wireless syncing support for a flash-based player(Microsoft Zune 8GB)

Microsoft Zune 8GB (Red)

Wireless and video support may be overkill on a device this size, but the 8GB Zune offers some interesting options as a flash player.

Is full wireless syncing support appropriate for a flash-based player? Microsoft's $199 8GB Zune certainly ships with a raft of features, but unless you need a light player with wireless functions, you'll probably be able to find better values elsewhere.

The 8GB Zune is a little thicker than one of the last-generation iPod Nanos. That puts it on the large side for flash-based MP3 players these days. Its audio quality sounded a little better to my ears than that of the latest iPod Nano, on a par with Creative's Zen V. One tiny annoyance, though: The player's 20-step digital volume control doesn't provide much granularity. Occasionally, I'd reach points where one step was too low and the next too high.

The Zune supports MP3, WMA, WMA lossless, PlaysForSure DRM-ed audio, and its own DRM format for Zune Pass subscriptions. If you'd rather listen to radio, the Zune includes a built-in FM tuner. It also plays back video and displays photos on its 1.8-inch 320-by-240-pixel screen, and   the Zune   now supports h.264 and MPEG-4 encoding in addition to WMV.

Video playback looked   okay on the Zune's screen, though I wouldn't want to watch anything more than short clips on a screen that small.

All of the new Zunes center on a   rounded touch-sensitive control that also doubles as a clickable D-pad-style controller, much like the Click Wheel on Apple's iPods. Flick your thumb up or down the pad repeatedly, and you begin to build up momentum while scrolling through long lists. At any time, you can tap to stop the scrolling, though it will eventually come to a halt naturally. In my experience, it's a very fun way to navigate through a music collection, even in a long view of artists on the 80GB player.

As you browse through the interface, you'll find that you can often scroll left and right as well. So if you've selected an artist and an album, scrolling up and down will take you through songs on that album, while scrolling left and right will switch to other albums by that artist.

Though the touch control is the highlight of the interface, you can also click your way up and down through lists using the hard buttons of the D-pad. (The Zune is still very responsive in scrolling through lists, too.) That allows for simple blind navigation, such as adjusting volume or fast-forwarding a track or two without taking the player from your pocket--always a nice option.

Unfortunately, the player's lock switch doesn't include a way to lock out the touch control but not the physical buttons. That's not much of a problem with upward and downward swipes that simply adjust the volume, but it can be annoying   when an   inadvertent horizontal swipe fast-forwards you out of the song you're playing.

Ever since Wi-Fi-equipped media players such as the Zune and the Sansa Connect came out, users have been clamoring for wireless syncing. Well, it's finally here. To set up a Zune for wireless syncing, you first select the appropriate wireless network using the PC you'll sync the Zune with. Enter the appropriate security key, and you should be good to go.

When your Zune is within range, you enter 'settings, wireless' on the player and select 'sync now'. Your PC reports that it has found new hardware--a 'Zune Wireless'--and installs the proper driver. Then, if the Zune software isn't running already, it pops up and your sync begins. Over my 802.11g wireless network, transfers weren't exactly lightning-fast, but I could easily imagine buying a stereo dock for my player and setting it up to charge and sync overnight without ever coming near my PC.

At the same time, Microsoft has made a few tweaks to the Zune's wireless music sharing feature. Originally, shared tracks could be played only three times over a period of three days, and couldn't be passed on. Now you can pass along shared tracks to other users and play them up to three times over any time period you like.

Among other additions, the Zune's software now includes support for podcasts. You can browse for them and subscribe to them easily, and the player will download new subscriptions whenever   you sync it.

Microsoft has spent a lot of time rethinking the social aspects of the Zune player, removing several restrictions on how you can share tracks between Zune players and adding an online community called the Zune Social. At the time of this review, the Zune Social wasn't available for testing.

With wireless syncing, FM radio, and full video support, the 8GB Zune has a lot going for it. Unfortunately, unless you really want wireless syncing, it's not the best choice. If you're looking for lots of storage, the Sansa View has the Zune   beat. If you'd prefer a compact player, the new iPod Nanos are much smaller. If you're   seeking lots of features, the Creative Zen V is still one of my favorites. All are available for similar prices, and might fit your needs better than the flash-based Zune.

Technorati : -(Microsoft, Zune 8GB), syncing flash, wireless

Google Offers $10M in Software Prizes

Google Inc. is offering $10 million in prizes for people who build the best software to enhance the company's upcoming cell phone operating system.

The Mountain View-based company is developing a free cell phone software package that it says will make it easier to surf the Web over mobile devices. It also will give Google more opportunities to sell ads and services.

The operating system will be based on computer code that can be openly distributed among programmers, which Google hopes will encourage developers to create new software and improvements that could spawn new uses for smart phones.

Winning offerings could encompass simple aesthetic improvements like personalized home screens or more complicated social-networking programs that merge data from the Web - such as maps or personal Web pages - with data from users' phones - like contact information or the phones' geographic locations.

As part of the Android Developer Challenge, a panel of judges will pick 50 winners from entries received from Jan. 2 through March 3, 2008. In the first phase of the competition, those winners will each get $25,000 and be eligible for ten awards of $100,000 and another ten $275,000 awards.

The second phase of the competition will feature another $5 million in prize money.

Google did not specify how the applications will be judged. The company only said the winning programs will "provide consumers with the most compelling experiences."

Google also released a tool kit Monday for working on the new platform, which is to be released in the second half of next year.

Four cell phone manufacturers - Motorola Inc., Samsung Electronics Co., HTC and LG Electronics Inc. - have agreed to use Android in some of their phones. Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said he eventually hopes the software will be integrated into thousands of different devices.

Twenty-nine other companies have signed on as members of the alliance.

Technorati : Google, Prizes, Software

Google Offers $10M in Software Prizes

Google Inc. is offering $10 million in prizes for people who build the best software to enhance the company's upcoming cell phone operating system.

The Mountain View-based company is developing a free cell phone software package that it says will make it easier to surf the Web over mobile devices. It also will give Google more opportunities to sell ads and services.

The operating system will be based on computer code that can be openly distributed among programmers, which Google hopes will encourage developers to create new software and improvements that could spawn new uses for smart phones.

Winning offerings could encompass simple aesthetic improvements like personalized home screens or more complicated social-networking programs that merge data from the Web - such as maps or personal Web pages - with data from users' phones - like contact information or the phones' geographic locations.

As part of the Android Developer Challenge, a panel of judges will pick 50 winners from entries received from Jan. 2 through March 3, 2008. In the first phase of the competition, those winners will each get $25,000 and be eligible for ten awards of $100,000 and another ten $275,000 awards.

The second phase of the competition will feature another $5 million in prize money.

Google did not specify how the applications will be judged. The company only said the winning programs will "provide consumers with the most compelling experiences."

Google also released a tool kit Monday for working on the new platform, which is to be released in the second half of next year.

Four cell phone manufacturers - Motorola Inc., Samsung Electronics Co., HTC and LG Electronics Inc. - have agreed to use Android in some of their phones. Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said he eventually hopes the software will be integrated into thousands of different devices.

Twenty-nine other companies have signed on as members of the alliance.

Technorati : Google, Prizes, Software

Why Explore Space

As NASA resumes flights of the space shuttle to finish building the International Space Station, many are questioning whether the project - the most complex construction feat ever undertaken - is worth the risk and expense.

have been asked, and asked myself, this question many times during my career, particularly when the United States lacked a plan to go beyond the space station to other destinations in the solar system.

The issue was addressed eloquently in the report of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, which examined the 2003 loss of the shuttle and its crew. That report pointed out that for the foreseeable future, space travel is going to be expensive, difficult and dangerous. But, for the United States, it is strategic. It is part of what makes us a great nation. And the report declared that if we are going to send humans into space, the goals ought to be worthy of the cost, the risk and the difficulty. A human spaceflight program with no plan to send people anywhere beyond the orbiting space station certainly did not meet that standard.

President Bush responded to the Columbia report. The administration looked at where we had been in space and concluded that we needed to do more, to go further. The result was the Vision for Space Exploration, announced nearly three years ago, which commits the United States to using the shuttle to complete the space station, then retiring the shuttle and building a new generation of spacecraft to venture out into the solar system. Congress has ratified that position with an overwhelming bipartisan majority, making the Vision for Space Exploration the law of the land.

President Bush responded to the Columbia report. The administration looked at where we had been in space and concluded that we needed to do more, to go further. The result was the Vision for Space Exploration, announced nearly three years ago, which commits the United States to using the shuttle to complete the space station, then retiring the shuttle and building a new generation of spacecraft to venture out into the solar system. Congress has ratified that position with an overwhelming bipartisan majority, making the Vision for Space Exploration the law of the land.

NASA is moving forward with a new focus for the manned space program: to go out beyond Earth orbit for purposes of human exploration and scientific discovery. And the International Space Station is now a stepping stone on the way, rather than being the end of the line.

On the space station, we will learn how to live and work in space. We will learn how to build hardware that can survive and function for the years required to make the round-trip voyage from Earth to Mars.

If humans are indeed going to go to Mars, if we're going to go beyond, we have to learn how to live on other planetary surfaces, to use what we find there and bend it to our will, just as the Pilgrims did when they came to what is now New England - where half of them died during that first frigid winter in 1620. There was a reason their celebration was called "Thanksgiving."

The Pilgrims were only a few thousand miles from home, and they were accomplished farmers and artisans. And yet, when they came to an unfamiliar land, they didn't know how to survive in its harsh environment. They didn't know what food would grow and what wouldn't. They didn't know what they could eat and what they couldn't.

The Pilgrims had to learn to survive in a strange new place across a vast ocean. If we are to become a spacefaring nation, the next generation of explorers is going to have to learn how to survive in other forbidding, faraway places across the vastness of space. The moon is a crucially important stepping stone along that path - an alien world, yet one that is only a three-day journey from Earth.

Using the space station and building an outpost on the moon to prepare for the trip to Mars are critical milestones in America's quest to become a truly spacefaring nation. I think that we should want that. I want that. I want it for the American people, for my grandchildren, for my great-grandchildren.

Throughout history, the great nations have been the ones at the forefront of the frontiers of their time. Britain became great in the 17th century through its exploration and mastery of the seas. America's greatness in the 20th century stemmed largely from its mastery of the air. For the next generations, the frontier will be space.

Technorati : NASA, Space, Space Station

world’s fastest supercomputer.

Blue Gene's supercomputer dominance isn't fading at Livermore lab

A computer used to simulate the turbulence following an H-bomb blast has retained its title as the world's fastest computer, bringing honor to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where it runs around the clock, and glory to IBM Corp., which built that colossus of calculation better known as Blue Gene.

The victor's wreath in what is arguably the Olympics of computing was handed out Monday in Reno, where number-crunchers from around the globe gathered to hear which industrial, academic and government labs made the Top 500 Supercomputer List, compiled by academic research groups.

Of course these rankings lead to the question of how fast these computers are, and that takes a bit of considering.

On the face of it, the Top 500 List measures speed in trillions of calculations per second, known by the shorthand, "teraflops," and by that reckoning the Blue Gene machine in Livermore clocked in 478.2 teraflops, while the second-placed IBM supercomputer, which works in Germany, came in at 167.3 teraflops.

That means nothing without a frame of reference to appreciate such speed and, here, Sonoma State University math Professor Rick Luttmann said the trick is to think about the speed of these computers in relation to the speed of light, which takes about eight minutes to travel the roughly 93 million miles between sun and earth.

With that in mind, Luttmann said, a 1-teraflop computer can do 1,000 calculations in the time it takes light to travel a foot. Multiply that by the number of teraflops and the next question is: How do they make computers capable of solving problems that fast?

That's a cinch, said Mark Seager, the director of the 50-person staff at Lawrence Livermore that uses Blue Gene to simulate things like the dispersal patterns of nuclear fallout, and whether the material used to build H-bombs is likely to give the anticipated bang for the buck.

He described the $100 million Blue Gene thus: Imagine 104 refrigerated cabinets, stuffed full of 106,496 tiny processors, relatively dumb chips of the same family that IBM puts in cable television boxes or in the braking systems of cars. Wire together that horde of processors. Add the requisite software to assign tiny bits of monstrously huge problems to each of those 106,496 processors. And Blue Gene will simulate the hellish conditions that would follow if the unthinkable ever occurred.

"We're talking about keeping the weapons safe and reliable," Seager said.

Though IBM won the first and second spots and dominated the Top 500 list overall, the third-speediest machine turned out to be an $11 million system built by Silicon Graphics and commissioned by the state of New Mexico to solve civilian problems like water conservation.

Hewlett-Packard placed fourth and fifth, with two supercomputers built for customers in India and Sweden, respectively. HP supercomputer guru Frank Baetke said the machine in Pune, India, will help the research arm of industrial giant Tata design products from nanotech to aerospace, while the other machine is for a tight-lipped Swedish government agency.

This authoritative speed list reflects the growing strength of European supercomputer installations, with 149 of the Top 500 systems, although the United States remains the volume leader with 284 entries on the list. Asian nations accounted for 58 of the earth's fastest machines.

Most of the supercomputer users don't have dramatic problems to solve, said HP's Baetke. The Top 500 organization keeps track of the types of supercomputer users and 57 percent fall into the "industrial" category, which he described as tasks such as:

-- financial modeling by banks, insurers or hedge funds interested in predicting currency, stock or risk trends;

-- data mining by corporations that want to look for patterns in the information they gather;

-- product simulation for faster manufacturing; and

-- computing intensive tasks like oil and gas explorations that involve probing the Earth and constructing 3-D visualizations about what might be buried underneath.

"The geologists today are not out in the field any more, they're sitting behind computer screens," Baetke said.

The Top 500 list is kept by supercomputer experts at Germany's University of Mannheim, the University of Tennessee and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and is updated twice a year.

IBM's Blue Gene Pulls Away from the Pack

IBM's Blue Gene/L supercomputer sprinted to a new world record as it continued its four-year domination of the official TOP500 Supercomputer Sites list. The world's fastest computer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is now nearly three times faster than the rest of the pack.

Move Over for 'Roadrunner' in 2008

Rounding out IBM's petaflop portfolio will be a computer nicknamed "Roadrunner," a hybrid design that blends thousands of PC-type processors from AMD, and the Cell Broadband Engine, the graphics processor at the heart of the Sony Playstation 3. Roadrunner, planned to be delivered to the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory in summer 2008, will be capable of speeds exceeding a petaflop. By combining the two styles of microprocessors, Roadrunner will slash typical power consumption to offer a highly energy-efficient operating environment.

IBM's petascale hardware initiatives are matched with corresponding investments in software, including application support and development tools, to increase productivity, ease of use and commercial viability. For instance, IBM will expand Blue Gene application support next year with a new open-source developers' program with Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, the first site in the U.S. to field a Blue Gene/P next year.

Based on IBM's POWER Architecture, the IBM System Blue Gene Solution is optimized for bandwidth, scalability and the ability to handle large amounts of data while consuming a fraction of the power and floor space required by today's fastest systems. A variety of industries are using Blue Gene systems to advance their research capabilities for life sciences, financial modeling, hydrodynamics, quantum chemistry, molecular dynamics, astronomy and space research and climate modeling.

The "TOP500 Supercomputer Sites" is compiled and published by supercomputing experts Jack Dongarra from the University of Tennessee, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim (Germany). The entire list can be viewed at http://www.top500.org .

Technorati : supercomputer., world's