If you do not know already, there was a format war brewing between electronic companies and movie studios over the next generation media of audio and video. After almost a decade the Toshiba-led HD-DVD consortium blinked, and Sony’s Blu-ray will now be the standard.

The Blu-ray Disc, also known as the BD is an optical disc storage media format that uses high-definition video and data storage. It gets its name from the blue laser that is used to read and write this type of disc, in contrast to the DVD format that uses a red laser. Data storage capacity is much greater on the Blu-ray Disc than on the DVD format, due to its shorter wavelength. A Blu-ray Disc has storage of almost six times the capacity of a dual layer DVD.

Blu-ray Disc was competing with the HD DVD format in the high definition optical disc format war. Recently Toshiba, the company that supports the HD DVD, announced that it will no longer manufacture or market HD DVD players and recorders, giving way to Blu-ray as the winner of this format war.

While Blu-ray discs are still expensive, they can store 50 GB worth of data in a disc that does not look any different from the regular CD or DVD with the same dimensions. This means, users get movie discs with high definition and enhanced picture over DVDs and awesome sound.

The BDU-X10S, which is a read-only player, has a Serial ATA (SATA) interface and a standard 5.25-inch form-factor that makes installation easy and will slot itself into the Windows XP or Vista enabled contemporary desktop PCs. In case the cost of Blu-ray discs seems high, the good news is that it even reads standard CDs and DVDs.

BDU-X10S comes with CyberLink’s PowerDVD BD-Edition software to playback commercial movies, DVD-ROMs, CD-ROMs and Blu-ray disc home videos as well as recordable/rewritable Blu-ray Discs (BD-R/BD-RE.) It also allows playback of Blu-ray discs in H.264 or MPEG-2 format, the standard DVD-Video discs or recorded DVDs in the MPEG-2 or AVCHD formats. It reads almost any disc, except HD-DVD or DVD RAM.

This BD-ROM, being in the $200 price range offers consumers a viable option to discover and enjoy about 500 high-definition Blu-ray Disc titles that have been released as of now.

The BDU-X10S also supports disc-quality scanning and its tray opens and closes perfectly with no problems and the wide tray bezel can be replaced with a skinny one.

The read speed of this BD-ROM is middling among BD drives, which is CD-ROM:24x, DVD-ROM: 8x and BD-ROM: 2x.

Sony also includes SATA data cable, a Molex-to-SATA power adapter, a tray eject tool and a BD-capable version of the Cyberlink PowerDVD, in the box.

The main reason people would want to buy a BD-ROM as of now is to be able to watch Blu-ray movies on a PC, so this requires a fast system with an HDCP-supported (high-bandwidth digital content protection) graphics card and monitor. The recommended resolution is 1920 x 1080 or higher.

For people who are ready for “the Blu’s,” it is time to let the blue-laser revolution flow, by getting the Sony BDU-X10S, which comes with a one-year warranty.

With all the technological advancements that have taken place, all our personal information is exposed to others, whether we like it or not. If there is one thing that we can call our own, it is our mind. We are actually on the verge of losing it too. We are not going harebrained but we are being subjected to mind reading by our own creations – the computers.

Researchers are turning computers into mind readers. They have created a computer that can look at the brain waves or scans and figure out what humans are thinking.

The brain is not exactly unexplored territory. Philosophers have long before pondered on the nature of thought that pulses through our gray matter and even used several serums, polygraphs, lobotomies and hypnotism to find out what the thoughts are.

However, the past few years have seen an extraordinary and unprecedented promise in the field of neurosciences, with scientists scanning the brain to find patterns of emotion and thought, which are the precursors for behavior and learning.

Brain waves are electrical brain activity patterns. This means, that brain cells communicate with each other by using electricity and neurotransmitters, which are chemicals. These brain waves can be altered by thoughts of different planned actions, such as moving a hand without actually moving the hand. (more…)

Apple’s core calling is “creating the next cool thing for the world’s consumers.” Apple practices what it preaches and succeeds at it too.

The month of March changed a lot of things for Apple, in terms of fading resistance for Mac. Mac sales reported an enormous 51% increase compared to the previous year. This is said to be three times the rate for the personal-computer industry. These figures are excluding that of the iPod and iPhone. Adding them would bring Apple’s sales from $5.2 billion in the year 2002 to $24 billion last year. Even the share prices have seen a rise.

The reason for this is the millions of consumers that are looking at the Mac in a new light. Once only favored by artists and students, today the Mac is fast becoming the first choice of many.

The Mac revolution is also slowly making its way into the corporate world, with employees increasingly insisting that employers provide them Macs to work on. Google is always said to have given its employees the power to choose any system they want. Now even IBM and Cisco are running tests to see if they should allow Macs into their offices. The Mac always had fans who would sing its praises, but now even the mainstream users are learning the song.

There are several reasons why Macs make sense in the corporate world. With Apple’s share jumping to more than 10% in the consumer PC market, and with consumer applications from chat to Facebook entering the office environment, more businesses consider notebook PCs for their personal use as well as for work, and many choose Apple’s MacBooks.

Software evaluation analysts say that Apple’s operating system, the OS x, is superior to Microsoft Windows by many metrics, including its design, efficiency, bug-free operation, and the fact that it is less vulnerable to viruses and hackers. (more…)

“How nice it would be if I could taste that food.” “What if I can touch things through the PC.”

I cannot be the only one who would have thought such things when using the computers as a youngster. The need to feel them is always there, although we know it’s all just virtual.

Carnegie Mellon University developed a controller that allows computer users to use their sense of touch along with the senses of sight and sound, in manipulating three-dimensional images and exploring virtual environments.

This device, created to use mostly for training, industrial purposes and for research, comes very close to the sensitivity of the human hand.

This haptic (devices that convey the sense of touch) device uses magnetic fields to replicate the response a hand has to textures and gravitational forces.

According to Ralph Hollis, a professor at Carnegie Mellon, “We believe this device provides the most realistic sense of touch of any haptic interface in the world today.”

This controller is said to have only one moving part and rests in a bowl like structure connected to the computer. Two controllers can be used simultaneously to pick up more objects (virtual) from the monitor.

Recently, a demonstration was held for the visitors of Hollis’ lab and they were invited to move an image of a pin across a plate of various textures, which caused the controller to bump along ripples, vibrate across fine striations and glide across smooth areas. On one computer, users were amazed that they could actually “feel” the contours of a virtual rabbit.

Hollis said that his researches created 10 such devices, out of which six were sent to other universities across the country and Canada. He said that a new company, Butterfly Haptics would begin marketing the device in June or July of this year.

The cost of this controller is said to be less than $50000, and may perhaps come with a bonus of a virtual surgeon, which allows people to operate on a virtual human organ and feel the tissue texture or even allow a designer to enjoy the feeling of fitting a part into a jet engine that is of course virtual.

Researchers say that this device can provide the most amazing and unbelievable experience, to the extent of users feeling the wind below the wings of military planes.

Hollis and his team did build a prototype of this device in 1997, but later they refined it and made it into a much more advanced system, as well as lowered the cost recently, with the grant from the National Science Foundation.

This technology of haptic devices is already being used in a different form, with cell phones that vibrate as well as in video games that already make users feel the physical sensations.

However, there is a huge difference in the technology created by Carnegie Mellon, as their system relies on a part that floats in a magnetic field rather than on mechanical links and cables.

We may not (yet) be able to taste food, but we can enjoy the feeling of being able touching it.