Game Rentals: Blockbuster Adding Games To Total Access

Blockbuster Video's rent-by-mail program Total Access is set to become even more total later this year, with the addition of video game rentals to its expansive lineup of rental titles.

Blockbuster's Total Access rental program might soon have a distinct advantage over rival rent-at-home company Netflix with the introduction of video game rentals to the service. Having focused solely on movie DVD rentals since its inception, Total Access will soon begin offering select customers the option of having video games delivered directly to their door as well, as part of a pilot program that will lead directly to a nationwide launch of the service in the second half of this year.

"We already rent more video games than any other company, store-based or online, in the nation, so we know our core customer loves games as well as movies," said Bob Barr, Vice President and General Manager of blockbuster.com. "With this pilot program, we're laying the groundwork for offering BLOCKBUSTER Total Access customers easy online access to the movies and games they want, through an integrated subscription offering."

The move could give Blockbuster a leg up on rival Netflix, which currently only offers movies, as well as stirring up competition for game rental service GameFly.

This of course all depends on how well Blockbuster implements the service. I've found that Netflix generally has wider selection and better availability, and as many a Blockbuster game renter can attest to, the company tends to be rather selective when it comes to which games wind up on store shelves.

Still, some video games is better than none at all, and the added ability to trade in your online rentals for half-priced game rentals at your local Blockbuster is certainly a plus. Time will tell if the move can help Blockbuster persevere in the face of an increasingly hostile business environment.

Game Rentals: Blockbuster Adding Games To Total Access

Probabilistic Chips Could Revolutionize CPU Industry

New chips consume less power, and are many times faster than current offerings, while retaining acceptable accuracy

Suppose you want to use your CPU to calculate your savings, which consists of $13,000.81, spanning several accounts.  Now you could precisely add every digit of various accounts and get your precise balance, but at a significant computing cost.  However, as an alternative, you could use weighted probabilistic calculations that were faster, but less accurate.  While obtaining $50,000.81 would be a very undesirable result, obtaining $13,000.57 would be "close enough" in most cases.  Thus applying greater weight to the tens, hundreds digits, and so on would yield a good calculation -- thus is the nature of probabilistic hardware computing.

With the limits of traditional computing being pushed to the brink, Moore's Law may soon expire.  CPU manufacturers are preparing to launch 32 nm circuits late this year or early next year, and 22 nm is also in the works.  However, past about 10 nm, using traditional light etching techniques begins to fail.  Some are saying that this calls for ditching the traditional CPU entirely and adopting an entirely new design, such as optical computing or quantum computing.  However, these options would be expensive and risky.  The alternative is to repurpose the wheel -- make silicon computers that do the job better with the same number of transistors.

The idea for probabilistic computing has floated around for a while, and was born out of such a mindset.  It has been largely pioneered and developed by Rice University Professor Krishna Palem.  On Sunday, Professor Palem announced the results of his first chip and they're nothing short of groundbreaking.

His probabilistic CPU chip ran seven times as fast as traditional circuits and consumed only 1/30th of the energy.  The results match or even exceed those predict by his mathematical models and computer simulations.  He states, "The results were far greater than we expected.  At first, I almost couldn’t believe them.  I spent several sleepless nights verifying the results."

Professor Palem's chips could revolutionize fields such as computer-generated graphics, content streaming, and other applications that would accept a tradeoff of precision for increases in computing speed and decreases in power.  Many experts in these fields which had been previously reticent about the idea of probabilistic computing have been convinced by Professor Palem's results.

Al Barr, a computer scientist at the California Institute of Technology, is among the new believers.  He acknowledges former doubts, stating, "Initially there was definitely a lot of skepticism."

However, Barr and his colleagues are now planning to test new graphics software using Professor Palem's design or other upcoming probabilistic chips.  Such designs might allow next generation cell phones and laptops to run for days more on a charge, while running significantly faster.  While some artifacting might occur, it would only be a few missed pixels -- the overall image would remain.  The human brain's imaging abilities can fill in most of this missing information, says Professor Palem.  As he puts it, "In effect, we are putting a little more burden on the CPU in our heads and a little less burden on the CPU in our pockets."

Intel and other CPU makers have expressed interest in probabilistic designs, for lack of a clear die shrink solution in the long term.  Professor Palem's results have them very excited.  Shekhar Borkar, director of Intel’s Microprocessor Technology Lab lauds the work, stating, "This logic will prove extremely important, because basic physics dictates that future transistor-based logic will need probabilistic methods."

DailyTech - Probabilistic Chips Could Revolutionize CPU Industry

Google offers calendar, contact sync app for iPhone, Windows Mobile

Over the past few years, a cottage industry has formed around the idea of allowing users to synchronize their mobile Google contact and calendar items with mobile devices. Today, Google got in on the action by announcing that iPhone and Windows Mobile devices could now be synchronized with Google Calendar and your Gmail contact list.

Google Sync is using Microsoft ActiveSync push technology to keep your contacts and calendar appointment up to date. Once you set up your phone, your information should update continuously, with no user intervention required.

In order to synchronize your contact list, your phone will need to support SyncML. Google Sync is currently in beta, which means it's a real Google product. But it also means there may still be some kinks to work out. It's also important to note that Google Sync will replace all the data on your device with information from the server, so you'll want to make sure to back up your data before trying it out.

Google offers calendar, contact sync app for iPhone, Windows Mobile - Download Squad

Open web-based media links in external media players

When you run across a Quicktime, MP3, Real Media, or other media link on a web site, Firefox typically offers to download the file, open it in an external player, or opens a new tab and starts playing it if you have the proper plugins installed. But what if you like to open all of your files using Windows Media Player or VLC, so that you can close Firefox without interrupting playback?

Media Player Connectivity is a Firefox plugin that lets you assign external media players to file types. So any time you click on a media file, it will be opened in the correct player. The plugin supports a ton of file types, including OGG, MP3, AAC, RAM, WMV, WMA, and playlist files like PLS and M3U.

The latest versions of Media Player Connectivity work best with Windows, but Mac users can download older versions of the plugin which should work with OS X.

Open web-based media links in external media players - Download Squad

Amazon unveils Kindle 2 e-reader

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos this morning unveiled the next-generation Kindle, the company's e-reading device that first appeared in November 2007. The new Kindle improves upon the old one by making the chassis even thinner, increasing the battery life, jacking up the memory, and adding a few extra features. As expected, the chassis is exactly what we've been seeing in leaked photos, but it's surprising just how slim it is: Kindle 2 is 0.36 inches thick, half as thick as the old one. It also has 25% more battery life, said to be good for two weeks of reading without a recharge. And the 2GB of memory is a huge improvement over the 256MB in Kindle 1, letting you store up to 1,500 books onboard.

Also new is Whispersync, which uses Amazon's 3G Whispernet wireless tech to automatically sync your content between multiple Kindles (old and new) and, in the future, other wireless reading devices (iPhone, anyone?). The built-in dictionary lookup has been improved as well, with definitions of highlighted words appearing instantly at the bottom of the screen.

Interesting upgrade: The new Kindle has built-in text-to-speech, so the device can actually read to you when you want it to (say, while you're doing dishes). Unfortunately, the voice sounds like the most awful GPS you've ever heard (think the evil computer in WarGames), so you probably wouldn't want to use it for anything but the most basic of articles.

Kindle 2 will be available Feb. 24 (but Amazon's site actually estimates a March 2 ship date) for the same price as the original: $359. If you have an old Kindle and want a new one, you should order before 12:01 a.m. on Feb. 11 so you can get to the front of the line.

See for yourself just how thin the new Kindle is in the gallery below.

DVICE: Amazon unveils Kindle 2 e-reader

Star Trek communicator actually communicates via VoIP

There's no shortage of Star Trek communicator replicas, but this one's different: Instead of playing a repertoire of goofy sound effects, it's actually a communicator. If you use a VoIP phone system such as Skype (which has been recently improved a lot) on your Mac or PC, this realistic replica wirelessly connects to a USB transceiver and beams your conversations into the final frontier and back. Now all it needs is that little chirping sound when you open it.

Will somebody just go ahead and make this timeless design into a regular cell phone? Ever since the Motorola StarTAC (get it? StarTAC/ Star Trek?), phone makers have been flirting with the whole Star Trek communicator paradigm.

But then, it might be difficult to be taken seriously when talking into one of these, so maybe that's why it's never made it as a cell phone. If you do decide to go for it, just don't wear a red shirt when you're talking on it, or your chances of being killed will suddenly increase by 73%.

DVICE: Star Trek communicator actually communicates via VoIP

Hubble Photographs Strange Galaxy

The Coma Galaxy Cluster is one of the closest very rich collections of galaxies in the nearby universe. The cluster, also known as Abell 1656, is about 320 million light-years from Earth and contains more than 1000 members.

Now the Hubble Space Telescope has revealed fine details of the galaxy, called NGC 4921, as well as an extraordinary rich background of more remote galaxies stretching back to the early universe.

The cluster is in the northern constellation of Coma Berenices, the hair of Queen Berenice. The brightest galaxies were discovered back in the late 18th century by William Herschel.

The galaxies in rich clusters undergo many interactions and mergers that tend to gradually turn gas-rich spirals into elliptical systems without much active star formation. As a result there are far more ellipticals and fewer spirals in the Coma Cluster than are found in quieter corners of the universe.

NGC 4921 is one of the rare spirals in Coma, and a rather unusual one â€" it is an example of an "anemic spiral" where the normal vigorous star formation that creates a spiral galaxy's familiar bright arms is much less intense. As a result there is just a delicate swirl of dust in a ring around the galaxy, accompanied by some bright young blue stars that are clearly separated out by Hubble's sharp vision. Much of the pale spiral structure in the outer parts of the galaxy is unusually smooth and gives the whole galaxy the ghostly look of a vast translucent jellyfish.

The long exposure times and sharp vision of Hubble also allowed it to not just image NGC 4921 in exquisite detail but also to see far beyond into the distant Universe. All around, and even through the galaxy itself, thousands of much more remote galaxies of all shapes, sizes and colors are visible. Many have the spotty and ragged appearance of galaxies at a time before the familiar division into spirals and ellipticals had become established.

The Hubble images used to make this picture were originally obtained by a team led by Kem Cook (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California). The team was using Hubble to search for Cepheid variable stars in NGC 4921 that could be used to measure the distance to the Coma Cluster and hence the expansion rate of the Universe. Unfortunately the failure of the Advanced Camera for Surveys in early 2007 meant that they had insufficient data to complete their original program, although they hope to continue after the servicing mission. Very deep imaging data like this, which is available to anyone from the Hubble archives, may also be used for other interesting scientific explorations of this galaxy and its surroundings.

This image was created from 50 separate exposures through a yellow filter and another 30 exposures through a near-infrared filter using the Wide Field Channel of the Advanced Camera for Surveys on Hubble. The total exposure times were approximately seventeen hours and ten hours respectively.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA.

SPACE.com -- Hubble Photographs Strange Galaxy