Tuesday, 10 October 2006
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NEC Electronics ships dual-format DVD chip  Jacob B. Delderfield 10:18:59 |
 | Japanese chip maker NEC Electronics Corp. said on Tuesday it began shipping a chip compatible with both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats in next-generation DVDs, bridging a format war splitting the electronics industry in two.
If other hybrid technology is developed, the new chip could lower costs to build dual-format players, helping consumers and the movie industry sidestep the rivalry between the two opposing camps.
The chips go on sale for 10,000 yen ($84), roughly the same price as NEC Electronics' chips which read only Blu-ray or only HD DVD formats, the world's No. 8 chip maker said.
NEC Electronics targets monthly shipments of 300,000 during the business year starting April 2007.
A group of companies led by Sony Corp. are promoting the Blu-ray format as the next-generation optical disc standard, while Toshiba Corp. is a leading proponent of the rival HD DVD technology.
Still missing from the dual player equation is optical pick-up technology to read and play back both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats.
The chip and the optical pick-up lens together can make up more than half the cost of a DVD player, said NEC Electronics spokesman Hisashi Saito.
NEC Electronics shares closed up 3.6 percent at 4,040 yen, outperforming the Nikkei average, which nudged up 0.25 percent.
Source: http://asia.news.yahoo.com
 Wagner
Mood: Nice
I want: to eat |
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Friday, 6 October 2006
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| Elecom Offers Advanced 3D Laser Mouse Jacob B. Delderfield 13:43:59 |
| Sandio Technology Corporation, a 3D input company based in San Jose, California, announced today that Elecom Corporation of Osaka, Japan, will offer a 3D laser mouse based on the Sandio’s 3D input technology.
Elecom, under its president, Mr. Junji Hada, has apparently created numerous best-selling products and is currently the number one in mouse, keyboard, numeric keypad and USB HUB market products in Japan. The new Sandio-based M-3D1UR series mouse will begin shipping in late November.
With the M-3D1UR series mouse, PC users are now able to move along and rotate about x, y, and z-axis, action that requires users to work with multiple keys on the keyboard or an on-screen navigation bar when using a traditional mouse. The M-3D1UR series mouse allows PC users to move freely on CAD software, game software and 3D applications, such as Google Earth.
Elecom’s M-3D1UR series employs high precision laser sensors and offers users greater flexibility through multiple dpi: 400, 800, 1600 and 2000.
As the market leader of input devices in Japan, Elecom has been deploying new input technologies into the Japanese market, offering an advanced mouse even before the Japanese version of Microsoft Windows 3.1 became a significant factor in the market.
Elecom sees the evolution of PC hardware and operating systems leading to 3D applications and 3D games becoming pervasive. Traditional 2D input devices will not be adequate for today’s users and the company has predicted a revolution is ahead in the mouse industry with the introduction of its 3D mouse based on Sandio 3D input technology.
In Japan, the manufacturer’s suggested retail price of the M-3D1UR series is 12,800 yen. Elecom exhibited the M-3D1UR series 3D mouse at the Tokyo Game Show in September |
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Thursday, 5 October 2006
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| AntiVir Removal Tool for Windows ... Jacob B. Delderfield 14:22:27 |
| AntiVir Removal Tool for Windows
FREEWARE!!!
For all those experiencing the damaging effects of a virus infection, Avira’s researchers have prepared a removal tool, which can be used to eliminate major distinct threats.
This Removal Tool does not replace any antivirus solution. You must install an antivirus product on your system and keep it up-to-date, in order to ensure your protection.
http://dl.antivir.de/down/windows/tool_en.com |
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| ICONS: Apple OS X Jacob B. Delderfield 12:21:18 |
| Icon genres help communicate what you can do with an application before you open it. Applications are classified by role—user applications, software utilities, and so on—and each category, or genre, has its own icon style. This differentiation is very important for helping users easily distinguish between types of icons in the Dock.
Figure 10-1 Application icons of different genres—user applications and utilities—shown as they might appear in the Dock
For example, the icons for user applications are colorful and inviting, while utilities have a more serious appearance. Figure 10-2 shows user application icons in the top row and utility icons in the bottom row. These genres are further described in "User Application Icons" and "Utility Icons".
Figure 10-2 Two icon genres: User application icons in top row; utility icons in bottom row
The graphic flexibility of Aqua icons can also help users identify files associated with an application. In iTunes, for example, a visual cue provided in the application icon is carried over into icons for other files associated with iTunes, forming an icon family, as shown in Figure 10-3.
Figure 10-3 An icon family: The iTunes application icon and its associated icons
Application Icons
Application icons are the most visible to users. Since they are seen in the Finder and the Dock even when your application is not running, they form a significant part of a user’s first impressions.
User Application Icons
Mac OS X user application icons should be vibrant and inviting, and should immediately convey the application’s purpose. The TextEdit icon, for example, indicates clearly that this application is for creating text documents.
Figure 10-4 The TextEdit application icon makes it obvious what this application is for
If the primary function of your application is creating or handling media, its icon should display the media the application creates or views. If appropriate, the icon should also contain a tool that communicates the type of task the application allows the user to accomplish. The Preview icon, for example, uses a magnification tool to help convey that the application can be used to view pictures. If you include a supportive tool element, it should closely relate to the base object that it rests upon.
Figure 10-5 The Preview application icon: An example of a tool element
In the Stickies application icon, however, the yellow rectangles are easily identifiable as sticky notes; the icon doesn’t include a tool because it isn’t necessary to tell the icon’s story.
Figure 10-6 The Stickies application icon: Effective without the addition of a tool
Notice that the text in the Stickies icon is actual text, not simply wavy lines representing text. If you want to “greek” text in an Aqua icon, use actual text and make it unreadable by shrinking it or doubling the layers.
Generally, Mac OS X user application icons are designed to appear as if they’re sitting on a desk in front of you. They have a slightly diminishing perspective (they are wider at the bottom). For more information, see "Icon Perspectives and Materials ".
Viewer, Player, and Accessory Icons
Some applications that represent objects, such as QuickTime Player and Calculator, are most easily recognized by the objects themselves. When creating icons for such applications, it’s more aesthetically pleasing to create a simplified, idealized representation of the object, instead of using an actual screen shot of the software. Re-creating the object is particularly important when users could confuse the icon with the actual interface.
Figure 10-7 The icons for QuickTime Player, DVD Player, and Calculator
These icons, many of which are a precursor of what you’ll see when you open the application, use a straight-on perspective (rather than the “on a desktop” user application style). You never see the Calculator onscreen in three dimensions, for example, so its icon doesn’t depict it that way.
Utility Icons
Icons for utility applications—which are used less often and not simply for fun or creative activities— convey a more serious tone than those for user applications. Color in these icons is desaturated, predominantly gray, and added only when necessary to clearly communicate what the applications do.
Figure 10-8 Discriminating use of color in the Activity Monitor and Printer Setup Utility icons
Because utility applications are normally focused on a narrow set of tasks, it’s best to keep the number of elements in the icon to a minimum. The focus should be a single object that represents what the utility does. The perspective of utility icons is straight-on, as if they are on a shelf in front of you. For more information, see "Icon Perspectives and Materials ".
Document Icons
Traditionally, a document icon looks like a piece of paper with its top-right corner folded down. As previously suggested, Aqua document icons should make it obvious which application they are associated with. Preview documents, for example, include a graphic of the media (the pictures) used in the application icon. For simplicity and to avoid confusing the document with the application itself, the viewing tool is not repeated in the document icon.
Figure 10-9 Icons for the Preview application and a Preview document
Document icons are presented as if they are hovering on the desktop, with the shadow behind the document. For more information, see "Icon Perspectives and Materials ".
When you want to put an identifying badge over a document icon, treat the badge as an integrated element within the document instead of putting it over the top of the base image and breaking out of the overall document shape.
Figure 10-10 Incorrect and correct badging of a document icon
Icons for Plug-ins
Plug-in icons look like stackable components, with the associated application identifier on the left side and a plug-in–specific image on the right.
Figure 10-11 A plug-in icon
Hardware and Removable Media Icons
Hardware icons represent devices as you most often see them: on your desk. Because these devices are also frequently handled and carried, people are familiar with them as three-dimensional objects with weight. The Aqua treatment of hardware icons reinforces their association with real objects.
Figure 10-12 Icons for external (top row) and internal hardware devices
To help users distinguish between external devices, their icons provide a region for an identifying symbol (FireWire, SCSI, and so on).
Removable media such as CDs, floppy disks, and PC cards are depicted the way they look when you hold them in front of you—that is, the perspective is straight-on.
Figure 10-13 Icons for removable media
Toolbar Icons
The primary purpose of a toolbar is to provide users with easy access to frequently used commands. Although toolbar icons should conserve screen real estate (32 pixels by 32 pixels is the recommended size), they should be inviting and easy to identify. The perspective of a toolbar icon is straight-on, as if it is sitting on a shelf in front of you.
Ideally, each toolbar icon should represent a unique object or action that is directly related to the command it represents. A toolbar can also contain icons that represent recognizable interface elements from elsewhere in the system (such as an Info button or an iDisk icon) when they make sense in the context of the application. If you choose to include an icon such as an Info button, be sure to preserve its meaning. Users expect such icons to mean the same thing in every context, so you should not redefine them when you use them in your toolbar.
Important: Do not use a system icon, such as the yellow caution icon, in your toolbar. A system icon provides important information to the user in a specific context, such as in an alert window; using it in a toolbar blurs its meaning and dilutes it effectiveness in the system.
Figure 10-14 shows some of the icons available in Xcode's toolbar (Xcode is the Mac OS X integrated development environment, or IDE).
Figure 10-14 Xcode toolbar icons
Some of the icons in Figure 10-14 use familiar objects (a hammer, a can of bug spray, and a broom) as metaphors for frequently used Xcode commands (build a project, debug code, and clean a target, respectively). To represent the run action, Xcode uses the right-pointing triangle users associate with play or run in applications such as iTunes, Keynote, and Automator. The Xcode toolbar also contains the Info button users are accustomed to seeing in the Finder and in other applications in Mac OS X. As a general rule, a toolbar icon that depicts an identifiable, real-world object or recognizable user-interface element gives first-time users a clue to its function and helps experienced users remember it.
Making each toolbar icon distinct helps the user associate it with its purpose and locate it quickly. Variations in shape, color, and image all help to differentiate one toolbar icon from another. At the same time, however, an application's toolbar icons should harmonize together as much as possible in their perspective, use of color, size, and visual weight. For example, each icon in Figure 10-14 is unique, but all are similar in general size, perspective, and color saturation (intensity) and none appear more important than the others.
Although icons designed specifically for use in a toolbar appear as if they are sitting on a shelf in front of you, if you use a recognizable control from elsewhere in the interface (such as a pop-up menu), that control should retain its standard appearance and perspective. That is, don’t redesign a toolbar version of a well-known interface element.
Figure 10-15 The circled icons appear elsewhere in the interface; they retain their perspective when used in a toolbar
Creating a family of visually related toolbar icons can strengthen the user's perception of your application as being well-integrated and well-designed. One way to do this is to start with a consistent theme for the style and appearance of the icons, then introduce variations when it makes sense. You might also consider using a variation of the application icon or an image symbolic of your application's purpose as a common element in toolbar icons. For example, Preview reuses the photo from its application icon in some of its toolbar icons, as shown in Figure 10-16.
Figure 10-16 Reusing the application icon image in toolbar icons
Taken from http://developer.apple.com |
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Wednesday, 4 October 2006
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| A CAMERA REVOLUTION! Jacob B. Delderfield 13:15:35 |
| Rice's single-pixel camera takes high-res images
Engineers use new mathematics and micro mirrors in 'multiplexed camera'
For all their ease and convenience, there are few things more wasteful than digital cameras. They're loaded with pricy microprocessors that chew through batteries at a breakneck pace, crunching millions of numbers per second in order to throw out up to 99 percent of the information flowing through the lens.
Using some new mathematics and a silicon chip covered with hundreds of thousands of mirrors the size of a single bacterium, engineers at Rice University have come up with a more efficient design. Unlike a one megapixel camera that captures one million points of light for every frame, Rice's camera creates an image by capturing just one point of light, or pixel, several thousands of times in rapid succession. The new mathematics comes into play in assembling the high-resolution image – equal in quality to the one-megapixel image – from the thousands of single-pixel snapshots.
The research will be presented Oct. 11 at the Optical Society of America's 90 th annual meeting, Frontiers in Optics 2006, in Rochester, New York.
The oddest part about Rice's camera may be that it works best when the light from the scene under view is scattered at random and turned into noise that looks like television tuned to a dead channel.
"White noise is the key," said Richard Baraniuk, the Victor E. Cameron Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "Thanks to some deep new mathematics developed just a couple of years ago, we're able to get a useful, coherent image out of the randomly scattered measurements."
Baraniuk's collaborator Kevin Kelly, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, built a working prototype camera using a digital micromirror device, or DMD, and a single photodiode, which turns light into electrical signals. Today's typical retail digital camera has millions of photodiodes, or megapixels, on a single chip.
DMDs, which are fabricated by Texas Instruments and today used primarily in digital televisions and projectors, are devices capable of converting digital information to light and vice versa. Built on a microchip chassis, a DMD is covered with tiny mirrors, each about the size of a microbe, that are capable of facing only two directions. They appear bright when facing one way and dark when facing the other, so when a computer views them, it sees them as 1's or 0's.
In a regular camera, a lens focuses light, for a brief instant, onto a piece of film or a photodiode array called a CCD. In the single-pixel camera, the image from the lens is shined onto the DMD and bounced from there though a second lens that focuses the light reflected by the DMD onto a single photodiode. The mirrors on the DMD are shuffled at random for each new sample. Each time the mirrors shift, a new pixel value is recorded by the photodiode. In effect, the lens and DMD do what the power-hungry microchip in the digital camera usually does; they compress the data from the larger picture into a more compact form. This is why the technique goes by the name "compressive sensing."
Today, it takes about five minutes to take a picture with Rice's prototype camera, which fills an entire corner of one of the table's in Kelly's laboratory. So far, only stationary objects have been photographed, but Kelly and Baraniuk say they should be able to adapt the "time-multiplexed" photographic technique to produce images similar to a home snapshot because the mirrors inside DMDs can alter their position millions of times per second. However, their initial efforts are aimed at developing the camera for scientific applications where digital photography is unavailable.
"For some wavelengths outside the visible spectrum, it's often too expensive to produce large arrays of detectors," Kelly said. "One of the beauties of our system is that it only requires one detector. We think this same methodology could be a real advantage in terahertz imaging and other areas."
taken from http://www.media.rice.edu |
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| Bluetooth to be Buried? Jacob B. Delderfield 10:56:40 |
| Nokia has accomplished the development of a new wireless system Wibree. This standard of communication is speedy and doesn't consume lots of energy, which can make it a serious rival to the Bluetooth. Actually, the first one in 8 years.
Like Bluetooth, Wibree is a radiosystem working at the frequency of 2,4 GHz with a data transmission rate of 1 Mbps. Moreover, the new system is said to be a lot cheaper and use energy than the good old Bluetooth. The range of the new station shall be not more than 10 metres.
Will Bluetooth be buried? Not yet, I think. From now Wibree may be used in Bluetooth-Wibree dual-purpose chips in mobile phones, notebooks and portable PCs. It may also be used as a stand-alone wireless chip for specialized products such as watches, and the like. |
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