Microsoft Lets Zune Users Play Radio Tag

As the tech media and blogosphere focused their spotlights on the announcements coming out of Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) Latest News about Apple "let's rock," press event on Tuesday, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Free Trial. Security Software As A Service From Webroot. Latest News about Microsoft risked being lost in the chatter. The company chose Monday to reveal details about upcoming changes to its Zune digital media player.

Among the new features for the Zune are improved WiFi, radio tagging functionality, a 120 GB model and a 16 GB flash memory version.

"It seems like some minor hardware upgrades," said Joshua Martin, an analyst at the Yankee Group, "but it's really about an experience change. They're offering more functionality and increased usability, and that's really [how] Microsoft has tried to position the product ... the whole time. Easy discovery of music, easy sharing of music, easy interaction with people who like music -- that's been their niche, and it seems they are beginning to hone that message."
Cat Out of the Bag

The Zune announcement was originally scheduled to hit next week, but retailer Fry's Electronics miscued, exposing details of the updated Zune to the Web. At that point, it was just a matter of time before the news spread. After Zunerama bloggers published the information, Microsoft decided to seize the moment and roll out the announcement on Monday.

"The intention was not to release the information today," Martin told TechNewsWorld. "Fry put the product page up, and someone found it, and it had all the details on it, and one thing led to another. So, you can confirm it or deny -- they decided why not run with it? People are talking ... why not make a splash while you can?"
Zuning In

Among the most noteworthy new Zune features is its new FM tagging capability. Dubbed "Buy from FM," the feature capitalizes on the Zune's built-in FM tuner, allowing users to tag and purchase songs they hear while listening to the radio through the device.

They can buy the songs directly from the Zune store. When they are connected to the Internet via a WiFi hotspot or a home computer, the song will download immediately. If, however, no Internet access is available, the Zune will queue tracks for download when a Web connection is established.

Some 450 stations, including those belonging to Clear Channel, have reportedly signed up and will support World Class Managed Hosting from PEER 1, Just $299. Click here. technology that uses Radio Data System and RT+ data feeds within the FM broadcast frequencies to identify song and artist information.

"It's a good idea, but Apple had a deal with HD radio guys for iTunes tagging also. It's an important feature. It's good because it takes a traditional medium like FM radio into the digital age -- but it's not unique," Martin said.
The WiFi Factor

Speaking of WiFi, the hardware maker has also given its WiFi a boost enabling users to access the Zune Marketplace music store directly from the device when they are within range of a recognized WiFi hotspot, or through a home wireless network New HP LaserJet P4014n Printer Starting at $699 after $100 instant savings..

The WiFi offering might have been a differentiator for the Zune as it struggled to compete with the iPod, noted Martin, "but the implementation through the first phase was not very good. [It had] a limited area to share content, which was understandable because they were trying to make it a social thing. But it [was hurt by] a combination of factors -- small installed base of users and undefined, unclear rules on who content could be shared with."

All that conspired to make the feature underwhelming, and now Microsoft is "behind the eight ball," according to Martin, because Apple has included WiFi in the iPod touch.

"WiFi is not terribly useful unless there are actual implementations for being able to find and access additional music, which is really the purpose of the device," he pointed out.
Firmware and Software

Included in the Zune's new features are some firmware and software updates.

"Channels" enables users to cruise channels from music industry experts such as the Billboard Top 100, FADER magazine and KEXP radio to discover new music. Users can also create their own custom channels based on their favorite artists and genres.

The smarter Zune will even be able to learn what kind of music a user enjoys and then make personal recommendations using the "Personal Picks" feature. After a user logs onto the Zune Marketplace, they will find a new "Picks" area where their recommendations will be stored.

With the Zune's new "MixView" software, users select an artist, album or Zune card, which triggers a visual mosaic of related music and listeners. Clicking on the view will highlight a different artist or album.

The firmware update will also improve the Zune's "Games on the go," "Audiobooks," "Audible" and "Overdrive" functionality.

The updated line will be available Sept. 16 in two new colors: blue and silver. The 120 GB Zune is priced at US$249; the 80 GB model at $229. The Flash memory Latest News about Flash memory 16 GB version retails for $199, while the 8 GB and 4 GB Zunes will sell for $149 and $129, respectively.

Collider probing mysteries of the universe at the speed of light

September 9, 2008 (Computerworld) With the world's biggest physics experiment ready to fire up tomorrow, scientists from around the world are hoping to find answers to a question that has haunted mankind for centuries: How was the universe created?

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which has been under construction for 20 years, will shoot its first beam of protons around a 17-mile, vacuum-sealed loop at a facility that sits astride the Franco-Swiss border. The test run of what is the largest, most powerful particle accelerator in the world, is a forebear to the coming time when scientists will accelerate two particle beams toward each other at 99.9% of the speed of light.

Smashing the beams together will create showers of new particles that should re-create conditions in the universe just moments after its conception.

Tomorrow's test run is a critical milestone in getting to that ultimate undertaking. And a worldwide grid of servers and desktops will help the scientific team make sense of the information that they expect will come pouring in.

"This will move the limit of our understanding of the universe," said Ruth Pordes, executive director of the Open Science Grid, which was created in 2005 to support the LHC project. "I'm very excited about the turning on of the accelerator. Over the next two years, our grids will be used by thousands of physicists at LHC to make new scientific discoveries. That's what it's all for."

Pordes noted that the U.S. portion of the global grid is a computational and data storage infrastructure made up of more than 25,000 computers and 43,000 CPUs. The mostly Linux-based machines are linked into the grid from universities, the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and software development groups. Pordes also said the U.S. grid offers up about 300,000 compute hours a day with 70% of it going to the particle collider project.

Harvey Newman, a physics professor at the California Institute of Technology, told Computerworld that there are about 30,000 servers and more than 100,000 cores around the world hooked into grids that support the LHC project.

"The distributed computing model is essential to doing the computing, storage and hosting of the many petabytes of data from the experiments," said Newman. "Coordinating data distribution, processing and analysis of the data collaboratively by a worldwide community of scientists working on the LHC are key to the physics discoveries. Only a worldwide effort could provide the resources needed."

The computer infrastructure is critical to the work being done in the particle collider, which is a tunnel buried 50 meters to 150 meters below the ground. The tunnel, or tube, is designed to facilitate and control a head-on collision between two beams of the same kind of particles -- either protons or ions. Traveling through a vacuum comparable to outer space, the beams are guided around the tube by superconducting magnets.

According to documents from CERN, as the European Organization for Nuclear Research is known, each of the two beams will contain about 3,000 bunches of particles. Each bunch will hold as many as 100 billion particles. Despite these huge numbers, the particles are so tiny that a collision between any two is quite small. However, since the beams will be traveling at near light speed around the 17-mile tube, they'll cross each other about 30 million times per second, resulting in an estimated 600 million collisions.

If a beam circulates around the tunnel for 10 hours, for instance, it will travel more than 10 billion kilometers, which is the distance it would take to travel to Neptune and back.

With the Big Bang theory, scientists largely believe that more than 13 billion years ago an amazingly dense object the size of maybe a coin expanded into the universe that we know now -- with planets, stars, black holes and life.

Bolek Wyslouch, a professor of physics at MIT who has been working on the collider project for the last seven years, said that a main goal of the experiments is to find the elusive Higgs particle that is believed to be responsible for giving other particles their mass. Though its existence hasn't been proven yet, it's believed that Higgs particles are what give electrons their weight, for instance.

Scientists are also hoping the particle collider will give them information about dark energy and dark matter.

"This is part of the quest to explore our surroundings. It's part of the quest to understand our world and ourselves," said Wyslouch. "We are trying to describe the basic elements of the matter surrounding us -- to understand the basic infrastructure of how things work. The knowledge of this microscopic world can be translated into knowledge of the whole universe -- how it was formed, where all the matter is coming from."

As the time for tomorrow's experiment has neared, rumors have increasingly circulated around the Internet that the experiments might destroy the universe by accidentally creating a black hole that would suck everything and everyone into it.

CERN released a report late last week saying that safety fears about the LHC are "unfounded." CERN Director General Robert Aymar was quoted as saying that any suggestion that there's a risk is "pure fiction."

Fixes coming for iPhone 3G

Though iPod news dominated Tuesday's Apple's "Let's Rock" event in San Francisco, Apple CEO Steve Jobs did spill a bit of iPhone news. Jobs said that coming this Friday, Apple will release the anticipated 2.1 software update. What will it bring? Well...Jobs didn't really say, except that is a "big update" that would fix "lots of bugs."

The pesky bugs should be no surprise to current iPhone 3G owners as they've been widely reported since the handset launched two months ago. Specifically, the fix should bring fewer dropped calls, battery life improvements, no crashes with applications and faster backups.

If the software update does what Jobs promises, there's no question that it will be welcomed warmly. The ongoing issues have proved to be a thorn in the side of many iPhone 3G owners, but Apple was relatively slow in acknowledging the problems. On August 18, it released the 2.0.2 software update, which was supposed to bring "improved communication with 3G networks," a company spokeswoman said. Then, two days later, rumors circulated that the crashing applications problem would be fixed in a September software update.

So, this does appear to be the moment we've been waiting for. When the update is out, we'll download it to our iPhone as soon as we can and tell you how it works. I'm hopeful the issues will be solved, but I'm also wondering how a software update can address bad 3G coverage from AT&T. What's more, I'd be happier if the 2.1 update also added missing features to the iPhone like cut and paste, multimedia messaging ,and voice dialing, to name a few. I guess we'll have to continue waiting.

What do you want from the iPhone 2.1 software update? Let us know below.