HD-DVD , a thing of past ????

THE sprawling consortium of technology and media companies assembled to promote the HD DVD format of next-generation, high-definition discs could be close to collapse after a spate of defections to the rival Blu-ray disc group.

As many as 20 companies that are members of the HD DVD Promotion Group could be preparing to remove their names from the alliance's 130-strong membership list.

The defections could, one Tokyo-based analyst said, represent the final nails in the coffin of Toshiba's HD DVD standard after a bitterly fought battle between the formats.

Eiichi Katayama, of Nomura Securities, said the battle between the formats, which display films and video games more sharply in an era of ever-larger television screens, was "entering its final phase".

The threatened exodus from the HD DVD format follows the decision of Warner Bros last week to back the rival Blu-ray disc format, whose main technology backers include Sony, Apple and Dell.

Apparently encouraged by the strong momentum behind Blu-ray, Paramount emerged yesterday as the latest of the Hollywood studios poised to switch allegiances.

Pony Canyon, a Japanese music, animation and film studio, which is part of the Fuji Television media empire, said it was a member of the HD DVD Promotion Group, but decisions taken by US studios meant that it would "choose Blu-ray in the end".

Several other Japanese companies, including content producers and electronics component makers, said their support of HD DVD was "under review".

Backers of HD DVD point to the relative ease of producing the discs and the lower cost of building machines capable of reading them.

Unlike previous format wars, particularly the Betamax versus VHS skirmish in the 1980s, the Blu-ray versus HD DVD war effectively has been decided in boardrooms, rather than in electronics showrooms. The decisions of the big studios have come well before those of customers, who generally have held back from picking one format for fear of backing a loser.

Paramount has turned out to be a pivotal figure.

Its decision in August to give exclusive backing to HD DVD was seen as a potentially devastating blow to the prospects of Blu-ray and to the strategy of Sony president Howard Stringer.

Sir Howard argued, however, that the PlayStation 3 games console, which includes a Blu-ray disc player, would put the format in people's living rooms more quickly than HD DVD players would be adopted by consumers.

Paramount, like other members of the HD DVD group, such as Fujitsu, Lenovo and Kenwood, had hedged its bets.

It offered exclusivity on the basis that it could reverse the decision should Warner Bros switch to Blu-ray.

Facing a future with only Universal Pictures as its big Hollywood supporter, Toshiba and HD DVD could quickly become isolated, analysts at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas said.

Supercomputers to Simulate Nuclear Reactors

Computers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Brookhaven National Laboratory will run virtual models of a reactor. Computers which can perform trillions of operations per second to test the reliability and safety of the reactor designs are to be used.The computers will model a so-called sodium-cooled fast reactor, which would be able to use highly radioactive nuclear materials for fuel and would produce electricity more efficiently than current reactors. Proponents say the reactors also would provide a way to reduce the worldwide stockpile of weapons-grade nuclear fuel.
The idea is to design reactors that can use this material and that are safe.The company's Blue Gene computers at the site will be able to simulate the vastly complex reactor, down to modeling the flow of liquid around pipes and through valves.Researchers expect that if the simulation is done properly, then the weak spots can be avoided.Researchers at Columbia University and the State University of New York at Stony Brook also will be involved in the three-year project.

JVC Handclap & Gesture Recognition TV demonstrated at CEATEC

Clap Clap Clap to operate the TV, as gestures give icons.

JVC has showcased a new TV that reacts on claps and hand gestures, at CEATEC in Japan. It’s called the “handclap & gesture recognition TV”.
The company said that the TV has the ability to collect the sounds of handclaps with the help of the microphone that is placed on top of the TV. Further, it distinguishes commands based on the timing and number of handclaps.
Now, check out how the system actually works.
Initially, when the TV is switched on, icons will be placed on the center of the screen after the user claps three times. The image of the hands acts as a pointer.

here it comes!!!!!

similar to the internet connection and telephone lines moving from traditional copper cables to fibre optic cables the USB3.0 is also found to be using this technology.

Intel is now working fellow USB 3.0 Promoters Group members Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Texas Instruments, NEC and NXP Semiconductors to release the USB 3.0 specification in the first half of 2008, said Pat Gelsinger, general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, in a speech in san francisco at the Intel Developer Forum.



INTEL SHOWED OF THE PROROTYPE AND ADD IN CARD AT THE INTEL DEVELOPER FORUM.

The most important advancement made in this USB 3.0 is that it supports speed up to 10 times of USb2.0.for example now usb2.0 has a transfer rate of 486mbps.ten fold would lead to 4.8GBps.Thats too much speed.not many device need that much speed.But some device such as optical drives blue ray and HD DVD will make use of the speed.

i guess it would compleatly occupy the market in 2009 and 2010.Dont worry about the compatablity because USB3.0 is backward compatablity.It means USB2.0 can also be plugged in to USB3.0.

ever wondered wats inside your computer system

here is a small diagrammatic explanation of your system
Multicore CPUs like Intel's Core 2 Extreme and AMD's dual-core Athlon 64 have brought about better performance, better power management, and a way for the industry to free itself from a slavish devotion to sheer clock speed. But multicore CPU architectures are creating a nightmare for programmers, particularly those who want to take full advantage of the new chips' power. The upshot? Much of your brand-new CPU's potential, like an uneducated brain, is going to waste. Even if (programmers) did nothing and the clock speed doubled, their software would run significantly faster, the days when the megahertz wars raged.

In general, "multicore" chips include two or more cores -- the central processing units of a chip on a single piece of silicon. This allows properly coded software to break computing tasks down into separate pieces, known as "threads," and process the threads simultaneously, in parallel, instead of sequentially, as older single-core chips require. Although multicore platforms have been around for some time in academia and research, it's been just over two years since the chips were commercially introduced by the likes of Sun Microsystems, IBM, Intel and AMD. Now, as core counts are poised to take off with eight, 32 and even 64 cores, the software that will run on them is seriously lagging. With the exception of the gaming industry, the vast majority of software publishers aren’t programming for multithreaded chips.Indeed, the potential benefits of multicore chips are rendered obsolete if the software itself isn't coded to take advantage of its primary selling point: namely, parallelism.