科技新聞

第三季

2004/08/08

Portable video may have tiny audience
They can capture video from computers and TVs to watch anywhere. But who really wants to do do that?
August 5, 2004: 4:22 PM EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Electronics makers are enticing consumers to take Seinfeld on the subway with portable video players that look like an iPod crossed with a digital camera.

Smaller than a Stephen King paperback thriller, these compact players have room for up to 80 hours of video -- that's all five seasons of "The Sopranos," the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, and six hours of Thighmaster infomercials.

Built-in video screens about 3.5 inches across provide a crisp picture for personal viewing, while output jacks allow them to be plugged into a TV screen for a more panoramic experience.

Users can record TV programs off the air, download movies from the Internet or copy vacation videos from their own camcorders.

Portable media players like the Archos AV420 can also store and play back hundreds of hours of music and display thousands of digital photos. And, like a TiVo, the AV420 can be programmed to automatically record certain shows.

The AV420 lists for $549.95, while Thomson's RCA Lyra A/V Jukebox lists for $449.99 -- about $50 more than the most expensive version of Apple's iPod, which has sold more than 2 million units since it was introduced in 2001.

With manufacturers like Samsung and Sanyo readying units of their own, Christmas shoppers could find store shelves filled with media players.

"We see the video player market as a natural progression for MP3," said Archos chief operating officer Brad Wallace. "We can do everything you can with an iPod."

Analysts are less bullish about the category.

"As a mass-market device, I think it's unlikely to succeed," said Paul O'Donovan, a principal analyst at Gartner Inc. "I think it's a very neat, very clever technology, but that doesn't guarantee a market."

The price is too high to attract all but the most avid gadget hounds when laptop computers and portable DVD players offer larger screens and fewer technical headaches, said Mike McGuire, another Gartner analyst.

U.S. consumers will buy 25 million portable MP3 players in 2008, but portable-video player sales will be closer to 2 million units that year, O'Donovan said.

Unlike music, video demands much more of a user's attention and can't be viewed while driving, exercising or walking down the street.

Delunte Lewis, a salesman at Best Buy in Washington, said the Archos and RCA units have appealed to commuters who spend a fair amount of time on the train, but they haven't been particularly hot sellers.

Like elsewhere in the high-tech world, the products have broken down into two camps: Microsoft Corp. and the rest.

Apple Computer Inc., which accounts for 55 percent of the MP3 market when measured by revenue, has said it has no plans to offer a video player.

Microsoft last year unveiled a software platform that would link personal media players closely with its Windows XP operating system.

Movies, music and other content could be automatically copied from a user's computer onto the mobile device while computers with a built-in TV tuner could record shows automatically and copy them to the mobile player.

Samsung, Sanyo and Creativehave announced plans to release Microsoft-compatible players, and Amazon.com Inc. is taking pre-orders, though the products are not yet on the market.

Archos and RCA, which run on proprietary software, say their units can sync up with personal computers, or record video directly from TV units.

But that's a labor-intensive way to get content, said Josh Martin, an associate research analyst at IDC.

Paid download services like CinemaNow that allow users to download programs in minutes could encourage adoption if they're priced right, he said.

"If you could download as many episodes of Seinfeld as you want for $10 a month and keep them on your device, that's a pretty good value proposition," Martin said.

Video-download services have been slow to get off the ground due to piracy concerns. Overly restrictive copy-control measures and conflicting file formats could dampen enthusiasm, he said.

2004/08/31

NEW YORK (AP) -- Thirty-five years after computer scientists at UCLA linked two bulky computers using a 15-foot gray cable, testing a new way to exchange data over networks, what would ultimately become the Internet remains a work in progress.

University researchers are experimenting with ways to increase its capacity and speed. Programmers are trying to imbue Web pages with intelligence. And work is underway to re-engineer the network to reduce spam and security troubles.

All the while threats loom: Critics warn that commercial, legal and political pressures could hinder the types of innovations that made the Internet what it is today.

Stephen Crocker and Vinton Cerf were among the graduate students who joined UCLA professor Len Kleinrock in an engineering lab on September 2, 1969, as bits of meaningless test data flowed silently between the two computers. By January, three other "nodes" joined the fledgling network.

Then came e-mail a few years later, a core communications protocol called TCP/IP in the late 1970s, the domain name system in the 1980s and the World Wide Web -- now the second most popular application behind e-mail -- in 1990. The Internet expanded beyond its initial military and educational domain into businesses and homes around the world.

Today, Crocker continues work on the Internet, designing better tools for collaboration. And as security chairman for the Internet's key oversight body, he is trying to defend the core addressing system from outside threats, including an attempt last year by a private search engine to grab Web surfers who mistype addresses.

He acknowledges the Internet he helped build is far from finished, and changes are in store to meet growing demands for multimedia. Network providers now make only "best efforts" at delivering data packets, and Crocker said better guarantees are needed to prevent the skips and stutters now common with video.

Cerf, now at MCI Inc., said he wished he could have designed the Internet with security built-in. Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc. and America Online Inc., among others, are currently trying to retrofit the network so e-mail senders can be authenticated -- a way to cut down on junk messages sent using spoofed addresses.

Among Cerf's other projects: a next-generation numbering system called IPv6 to accommodate the ever-growing armies of Internet-ready wireless devices, game consoles, even dog collars. Working with NASA, Cerf is also trying to extend the network into outer space to better communicate with spacecraft.

But many features being developed today wouldn't have been possible at birth given the slower computing speeds and narrower Internet pipes, or bandwidth, Cerf said.

"With the tools we had then, we did as much as we could reasonably have done," he said.

While engineers tinker with the Internet's core framework, some university researchers looking for more speed are developing separate systems that parallel the Internet. That way, data-intensive applications like video conferencing, brain imaging and global climate research won't have to compete with e-mail and e-commerce.

Think information highway with an express lane.

Some applications are so data-intensive, they are "simply impractical to do on the current Internet," said Tracy Futhey, chairwoman of the National LambdaRail. The project offers for its members dedicated high-speed lines so data can "get from point A to point B and not have to contend with the other traffic."

LambdaRail recently completed its first optical connection from San Diego, California, to Seattle, Washington, to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Jacksonville, Florida. Work on additional links is planned for next year.

Undersea explorer Robert Ballard has used another network, Internet2, to host live, interactive presentations with students and aquarium visitors from the wreck of the Titanic, which he found in 1985.

The Internet's bandwidth can carry only "lousy" video and "can't compete with looking out the window," Ballard said. But with Internet2, "high-definition zoom cameras can show them the eyelids."

Internet2, with speeds 100 times the typical broadband service at home, is now limited to selected universities, companies and institutions, but researchers expect any breakthroughs to ultimately migrate to the main Internet.

While Internet2 and LambdaRail seek to move data faster and faster, researchers with the World Wide Web Consortium are trying to make information smarter and smarter. Semantic Web is a next-generation Web designed to make more kinds of data easier for computers to locate and process.

Consider the separate teams of scientists who study genes, proteins and chemical pathways. With the Semantic Web, tags are added to information in databases describing gene and protein sequences. One group may use one scheme and another team something else; the Semantic Web could help link the two. Ultimately, software could be written to process the data and make inferences that previously required human intervention.

With the same principles, searching to buy an automobile in Massachusetts will also incorporate listings for cars in Boston.

Change doesn't come easily, however. For instance, the IPv6 numbering system was deemed an Internet standard about five years ago, but the vast majority of software and hardware today still runs on the older IPv4, which is rapidly running out of room.

And the Internet faces general resistance from old-world forces that want to preserve their current ways of doing things: Companies that value profit over greater good. Copyright holders who want to protect their music and movies. Governments that seek to censor information or spy on its citizens.

In early August, the Federal Communications Commission declared that Internet-based phone calls should be subject to the same type of law enforcement surveillance as cell and landline phones. That means Internet service providers would have to design their systems to permit police wiretaps.

Jonathan Zittrain, a professor with Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, fears a slippery slope. As these outside pressures meddle with the Net's open architecture, he said, there's less opportunity for experimentation and for innovations like the World Wide Web, born out of an unauthorized project at a Swiss nuclear research lab.

2004/09/08

Fever pitch for mobile entertainment market

By Nick Easen for CNN
Tuesday, September 7, 2004 Posted: 5:32 AM EDT (0932 GMT)

LONDON, England (CNN) -- It has been 25 years since Sony launched the original Walkman, now the portable entertainment scene is going through a energetic renaissance, but this time it is digital.

Seeded by the success of Apple's iPod and online store iTunes, joggers, cyclists and drivers the

 world-over now consume entire CD collections and downloaded tunes on pocket-held devices.

But Apple is about to find the market more crowded. Microsoft and others are moving in. Their entry is set to herald a new phase in the battle for personal entertainment.

"We are seeing new players in the market innovate with new features such as video. But the market is still very young, people still carry CD and cassette players," Ian Fogg, personal technology analyst at Jupiter Research told CNN.

In direct competition to iTunes, Microsoft is about to offer songs on its Web site for 99 cents. RealNetworks already has a promotional 49 cents per-song download campaign.

Other competitors include Wal-Mart Music Downloads, Sony Connect, Musicmatch Jukebox, Napster 2.0.

On the hardware side, Singapore-based Creative Technology is doubling the number of digital music players from eight to 16 by the end of the year.

"This year, MP3 (digital audio players) will be the hottest segment -- last year was digital cameras," Creative Chief Executive Sim Wong Hoo told reporters.

Reviewers are hailing its new "Zen" player as one of the strongest rivals to-date for Apple's market-leader, iPod.

One thing that differentiates Zen is its ability to offer more than just music in easy to use formats. It has the ability store up to 85 hours of video and thousands of photos.

"Portable Media Centres are vanguard devices that will change the way we think about digital entertainment on the go," says Todd Warren, a corporate vice-president at Microsoft.

"Today we are seeing just the tip of the iceberg in how content companies are envisioning a future where people can take all of their digital entertainment wherever they go -- on vacation, while they commute, at the gym."

The company that invented the portable music player, Sony, has released a digital version called the Network Walkman complemented by its online music store Connect. Hewlett Packard has also launched a digital music player.

But dethroning the iPod is likely to be an uphill struggle. Microsoft has come late to the music game -- one in which Apple has significant market share. Many consumers already associate the Apple brand with portable digital music.

The simplicity of Apple's online store and its music player could also create a barrier for competitors.

"The goal is to make it easy to use, Apple has this, but it may not be the dominant player in the future," says Fogg.

Analysts say that the boom in the personal entertainment scene may also be marked by consumer bewilderment at the multitude of models and digital-entertainment formats.

By giving people an increasing range of choices for audio and visual content that is portable and competitively priced could change the face of personal and pocket-sized entertainment -- but do not throw out your first generation iPod yet.

"I expect in 10 years you will still have a music player that is just good for music. I do not think you will have a single device for all forms of entertainment including video -- it is an experience issue," explains Fogg.

2004/09/09

Genesis scientists try to salvage solar dust

DUGWAY PROVING GROUND, Utah (AP) -- Scientists with tweezers picked through the twisted wreckage of a space capsule that crash-landed on Earth, hoping that microscopic clues to the evolution of the solar system weren't completely lost in Utah's salt flats.

NASA engineers were stunned Wednesday when neither parachute deployed aboard the Genesis capsule and the craft plummeted to the ground at 193 mph, breaking open like a clamshell and exposing its collection of solar atoms to contamination.

"There was a big pit in my stomach," said physicist Roger Wiens of Los Alamos National Laboratory. "This just wasn't supposed to happen. We're going to have a lot of work picking up the pieces."

The capsule held billions of charged atoms -- a total haul no bigger than a few grains of salt -- that were harvested from solar wind on five collecting disks during the 884-day, $260-million mission.

Roy Haggard, who took part in the initial reconnaissance of the capsule, said the capsule's shell had been breached about three inches and the science canister inside appeared to have a small break.

The inner canister was flown to the Army's air field at the proving ground and put in a clean room, a work area in which the air quality, temperature and humidity are highly regulated to prevent contamination.

The reconstruction was expected to take several days, and scientists were hopeful they could salvage the embedded atoms among the twisted platters of exotic metals and silicone.

"This is something that's not a total disaster," said Carlton Allen, astromaterials curator for the Houston-based Johnson Space Center. "We didn't lose all the science in the crash."

NASA planned to appoint a "mishap review board" to determine a cause for the failure. Flight engineers say a set of tiny explosives didn't trigger the capsule's parachutes, although the fact that all explosives failed pointed to another cause.

The spacecraft was designed and built by Lockheed Martin Space Systems near Denver. Robert Corwin, an engineer for the company, said a battery that overheated shortly after the 2001 launch could be a culprit.

The mishap also raised questions about the durability of another NASA sample-return capsule called Stardust, due to land here in 2006. But that capsule was built to be more rugged and will land on its own with a parachute.

Scientists got their first glimpse of the damage when the Genesis capsule was wheeled into a garage bay late Wednesday. The capsule's inner canister was all but unrecognizable, although scientists thought they saw some unbroken parts holding the atoms.

The space capsule had been outside the earth's magnetic shield for three years, collecting solar wind particles that could explain how the sun formed an estimated 4.5 billion years ago and what keeps it fueled.

The atoms were captured on 5-foot disks, each with hexagons of gold, sapphire, silicone and diamond. Each collector array was assigned to catch various types of solar wind.

The five disks were of different thicknesses, which could make it easier for scientists put the pieces back together like a puzzle, Wiens said. The disks were so tightly packed within the canister that it was hard to tell how badly they were damaged.

Helicopters flown by Hollywood stunt pilots were supposed to grab Genesis almost a mile above the Utah desert and lower it gently to the ground by snatching its main parachute with a hook. But before the capture team learned of the parachute failure, the speeding capsule had plummeted into the Utah desert.

Solar wind is a stream of highly charged particles that are emitted by the sun. The Genesis mission marked the first time NASA has collected any objects from farther than the moon for retrieval to Earth.

Scientists hoped the charged atoms gathered in the capsule would shed important light on the solar system, said Don Burnett, Genesis' principal investigator and a nuclear geochemist at California Institute of Technology.

"We have for years wanted to know the composition of the sun," Burnett said before the crash. He said scientists had expected to analyze the material "one atom at a time."