Archive for August, 2009
New E- and S-Series Walkmans pop up at CNET
August 29th, 2009
Apparently, Disney does not have a problem with this.
(Credit: Donald Bell/CNET)
Yes, it’s true: I’ve managed to get my grubby little mitts on Sony’s new E- and S-Series Walkman MP3 players. How, you ask? I will never share my secrets…NEVER! OK, dramatics aside, it …
Originally posted at MP3 Insider
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You Have a PS3, But Do You Have the Ultimate Blu-Ray Movie Kit ?? [PS3]
August 28th, 2009
These haven’t shown up in the states just yet, but Sony is selling Australia a pretty interesting Ultimate Blu-Ray Movie Kit.
Priced at $50 USD, you get two Blu-ray movies (choices include films like Batman Begins and 300) and a PS3 Blu-ray remote. For Australians, the two movie pack is just a $10 premium on top of the remote price—not a bad deal (for them).
I’ve resisted Sony’s $20ish Bluetooth remote for some time—probably long enough that I’m over the need since I’ve gotten so darn good with a Dual Shock by now. But if they threw in some Blu-rays to sweeten the deal, I imagine that Sony could unload em by the truckload. Well, I guess all remotes come off trucks at sometime, but you get what I mean. [JB HiFi via Kotaku]
Yoshihiko Satoh’s Wooden iPod speaker bags are definitely re-usable, possibly biodegradeable, totally chic
August 28th, 2009
You can spend a lot of money on a handbag, so why not get one that’s functional? These co-Mobile Speakers designed by Japanese artist Yoshihiko Satoh are not just styled to look like a bag, they are a bag, sporting room for your iPod to serve tunes and maybe a bento box to serve lunch — but admittedly not much else. They’re available in dark wood or maple and will set you back ¥31,500; about $335. Sure, that’s not cheap for a 30 watt speaker dock, but we’ve seen far more expensive purses that are far less tastefully designed.
[Via Engadget Germany]
Gallery: iPod co-Mobile Speakers
Filed under: Home Entertainment, Portable Audio
Yoshihiko Satoh’s Wooden iPod speaker bags are definitely re-usable, possibly biodegradeable, totally chic originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 28 Aug 2009 08:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Crave giveaway of the week: Hercules ePlug 200 Duo
August 28th, 2009
(Credit: Hercules)For this week’s installment of the weekly Crave giveaway, we’re offering up the Hercules ePlug 200 Duo. The product is an Ethernet-to-powerline adapter set, and it’s ideal for anyone who wants to extend a home network into another room of the house without running extra …
Giz Explains: Snow Leopard’s Grand Central Dispatch [Giz Explains]
August 27th, 2009
You’ve probably heard about this snow kitty operating system for Macintosh computers. What you might not’ve heard is exactly how it’s supposed to be unleashing the power of all those processor cores crammed inside your computer.
The heart of the matter is that the trick to actually utilizing the full power of multiple processors—or multiple cores within a processor, like the Core 2 Duo you’ve probably got in your computer if you bought in the last two years—is processing things in parallel. That is, doing lots of stuff side by side. After all, you’ve got 2, maybe 4 or even 8 processors at your disposal, so to use them as efficiently as possible, you want to pull a problem apart and throw a piece of it at each core, or at least send different problems to different cores. Sounds logical, right? Easy, even.
The rub is that writing software that can actually take advantage of all of that parallel processing at an application level isn’t easy, and without software built for it, all that power is wasted. In fact, cracking the nut of parallel processing is one the major movements in tech right now, since parallelism, while it’s been around forever, has been the domain of solving really big problems, not running Excel sheets on your laptop. It’s why, for instance, former Intel chair Craig Barrett told me at CES that Intel hires more software engineers than hardware engineers—to push the software paradigm shift that’s gotta happen.
A big part of the reason parallel programming is hard for programmers to wrestle with is simply most of them have never spent any time thinking about parallelism, says James Reinders, Intel’s Chief Software Evangelist, who’s spent decades working with parallel processing. In the single core world, more speed primarily came from a faster clock speed—all muscle. Multi-core is a different approach. Typically, the way a developer takes advantage of parallelism is by breaking their application down into threads, sub-tasks within a process that run simultaneously or in parallel. And processes are just instances of an application—the things you can see running on your machine by firing up the Task Manager in Windows, or Activity Monitor in OS X. On a multi-core system, different threads can be handled by different processors so multiple threads can be run at once. An app can a lot run faster if it was written to be multi-threaded.
One of the reasons parallel programming is tricky is that some kinds of processes are really hard to do in parallel—they have to be done sequentially. That is, one step in the program is dependent on the result from a previous step, so you can’t really run those steps in parallel. And developers tend to run into problems, like a race condition, where two processes try to do something with the same piece of data and the order of events gets screwed up, resulting in a crash.
Snow Leopard‘s Grand Central Dispatch promises to take a lot of the headache out of parallel programming by managing everything at the OS level, using a system of blocks and queues, so developers don’t even have to thread their apps in the traditional way. In the GCD system, a developer tags self-contained units of work as blocks, which are scheduled for execution and placed in a GCD queue. Queues are how GCD manages tasks running parallel and what order they run in, scheduling blocks to run when threads are free to run something.
Reinders says he’s “not convinced that parallel programming is harder, it’s just different.” Still, he’s a “big fan of what Apple’s doing with Grand Central Dispatch” because “they’ve made a very approachable, simple interface for developers to take advantage of the fact that Snow Leopard can run things in parallel and they’re encouraging apps to take advantage of that.”
How Snow Leopard handles parallelism with GCD is a little different than what Intel’s doing however—you might recall Intel just picked up RapidMind, a company that specializes in optimizing applications for parallelism. The difference between these two, at a broad level, represent two of the major approaches to parallelism—task parallelism, like GCD, or data parallelism, like RapidMind. Reinders explained it like this: If you had a million newspapers you want to cut clips out of, GCD would look at cutting from each newspaper as a task, whereas RapidMind’s approach would look at it as one cutting to be executed in a repetitive manner. For some applications, RapidMind’s approach will work better, and for some, GCD’s task-based approach will work better. In particular, Reinders says something like GCD works best when a developer can “figure out what the fairly separate things to do are and you don’t care where they run or in what order they run” within their app.
It’s also a bit different from Windows’ approach to parallelism, which is app oriented, rather than managing things at the OS level, so it essentially leaves everything up to the apps—apps have got to manage their own threads, make sure they’re not eating all of your resources. Which for now, isn’t much of a headache, but Reinders says that there is a “valid concern on Windows that a mixture of parallel apps won’t cooperate with each other as much,” so you could wind up with a situation where say, four apps try to use all 16 cores in your machine, when you’d rather they split up, with say one app using eight cores, another using four, and so on. GCD addresses that problem at the system level, so there’s more coordination between apps, which may make it slightly more responsive to the user, if it manages tasks correctly.
You might think that the whole parallelism thing is a bit overblown—I mean, who needs a multicore computer to run Microsoft Word, right? Well, even Word benefits from parallelism Reinders told me. For instance, when you spool off something to the printer and it doesn’t freeze, like it used to back in the day. Or spelling and grammar running as you type—it’s a separate thread that’s run in parallel. If it wasn’t, it’d make for a miserable-ass typing experience, or you’d just have to wait until you were totally finished with a document. There’s also the general march of software, since we love to have more features all the time: Reinders says his computer might be 100X faster than it was 15 years ago, but applications don’t run 100x faster—they’ve got new features that are constantly added on to make them more powerful or nicer to use. Stuff like pretty graphics, animation and font scaling. In the future, exploiting multiple cores through parallelism that might be stuff like eyeball tracking, or actually good speech recognition.
Reinders actually thinks that the opportunities for parallelism are limitless. “Not having an idea to use parallelism in some cases I sometimes refer to as a ‘lack of imagination,’” because someone simply hasn’t thought of it, the same way people back in the day thought computers for home use would be glorified electronic cookbooks—they lacked the imagination to predict things like the web. But as programmers move into parallelism, Reinders has “great expectations they’re going to imagine things the rest of us,” so we could see some amazing things come out of parallelism. But whether that’s next week or five years now, well, we’ll see.
Still something you wanna know? Send questions about parallel processing, parallel lines or parallel universes to tips@gizmodo.com, with “Giz Explains” in the subject line.
Grand Central Terminal main concourse image from Wikimedia Commons
Sony Alpha 850 full-frame DSLR given the hands-on treatment
August 27th, 2009
Filed under: Digital Cameras
Sony Alpha 850 full-frame DSLR given the hands-on treatment originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 Aug 2009 14:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Why the Wii needs a price cut right now
August 27th, 2009
It's your turn.
With both Sony and Microsoft dropping the price of the PS3 and the Xbox 360 Elite, the Wii is beginning to look like an overpriced console. There a few reasons why Nintendo needs to drop at least $50 off the company’s best-selling home console
Home Theater PC Gets Crammed Into an Absolutely Ancient Cellphone [Mods]
August 27th, 2009
There are mods that don’t require a lot of time or skill, and then there are insane mods that only crazy people put together. This media center PC stuffed into an ancient Mobira Talkman cell phone is definitely the latter.
Inside this ancient phone you’ll now find a fully-functioning PC, plus a USB hub, Wi-Fi card, sound card and a 128×128 OLED screen on the handset. Is it the most powerful or cost-effective media center PC around? Uh, no. But it’s certainly one of the most impressive. [Metku via CrunchGear]
TiVo projects larger than expected losses, still taking the patent fight to AT&T and Verizon
August 27th, 2009
We’ll let the analysts make sense of TiVo’s new projection that it will lose $8 to $10 million in the third quarter, larger than Wall Street expectations while projected revenues are lower — we’re too busy adding Verizon and AT&T to the patent battlemap. Today it filed complaints against both for violating three of its DVR-related patents — Nos. 6,233,389 B1 (“Multimedia Time Warping System”), 7,529,465 B2 (“System for Time Shifting Multimedia Content Streams”), and 7,493,015 B1 (“Automatic Playback Overshoot Correction System”) if you must know — seeking damages for past infringement and a permanent injunction. We’d assumed it would wait until settling things with DISH to push forward against other companies, but it looks like we’re not the only ones getting impatient. Beyond the legal slapfight there’s a few nuggets for the bleep bloop faithful, with the Comcast TiVo on-line scheduler beginning to roll out in Boston plus further expansions on the way and the due-in-2010 DirecTV HD TiVo still on track — we’ll need a few seasons of Law & Order queued up before this mess ever gets resolved.
Read – TiVo Swings to Loss, Files Infringement Suits
Read – TiVo Reports Results for the Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2010 Ended July 31, 2009
Read – TiVo Files Complaints for Patent Infringement Against AT&T and Verizon Communications in United States District Court, Eastern District of Texas; Seeking Damages and Injunction
Filed under: Home Entertainment
TiVo projects larger than expected losses, still taking the patent fight to AT&T and Verizon originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Aug 2009 20:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Review: Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
August 27th, 2009
(Credit: Screenshot by Jason Parker/CNET)Finally, the wait for the next iteration of Apple’s flagship operating system is over. Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard will officially become available for wide release August 28. Apple has refined just about everything in the latest OS, from new and …
Originally posted at The Download Blog