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US and Russian communications satellites have collided in space in the first such reported mishap.

A satellite owned by the US company Iridium hit a defunct Russian satellite at high speed nearly 780km (485 miles) over Siberia on Tuesday, Nasa said.

The risk to the International Space Station and a shuttle launch planned for later this month is said to be low.

The impact produced a massive cloud of debris, and the magnitude of the crash is not expected to be clear for weeks.

The reportedly non-operational Russian satellite, weighing 950kg (2,094lb), had been launched in 1993, while the Iridium satellite weighed 560 kg and was launched in 1997.

When two such objects collide with such force, the ensuing debris can destroy other satellites, says the BBC’s Andy Gallacher in Florida.

But Nasa said the risk to the ISS and its three astronauts was low as the station orbits the earth some 435km below the course of the collision.

It is hoped that most of the wreckage from the collision will burn up in the earth’s atmosphere, our correspondent says.

Hundreds of pieces of wreckage are now being tracked, reports say, adding to the tens of thousands of objects that are routinely tracked through space.

Some 6,000 satellites have been sent into orbit since 1957.

Tens of thousands of objects are routinely tracked through space

January 14, 2009 - Xbox 360 gamers can forget about waiting until March 13 to sink their teeth into Resident Evil 5. Instead owners of Microsoft’s system will get a two-level demo exclusively for one week on January 26. The two levels are Assembly Place and Shanty Town and they can be played cooperatively on one system, with AI support, or over Xbox Live with a friend.

Players will encounter the Majini Executioner and the Chainsaw Majini as well as hordes of other infected citizens. The demo also includes the option of using the new “action controls” that are said to be inspired by games like Halo 3. The original Resident Evil control scheme is available as well.

Fans can also look forward to the trailer that was previously only shown at the Tokyo Game Show last year. The video will hit Xbox Live on January 16 with the demo following ten days later on January 26. 

Premium Xbox 360 expected to drop $50 at E3 while Wii stays at $250.

Quite a fuss has been made over the price comparison chart Sony released last week which pitted the PS3 against the Xbox 360 and Wii in a comparison of value. The biggest problem with Sony’s argument is the high price — $400 is a lot of money. A price drop would undeniably be a major boon to Sony’s cause, and Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter thinks a drop may be coming soon.

In a note to investors, Pachter has predicted that the 80GB PlayStation 3 will see its price dropped from $399 down to $299 by April. Pachter added, “Once the PS3 is at a more affordable price point, we think that sales of that device will once again begin to grow.”

But if everything develops as Pachter believes it will, we’ll be seeing Microsoft further drop the price of the 360 at E3 — although it’ll be the premium SKU that sees the drop, not the Arcade — from $300 to $250.

Sony denied the rumor that they would be dropping the PS3’s price in March — a rumor which stemmed along with many others from a purported Sony staff briefing back in November. While plans may or may not have changed since then, we do now know that Sony is expected to post an annual operation loss of roughly $1.1 billion. The loss might imply that Sony isn’t willing to begin bringing in even less money on each PS3 sold, but they also might be looking to jumpstart sales — and there aren’t many better ways of achieving that than a price drop. Read More at-

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/88627-Analyst-Predicts-PS3-Price-Drop-in-April

http://ds.ign.com/articles/944/944483p1.html

Microsoft Corp. said a glitch that apparently disabled thousands of its Zune personal music players was caused by a bug in the device’s internal clock driver.

On Wednesday, Zune owners flooded blogs and Internet chat sites to complain they couldn’t listen to music on the 30-gigabyte version of the Zune, an early version of the device, because it wouldn’t start up properly. The postings noted that the players got stuck with the Zune logo screen and were unresponsive.

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A 30-gigabyte Zune music player shown in brown, black and white

Microsoft initially acknowledged there was a problem with some Zunes and told customers it was working to address it. Later, the company said engineers had identified that the cause of the problem was an issue relating to the way the device handles a leap year.

The issue relates to a part of the Zune hardware, and only affects the 30Gb Zunes, a Microsoft spokeswoman said.

The issue should resolve itself as the device moves to Jan. 1, and should automatically reset by noon GMT Thursday. Microsoft advised customers to let the battery run down on the devices before recharging and restarting.

A Microsoft spokeswoman said even those Zunes no longer covered by warranty should be able to be reset.

Zune Pass subscribers should synch the device to their PCs, the company added.

The 30-gigabyte model, released in November 2006, was the first Zune player from Microsoft, which wanted to challenge Apple Inc.’s (AAPL) iPod players. Microsoft said it had sold more than 1.2 million of the units when it released updated models the following holiday season.

Read the rest at-

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123074469238845927.html?mod=special_page_campaign2008_mostpop

A Michigan-based networking company on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against Google, Microsoft, and Apple, alleging that all three tech giants violated a patent it owns on the use of document-preview icons–or thumbnails–in operating systems.

In the suit (PDF), Cygnus Systems targets Google’s Chrome, Microsoft’s Vista and Internet Explorer 8, and Apple’s iPhone, Safari, and Mac OS X as patent infringers. Apple uses the patent-protected technology in its Finder and Cover Flow Mac OS X features, the lawsuit claims.

Cygnus describes the technology covered by the patent as “methods and systems for accessing one or more computer files via a graphical icon, wherein the graphical icon includes an image of a selected portion or portions of one or more computer files.”

E-mails seeking comment from Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Cygnus’ attorney were not immediately returned.

The case was filed in U.S. District Court in Arizona, where company owner Gregory Swartz lives, according to PCWorld.

Cygnus was granted the patent in March 2008, according to the lawsuit, although it first applied for it back in 2001 as a continuation to a 1998 application, according to Ars Technica, which appeared to report the case first.

Cygnus is seeking damages and a permanent injunction to prevent further alleged infringement. It has also indicated that it might go after other companies as defendants.

More Stories at-

http://gizmodo.com/5119074/tiny-company-sues-apple-microsoft-and-google-has-balls-the-size-of-texas

http://government.zdnet.com/?p=4242

Dentsu, Japan’s largest ad agency, said it will team up with Nintendo to launch a video distribution service on the Wii.

The two companies plan to offer programs created specifically for the service, a Dentsu representative said Thursday. By contrast, most online channels tend to carry existing TV shows and movies. According to the Nikkei business daily, the programs will focus on cartoons and other entertainment.

Viewers will need to pay to see some of the programs, while others will be offered free of charge and accompanied by ads, the representative said.

Nintendo had sold 34.6 million Wii consoles as of the end of September, far outselling Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3.

Dentsu and Nintendo will launch the new service in Japan next year, while the timing for overseas sales has yet to be set, the Dentsu representative said. ( 2008 Reuters Limited)

Read More at-

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=21627

 http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE4BN4JR20081224

Intel and Nvidia are entering into a new, nasty phase of competition. What’s at stake? Only the future of the personal computer.

Though the Santa Clara, Calif., neighbors (only a couple of miles from each other) have never really been on speaking terms, the rivalry is intensifying with the emergence of the Netbook–small, lightweight laptops priced below $500.

The competitive backdrop is still the same–Intel’s longstanding (and very successful) vision of a CPU-centric universe versus Nvidia’s creed that graphics processing matters more and more in a multimedia-intensive world.

The challenge for Nvidia is that as laptops downsize into Netbooks, a graphics vacuum has been created. And Nvidia abhors a graphics vacuum.

Nvidia’s vision of the Netbook core

(Credit: Nvidia)

Inside almost every Acer, Asus, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell Netbook beats an Intel silicon core. Both CPU and GPU–the latter in the form of the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950. Read the rest at-http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10127699-92.html

http://www.vindy.com/news/2008/dec/21/pc-makers-aim-for-more-sales-with-netbooks/

http://www.newmobilecomputing.com/story/20671/NetBooks_To_Get_Serious_Performance_Boost_Next_Year

In the early 1960s, Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram shocked America when he demonstrated that ordinary people will commit acts of violence that conflict with their personal conscience and moral convictions if instructed to do so by an authority figure.

A researcher prepares for a Milgram-type experiment in which some subjects believe they are shocking other study participants with electricity — and they see how far these people will go to hurt their fellow man if prompted by an authority figure.

(Courtesy Dr. Jerry Burger)

Now, a replication of that famous experiment is uncovering some of the same findings and controversy.

In the original experiment, Milgram asked ordinary people to administer painful — and in some cases, even fatal — shocks to other people posing as research subjects. The maximum voltage they could administer was 450 volts — enough to cause permanent damage or even death to the study subject.

In reality, the “research subjects” were not receiving any shock. But the act of inflicting harm on another individual was still very much real to the people administering the voltage. Read the rest at-http://abcnews.go.com/Health/MindMoodNews/story?id=6496911&page=1

More at-

http://uk.reuters.com/article/burningIssues/idUKTRE4BI0VQ20081219

http://chattahbox.com/science/2008/12/19/experiment-shows-humans-still-unable-to-say-no-to-authority/

Will “Halo 3” players want to make cute little avatars on their Xbox 360s?

Well, guess what? They’ll have to. It’s the first thing you’re prompted to do in the New Xbox Experience, the shiny makeover to the Xbox interface that rolled out on Wednesday.

The NXE, as it’s called, is an update to the front-end of the Xbox Live online system, which is, without question, the industry standard.

Since its inception three years ago, the Xbox Live Marketplace — the storefront for the system — has grown far beyond Microsoft’s expectations. And the Xbox Live interface, called the “blade” system, became ill-equipped to handle the deluge of downloadable games, demos, trailers and movies that came to populate it.

Marc Whitten, general manager for Xbox Live, says they anticipated maybe 200 items in their online store when it launched. “But where we ended up, we have over 20,000, and we’ve had over 500 million downloads inside of our marketplace since we launched the 360,” he says. And from watching that growth, he says it became clear how to change it……………-you can find the rest at-

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27811886/

Toshiba unveils a 43nm MLC SSD with 512GB of storage

Las Vegas (CA) – Toshiba said it will showcase a 512 GB solid-state disk (SSD) drive at next month’s Consumer Electronics show (CES). The 2.5” drive is likely to be the highest-capacity SSD when shown at the tradeshow, but the device will not go into production until the second half of next year.

Among the issues that some users have with SSDs are price and storage capacity. It’s easy to recognize that SSD perform better than a traditional HDD, but it’s very difficult to argue that the increased performance justifies the often many fold increase in price an SSD commands over similar traditional HDDs.

Toshiba has addressed the easiest to defeat of the two concerns — storage capacity. Toshiba is the first company to introduce a 512GB SSD built on 43nm MLC NAND technology. The 512GB SSD uses a traditional notebook 2.5-inch form factor and is aimed at the consumer notebook space.

Alongside the 512GB SSD Toshiba has also announced other SSDs using the same 43nm MLC technology including SSDs with 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB of storage. All of the drives use advanced MLC controller technology, which allows them to achieve higher read/write speeds, parallel data transfers and wear leveling.(more at- http://www.dailytech.com/Toshiba+Takes+Its+SSDs+to+512GB/article13719c.htm 

Also on-

http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/content-view-40638-135.html

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2337194,00.asp