Richard Nicholson

Microsoft's ZuneHD, set to go on sale Tuesday, will not feature an open application store like its competitor the iPod Touch. Those capabilities will determine whether the ZuneHD sells well - and whether Microsoft decides to keep selling its own music player, said Matt Rosoff, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft. It will come with some unique features, though, like an HD radio tuner, and with software that has been well-received by users. After observers noticed a Marketplace folder during earlier demos of the ZuneHD, many had hoped the new device would feature an open application store like the one accessible from the iPhone and the iPod Touch.

But the Zune Marketplace will be a closed store, meaning third-party developers won't be able to easily build applications for it. Marketplace is the name of the open app store that will be available on Windows Mobile 6.5 phones, to be released in early October. The new device will include the same casual games that came with earlier Zunes, plus a few other applications like an MSN weather application and a calculator, said Brian Seitz, group marketing manager for Zune. Zune customers will be able to download the applications they like for free. In November, Twitter and Facebook applications will become available, as well as a "Project Gotham" racing game, he added.

Seitz said the timing wasn't right to include the Windows Mobile Marketplace application, which isn't due out until next month, with the ZuneHD, but he also said it's not certain that a similar open Marketplace will come to the Zune in the future. "Down the line, if there's an opportunity for us to snap into what they're doing from a mobile application perspective, I'm sure it's something we'll look at," he said. He acknowledged that people are likely to criticize the decision. "I'm not saying we won't get dinged for that because I know we will," he said. However, Microsoft may decide it makes more sense to limit the applications in the Zune market and offer them all free, he said. That's for good reason, Rosoff said. "When you look at it as a head-to-head comparison with the iPod Touch, people will see it as a shortcoming," he said. It will feature the "smart DJ," which allows the user to pick an artist and then automatically creates a playlist of similar songs.

Microsoft will also debut new Zune software on Tuesday that customers use on their PCs to manage their music. Microsoft will also start offering people who subscribe to Zune Pass a way to access the Zune music collection from a browser. A Zune Pass subscription lets users stream any song from the entire Zune catalog and download 10 songs each month. That means subscribers will be able to listen to music from the entire catalog from any PC, including one at work, rather than only from a PC running the Zune software. Microsoft also revealed a few more details about a Zune feature that will start showing up in Xbox Live later this year. That's part of a strategy to move the Zune software experience into other products from Microsoft, Seitz said. "Going forward, we hope more people think of a 'holistic Zune business,' as opposed to how many of these things we sell," he said, pointing to the Zune hardware.

Xbox users will be able to buy or rent movies from a new Zune store that will be featured in Xbox Live. The most important upcoming product that will include Zune software will be Windows Mobile phones, Rosoff said. "The Zune interface will show up in Windows Mobile," he said. Rosoff suspects that Microsoft will eventually get out of the MP3 player market altogether. "We'll just see the Zune as a consumer component of Windows Mobile," he said. "This is sort of the last [Zune], if it doesn't sell." Even Zune hardware elements, like the touch screen and the form factor of the device, will likely make it into Windows Mobile phones, he said.

A U.S. company whose software code was allegedly stolen in China by a controversial, government-backed Internet filtering program will hit back by launching a rival product for a low price in China, the company said late Sunday. The Solid Oak program, called CyberSitter and targeted at parents, will be offered in languages including Chinese in a version due out next month. Solid Oak Software, which has said its code was copied in a program that China ordered be bundled with all new PCs, is exploring ways to offer its own Web filter for free or at a very low price in China, company President Brian Milburn, said in an e-mail.

A Chinese version of the product would compete with Green Dam Youth Escort, the program that Solid Oak says copied its code and that China originally ordered PC makers to include with all new computers sold in the country from July this year. But under heavy pressure from foreign PC makers and the U.S. government, China indefinitely postponed the mandate just hours before it was set to take effect. The Chinese government had paid the program's developers to allow all PC buyers to use the software for free for one year. Major PC makers including Lenovo and Acer began bundling Green Dam with new PCs until this month. The program also used blacklists apparently lifted from Solid Oak's software, according to the company and a group of U.S. researchers. The program, which China said was meant to protect children from online pornography, was also found to block politically sensitive material such as negative references to a former Chinese president.

One file found in the Chinese program contained an encrypted version of a years-old Solid Oak news bulletin, according to the researchers. Green Dam came under fire for concerns about system stability in addition to user privacy and freedom of speech. Solid Oak, which is based in Santa Barbara, California, is preparing legal action against PC makers that shipped Green Dam, though an update to the program in June removed some of the allegedly infringing elements. One Beijing high school recently removed the program from its computers after finding that it conflicted with software used for grading and attendance tracking. Bryan Zhang, general manager of Jinhui Computer System Engineering, one of the designers of the Chinese software, declined to comment on the allegations of code theft.

Green Dam "is a conglomeration of whatever components [the developers] managed to steal ... or otherwise appropriate from various sources, and duct tape together in the form of an alleged piece of software," Milburn wrote in his e-mail. "They should be utterly humiliated, not just because they stole much of the core functionality, but even more so because they intentionally inflicted such a miserable product on a population of innocent computer users," Milburn wrote. The new Solid Oak product will have a Chinese user interface available and a filtering function that the company reworked after much of its old proprietary code appeared online. That is the ultimate goal," company spokeswoman Jenna DiPasquale said in an e-mail. The filtering will be entirely URL-based, avoiding the need to translate keywords into Chinese. "We are working on a way to release it for free.

NEC Corp. today unveiled several upgrades to its flagship HYDRAstor grid-storage system , adding write-once, read many (WORM) capabilities and the ability to encrypt data in transit. NEC officials said that the upgraded software will increase performance by 67%, while boosting security by improving HYDRAstor's ability to archive mission-critical data. "Over 70% of even high I/O data from source applications such as databases have not been touched after 6 months. The upgraded system also provides deduplication capabilities for more third party backup applications. A lot can be off loaded onto more efficient platforms," said Gideon Senderov, director of product management for NEC's IT Products Group.

The new RepliGrid in-flight data encryption capability protects data as it's being transmitted between HYDRAstor grids and data centers, he added. The new HYDRAlock WORM capability allows administrators to lock out any changes to documents or other records, maintaining a chain of custody for regulatory purposes, Senderov said. NEC also announced that it will allow users to license additional physical capacity that can be activated without adding additional components. A new quota management system allows administrators to set limits to the maximum effective capacity allocated for each file system and its associated application. For example, can now license as little as 12TB of capacity in a 24TB configuration and then pay a fee to activate additional capacity as needed.

The quota management system also offers threshold notifications as well as the ability to set aside a capacity reserve for other applications, such as critical archive data. The upgraded system can deliver up to 1.8TB per hour per accelerator node and up to 90TB per hour for the largest supported configuration of 55 accelerator nodes and 110 storage nodes, according to the company. Previously, the HYDRAstors grid architecture had a default capacity of 256 petabytes for all applications. "We are really looking forward to taking advantage of the new in-flight encryption and quota management functions," said Scott Ashton, a LAN/WAN specialist at TLC Engineering for Architecture Inc., an Orlando, Fla.-based engineering firm. "We've really seen the return on our initial investment as we've been able to take advantage of each new upgrade with HYDRAstor since our early adopter installation in 2007." NEC said that the performance boost comes from software enhancements and more efficient inter-node data transfer and communication protocols. Accelerator nodes are the controller blades with the CPU processing power and storage nodes are the system blades with disk storage capacity. NEC today also introduced lower-capacity, or "entry-level" models of HYDRAstor offering raw storage capacities of 12TB (or over 150 TB effective capacity); 24TB (or over 300 TB effective capacity) and 36 TB (or over 450 TB effective capacity). "A highly resilient storage solution primed for archiving, that self-evolves with the ability to intermix several generations of technology, offers global deduplication, great scalability, and automates provisioning, migration, workload balancing and system management will be the key features of a storage solution that the market will demand," said Dave Russell, a vice president at researcher Gartner Inc.

The new application-aware deduplication feature allows newly-supported third-party backup applications such as IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager and EMC's NetWorker, as well as previously previously supported Simpana from CommVault and NetBackup from Symantec, to take advantage of the data reducing feature. With the exception of WORM capability, the customers can install the latest HYDRAstor upgrades for free. The WORM upgrade costs $14,000 per accelerator node.

Things don't look good for NASA when the opening sentence of a report outlining its future begins: "The US human spaceflight program appears to be on an unsustainable trajectory."

'[NASA] is perpetuating the perilous practice of pursuing goals that do not match allocated resources. Space operations are among the most complex and unforgiving pursuits ever undertaken by humans. It really is rocket science. Space operations become all the more difficult when means do not match aspirations," the report continued.

That was just the beginning of the Review of US Human Space Flight Plans Committee summary report which was handed to the White House today after months of expert review and testimony. A bleak report was expected by many observers but ultimately how its results are interpreted will determine the future of any manned space flights. Keep in mind too that NASA has spent almost $8 billion of a planned $40 billion to develop systems for a lunar return.

President Obama initiated the "Review of United States Human Space Flight Plan Committee" which was led by Norman Augustine, the former CEO of Lockheed Martin to examine ongoing and planned NASA development activities, as well as potential alternatives, and offer options for advancing a safe, innovative, affordable, and sustainable human space flight program in the years following Space Shuttle retirement.

The report offered a number of interesting findings and space exploration options, chief among them was the fact that NASA should basically get out of the low orbit business and focus on deeper space research.

Another option, called Flexible Path by the committee, would have humans and robots visiting sites never visited before while traveling greater and greater distances from Earth. Successive missions would visit: lunar orbit; the Lagrange points (special points in space that are important sites for scientific observations and the future space transportation infrastructure); near-Earth objects (asteroids that cross the Earth's path); and orbit around Mars. Most interestingly, humans could rendezvous with a moon of Mars, then coordinate with or control robots on the Martian surface, the report stated.

The Flexible Path represents a different type of exploration strategy, the committee stated. "We would learn how to live and work in space, to visit small bodies, and to work with robotic probes on the planetary surface. It would provide the public and other stakeholders with a series of interesting firsts to keep them engaged and supportive. Most important, because the path is flexible, it would allow many different options as exploration progresses, including a return to the Moon's surface, or a continuation to the surface of Mars," the committee stated.

Additional findings included:

• NASA's budget should match its mission and goals. NASA should be given the ability to shape its organization and infrastructure accordingly, while maintaining facilities deemed to be of national importance.

• International partnerships: The U.S. can lead a bold new international effort in the human exploration of space. If international partners are actively engaged, including on the "critical path" to success, there could be substantial benefits to foreign relations, and more resources overall could become available.

• Short-term Space Shuttle planning: Under current conditions, the gap in U.S. ability to launch astronauts into space will stretch to at least seven years. The Committee did not identify any credible approach employing new capabilities that could shorten the gap to less than six years. The only way to significantly close the gap is to extend the life of the Shuttle Program.

• Extending the International Space Station: The return on investment to both the United States and our international partners would be significantly enhanced by an extension of ISS life. Not to extend its operation would significantly impair U.S. ability to develop and lead future international spaceflight partnerships.

• Heavy-lift: A heavy-lift launch capability to low-Earth orbit, combined with the ability to inject heavy payloads away from the Earth, is beneficial to exploration, and it also will be useful to the national security space and scientific communities.

• Commercial crew launch to low-Earth orbit: Commercial services to deliver crew to low-Earth orbit are within reach. While this presents some risk, it could provide an earlier capability at lower initial and lifecycle costs than government could achieve. A new competition with adequate incentives should be open to all U.S. aerospace companies. This would allow NASA to focus on more challenging roles, including human exploration beyond low-Earth orbit, based on the continued development of the current or modified Orion spacecraft.

• Technology development for exploration and commercial space: Investment in a well-designed and adequately funded space technology program is critical to enable progress in exploration.

• Exploration strategies can proceed more readily and economically if the requisite technology has been developed in advance. This investment will also benefit robotic exploration, the U.S. commercial space industry and other U.S. government users.

• Pathways to Mars: Mars is the ultimate destination for human exploration; but it is not the best first destination. Both visiting the Moon First and following the Flexible Path are viable exploration strategies. The two are not necessarily mutually exclusive; before traveling to Mars, we might be well served to both extend our presence in free space and gain experience working on the lunar surface.

• Human exploration beyond low-Earth orbit is not viable under the FY 2010 budget guideline.

• Meaningful human exploration is possible under a less constrained budget, ramping to approximately $3 billion per year above the FY 2010 guidance in total resources.

• Funding at the increased level would allow either an exploration program to explore Moon First or one that follows a Flexible Path of exploration. Either could produce results in a reasonable timeframe.