After years of selling online music digitally wrapped with copy and playback restrictions designed to hinder piracy, major music labels are beginning to make some songs available in the unrestricted MP3 file format.
The releases are part of an experiment to gauge demand for tracks that can be played on any digital music player capable of playing MP3s, one of the oldest music compression formats.
Normally, copy-protected tracks are only playable on certain devices. By selling MP3s, recording companies can ensure they can be played on Apple Computer Inc.’s market-leading iPod players without going through Apple’s iTunes Music Store.
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South Korean researchers have designed and built an inexpensive optical lens that collects light from a large area and produces a virtually distortion-free wide-angle image. Standing in contrast to commonly known “fisheye” lenses, which produce significant amounts of visual distortion, low-distortion wide-angle lenses can potentially improve image-based applications such as security-camera systems and robot navigation. The new wide-angle lens is lighter, smaller and more affordable than commercially available “rectilinear” lenses, which also produce low-distortion views. The researchers present their new feat of optical technology in the Dec. 1 issue of Applied Optics, a publication of the Optical Society of America.
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Because many e-mails and documents are printed out for brief viewing and then soon discarded or recycled, Xerox invented printing technology that creates images that last only a day.
The technology, dubbed Erasable Paper, could lead to a significant reduction in the amount of paper used in an office, because once the image fades away, the paper can be used over and over.
“Despite our reliance on computers to share and process information, there is still a strong dependence on the printed page for reading and absorbing content,” said Paul Smith, a Xerox manager, in a written statement. “Of course, we’d all like to use less paper, but we know from talking with customers that many people still prefer to work with information on paper. Self-erasing documents for short-term use offers the best of both worlds.”
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Intel Corp. said on Monday it is making prototypes of computer processors using new manufacturing techniques that further shrink circuitry, making the chips run faster and use less power.
The development is a further sign that the world’s biggest microchip maker is recovering from a series of missteps that caused it to lose market share to rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
The chips take Intel’s latest basic chip design — called the Core microarchitecture — and shrink it down to circuits measuring just 45 nanometers wide, nearly a third narrower than current models.
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Scientists turned on a massive telescope built on one of Mexico’s tallest mountains on Wednesday, hoping to get a glimpse of the beginning of the universe.
With a base like a launching pad and an antenna the size of a big Ferris wheel, the Large Millimeter Telescope or LMT, will be used to pick up electromagnetic radiation known as millimeter waves emitted 13 billion years ago, when the first stars burst into existence, astrophysicists say.
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