Sony launches 400-disc MegaChanger

Sony has just launched the BDP-CX960 and the "Elevated Standard" (ES) BDP-CX7000ES 400-disc Blu-ray Disc MegaChangers. This MegaChanger can store and play up to 400-discs, be it a Blu Ray disc, DVD, or a CD. Users can easily and conveniently manage their entire collection of movies and other media content by locating it in one convenient location.

The MegaChanger has the ability to download information from Gracenote's MusicID and VideoID products to organize movies and music. Whenever the user inserts a disc into the MegaChanger the Gracenote technology automatically searches and downloads information like title, director, cast, genre, release year, etc. over a broadband internet connection. This allows users to easily navigate through various titles and genres using the player’s own xross media bar menu system.

The BDP-CX7000ES is a top of the line product which can output full HD 1080/60p and 24p true cinema. This model offers exceptional audio quality thanks to the 7.1 channel output. The video is also quite clear and crisp due to Sony's HD Reality Enhancer and Super Bit Mapping technologies. The HD Reality Enhancer technology continually analyzes the original source bit by bit, sharpening edges and reproducing detail, while reducing the effects of film grain. Super Bit Mapping delivers smoother color gradation realizing true 14-bit equivalent color tone from 8-bit sources.

It also uses Sony’s Precision Cinema HD Upscale technology to upscale standard definition DVDs to 1080p. This is possible by using advanced conversion and processing technology to detect image changes at the pixel level, rather than the level of whole scan lines. Separate algorithms are used to process the moving and still parts of an image, resulting in sharp backgrounds with moving objects that are free from motion artifacts.

The other model in this line-up is the BDP-CX960 which can also play full HD at 1080/60p and 24p true cinema. Moreover, it also has Sony’s Precision Cinema HD technology built-in. The features common to both the devices are:

• Ethernet port (for broadband connectivity to download metadata)
• 1 channel Dolby TrueHD and Dolby Digital Plus
• DTS-HD High Resolution Audio
• Support for formats like: BD-ROM/R/RE (BDMV and BDAV modes), DVD-+ Video/R/RW, CD/R/RW, and MP3/JPEG

The BDP-CX7000ES will be available this August for about $1,900, while the BDP-CX960 will be available this fall for about $800.

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The original Google Research Paper

What the first thing you do after opening the browser? No prize for guessing – Google has become so famous (and dear-to-heart) among Digital information searchers that anything new the company brings out in the market, is viewed as a revolution – a classic case of Market drivers, as Akio Morita would put it. Be it Chrome browser, Android and now the Chrome OS. For a company that was founded just about 10 years ago, $21,795.6m revenue with $4,226.9 net profit (2008), a $437.34 share price tag and an asset of 19788 employees (as on March 31st) does not look bad, does it?

Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were students at Stanford University and the company was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 4, 1998. The initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004, raising US$1.67 billion, implying a value for the entire corporation of US$23 billion. Google has continued its growth through a series of new product developments, acquisitions, and partnerships. Environmentalism, philanthropy and positive employee relations have been important tenets during the growth of Google. The company has been identified multiple times as Fortune Magazine's #1 Best Place to Work, and as the most powerful brand in the world(according to the Millward Brown Group).

No we don’t stop here; we go to the very beginning – the time when two kids in a famous University thought something that would change the way we would share information. What was in there? Where will I get it? RIGHT HERE! Find below the original Research paper by Google founders Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page titled The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. The abstract below is taken from the paper –

In this paper, we present Google, a prototype of a large-scale search engine which makes heavy use of the structure present in hypertext. Google is designed to crawl and index the Web efficiently and produce much more satisfying search results than existing systems. The prototype with a full text and hyperlink database of at least 24 million pages is available at http://google.stanford.edu/

To engineer a search engine is a challenging task. Search engines index tens to hundreds of millions of web pages involving a comparable number of distinct terms. They answer tens of millions of queries every day. Despite the importance of large-scale search engines on the web, very little academic research has been done on them. Furthermore, due to rapid advance in technology and web proliferation, creating a web search engine today is very different from three years ago. This paper provides an in-depth description of our large-scale web search engine -- the first such detailed public description we know of to date.

Apart from the problems of scaling traditional search techniques to data of this magnitude, there are new technical challenges involved with using the additional information present in hypertext to produce better search results. This paper addresses this question of how to build a practical large-scale system which can exploit the additional information present in hypertext. Also we look at the problem of how to effectively deal with uncontrolled hypertext collections where anyone can publish anything they want.

Keywords: World Wide Web, Search Engines, Information Retrieval, PageRank, Google

Find the paper here – The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

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