Internet radio protests with day of silence

Webcasters turned off the music today in a protest against the royalty rate increase by the Copyright Royalty Rate Board.

More than 14,000 webcasters took part in the protest according to the SaveNetRadio Coalition’s spokesman. Many shut off access to the music streams while many others replaced the music with long strectches of noting but silence in a protect that was called “Day of Silence.”

Coalition spokesman Jake Ward stated that “Webcasters of every size and from every corner of the country will stand united…to protest a very real and fast approaching threat to their livelihood…time is running out.”

Webcasters are asking listeners to contact their congressional representatives and tell them to support the Internet Radio Equality Act. The Day of Silence is just a preview of what internet radio may be after July 15th if the new royalty rates go into effect.

Supercomputer steps up the pace

The world’s fastest commercial supercomputer has been launched by computer giant IBM.

Blue Gene/P is three times more potent than the current fastest machine, BlueGene/L, also built by IBM.

The latest number cruncher is capable of operating at so called “petaflop” speeds - the equivalent of 1,000 trillion calculations per second.

Approximately 100,000 times more powerful than a PC, the first machine has been bought by the US government.

It will be installed at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois later this year.

Two further machines are planned for US laboratories and a fourth has been bought by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council for its Daresbury Laboratory Cheshire.

The ultra powerful machines will be used for complex simulations to study everything from particle physics to nanotechnology.

Expansion pack
Currently the most powerful machine is Blue Gene/L, housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

Used to ensure that the US nuclear weapons stockpile remains safe and reliable, it has achieved 280.6 teraflops or trillions of calculations per second.

The machine packs 131,072 processors and is theoretically capable of reaching 367 teraflops.

By comparison the standard one petaflop Blue Gene/P comes with 294,912-processors connected by a high-speed, optical network.

However, it can be expanded to pack 884,736 processors, a configuration that would allow the machine to compute 3,000 trillion calculations per second (three petaflops).

“Blue Gene/P marks the evolution of the most powerful supercomputing platform the world has ever known,” said Dave Turek, vice president of deep computing, IBM.

Cell division
The new Blue Gene computers form just a part of IBM’s supercomputing portfolio.

The world’s biggest computer-services company has built almost half of the 500 fastest supercomputers.

It is also currently building a bespoke supercomputer for the DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico.

Codenamed Roadrunner, it will be able to crunch through 1.6 thousand trillion calculations per second.

The computer will contain 16,000 standard processors working alongside 16,000 “cell” processors, designed for the PlayStation 3 (PS3).

Each cell chip consists of eight processors controlled by a master unit that can assign tasks to each member of the processing team. Each cell is capable of 256 billion calculations per second.

The power of the cell chip means Roadrunner needs far fewer processors than its predecessors.

Another contender for top supercomputer has been unveiled by Sun. Its Constellation machine will be able to run at a maximum speed of 1.7 petaflops.

The first Constellation machine, called Ranger, is being put together for the University of Texas at Austin and will run at a modest 500 teraflops.

Virtual tourism to traditional holiday settings online

Don’t bother to pack your bags. Skip the queues at the airport. Forget security and immigration checks. Even leave your passport behind. Sound like a perfect holiday? Just log on to a virtual vacation, whether it be lazing on a beach, a ski trip or climbing archaeological ruins. Or all three — in the same hour.

Every day, millions of people already travel to virtual fantastical destinations, whether it is the World of Warcraft or Matrix Online, but there are also more traditional holiday settings online.

On Cocoloco Island Resort, within the Internet-based virtual world of Second Life, tourists can take a hot-air balloon above the thatched cabanas or float in the swimming-pool. In Virtual Venice, a gondola carries visitors to a Renaissance church adorned with paintings and ornate carvings. The Visit Mexico tourism board has created Chichén Itzá online, where visitors can fly over the great pyramid El Castillo or visit a traditional Mayan home.

Lost in translation
With all this adventure at your fingertips, it’s easy to get lost, a problem than has spawned a whole new industry of travel agencies, tour guides and digital guidebooks to cater to the confused virtual tourist.

In April, STA Travel launched a presence on Second Life, offering up what it calls a ‘Home for the Virtual Traveler’, with guidance to the must-see places and adventures in this online world.

Matt Nixon, Director of E-commerce for STA Travel North America, says their plan is to offer free tours to alluring places in Second Life. ‘Hopefully, that will inspire people to travel in the real world,’ Nixon says.

Nixon concedes nobody has yet paid real dollars for a real vacation but that’s what STA Travel ultimately wants to achieve on Second Life. He has just hired a manager to work in their virtual retail branch.

‘We sell a pretty complex product, from flights to tour packages, insurance to hotel rooms,’ Nixon says, ‘and you really need to sit down one-on-one with a travel person to have a discussion about your trip. We believe there is potential to have a rich engaging experience with the customer in the virtual environment, where we’re selling real travel packages.’

Getting your bearings
Some entrepreneurs are already making travel pay. A year ago, Danielle Jansen founded AmaZingg Travels, which publishes digital travel brochures about what is going on in Second Life. The brochures sell for 50 Linden dollars (the Second Life currency, convertible to real dollars) and cover an array of subject matter, from where to shop, to places of worship and where play a sport.

‘There is a search engine on Second Life so you could find all these places by yourself,’ Jansen says, ‘but we’ve found people like getting our help. When you first come to Second Life, you don’t understand it’s not a game but a whole virtual environment.’

The concept of supportive navigation has proven so popular, businesses wanting a Second Life presence also started approaching Jansen for help. ‘The avatars of the company come to my travel agency,’ Jansen says, ‘and I organize in-world tours, guiding them around the virtual world, showing them locations that they are interested in.’

AmaZingg has been so successful, Jansen quit her government job a few months ago to work full-time conducting online tours and advising companies about virtual worlds. The market is big enough to support more than AmaZingg, too. The travel agency Synthtravels offers a similar service but across dozens of online worlds, including the massively popular World of Warcraft.

Back in the real world, with increasing worries about airport security and our carbon footprint, virtual tourism might become part of a modern solution to curb the global travel trend. If that’s the case, you’ll only need to offset the electricity used to power your PC.

iPhone could be obsolete in 2008

Phone technology never stops moving, and Apple’s iPhone could look like two cans tied together with a piece of string next year.

Chipmakers Texas Instruments are prepping to release their next-generation processor, which provides the platform that cellphones are built on.

It will allow laptop like power in a cellphone form-factor, which in turn allows phone manufacturers to push the tech boundaries even further.

The next-generation OMAP 3 processors will be released next year, heralding a whole new level of mobile entertainment and power.

High definition video, excellent photographic quality and massive speed are the selling points of the OMAP 3 chips.

The cameras on the phones will be able to shoot 12 megapixels per second - even divided up into four three-megapixel shots in burst mode.

The company claims that the image quality that OMAP 3 can handle will meet the levels of most high-end digital cameras on the market today.

Zooming, rotating and manipulating graphic or video heavy content will be seamless and S-video or composite output from the phones will be possible.

XGA display support means super-high resolution, and full speed USB2.0 will offer laptop-like file transfer capabilities and solid state disk performance.

Operators will even be able to include security services and network access abilities that are currently not possible, like terminal identity protection.

Fully-encrypted content and transaction protection will make OMAP 3 a far more consumer-friendly cellphone platform, providing absolute peace of mind.

According to cnet.com, Texas Instruments has even been experimenting with the possibilities of putting projectors into mobile handsets.

AOL relaunches news and sports sites

Time Warner Inc. plans to launch a test of its overhauled news portal on Tuesday, drawing influences from the uncluttered design of popular Internet blogs.

The online division of the world’s largest media company said it aimed to keep readers returning and to introduce a new generation of media consumers to the site by offering more interactive features such as polls and voting features and user-created news on one page.

AOL news can be found at http://news.aol.com/.

“I truly believe that when you go to most news sites, it’s a Web 1.0 world,” Lewis D’Vorkin, senior vice president of AOL News and Sports, said, referring to the first generation of Internet sites. “They have rearranged the furniture. We have built new furniture.”

AOL’s sports site will also relaunch later this week following a similar design model.

D’Vorkin’s work has included introducing a blog-like format about a year ago to celebrity gossip Web site TMZ.com, now one of the most closely read sites in Hollywood. TMZ is a joint venture of AOL and Warner Bros.

Like some, but not all, of its mainstream media rivals, AOL News faces a decline in visitors in the past month, according to comScore Media Metrix figures for May.

Even as top news site Yahoo News’ traffic rose 8 percent to 33.7 million unique visitors in May, AOL News traffic fell 12 percent to 19.1 million. The New York Times brand site also fell 9 percent to 8.3 million visitors in May.

AOL overhauled its business model last summer, when it decided to give away most of its services away for free to boost online advertising by focusing on its free portal.

The new design divides the page into three vertical columns, with the heart of the programming at the center column. There, AOL’s editors and producers update and select top news stories, videos and photos in one place.

Much like a blog, new stories push older ones lower as they are posted.

The right column is occupied by wire feeds from major news sources from the Associated Press, ABC News, CBS News and others. AOL News bloggers entries will also appear on the right column.

The left side of the page will feature user-submitted news and top stories voted on or commented on by viewers.

D’Vorkin said the ability to personalize the news page will come in the next two to three months, using technology the company acquired from Relegence, a financial news services company.