Tech News (page 3)

Microsoft Corp.'s effort to compete against Apple's iPod juggernaut will focus on the idea that people want to be able to easily share music with friends and others.

Microsoft said Thursday that its portable Zune media player, scheduled to be available around the holiday season, will include wireless technology to let people share some of their favorite songs, playlists or pictures with other Zune users who are close by.

• Those users can listen to the songs three times over three days before deciding whether to purchase it themselves. "The idea is to legitimize peer-to-peer sharing in a healthy way that works for everybody," said J Allard, a Microsoft vice president in charge of the Zune product line.
• The device, to be made by Toshiba Corp., will have 30 gigabytes of memory (enough to hold about 7,500 songs), a 3-inch screen and a built-in FM tuner.
• Microsoft said the song-sharing capability will be available for most songs available through its forthcoming Zune Marketplace service, although some music publishers won't allow it.
• Zune Marketplace music service, designed to compete with Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes store, will let users buy songs individually or listen to unlimited tracks for a flat subscription fee.

The company did not disclose pricing or a specific launch date for the first Zune player.

Put the 70-80 marketplaces like RAC together and a picture emerges of approximately one lakh Indian software programmers who generate about a billion dollars every year.

• Quantum computers are machines based on the principles of quantum mechanics, a branch of physics that describes the quirky world of subatomic particles where both yes and no can simultaneously be true.
• The transistors in today's digital computers hold information in binary units - either 0 or 1. In quantum computing, units of information called "qubits" can hold both 0 and 1 simultaneously. That capacity is the heart of the vast potential power of quantum computers.
• For example, while an array of three conventional bits could hold only one of eight possible values at a time, a similar quantum array could contain all eight values at once. Moreover, computing capacity based on multi-qubit computers scales up exponentially, a fact that underlies the potential of quantum computers.

Several quantum computing scientists said that the paper offered an interesting theoretical proposal but that there were significant obstacles to building a useful system. "The paper is interesting, and is likely a real advance in terms of quantum computing using photons," said Umesh Vazirani, the co-director of the Berkeley Quantum Information Center at the University of California, Berkeley. "That said, optical quantum computing schemes are not regarded as the most practical alternatives."

• At Flickr, the popular Web photo-sharing service where Ms. Fake, a co-founder, posted the photo, it can be tagged with geographic coordinates for use in a photographic map, or become part of a communal database of images that can be searched for certain colors or characteristics.

Indeed, the abundance of user-generated content - which includes online games, desktop video and citizen journalism sites - is reshaping the debate over file sharing. Many Internet industry executives think it poses a new kind of threat to Hollywood, the recording industry and other purveyors of proprietary content: not piracy of their work, but a compelling alternative.

The new services offer a bottom-up creative process that is shifting the flow of information away from a one-way broadcast or publishing model, giving rise to a wave of new business ventures and touching off a scramble by media and technology companies to respond.

The controls to the Goggle satellite maps are

``You have a professional order taker with strong communications skills whose job is to do nothing but take down orders,'' said Matthew Paull, the chief financial officer.

McDonald's spokeswoman Anna Rozenich said Friday it was too early to say whether the outsourcing strategy would be implemented systemwide.

Company officials said the idea, being tested at a small number of restaurants in the Pacific Northwest (US), is aimed at reducing the number of mistakes at the drive-thru window.

Heavy-Duty Data transfer via your Mobile. The company's research found people like to watch mobile TV in cars and public places, such as cafes. Watching mobile TV at home and in workplaces was also common.(Image: Matti Bjorkman / AP)

HELSINKI, Finland - Nokia Corp. on Tuesday launched a pilot project enabling cell phone users to watch television broadcasts on their handsets in the Helsinki region.

Besides Finnish TV programming, 500 test users in the capital region can also watch international television broadcasts, such

• as BBC World and
• CNN, and
• tune into radio programs.