Paramount, DreamWorks adopts HD DVD Format

Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks Animation on Monday said they would distribute their high-definition movies exclusively in HD DVD, giving the Toshiba-based format a big boost against Sony-backed Blu-ray.

The allegiance includes all moves distributed by Paramount Pictures, DreamWorks Pictures, Paramount Vantage, Nickelodeon Movies, MTV Films, and DreamWorks Animation, which distributes its films exclusively through Paramount Home Entertainment. Paramount Pictures is a unit of entertainment conglomerate Viacom.

Paramount plans to launch its first HD DVD under the exclusive program Aug. 28 with the release of the comedy Blades of Glory, which will be followed by Transformers and Shrek The Third. The three films represent more than $1.5 billion in box office ticket sales worldwide. The announcement did not include Steve Spielberg films, which will not be exclusive to either format. One of Hollywood's most commercially successful directors, Spielberg's films include Jaws, E.T. , Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park, and Schindler's List.

While the announcement gives a boost to HD DVD, the format still lags behind Blu-ray. According to the sources, movie discs in the latter format outsold HD DVD films 2-to-1 in the United States in the first half of the year and sales of Blu-ray discs from Jan. 1 to July 1 totaled 1.6 million units, compared with 795,000 HD DVD discs.

Toshiba Planning 320GB Notebook Drive

Toshiba Corp. will start producing a 320G-byte hard-disk drive for laptop computers before the end of this year.It is the first 2.5-inch drive to be announced at that capacity, with production to begin in the fourth quarter, according to sources. Pricing was not announced.

The drive is one of a series of five that make up Toshiba's new MKxx52SX family of hard-disk drives. The 320G-byte model will contain two platters -- the circular disks on which data is recorded. Other drives in the range will offer between 80G bytes and 250G bytes of storage space. They will connect via a 3G bps (bits per second) serial ATA (SATA) interface.

In today’s world the amount of data that can be stored on a hard-disk drive is constantly expanding as drive makers fine tune technology, and the needs of laptop users are growing in tandem with the expansion in drive space . While enterprise users might not require such a capacious drive, users of multimedia laptops will almost certainly welcome the extra space to store video.

Mobile Printing redefined; thanks to HP's CloudPrint

Hewlett-Packard Labs has come up with a solution that aims to address the problem of printing your files when you are on road and away from home--and its free, brilliantly useful CloudPrint service does so in an elegant way.

The reasons you need to print while you're traveling can seem endless: you have to update a marketing presentation; need to print an e-mail with directions to an event; or you're on vacation and want to print a brochure you stored digitally your laptop. The trouble is, when you're traveling and using a shared computer--be it at hotel, a kiosk, or an Internet café--you generally can't print your own documents due to various problems.

Enter HP's CloudPrint, named as such because you're uploading your files to live online, in the so-called "cloud," as industry jargon often refers to the Internet. The free service was quietly made public a few weeks ago; currently in beta, HP plans to continue to update and refine its service based on user feedback.

I found CloudPrint (beta version 0.71) made it easy to share, store, and print documents via the Internet. To use the service, I first downloaded and installed a new printer driver. When I wanted to print a document to the service, I selected the CloudPrint print driver, and up popped a screen to enter a document title, my telephone number (which serves as a means of ID for later retrieving documents), my name, and the telephone number(s) I want to have the DocID sent to via SMS (you can also opt not to have a text message sent).

The system then uploads the document and assigns the document a code. (Sadly, although the code does appear on screen when it's finished uploading, you can't just copy and paste from that dialog box to another document.) I used this code to retrieve and print my documents via a Web browser.

HP says that at this time, documents won't expire; they remain available on its servers for an unlimited amount of time. This means you could even upload files before you start your travels, so you can print them on demand as needed. The document title you enter as you first print a document turns out to be a handy way of tracking your documents, and finding them again should you set up a full PrintMe account (there's no charge to do so, but you do have to get a password).

The document you want to print appears as an Adobe Acrobat file within the CloudPrint page; simply press print, and the browser will generate the output. I found CloudPrint worked well, for the most; it printed the various Microsoft Word, Excel, and Acrobat documents I threw at it with ease.


The version I tested (0.71) wasn't perfect, either: The embedded Adobe Acrobat browser choked on a seven page long, graphics intensive .PDF file. I had another gripe as well--if I had last selected the CloudPrint driver to print my output, that was what the embedded Acrobat reader selected as the default print driver. While this won't be an issue in most circumstances, it can get annoying if you're trying vet that everything uploaded correctly and can print.

In addition to providing the remote printing service, the CloudPrint site also offers a Find a Printer service. Enter your address or ZIP code and get a directory of available printers (fee and free) in your vicinity. The CloudPrint service is open to users with phone numbers in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and Europe. Upcoming services include being able to SMS Web URLs to CloudPrint from your mobile device; and printing documents to your home or office printer, without physically being there.

Personally, I can think of several times a service like this would have come in handy. I'm looking forward to using the service more in the future, as well as seeing how the service evolves.

Sony giving clues of launch of Rolly Audio Player

Sony Corp. began a campaign in Japan on Monday for a new audio device called Rolly.As few details of the device are available but Sony is giving away a few clues. Chief among them is that Rolly is a "sound entertainment device.
Sony also opened a promotion site called Rolly World that offers even less information. The site currently consists of a mass of small videos, each an apparently random clip of people doing things. There are three people dancing, a cat walking across the street, a taxi driver speaking to a passenger and a drink being poured into a glass.
Each clip ends with a word or phrase that apparently has something to do with the Rolly. These words, which also scroll across the bottom of the screen, include: shuffle, share, music, small, motion, open and communication.
There are lot of rumors about Rolly player .According to the sources, many reported on the existence of the player and said that it would be "egg-shaped," include a speaker, and can move or dance to music. The original Web site now carries a message saying the story has been removed at the demand of Sony.
Sony was once king of the portable music industry. Its iconic Walkman players created the market and then led it for about 20 years until Apple Inc. decided to get into the game with the iPod. The iPod quickly stole the lead from Walkman thanks in part to the way it working seamlessly with the iTunes desktop application and an online music store.

Windows Patch made Skype crash

The widespread failure of Skype's Internet telephony service last week happened when millions of Windows users tried to log in to the system at the same time, after downloading a software update from Microsoft and rebooting their machines, Skype said Monday.
Users encountered problems logging on to Skype's VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) service early Thursday morning, leaving them unable to connect until Saturday. Skype said that the load placed on its system as computers rebooted after receiving a routine set of patches from Microsoft's Windows Update service revealed a previously unknown bug in the Skype software.
According to the sources, although the Skype network has a built-in self-healing function, the bug within the network resource allocation algorithm prevented the function from working as designed.
Skype has identified the bug, which was a design error and not caused by hackers. The company has already introduced "a number of improvements" to its software to help resolve the problem.

A game; first of it’s type 'Wedding Dash'

Fans of the hit game series "Diner Dash" have been anxiously waiting to swap brooms for grooms in first official offshoot game, "Wedding Dash."Available now for Windows-based computers, this downloadable "casual" game does not deviate far from what made its predecessors so popular but offers many challenging scenarios and laugh-out-loud moments.
Gamers play as Quinn, a bridesmaid who reluctantly takes on the role of a wedding planner for a hapless friend, but soon realizes she's good at the job and decides to make a career out of it.
Instead of taking care of restaurant customers in "Diner Dash," you must now pamper guests at a wedding reception, including seating them where they want (or don't want) to sit, serving them food (appetizers, entrees and cake), bringing song requests to the DJ and taking care of "incidents" such as breaking up a catfight between two bridesmaids, putting out a fire in the kitchen, handling inebriated guests and bringing tissues to Aunt Ethel who can't stop bawling.
Keep everyone happy and you'll make some cash and then get hired to take care of additional weddings, including one in a ballroom, on a cruise ship, in a castle and on an island.If you make at least the minimum amount of money at the end of each function, you advance to the next level and get to choose from some upgrades such as a larger table for your guests or more gratifying food and drinks.
Before each new wedding, a kind of mini-game has you read a blurb about what the happy couple likes and dislikes, and you must click off the correct item from three options. These include the kind of food they like, where they'd like to go on a honeymoon, the kind of wedding cake they'd prefer, and so on. Choose well and you'll earn extra cash.
Another way to ensure you're making as much money as possible is to chain tasks together, which will be familiar to "Diner Dash" players. This means Quinn will receive bonus points for carrying two appetizers instead of one or, say, bringing two gifts to the bride and groom.

One OS That Won't Die is Windows XP

Microsoft Corp. has had to create a new build of Windows XP Professional for computer makers because the six-year-old operating system's continued popularity has nearly exhausted the supply of product activation keys.
The new build, dubbed SP2c, includes no fixes or feature changes, but was created simply to address the shrinking pool of product keys. XP Pro SP2c, which has been released to manufacturing, will be made available to OEMs and system builders next month.
Since Windows XP Professional is so popular, it has become necessary to produce more product keys for system builders in order to support the continued availability of Windows XP Professional through the scheduled system builder channel end-of-life (EOL) date.
Microsoft has predicted continuing strong sales of Windows XP. Last month, the company's chief financial officer said that he tweaked the fiscal year 2008 forecast to account for XP's longevity. Rather than count on an 85/15 split in sales between Vista and XP, said Chris Liddell, Microsoft now expects a 78/22 split, an increase of nearly 50 percent in anticipated XP sales.

Now Cell Phone gets recharged by Wind

All mobile users would probably have seen mobile phone chargers that can power multiple devices at once and sync data between your phone and a PC. They also would have even heard some rumblings about wireless chargers that power devices over the air or solar-powered cell phones. Have you seen wind-powered cell phone charger?
According to the sources, a U.K.-based telecommunications firm, has announced plans to launch The Mobile Wind Charger, a mini turbine that latches on to the top of a tent and stores power in a separate "control box" that users can plug into when their mobiles need power.
The charger, which weighs roughly one-third of a pound and is small enough to fit into a backpack. In an environment with consistent 12 mph winds, it would take roughly 24 hours to charge an average cell phone.
The charger was designed for use in outdoor settings, like the Glastonbury Festival, to provide environmentally-friendly energy for cell phone users and others who may want to stay connected but don't have access to electrical outlets, according to sources. The smaller the blades on a turbine the longer it takes to generate power, so the Mobile Wind Charger may not be as effective as a traditional power unit; however, it'll do the trick when there aren't any electrical outlets to plug into. No official release date or pricing details have been set.

It’s time for 25th anniversary of Compact Disc

Day was August 17, 1982, and row upon row of palm-sized plates with a rainbow sheen began rolling off an assembly line near Hanover, Germany.
An engineering marvel at the time, today they are instantly recognizable as Compact Discs, a product that turned 25 years old on Friday and whose future is increasingly in doubt in an age of iPods and digital downloads.
Those first CDs contained Richard Strauss' Alpine Symphony and would sound equally sharp if played today .The recording industry thrived in the 1990s as music fans replaced their aging cassettes and vinyl LPs with compact discs, eventually making CDs the most popular album format.
The CD still accounts for the majority of the music industry's recording revenues, but its sales have been in a freefall since peaking early this decade, in part due to the rise of online file-sharing, but also as consumers spend more of their leisure dollars on other entertainment purchases, such as DVDs and video games.
As the music labels slash wholesale prices and experiment with extras to revive the now-aging format, it's hard to imagine there was ever a day without CDs.
Yet it had been a risky technical endeavor to attempt to bring digital audio to the masses, said Pieter Kramer, the head of the optical research group at Philips' labs in the Netherlands in the 1970s.The proposed semiconductor chips needed for CD players were to be the most advanced ever used in a consumer product. And the lasers were still on the drawing board when the companies teamed up in 1979.
In 1980, researchers published what became known as the "Red Book" containing the original CD standards, as well as specifying which patents were held by Philips and which by Sony.
Philips had developed the bulk of the disc and laser technology, while Sony contributed the digital encoding that allowed for smooth, error-free playback. Philips still licenses out the Red Book and its later incarnations, notably for the CD-ROM for storing computer software and other data.
The inspiration of CD's design drew from vinyl records: Like the grooves on a record, CDs are engraved with a spiral of tiny pits that are scanned by a laser ;the equivalent of a record player's needle. The reflected light is encoded into millions of 0s and 1s: a digital file.
Because the pits are covered with plastic and the laser's light doesn't wear them down, the CD never loses sound quality.
The CD was a massive hit. Sony sold more players, especially once its "Discman" series was introduced in 1984. But Philips benefited from CD sales, too, thanks to its ownership of Polygram, now part of Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group.
The CD player helped Philips maintain its position as Europe's largest maker of consumer electronics until it was eclipsed by Nokia Corp. in the late 1990s. Licensing royalties sustained the company through bad times.CD sales have fallen sharply to 553 million sold in the United States last year, a 22 percent drop from its 2001 peak of 712 million, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
Napster and later Kazaa and BitTorrent allowed music fans to easily share songs over the Internet, often illegally. More recently, Apple Inc. and other companies began selling legal music downloads, turning the MP3 and other digital audio formats into the medium of choice for many owners of Apple's iPods and other digital players.
Record labels seeking to revive the format have experimented with hybrid CD-DVD combos and packages of traditional CDs with separate DVDs that carry video and multimedia offerings playable on computers.The efforts have been mixed at best, with some attempts, such as the DualDisc that debuted in 2004, not finding lasting success in the marketplace.

Skype is back on track

Skype almost fully recovered late Friday. Skype said the problem was related to a broken algorithm in its network that was preventing users from logging on. The sign-on problems have been resolved. Skype presence and chat may still take a few more hours to be fully operational.
The system, however, still shows signs of shakiness. When I logged on at 3PM, around 5.5 million users were logged on to the network; an hour later only 4.1 million were logged on (Skype usually has 5 million to 6 million users logged on at any one time, with peaks of 8 million to 9 million). As I write this, just more than 4 million users are logged on. Still, Skype is in far better shape than it was early Friday, when only about 2.5 million users could get onto the system.
News reports indicate that instant messaging and chat still are not fully operational. The user numbers will likely normalize over the weekend.

Windows Vista Prevents Users from playing High Quality video and audio

Feature of Content protection in Windows Vista are preventing customers from playing high-quality video and audio and harming system performance, even as Microsoft neglects security programs that could protect users.
Vista requires premium content like high-definition movies to be degraded in quality when sent to high-quality outputs, so users are seeing status codes that say graphics OPM resolution too high.
Microsoft acknowledged that quality of premium content would be lowered if requested by copyright holders, the sources reported. The protections allow copyright holders to prevent video from being played in high definition unless users have equipment that supports the High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) digital rights management system developed by Intel. If PC users have graphics cards with video connections that don't support HDCP, they are out of luck.
According to the sources,hardware costs will increase because vendors can't provide Vista-approved security functionality unless Hollywood studios like MGM, 20th Century Fox and Disney grant written approval saying the content security meets their standards.
All the extra encryption required to meet Vista's content protection standards means some computer components can never enter power-saving mode. Thus, when you play a movie your CPU keeps running at full steam, he said. The extra power demands make it hard to reduce electricity usage.
The encryption requirements render high-end graphics processing units less effective, he said, because the best of those products emphasize graphics performance over content protection. On Vista, US$100-video cards can thus outperform those that cost $1,000.

Are Bigger Laptop PCs Better?

A new category of supersized notebooks with screens larger than 20 inches could now be the real desktop replacements.
A new category of supersize notebooks with screens larger than 20 inches has recently emerged to challenge our decades-long preference for smallness in portable computers.
The reviewers and mobile computing experts tell us these monster notebooks aren't practical. They're heavy. They don't fit in standard laptop bags. They're too big to use on an airplane. There are three major players for this job ; Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Acer.
These systems all sport huge, bright and sharp 20.1-inch 1,680 by 1,050-resolution monitors with game-quality 3-D graphics cards; full-size or near full-size keyboards; remote controls; loud, powerful stereo-sound systems with subwoofers; built-in webcams with microphones; built-in wireless and network ports; DVD-burning capability; large-capacity dual-hard drives; and every port and media card reader your desktop has. The features lists go on and on.
The Dell has an innovative handle that doubles as a monitor stand when you open it. The Dell keyboard is detachable, wireless and full size. The HP has a pop-out remote control unit. There are many other minor and subtle differences between the three. But they all weigh between 15 and 19 pounds and cost more than US$4,000.
Desktops these days have huge LCD screens, spectacular multimedia options, including hi-fi stereo sound. They have enormous capacity hard drives and DVD burners built-in. Desktops tend to have five or more USB ports, full-size keyboards, webcams, full-size mice, multimedia controls on the keyboard and plenty of options for plugging in multimedia peripherals.
The three giant laptops mentioned here are the only real desktop replacement notebook computers on the market. The others replace the limited, small-screen, quiet, boring desktop you had five years ago, not the modern, big-screen media-center desktop you have right now.
Buying a monster notebook means you can buy one PC instead buying both a desktop and a notebook -- without making compromises in computing experience.
Also Giant laptops replace an HDTV.The quality of high-definition TV is so high that it no longer makes sense to spend a penny on a non-HDTV. These monster systems have such big and good screens, such brilliant sound systems and (with HD options) play HD movies that might even look better than your TV that they're perfectly reasonable alternatives to HDTV sets. They come with remote controls, so watching your monster laptop is just like watching your TV.

In U.S. Blu-ray Outsolds HD-DVD

According to the sources, Blu-ray high-definition movie discs outsold films on the rival HD-DVD format by 2-to-1 in the United States in the first half of 2007.Total sales of Blu-ray discs, using a Sony Corp-backed technology, totaled 1.6 million units from Jan. 1 through July 1, compared with 795,000 HD-DVD discs sold in that period.
HD-DVD was developed by Toshiba Corp and backed by Microsoft Corp and film studios such as Warner Bros.Both formats were launched in spring of 2006. An estimated 3.7 million high-definition discs have been sold, including 2.2 million in Blu-ray and 1.5 million in HD-DVD through the end of July, according to sources.
Also Blu-ray got a further boost in August from strong sales of the "300" title. Sources told that about 190,000 Blu-ray units of the film, versus 97,000 in HD-DVD since July 31.The industry-wide standards war is reminiscent of the VHS and Betamax battle.

Microsoft fixes First Vista Gadget Bugs

Microsoft Corp. patched several Windows Vista gadgets, the first time it's had to fix the small applications, prompting one researcher to mark the date as the real "arrival of the next-generation of exposures.
According to the sources, the three bugs detailed in one of the nine bulletins could let attackers inject their own malicious code into a victim's Vista-powered PC. Three of Vista's bundled gadgets -- the small applications that sit on the desktop, usually pulling information from other programs or off the Web -- are flawed: the RSS, contacts and weather gadgets. The vulnerabilities in the RSS and weather gadgets are particularly dangerous, since both are enabled by default in a standard Vista installation.
Sources revealed that if a user subscribed to a malicious RSS feed in the Feed Headlines Gadget or added a malicious contacts file in the Contacts Gadget or a user clicked on a malicious link in the Weather Gadget an attacker could potentially run code on the system.
Although the bugs can result in remote code executing on the target machine ; a characteristic that usually pegs the vulnerability as "critical" .Most third-party researchers fixed attention not so much on the bugs themselves but on the fact that they lived inside Vista's gadgets.
According to the sources, the RSS gadget bug is a harbinger of bad things to come. If an attacker can find some way to inject data into a trusted feed then they will be able to exploit any subscribers to the feed. Microsoft's gadget patches can be grabbed via one of the developer's update services.

Technology to wear

Technology has been shrinking in size as fast as it has been expanding our communication and entertainment horizons over the past 20 years. Today's latest gadgets are so refined and small that they clip on to a belt or slip easily into a pocket or a bag. The next challenge confronting designers and engineers is to make technology not only portable but also wearable.
One of the most popular inventions that have come up is the solar bikini. The solar bikini is fitted with 1" x 4" photovoltaic filmstrips, which are sewn together with a conductive thread.
A USB port allows the wearer to plug-in any number of small gadgets. According to sources, an iPod shuffle would be fully charged in just two hours. Although not shown at the fashion show, Schneider said that the male version would be available soon. Because of its larger surface the "i-Drink" will not only charge up your phone or your iPod but also generate enough power to chill a beer.
The uses for the technology range from the frivolous, such as placing hidden messages on clothing to the more serious problems of counterfeit goods, in particular pirated movies.
Messages could also be displayed on cinema screens, on billboards or in museums, without distracting patrons from the main event. Also, the bracelet can be programmed with animations like cellular automata and scrolling text. The bracelets each contain an accelerometer that senses wrist movement and a Bluetooth module for wireless communication, which not only makes it possible to interact with other wearable's but also laptops and mobile phones.
A new concept called "Jacket Antics", which featured unique texts and designs scrolling across the back of specially adapted jackets. When a couple join hands their message becomes synchronous and scrolls from one jacket to the other.

Good Wishes now comes with a E-Card Virus

Now a days ,a new form of false e-card notification e-mails are unleashing nasty viruses and virus-carrying Trojan horses on unsuspecting users.
While e-card-triggered viruses and Trojan horses are not new, the latest versions are becoming more difficult for typical antivirus and antispam defenses to detect. The complexity is that the latest batch of fake e-card e-mail notifications are using plain text in their messages, which don't get scanned and scrutinized by antivirus and antispam defense applications. While the e-mails don't contain pasted links or attached files that a recipient can click on to get a computer infection, many e-mail clients automatically convert the included text into a clickable link when the e-mail clients recognize a Web address in the text.
All recipients have to do to trigger the virus is to click on the link created by the e-mail client once they have read the message.Also the culprits sending these e-mails are using the names of some of the most popular electronic greeting card companies in their messages and Web links.
According to the sources,the links to the fake e-greeting cards lead to IP addresses in various locations, including the U.S. and Eastern Europe, and many are registered to U.S. Internet service providers. The damaging payload files are new variants of the Storm Worm virus that was first detected in January.
For antivirus and antispam sellers, the theory had been that if the message includes plain text without links and attachments, it could cause no harm, he said. That approach has to change. User need to be cautious and not click on links they find in e-mails. Instead, they should go directly to a Web site by typing its address into a Web browser and go there on their own, bypassing links that could be malicious.
According to the sources, latest e-greeting attacks are an example that criminals are going to be coming up with more and more ingenious ways of tricking people or exploiting ways of tricking your e-mail client. This is just one of any number of ways that these guys are going to try to lure users to do something they shouldn't.