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I've been waiting (and drooling) over the prospect of laser projection techs for the last 10 years or so. Sony's done a lot in the field recently. In fact, they have a 2005 inch screen set up at their exhibition building at the 2005 World's Fair in Seto, Japan. I dearly wish I could see this thing in person...

http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/GxL/

Be sure to have a look at their tech explanation too. They went with the Grating Light Valve design, using MEMS.

Archiving digital video and audio can be a daunting challenge. Many groups in the television broadcast industry have grappled with this issue for years. Some have settled on expensive spinning disk-based storage such as NAS and SAN solutions. Others have found value in tape-based robotics libraries for massive archival arrays. Recent advances in optical storage technologies have led to the development of Sony's Professional Disk for Data. The optical disks used in this technology have the same physical dimensions of a typical CD or DVD disk, but can store 23.3GB (about 2 hours at DV-25) for 50 years or more. Sony markets these disks in a cartridge-based format (primarily because these new disks don't yet have a protective coating like CD's and DVD's, making them more susceptible to damage from particulate matter). Bare media is available for use in specialty applications such as Asaca's AM750PD robotics library. For the typical user, I would recommend cartridge-based media for practical day-to-day use. More information is available at: http://www.sony.net/Products/MO-Drive/ProDATA/

So 200 CD's, with ~20 songs a cd. And about 3.5 minutes a song.

Well, perhaps the Sony Walkman brand Walkman can't play mp3s, but the $20 models I've bought at Fry's recently can. (Hmm, OK, even the Sony models can play mp3s too now. They'll probably cost you more than $20, however.)

More technical info on the card:

http://www.sony.net/Products/felica/contents02_02. html

In Japan they have already rolled out Felica for train tickets, coke machines and some convenience store purchases. The cards are pre-paid and you can recharge them at any JR (Japan Rail) train station. Here is the info on the technology.

http://www.sony.net/Products/felica/contents04_02. html

In Japan we have been using contactless technology for our daily needs for a while now. Good examples of the technology are Felica Suica and Edy.

As much as the /. crowd has been all skeptical about this technology, over here I've not heard of anything happening that could make headlines for this and I personally have been using them for my daily commute needs and have never had any sort of problems with them.

Now its understandable that people are getting all finicky about something like this, but I say first try it out before you make a comments on about it. Its a lot better then walking around with a wad of cash and it sure as hell beats having to stand in line trying to by a ticket for anything from airlines to trains.

I worked for a company, here in Japan where thre use of these type of contactless smart cards is wide spread, which used this technology for fare collection. The bigest problem I had and still have with the system here is that you load up your card with virtual money. So in essence you pay before you play.
We used these cards to sign in and out of work as well as to pay for lunch at the cafeteria.
A number of phone manufacturers here are also putting this technology into their phones so you can swipe your phone to pay for things at stores. The main supplier of the actual chip is sony, under the namefelica.
Now here, it is impossible to use your bank card to pay for anything. The service is just not avaliable as it is in North america or Europe.
As to the security of the smart cards, the only information on the card is your personal account number and how much money you have on the card. At the end of the day, on mobile fare collection systems anyways, the data is transfered at the depot to a server which updates the main account information. As to store systems, the data is retrieved immediately from the server and updated.
If your card is stolen or lost, it is like loosing cash at least until you call the card issuer and they freeze the account.
I am not sure about how this may affect the magnetic strip on most credit cards, but a magnetic field generates the electrical power required by the chip on card to 'transmit' the data to the reader.

anyone wanting to see how much linux is in Sony's game plan, should check http://www.sony.net/Products/Linux/Download/search .html there's a few interesting tid bits in there, including the source for the PS2 kernel.

http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/QRIO/videoclip/ Watch him interact with the kids...

http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/QRIO/

What you said is true, but you made it sound like it is a bad thing. Most technology are derived from the need for 'better' entertainment. Where would the game industry and graphic technologies be if people were not interested in making games and enhancing gameplay?

The Japanese do have a genuine interest in robotics. And it is true that the anime and game industries are big factors in Japan's advances in Robotics. Because of mainstream interest in mecha, especially Gundam, advances such as Sony's QRIO and Honda's ASIMO are made. From bioengineering to fire-fighting robots, these advances in robotics are helpful in many aspects of our lives.

Personal robot development has certainly gone to the dogs for a while.

First problem is Sony's penchant for DRM. They really like proprietary formats and copy protection. Sure, Sony ought to be making money on their films, but if you make it too hard to deal with the media people just aren't going to deal with it. Just look at Sony's proprietary ATRAC format...

Second problem is that Sony apparently wants the PSP to be the delivery mechanism for their new media downloads... I just don't see that working very well. The iPod has a huge amount of storage and a fairly standard interface (firewire/USB). It is easy to dump a bunch of music onto it. The PSP doesn't have much on-board space, and it has no real PC interface. I guess you could do it wirelessly...or burn it to a PSP format disc...or put it on a memory card...? But none of those sound all that simple. I just don't see how you're going to transfer a movie you purchased on-line into your PSP.

If someone told you that the PSP is a portable gaming device, shoot these people. The PSP is not a portable gaming device, it is really a convergent portable entertainment device.

Right, because the history of convergent entertainment devices is long and illustrious. They would be fools to not want some of this action.

And going with a brand new disk standard that nobody has and nobody sells as a medium for selling movies? It's a brilliant maneuver from some of the industry's best minds.

I should say that the Sony reps I've worked with about other things have been completely with it and didn't lose sight of reality. So what happened to this guy?

: A music jukebox configured for storing a music library therein, said music jukebox comprising: a housing; an audio data receiver arranged to receive audio data from outside the housing; audio output structure located at least partially within the housing for outputting audio signals; data storage memory in the housing for storing audio data received from outside the housing through the audio data receiver, said music jukebox including a user interface comprising a display device located at least partially within the housing, said display device providing a display which is viewable from outside the housing, and a plurality of manually operable function controllers on the housing, said music jukebox configured such that a music library of sound tracks is storable in digital form in the data storage memory as a result of audio data being received from outside the housing through the audio data receiver, said music jukebox configured such that said music library is organizable into a master song list and at least one group of sound tracks wherein each group comprises at least one sound track selected from the master song list, wherein said music jukebox is configured such that indicia of said master song list and indicia of at least one group of sound tracks are displayable on said display, wherein said music jukebox is configured such that said plurality of manually operable function controllers is useable to select a group of sound tracks stored in the data storage memory and operate the music jukebox such that said music jukebox outputs audio signals through said audio output structure.

Now, the thing to remember is that winamp has been around since sometime before 1999, ie more than a year before this patent was filed.

The only SLIGHTLY new thing here would be the "select a group of soundtracks" which sounds like "album shuffle" to me. The rest? Not a single thing MiniDisc didn't do in 1991. It's pretty clear that its not itunes thats infringing, because the only thing it does that napster and/or winamp didn't was download tracks from a main server and take your money.

Lets look at the other claims here:
2) plays a CD (how many years have we had cd players?)
3) edit an audio track
4) seems to mean that even if you have a cd in the drive you can play tracks from memory. Just like winamp.
5) edit an audio track using a "manually operable function controller"... are they calling volume adjustment "editing"?
6) "at least one sound track in the data storage memory is organizable into at least one group of sound tracks." Wow, a playlist editor?
7) "one manually operable function controller" for organizing sound tracks. When I use a mouse to rearrange songs in my winamp playlist using a "manually operable function controller"?
8) Peak level indicator (like winamp).
9) "such that names are assignable to at least one sound track in the data storage memory." OH MY GOD! THEY INVENTED THE ALBUM FIELD OF THE ID3 TAG! BOW TO THEIR INTELLIGENCE! Or you could just mean saving your playlist to a file and giving it a name. Winamp, and this claim is so oldschool its playschool.
10) "manually operable function controller" for assigning names to your winamp playlists. Like a keyboard!
11) Names assignable to at least one group of soundtracks. Could be the directory I store all my playlists in.
12) the obligatory device for naming groups of soundtracks
13) Uses a harddrive@!!%@2!@ wow, thats original!
14) Uses a line-in jack. Just like MD players right after Sony discovered that nobody cared about the optical inputs
15) Line Out Jack. Doesn't de

You mean Sony's site. Search on MagicGate. It ain't so magic unless you like to limit consumers' use of their music.

I hope they don't price it too high -- they might lose customers.

I have been thinking about the recently anounced cell processor and robots, I think it will be excellent to use it in them. Remember that 2 of the companies involved in the development of the cell are toshiba and sony , and those two companies are developing/sell robots. The parallelism that that the cell will provide will be excellent. Imagine an APU dealing with some pattern recognition algorithms while other deals with voice recognition and so on .... I start to see a future with home robots made by sony, industrial robots by toshiba and business equipment by IBM .... here some links to robots

.. a beowulf cluster of Asimo, Qrio and Aibo attack bots running the latest Quake 3 Avida mod

.. a beowulf cluster of Asimo, Qrio and Aibo attack bots running the latest Quake 3 Avida mod

I've been an avid MiniDisc user for a few years now, and while the MP3 players are very attractive I find myself sticking to the minidisc. Here are my reasons for using a minidisc player:

1. I'm clumsy. I've dropped my player while biking, working on heights and sat on it. It still works.

2. I can record internet radio streams. Just open the whatevercast stream and push the record button. A tad trickier to do on an MP3 player afaik

3. Before the long-play, it was a hassle, I agree, but now, with the Hi-MD that Sony is releasing, things are really looking up

4. The USB transfer possibility finally enables you to transfer audio to the disc at reasonable speeds.

So if anyone wants to give their MD-players away, there are still a few fans out there!

I actually owned the Music Clip at one time. The interface software accepted either audio CDs, MP3 files, or WAV files as input, and transferred songs into the device. The transfer process took as long for each song as it did to encode each song into MP3, because the interface was indeed doing encoding, to ATRAC3. I don't remember much about sound quality, mostly because back then I still thought Sony's earbuds and headphones were pretty good (insert laugh track here). I do remember that the max you could encode in ATRAC3 was 144kbps, IIRC, but then you'd lose quite a bit of space on the flash memory. I would usually encode at 128 so I'd have the space, but the transfer process took so long, I only did about one or two transfers during the short time I actively used the device.

Sony's competition back then was already well established, with Diamond's Rio line. The 32 MB PMP300 had been out for around a year, and the 64MB PMP500 was just in. They also used an interface software, but it would carry MP3 files right over to the player, without doing any intermediary re-encoding. Creative was soon to come out with a flash-based player, and later the HDD-based Nomad Jukebox. RCA also had an MP3 player come out, and much like RCA's other electronic devices, was avoided like the plague by those in the know. These non-Sony players dealt natively with MP3, used standard removable flash media without "content protection" locking, and frankly worked better than Sony's pittance of an offering, even in the infancy of the portable music player market. Sony's players were left in the dust, their only remaining market being the fanatics.

Fast-forward to today. Past the fall of Napster, the maturation of the LAME encoder, the introduction of Ogg Vorbis, the iPod, larger flash capacities and lower flash prices. For the same $300 price of the Music Clip back in 2000, one could buy a Palm Tungsten E (today's equivalent of the Vx back then), fit it with a 128 MB MMC card, install AeroPlayer, load the Palm up with a bunch of songs in Ogg format, and go. The Palm also has a bit more bang for buck, considering you can use it as a clock, calendar, day planner, flashlight, MATLAB-esque calculator, etc. Plus, many portable music players allow the user to just copy the files directly into the storage medium instead of tangling with a proprietary transfer interface with proprietary drivers. I can just throw my MMC card into a flash reader, copy what I want into the card directly, and go. I can even do it from Linux! So where's Sony in all of this? Still stuck in 1999, with their "Sonic Stage" software, which still encodes everything it receives into ATRAC3, which is all Sony's players can still handle. Their big marketing push during the years was that they had MiniDisc players that can be loaded up with MP3s (which had to be converted to ATRAC3). They even advertised that the

Psshhh, boooring, this is old news, these robots might not be able to play DDR, but these one's sure can! :
http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2003/1218/sony_ 06.wmv

beside's that robot putting up the panel is weak, the Qrio's f*ck*ng amazing.. the video's make you feel like your watching a sci-fi or something:
http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/QRIO/videoclip/

But preoccupation with entertainment at the expense of real goals is something to watch out for.

Sure, but as you point out, this may not actually be happening in any of the cases that have been raised.

In fact, I think space tourism will make people *more* conscious of the things we ought to be doing in space, and more supportive of them.

Exactly! It's things like this, and even more mundane things, that make achieving our "higher purposes" possible at all.

If anything, beyond the goals of a certain amount of scientific exploration of our surroundings, the NASA model of space exploration has been proven to be a failure, when it comes to giving a larger proportion of the human race a stake in space travel. And it's only when people have a stake that there'll be real incentives and enough support for doing anything beyond trips to examine rocks. You don't necessarily achieve higher purposes by aiming straight for them - you have to build a foundation that will support them, first.

A world full of robot puppies and vacuum cleaners is much more likely to result in useful robotics in the end than working in a pure research lab trying to create intelligent robots from day one. Which is more important: Kismet or Aibo? I'd argue the latter.

It's nothing more than a catch-up move to Sony/Toshiba/IBM Cell, just like EMT64 to catch up AMD. Those late and awkward moves are of bad omen for Intel, IMO.

If any other single entity was capable of making a robot as polished as ASIMO we'd be seeing it. And we're not.

You mean like Sony's QRIO? It's a significantly smaller robot, but I can't think of a single thing ASIMO does which it doesn't do, and several things ASIMO can't do that QRIO can.

Can the robosapien stand back up after you knock it over, like the QRIO?

You can also see some cool videos of Sony's similar QRIO robot on their website (warning - RealPlayer format only). QRIO is smaller and more nimble, making 'him' arguably more interesting to watch. Nothing against ASIMO of course!

Should have included a link to Sony's page regarding a 3 laser head, which is interesting.

here

bzzzt .... I'm sorry, but Aibo was the correct subject line reference.

Hmmm, ever heard of the PSX?

http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press/200310/03- 1007E/

I call shenanigans!

Even then MD was great, but I no longer have the patience to babysit an MD-deck and CD player to make compilations (I've never tried NetMD). ...and then there's the matter of comparing 20gb of storage to 660MDs. While I'm very excited about HiMD technology, I can't see myself putting it to any use until HiMD players support MP3 playback.

Welcome to the club

-- james

Blu-Ray backup already exists my friend!

http://www.sony.net/Products/MO-Drive/ProDATA/

The most amazing one I've seen was linked to by Nat Friedman in his weblog.. it's by sony, and called QRIO meaning curiosity.

This thing looks like a small child and seems pretty inteligent.. My wife said she wan't to take one home and love it to bits (she's a bit broody at present), me.. I'd love to teach it to fetch my beer..

Don't get a dog, rather get an Aibo then?

(What a fearsome creature!) -shiver-

for those of u wondering which one of Sony's model would come out with this technology.. its SONY WEGA series.. check out the official press release

Hmmm,

Have you tried this on a Windows machine?

The reason I'm sceptical is that my Pro3000 uses a SONY ICX098AK CCD. The overview and tech specs would tend me to believe that the device can do VGA without software. Why would Phillips/Logitech fake it?

Since when is 12 cm the size of a DVD or CD?

since before August 31, 1982

I think the poster was talking about magneto-optical disks (see for instance http://www.sony.net/Products/MO-Drive/) and not about cd/dvd media. I was always told that MO-disks last much longer. Does somebody have experience with this kind of stuff?

You seem to have a very limited understanding of product pricing, fixed costs, variable costs, marginal revenue, and basics like reading annual reports. Just because the marginal cost of a DVD or CD is minimal doesn't mean the fixed cost doesn't represent a very high percentage of the sale price. Some neato little charts. Sony gets almost as much revenue from financial services as they do from their music division. Their game and movie divisions, though, have been improving (especially in terms of net profit), but are still no match for the electronics division which is as large as all the other divisions put together.

According to http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press/200405/04- 026E/, Sony has developed a optical head that can output 3 difference wavelengths. So, no, reading burned CDs/DVDs shouldn't be a problem, since the optical head will be able to use the 'native' wavelength of each format.

Funny, at first I thought you were posting slightly off-topic and talking about the PSX, but now that I've noticed you've written "Playstation 10", I think just you don't know much about Sony's product line...

Of course, it doesn't support HD-DVD.

Since the PS3 is already stated to support PS1 and PS2 games, it *must* support CD and DVD, so you don't *have* to re-purchase your DVDs in Blu-ray, just your HD-DVDs. Of course, if you're an HD addict and just can't stand those "low-res" DVDs, then yea, you need to buy *either* HD-DVD or Blu-ray, but Sony just helped you decide which one, in that case.

If you've already bought HD-DVD stuff, you *know* you're bleeding edge, and Sony just cut you...

Sony has a device called the Gummi Bendable Computer that they've been developing. Input is based on bending the credit-card sized device (made of flexable material) towards and away from you. The design is well thought out, and as an HCI person, I'm actually pretty impressed with it.

If you have access to ACM's digital library there's a good paper on it that was published at the CHI 2004 conference.

Adaptive TRansform Acoustic Coding originated with the minidisc. A nice little description.

It seems that HD-DVDs use the same wavelngth blue laser that Blu-Ray DVDs use accoring to the Blu-Ray FAQ. Also, sony has succesfully made a single head for reading regular DVDs and Blu-Ray discs, the head uses a 3-wavelength diode.

Odd, because Sony has gone to the effort of making a head that will read Blu-Ray, DVD-ROM and CD-ROM:
http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press/200405/04- 026E/

Looks like they're planning on systems that support all three, to me!

It uses an embedded IC chip FeliCa by Sony, according to the actual article.