precursor to the connected car,” said Roger Entner, a wireless telecommunications analyst at Ovum, a consulting firm based in London. “This shows us a glimpse of where we will be in the future.”

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Fujitsu has developed what is calls the industry’s first H.264 format video-processing IC for HD recording and playback, which it will demonstrate at next week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.Fujitsu has worked with Amedia Networks to create new gateways, using Fujitsu’s MPEG-2 encoder/decoder technology combined with Amedia’s wireless chipset technology to wirelessly transmit HD video at high levels of bandwidth.

The MB86H50 will be the first IC to use the new format, which compresses and decompresses high-definition TV quality video in real-time, says Fujitsu. Fujitsu also has stakes in the world of biometric IC technology, with fingerprint sensor ICs in its arsenal.

The first commercial chip samples for the H.264 IC will be available in March, Fujitsu said.

As reported by engadget:

If one of your New Year’s resolutions involved spending a massive chunk of change to kick out as many frames per second as technologically possible, you may want to put the brakes on that impending NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX purchase. Lvl505 got their palms on a pre-release ATI R600 graphics card and put it up against the best NVIDIA currently has to offer, and the results thus far show ATI’s device as “the clear winner.”

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Samsung has announced a better way to speed up MP3 players, smartphones, handheld computers, and gadgets of nearly every stripe. The South Korean firm, with more than $50 billion in revenue and 125,000 employees across the globe, has designed a 1 gigabit mobile DRAM chip that’s smaller and more powerful than any current model.

DRAM, short for Dynamic Random Access Memory, is also used in notebooks and desktops. But Samsung’s new chip is designed for a device that fits in the hand—a digital camera, video camera, iPaq, or any one of the mobile gadgets that crowd today’s pockets, bags, and belts.

Less Is More

Samsung’s chip has on-board features that determine its temperature, which in turn lets it reduce the amount of power it needs in stand-by mode. As a result, the chip draws 30% less power than current mobile DRAM models. For users, the lower power consumption translates into benefits like more music for MP3 players and longer talk-time for cell phones.

But just as important as the chip’s low power consumption is its size. To achieve a full gigabit of storage, other designs stack two 512 megabit chips together (one gigabit is 1024 kilobits, or two 512 megabit chips). In contrast, Samsung’s DRAM is “monolithic,” meaning it is composed of a single unit, and it’s actually 20 percent thinner than stacked models.

The new chip can also be stacked to achieve 1.5 gigabit or even 2 gigabit densities. It can also be combined with well-known forms of mobile memory, such as Flash technology.

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As if its options woes weren’t trouble enough, Apple Computer Inc. said Friday it is facing several federal lawsuits, including one alleging the company created an illegal monopoly by tying iTunes music and video sales to its market-leading iPod portable players.

The case, filed July 21, is over Apple’s use of a copy-protection system that generally prevents iTunes music and video from playing on rival players. Likewise, songs purchased elsewhere aren’t easily playable on iPods.

The plaintiff is seeking unspecified damages and other relief. The court denied Apple’s motion to dismiss the complaint on Dec. 20.

Another lawsuit, filed Nov. 7, alleges that the logic board of Apple’s iBook G4 fails at an abnormally high rate. The plaintiff is seeking unspecified damages. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Apple said its response to the complaint is not yet due.

The Cupertino, Calif.-based company also disclosed that PhatRat Technology LLC filed a lawsuit Oct. 24 alleging patent infringement. The Nike-iPod product in question, developed jointly with Nike Inc., allow runners to keep track of how far and how fast they’ve gone. The company’s response to the complaint is not yet due.

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Copyrighted content on High-Definition DVD may be available for illegal copying despite the supposedly ‘bullet-proof’ encryption code that goes with it. A hacker known only as Muslix64 posted details showing how to crack the Advanced Access Content System on HD DVDs. The AACS is meant to restrict new HD DVDs from playing only on some devices in order to prevent piracy.

The Doom9 Forum user explained how he decrypted some titles after getting past the security code. He also made a Java-based program called BackupHDDVD and a video that he posted on YouTube to show how anyone can crack the AACS code.

Hollywood studios and disconcerted makers of encryption code are now looking into the claim made by Muslix64. If true, the code decryption could mean a financial threat to movie studios Warner Bros, Universal Studios and Walt Disney, among others. DVD sales accounted for $24 billion of the movie industry’s revenues for last year.

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