Microsoft's Xbox 360 HD DVD Player Now Priced at $129.99

Microsoft's Xbox 360 add-on gets another price cut

There has been quite a bit of turmoil in the HD DVD market over the past month. With movie studios shifting their alliances from HD DVD to Blu-ray, Toshiba took the drastic step of slashing the MSRPs on its HD DVD players.

Microsoft is following suit and today cut the price of its Toshiba-manufactured Xbox 360 HD DVD player to $129.99. According to Microsoft's Major Nelson, the price cut is effective immediately in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The player originally retailed for $199 when it launched in late 2006 and received a price reduction to $179 in July of 2007.

While $129.99 is the new official price, some retailers are offering the Xbox 360 HD DVD player for even lower prices. Best Buy is offering the player for a low $119.99 on its online site.

For night owls that were browsing the Internet early this morning, Amazon had the peripheral on sale for $79.99 with free shipping for a short period of time according to Engadget.

Microsoft's Xbox 360 HD DVD player ships with an Xbox 360 universal remote and a copy of King Kong on HD DVD. Users can also hook the player up to a Windows-based machine with the proper drivers.

In addition to the new $129.99 price tag, customers are still eligible to receive five free movies via mail-in rebate [PDF] courtesy of Toshiba. The selection of movies won't set any hearts racing, but free is free.

DailyTech - Microsoft's Xbox 360 HD DVD Player Now Priced at $129.99

NASA: Space Shuttle on Track for Thursday Launch

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA's space shuttle Atlantis is ready for a Thursday space shot attempt, mission managers said today.

Atlantis is slated to launch the seven-astronaut crew of the STS-122 mission into space from Kennedy Space Center (KSC) on Thursday. Doug Lyons, launch director for the mission, said he's hopeful for an attempt at 2:45 p.m. EST (1945 GMT) — fickle Florida coast weather permitting, of course.

"We're all thinking that Thursday's the day, regardless of what the weather guy might tell you," Lyons said. "We're ready to make [the launch] happen."

LeRoy Cain, chair of NASA's mission management team here at KSC, said he's confident problems are now resolved with two fuel gauge-like sensors in the bottom of the shuttle's 15-story external fuel tank as well as a kinked radiator hose in the payload bay of Atlantis. Engineers tracked the sensor glitch to a bad electrical connector and replaced it.

"We're not working any issues," Cain said. "We're hoping it will stay that way, of course, and we have some confidence that it will."

Cases closed

Lyons said technicians will constantly test the fuel gauge sensors, known as engine cutoff (ECO) sensors, during fueling of the external fuel tank early Thursday morning.

"We'll be keeping a close eye on our ECO sensors," Lyons said, noting that launch should commence even if one of the four devices fails during testing.

The sensors are designed to stop the three main engines of Atlantis before its 500,000 gallons (1.9 million liters) of fuel runs dry. Because the cryogenic fuel runs through the orbiter's engine cones and cools them as it is expelled and burned, running out of fuel could cause catastrophic damage to the spacecraft, mission managers have said.

Cain said Atlantis' kinked hose is now tucked back into it's intended place, but engineers are still determining whether or not it could leak after the payload bay doors are opened and again closed — a maneuver that could again cause it to bend outwards in a stressed position.

"We're a long ways from having a leak develop in this particular hose we have on Atlantis," Cain said. But in the unlikely event of a leak, he explained, the orbiter's computers would shut down the redundant radiator system before Freon could leak out.

Anxious for orbit

Navy captain Stephen Frick will head the 11-day mission, the prime objective of which is to deliver the European Space Agency's (ESA) bus-sized Columbus laboratory to the International Space Station (ISS).

Alan Thirkettle, space station program manager for the ESA, said he's pleased with the work done by NASA to get Atlantis into orbit.

"From an ESA point of view that we're very confident and very comfortable with the design fixes ... since December," Thirkettle said. "It seems very, very solid."

As mission managers wait to see if the weather will shape up for a safe launch on Thursday, Lyons said the astronauts are waiting in good spirits.

"They're very anxious to get to launch day, get in orbit, and start their mission," Lyons said.

NASA will broadcast Atlantis' STS-122 mission live on NASA TV. Click here for SPACE.com's STS-122 mission coverage and NASA TV feed.

SPACE.com -- NASA: Space Shuttle on Track for Thursday Launch

Bad to Worse: Fifth Undersea Cable Cut in Middle East

Undersea cable owners still won't speculate on cause of cable cuts

Reports are coming in this morning that a fifth undersea fiber optic cable was severed in the Middle East. However, by several accounts, the fifth cable cut is actually a second cut on a different segment of the FALCON cable. How exactly these cables are being cut is still unknown, though Egyptian officials maintain a ship didn’t cause the breakages near the port of Alexandria.

The saga of cut cables and lost bandwidth began on January 23 when the Flag Telecoms FALCON undersea fiber optic cable near the Egyptian port of Alexandria was severed. On January 30 another cable called the SeaMeWe-4 (South East Asia-Middle East- Western Europe-4) cable was cut according to the Khaleej Times Online. Egyptian officials said that a review of ship traffic in the area at the time of the breakage precludes the damage being caused by a ships anchor.

Khaleej Times Online reports that on February 1 another cut appeared in the FALCON cable, which resulted in severe disruption of data service in the Gulf region. The rundown of cut cables in the region includes the FLAG Europe-Asia cable near Alexandria, FALCON near Bandar Abbas in Iran, SeaMeWe-4 near Alexandria, SeaMeWe-4 near Penang, Malaysia, and FLAG near the Dubai coast.

Mahesh Jaishanker executive director of Business Development and Marketing for TeleGeography is quoted by the Khaleej Times Online as saying, “The submarine cable cuts in FLAG Europe-Asia cable 8.3km away from Alexandria, Egypt and SeaMeWe-4 affected at least 60 million users in India, 12 million in Pakistan, six million in Egypt and 4.7 million in Saudi Arabia.”
DailyTech reported that the first pair of cables were severed on January 31, followed by a third cut undersea cable on February 4, and a fourth cut cable on February 5.

DailyTech - Bad to Worse: Fifth Undersea Cable Cut in Middle East

Space Magnetism May Hold Secret to Fusion Power

New discoveries about magnetic field lines and the first-ever direct observation of their reconnection in space are offering hope that scientists will learn how to unlock fusion power as an energy source in the future.

"The reconnection processes in the [Earth's] magnetosphere and in fusion devices are the same animal," said James Drake, a University of Maryland physicist.

Space contains magnetic fields that direct the flow of plasma, an energetic fourth state of matter consisting of positive ions and electrons. The plasma particles normally follow the paths of the magnetic field lines like streams of cars following highways.

Magnetic reconnection can release that stored energy when two magnetic field lines bend towards each other and fuse to create new field lines. The effect is not unlike an earthquake forcibly realigning parallel highways into perpendicular routes and channeling cars along the newly created paths. Although some released plasma energy travels in a straight line — called a super-Alfvenic electron jet — other plasma particles fan out as though escaping the opening of a trumpet.

The effect not only fascinates astrophysicists but also frustrates efforts on Earth to create sustained energy sources through fusion. Experimental fusion reactors force atomic particles to fuse together and release energy as plasma. The plasma is contained within a "magnetic bottle," or a cage of magnetic field lines, so that the high plasma temperatures can maintain the fusion reaction.

However, magnetic reconnection can break the magnetic bottle and allow plasma to reach the colder walls of the reactor where fusion will not sustain itself.

Drake became interested in the topic when he looked at early fusion studies and realized how many theories at the time were "dead wrong" about magnetic reconnection. To learn more about the phenomenon, he had to look beyond Earth.

"I started realizing some of the best magnetic reconnection data is in space," Drake said.

During a sabbatical at the University of California-Berkeley, the theoretical physicist happened to work in the same office as Tai Phan, an observational physicist who was looking at magnetic field data from the European Space Agency's Cluster satellites.

"I was doing theory, Tai was doing data and we suddenly saw this correspondence," Drake marveled. "It was purely accidental."

The four Cluster satellites crossed through a turbulent plasma region just outside Earth's magnetic field in January 2003, when they happened to run into an area where magnetic reconnection had occurred. Physicists thought such areas, known as electron diffusion regions, were just over six miles long and so spacecraft would probably miss them in the vastness of space.

Instead, a new look at the Cluster data showed that the electron diffusion region measured 1,864 miles long — 300 times longer than early theoretical expectations and still four times longer than seen in the latest astrophysics simulations. That also marked the first ever direct observations of magnetic reconnection in space.

Although the basic physics behind magnetic reconnection remain a mystery, Cluster promises that future missions have a good chance of further examining the phenomenon. One example is NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, which will consist of four spacecraft that study why the plasma particles can become "unfrozen" or unstuck from the magnetic field lines they normally travel along. Magnetic reconnection is simply the most "dramatic" example of this, Drake said.

Such an energy release amounts to a conversion of magnetic energy into particle energy, which can occur in black hole jets and drives solar flares. Drake hopes to someday create a computer model that can accurately describe the conversion process — and if scientists can also apply some understanding towards improving fusion reactors, so much the better.

SPACE.com -- Space Magnetism May Hold Secret to Fusion Power

The O'Brien vs. Stewart vs. Colbert three-show throwdown - VIDEOS

 
As most late night TV lovers know, Conan O'Brien, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have developed a feud over who is responsible for Mike Huckabee's popularity in the presidential race. It's been a long, involved story, with each guy claiming that they "made" Huckabee and bashing each other back on forth. Well, Monday night was truly spectacular, because the world got to see the feud reach its climax, in the form of a conflict that crossed over The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and Late Night. With the three hosts appearing on each others' shows all on one night, it was special appearances galore. It became a clash of the Titans, a battle of epic proportions, a heaping helping of Monday fanservice --
Goodness, for a minute there, I lost myself. Should I be worried by how overjoyed I was (and kind of still am)?

As a huge fan of all three programs, I was, needless to say, filled with joy for the entire evening. First up was The Daily Show, which I recapped in detail. In the middle of a seemingly normal show, Colbert and O'Brien popped up and prepped for some hardcore fighting.

Stewart made them wait outside as he wrapped up his own show, but by the time he met up with O'Brien, Colbert had scampered off to do The Colbert Report. Much to the delight of the rabid Report audience, Stewart and O'Brien showed up and tried to drag Colbert out to start the fight. I got a bit worried -- yes, that's the word I'm going to use -- when the boys started taking off their jackets and belts, but what proceeded was just some light desk abuse. Colbert shoo'd Stewart and O'Brien away so that he could finish up his own program.

Of course, as soon as Colbert finished up and found Stewart outside, O'Brien had run back to 30 Rock to do Late Night. The home audience then had to wait half an hour before Late Night started to see the final round of the event. It was definitely, definitely worth the wait. After O'Brien's monologue, Stewart and Colbert strutted West Side Story-style into the studio and pulled O'Brien backstage. It was one fight scene cliche after the other, from slow-mo punching to falling into cardboard boxes to rolling down a flight of stairs. Some dancing somehow made its way in there, but I'm not complaining.

In the end, a pre-taped Huckabee had to settle things and make it clear that none of these "idiots" made him. I'm looking forward to Colbert's inevitable sobbing breakdown after this betrayal from his runningmate... Or should I say, former runningmate.

I'm surprised that they managed to pull this off, since all their tapings occur around the same time in the evening. Apparently ticket holders started getting e-mails to come a little earlier or a little later and rumors began circulating that at least one crossover was going to happen. I doubt anyone expected anything as awesome as this. I would also like to note that even those that haven't found this fake feud particularly amusing must find a bit of sweetness in it. After all, these are hosts that have constantly expressed how lost they feel without their writers. There's something wonderful in seeing three comedians doing each other a favor by creating some silly material and taking it this far, just to help fill time. This one dumb fight alone has taken up so many episodes. Bless their little late night hearts for helping each other out.

Group hug!

The O'Brien vs. Stewart vs. Colbert three-show throwdown - VIDEOS - TV Squad

ICANN flips switch on IPv6 DNS root servers

 IPv6 took another significant step forward yesterday, as the root DNS zone was updated with IPv6 addresses for six of the 13 root servers. Most root servers are "anycasted:" physical machines are placed in different locations, but share an address. Requests are automatically routed to the closest server. 

As we noted a month ago, this change means that it's now possible for an IPv6-only system to connect to another IPv6-only system without the need to do DNS lookups over IPv4. In order to see how well that works, I turned off IPv4 on my Mac, started up a local nameserver, and started typing URLs. Of the 16 web sites that I tried, nine were reachable, seven were not. For instance, the Internet Systems Consortium that publishes BIND, the most popular DNS server software, was reachable, as were the RIPE NCC, LACNIC, AfriNIC, and APNIC, four of the five Regional Internet Registries that give out IP addresses around the globe. The missing RIR is ARIN, the American Registry for Internet Numbers, which fulfills this function in North America. Although the ARIN site is reachable over IPv6, ARIN only has IPv4 nameservers so an IPv6-only nameserver can't reach any of those nameservers to resolve the www.arin.net name.

Before the addition of the IPv6 addresses to the root zone, there was worry about the increase in the size of the DNS reply that lists all the root nameservers and their addresses. However, the names of all the root servers easily fit in a 512-byte packet. The addresses are extra information, and as such, may be omitted if the packet is in danger of becoming too large. So when a DNS server that doesn't indicate that it supports larger packets does its initial request for the list of root nameservers after it starts, it will always see the full list of 13 root server names in the reply. Some of the root servers then include all the IPv4 addresses and as many IPv6 addresses as will fit in the response (usually, two of them), others return a more balanced mix of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, usually ten of the former and four of the latter. However, the reply is not marked as "truncated" so there is no need to repeat the query over TCP with all the firewalling dangers that that entails.

Interestingly, the K root server is already getting more than 100 queries per second over IPv6, while the maximum IPv4 query rate is around 9,000 per second. A bit more than 1 percent of the queries over IPv6 doesn't seem like much, but it does suggest that IPv6 uptake, at least in some circles, can no longer be accounted for by margin of error. It does, however, seem as though these figures aren't consistent from one root server to the next.

What does this step mean in the grand scheme of things? In practical terms, nothing, really: you pretty much have to go out of your way to run an IPv6-only nameserver, which will then be slower and more failure-prone than its easier-to-configure dual stack IPv4+IPv6 counterpart. Even then, you'll have to find a domain seller who can handle the necessary DNS records in the first place. But the move does mark a fundamental change: before yesterday, IPv6 was incapable of doing some things that IPv4 could do since the invention of the DNS in the late 1980s. Now, the two protocols are on an equal footing—in theory, at least.

In practice, it is of course possible to completely ignore IPv6 in favor of IPv4. The next big step for IPv6 is to become so ubiquitous that users will expect to be able to reach services over IPv6 as well as IPv4. For a long time, IPv6 proponents assumed—or at least hoped—this would happen before we ran out of IPv4 addresses, but appears increasingly unlikely. So it looks like in a few years we'll have a situation where most of the Internet is still IPv4-only, but newcomers won't be able to get IPv4 addresses to join the party.

"This is an important step in the direction of adopting IPv6 and with that, the preservation of an open Internet," said Erik Huizer, chair of the Dutch IPv6 Task Force. "But it's a first step, there is still a lot to be done."

So read everything you need to know about IPv6 and go forth and enable it on your systems. And don't forget to download the latest named.root file if you run a DNS server.

ICANN flips switch on IPv6 DNS root servers

Nvidia to Acquire AGEIA, Plans PhysX Integration

Hardware manufacturer Nvidia today announced its plans to acquire physics technology developer AGEIA, with the company stating it will integrate AGEIA's PhysX technology into its future line of GeForce graphics cards.

"By combining the teams that created the world's most pervasive GPU and physics engine brands, we can now bring GeForce-accelerated PhysX to hundreds of millions of gamers around the world," said Huang.

Founded in 2002, AGEIA made a name for itself by inventing the Physics Processing Unit (PPU) chip, the world's first dedicated hardware physics processor for personal computers. The company also develops physics software, boasting a list of over 140 games across multiple platforms that utilize PhysX technology.

"Nvidia is the perfect fit for us," added AGEIA CEO Manju Hegde. "They have the world's best parallel computing technology and are the thought leaders in GPUs and gaming. We are united by a common culture based on a passion for innovating and driving the consumer experience."

Processor manufacturer AMD was rumored to be eyeing AGEIA for purchase in November, but had since denied the claims. Competitor Intel picked up physics software developer Havok last September.

The deal is all but final, with only customary closing conditions in the way. More details of the acquisition will be available following Nvidia's quarterly conference call on Feb 13.

Nvidia to Acquire AGEIA, Plans PhysX Integration - Shacknews -