While there’s no doubt that Apple’s insanely popular iTunes store would hit this milestone, they felt it necessary to announce that they’ve finally hit 200 million sales of TV episodes, with more than one million of those being HD episodes sold just last month.

Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of Internet Services, said in a statement this past Thursday, “We've got an incredible Fall 2008 TV lineup with over 70 primetime comedies and dramas, including many of the most popular shows on TV in stunning HD. With over 200 million episodes sold, iTunes customers have proven they love watching television on their computer, iPod, iPhone and TV with Apple TV.”

Thanks to the partnership of major television networks such as Bravo, Comedy Central, Disney Channel, ESPN, FX, HBO, MTV, Nickelodeon, Sci Fi, Showtime and USA, these sales don’t look they’re going to slow down anytime in the near future.

For those keeping track, the iTunes store now offers over eight million songs, over 30,000 TV episodes and over 2,500 films. Almost makes a man never want to leave his house.

10 billion, that’s a pretty sizeable number. For the sake of this story, let’s see that number in its natural state: 10,000,000,000.

That’s the number of images that Facebook is now hosting, according to a post by engineer Doug Beaver on Facebook’s official blog. While this number might sound like it’s lost in the crowd of other photo-sharing sites, bear in mind that Flickr only hit 2 billion photos a little less than a year ago and Photobucket’s active ticker puts them at 6.2 billion at time of press.

Beaver’s post also listed some impressive stats on the amount of photos that Facebook is now handling. “To celebrate, we got a bunch of cupcakes and handed them out to our engineering and operations groups,” he said, “One of our engineers calculated that if we had gotten one cupcake for each of our photos, and lined them up side by side, the line could reach halfway to the moon.” They’re also receiving a staggering two to three terabytes of photos per day, and their photo traffic peaks at over 300,000 images served per second.

As monumental as this is, the hardware isn’t free. Facebook reportedly borrowed $100 million in May to help cover the colossal costs of hosting all those photos, and it’s not evident that revenues will be level with server demands anytime soon.

Thermoelectric materials are common, but they’re not used as often as one would expect. This is because these materials have either been inefficient, expensive, or both. Several groups of researchers have been looking to correct this, and solve the mysteries that have been surrounding these compounds with a goal of bringing them to the world.

Mildred S. Dresselhaus is one of those looking to change the face of thermoelectric compounds. Working with her team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology she’s looking to create more efficient materials by manufacturing tiny particles or wires into them to disrupt the flow of head. These particles and wires would make the materials that are already great conductors much more competent at dispersing heat.

Professor Peidong Yang’s team at the University of California at Berkely is searching for entirely new materials. While silicon isn’t a great thermoelectric material, once you look at it in nanoscale, things change. Silicon nanowires have been shown to be one hundred times more efficient at conserving energy than bulk silicon.

Where things really start to get interesting are at the University of Århus, Risø-DTU (say that three times fast) and the University of Copenhagen where they’ve unlocked a secret of certain thermoelectric compounds which might potentially help in developing more efficient materials.

There are several other teams working on pushing the technology of thermoelectric based compounds, and they’re looking to implement them in a multitude of places, including your PC.

So you just got a snazzy new printer, huh? Funny thing, so did GE! While they think your photo quality printer is nice, they’re much happier with theirs that prints OLED lights.

GE’s printer, which is about the size of a semi-trailer, coats an 8-inch plastic sheet with chemicals and seals it up with a layer of metal foil. Once an electric current is applied to this sheet, it lights up with a blue-white glow.

GE has been heralding the countless possibilities of these sheets. Given that they’re flexible, one could wrap them around a pillar, tack them to a wall or even make a translucent version and attach it to a window (though, nobody’s really sure why). And given that these panels provide diffused light, they’ll be much easier on the eye than current lighting technology.

Lawrence Gasman of Nanomarkets LLC, a research firm in Glen Allen, Virginia is suggesting that these OLEDs could become very common sources of lights, with sales reaching $5.9 billion by 2015.

Bob Sagebiel, the technical marketing manager for lighting at Arrow Electronics Inc. isn’t as confident in these figures though. He points out that these fixtures won’t fit into the 20 billion light-bulb sockets worldwide, and that since they’re so different from current lighting technology they may have issues being accepted. Not to mention commercial buildings would need to be rewired in order to take advantage if potentially bigger OLED panels that wouldn’t fit into existing fixtures for fluorescent tubes.

Only time will tell, but the future for this technology looks pretty bright (see what I did there?).

LaCie has always been good about their design, and that trend looks like it’s going to continue with designer Neil Poulton’s HAL 9000 inspired 5big Network Drive.

The 5big is aimed at small and medium sized workgroups with nerves of steel, and a need for a ton of storage. It will feature five hot-swappable Serial ATA drive bays that can hold up to 7.5 terabytes of storage total (more than HAL 9000 had, I bet). Should 7.5 terabytes not be enough, you can always add additional drives through the included USB ports.

The drives that you decide to put in the 5big can be put in several different raid arrays, including RAID 5, RAID 5+Spare, RAID 6, RAID 10 and RAID 0. And thanks to an included Gigabit Ethernet port, anyone connected to your local network can access it.

And don’t worry, should you decide to get a new network drive somewhere along the line you won’t be having the same issues that a certain Dave Bowman did.

Yahoo has single-handedly disproved Moore’s law, by finally updating their online calendar after 10 long, tech rich years. Tonight they will be rolling out a new drag-and-drop Ajax based calendar in a closed beta to Yahoo Mail users in the U.S., UK, India, Taiwan and Brazil (sign ups can be found here).

The upgraded calendar doesn’t do much that Google’s isn’t already capable of, but it does play nice with iCal and CalDAV and has a slew of new features, including; layering (viewing multiple calendars in different colors or subscribing to someone else’s calendar), zooming in when adding an appointment, integration with Flickr, setting email  or SMS reminders, and a to-do list.

With this addition to their juggernaut of offerings, Yahoo should increase their market share in online calendars, despite already being the leader. Of their 285 million Yahoo Mail users, 8.1 million use the calendar compared to the 5 million that use Google’s.

Asus has recently admitted that some of their Eee Box desktop PC’s have shipped with a virus.  While they’ve claimed that they’ve only sent boxes with viruses to Japan, it can be confirmed that other territories have received units as well.

As stated by an email sent out by Asus, the Eee Box’s 80GB hard drive has the “recycled.exe” virus files hidden in the drive’s D: partition. Once the drive is opened, the virus activates and infects the C: drive, as well as any removable drives connected to the system. Symantec states that the malware is likely to be a W32/Usbalex worm, which creates an “autorun.inf” file to trigger “recycled.exe” from D:.

With any luck, Asus will have this under control before they send out their next shipments. Until then though, be sure to look out for any of these new boxes shipping to a desk near you, they could be waiting to take all of your precious information.

At this month’s Professional Developer Conference Microsoft will be handing out the software development kit for their Surface tabletop computer. In an announcement made on the PDC’s site, Robert Levy sates that attendees will be able to “learn how you can become a part of the expanding partner ecosystem for Microsoft Surface and leverage your existing investments in WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) and Visual Studio to build engaging end user applications. Attendees will receive access to the Microsoft Surface SDK.”

This announcement comes as a sigh of relief to developers, who have been promised the SDK for some time now. The only known companies with access to the SDK are AT&T and Starwood hotels, whose projects are unknown. Microsoft has also been stating that the multitouch interface will be part of Windows 7, but is yet to detail how.

Let’s just hope that Chris Taylor and his boys get started on their version of Supreme Commander for the Surface ASAP!

So you’re enjoying watching the baseball playoffs in HD, are you? Well, imagine yourself in the next 10 years watching these same playoffs in 3D. Dr. Nasser Peyghambarian (say that three times fast) of the University of Arizona is claiming that this could be possible, all thanks to hologram technology.

Dr. Peyghambarian, the chair of photonics and lasers at the University of Arizona’s Optical Sciences department claims that his crack team of scientists have broken a barrier by creating the first updatable three-dimensional displays with memory. "This is a prerequisite for any type of moving holographic technology. The way it works presently is not suitable for 3-D images," said Peyghambarian.

In order to create a television that’s capable of displaying 3D images they’ll need to create displays that can update multiple times per second, whereas they’ve only created displays that can update on a minute-by-minute basis.

Dr. Peyghambarian’s team has been hard at work on the technology since 1990, and believes that now that this breakthrough has been made the rest of the essentials will soon follow. "It took us a while to make that first breakthrough, but as soon as you have the first element of it working the rest often comes more rapidly," he said. "What we are doing now is trying to make the model better. What we showed is just one color, what we are doing now is trying to use three colors. The original display was four inches by four inches and now we're going for something at least as big as a computer screen."

There is some criticism though. Justin Lawrence, an authority on Electric Engineering at Bangor University in Wales said that while small steps are being made on technology like 3D holograms, but he can’t see it being available within the next ten years. "It's one thing to demonstrate something in a lab but it's another thing to be able to produce it cheaply and efficiently enough to distribute it to the mass market," said Lawrence.

Yesterday Google unveiled YouTube’s brand new theater view and dimming function, both dead ringers for the prospect of HD video. With the new theater view, users will be able to watch videos in a widened, dimmed format that will make whatever video they’re watching the main focus of the screen, much like Hulu’s “lower lights” feature.

Theater view provides a nice break from YouTube’s plethora of ads and “what you should watch” next suggestion boxes, all without making the video fit the screen and turn what was a watchable video into a pixilated mass.

The theater view provided by YouTube currently fills the extra space on the sides of the video with red curtains. Given the HD prospect of the theater view, there’s a good chance that this will be used to make room for 16:9 videos. And if that’s not enough for you, last week YouTube’s upload limit was changed to 1GB, convinced?

Now, we just need Tay Zonday to make a HD version of Chocolate Rain, and this will really catch on. 

A machine’s ability to think is something that’s been questioned for nearly half a century, thanks to mathematician Alan Turing. Turing, who helped decipher German military codes during WWII, created a test that is designed to find out if a machine can think on its own. The test consists of a machine attempting to fool a judge into believing that it could be a human by having a text-based conversation on any subject. If the computer’s responses convince the judge that they are speaking with a human, then it has passed the Turing test, and is believed to be capable of thought.

This Sunday, six computer programs will be put through the Turing test in an attempt to win their creator not only an 18-carat gold medal and $100,000, but to prove that computers are capable of thought. The programs competing for the prize go by the names Alice, Brother Jerome, Elbot, Eugene Goostman, Jabberwacky and Ultra Hal. While the names sound like those of rejected VH1 reality show contestant names, they’re far more intelligent, and won’t be spitting on any of their opponents anytime soon.

Should the computers be found to have the ability to think, it’ll raise ethical questions as to how conscious a computer is, and if humans have the “right” to switch them off.

But the Turing test isn’t for everyone. "The test is misguided. Everyone thinks it's you pitting yourself against a computer and a human, but it's you pitting yourself against a computer and computer programmer,” criticizes Professor AC Grayling of Birkbeck College, “AI is an exciting subject, but the Turing test is pretty crude."

Do you think you’ve got what it takes to decipher whether or not you’re talking to a computer? Test your mental mettle after the jump.

Last Friday the world’s largest computing grid was launched in order to help tackle the nearly 15 million gigabytes of data that will be coming out of the Large Hadron Collider every year. 33 countries are already contributing 140 computer centers to the project, but with that much data, they’ll need worldwide assistance.

Here in the U.S. we’ve got 15 universities and three Department of Energy national laboratories contributing their power to the project (and maybe you, if you’ve decided to contribute your spare CPU cycles to the project). And every last bit of that help will be needed, because when the LHC finally gets up to full speed it will produce enough data to fill six CD’s per second.

Once the data has been processed, physicists from around the world will begin searching for he tiny signals that will lead them to discoveries about the nature of the physical universe. And perhaps then, they’ll be able to explain just why they LHC will rock us in the head.

A collective sigh of relief was let out Thursday, as a panel of federal judges who determine royalty rates for recordings ruled to renew the current royalty rate until 2012.  The ruling by the Copyright Royalty Board, a panel of three judges appointed by the Librarian of Congress, applied directly to mechanical royalties (which as we mentioned before, are the fees paid directly to songwriters and publishers of music, not the performers).

The currently royalty rate of 9.1 cents was lobbied to receive a 66 percent increase by music publishers, concerned about losing income as music sales decline. Labels and retailers pushed to judges to adopt a new model that would determine royalty payments as a percentage of wholesale revenue, however neither of these suggestions made the ruling.

One document in the hearing, submitted by an Apple executive, had threatened that a significant inflation in royalty rates could potentially force them to shut down the massively popular iTunes music store, which has sold over 5 billion songs to date. While Apple sees substantial sales, they operate with very thin margins.

There are still some in the music industry that have claimed that new rulings such as these might not be enough to satisfy the insatiable rise of illegal file sharing. “Whether these developments will be sufficient to return the music industry to health is not clear,” said Jonathan Feinstien, a music lawyer at the Krasilovsky & Gross firm in New York.

With a design so simple it falls under the “I-can’t-believe-no-one-else-thought-of-this-before” category, Sangho Jin of Yanko Design’s hanging hard drive concept is looking to clear up desk clutter, one tiny footprint at a time.

The hanging hard drive, which would mount to your laptop’s screen, provides a nice way to add additional storage to your machine without using valuable desk space. Granted, this simple shift in external HDD placement wouldn’t change any lives, there are definitely plenty of laptop users out there worried about aesthetics (looking at you, Mac users), and to them this will be a welcome change.

“Portable hard drives are not really THAT portable if you have to tote around another peripheral but maybe you should have bought a laptop with a bigger hard drive! OOO Zing! No I didn’t! Yes, yes I did just go there,” writes Yanko Design’s Long Tran on the concept’s page, “Kidding aside, the Hang it On hard drive encloser lets you hang you 2.5” companion off the back of your lappie’s LCD screen. Sure, now your MacBook Air looks like it has a tumor growing off it’s svelt lines but at least you’ll get more than a measily 80GB.”

Well said, Mr. Tran. Well said.

Video games have always been linked to providing gamers with above average hand-eye coordination, but could video games be linked to making better drivers? Allstate is looking to find out, and possibly give insurance discounts to those that do.

A new program, called InSight, will provide specialized games to 100,000 Allstate insured drivers in Pennsylvania aged from 50-75. While drivers in their 50’s and 60’s have the least amount of accidents, once they hit mid-60’s the rate begins to climb. Tom Warden, an assistant vice president at Allstate hopes that the games will provide brain fitness for these drivers, and “significant benefits … beyond dollars and cents.”

The games, developed by San Francisco’s own Posit Science, include many non-driving specific games such as Jewel Diver. In Jewel Diver you’re required to keep track of jewels underwater that are hidden by fish. The fish shuffle themselves around the screen, and the goal is to select the fishes that are hiding the treasures. As the game progresses, it gets increasingly difficult, adding more fish to the screen.

Allstate will decide next year whether or not to roll out the program in other states, and with any luck they’ll leave Grand Theft Auto IV out of their curriculum (might I suggest FlatOut?).

That’s right, you didn’t misread the headline – Microsoft is looking to pay you to use their search engine (again). Not with real money mind you, but points that can be redeemed for prizes (read: Chuck E. Cheese).

The program, called SearchPerks, will give users of Microsoft’s LIVE Search a point each time they search, with the possibility of accumulating 25 per day. However, users will only be able to collect these points once they’ve agreed to download and install a small program that allows Microsoft to track their usage.

In the past, Microsoft hasn’t been successful in getting new users for their search engine, currently only holding 8.3 percent of the search engine market. With the Live Search Club, Microsoft saw an initial boost in their search engine usage of nearly 3 percent, but the results failed to hold. The success of the search engine appears to be directly tied with the incentive programs that Microsoft offers.

If you’re looking to get in on the point-spending goodness, be sure to sign up soon. Microsoft is only allowing people to sign up until the end of the year, or until they get their target of 250,000 participants.

I bet you never thought all those searches for Lindsay Lohan would one day be profitable, did you?

Anyone that plays World of Wacraft will know all about the woes of bots. They provide players with unfair advantages, and the ability to level their character when they’re not even at their computer. Blizzard has been aware of this as well, having recently won a lawsuit against the bot program MMOGlider’s creator, MDY Industries.

For those that don’t know, MMOGlider is a third party application that runs the many repetitive tasks involved in World of Warcraft. Whether it’s leveling your character up from 1 to 70 or grinding for leatherworking materials, the application can do it for you. And the best part about it? You don’t even have to be at your computer, you simply run a script that sends your character in a pre-determined route.

Blizzard’s lawsuit is based on MMOGlider’s automation of said repetitive tasks. Using this application to complete these tasks breaks the terms of service that players agree to when they play World of Warcraft. The software is said to have sold 100,000 copies for $25 a piece.

While admittedly $6 million is no small number (unless you’re Blizzard), the amount could have been higher if MDY hadn’t won some of the prior arguments about the claimed damages in court. But there’s still a possibility for more, should Blizzard decided to appeal the judgment in favor of going for their original claim, which was double or triple that number.

The remainder of the case is set to go to court in January 2009, where the last of the issues in the legal conflict are likely to be settled.

We may or may not recognize it, but fluid is a very integral part of our everyday lives. It decides everything from our fuel economy to (in some cases) how cool our computer runs. Until now, there was only one key way of deciphering the mechanics of fluids, and that was the Prandtl equation, developed in 1904. Sadly though, the Prandtl equation has many limitations, including only having the ability to calculate only two-dimensional problems, and a steady flow (such as that of a car traveling slowly). Thanks to a breakthrough by MIT’s George Haller, that’s all about to change.

A recently developed new equation, which is a product of four years of work by Professor Haller, will apply to three-dimensional and unsteady flows. This was confirmed with the aid of Thomas Peacock, the Atlantic Richfield Career Development Associate Professor at MIT, who lead experiments in order to validate the equation. Professor Peacock states, “This is the tip of the iceberg, but we’ve shown that this theory works.” The new work will probably go down as one of the greatest scientific advances of the decade, if it survives the peer review that will come.

This innovation in the mechanics of liquids will have an overwhelming influence on many industries, including aerospace, automotive and even computers. With these breakthroughs in calculating how liquids will act and perform in different environments, there’s no doubt that your PC’s liquid cooling system will soon get an overhaul.

Going green is something that just about everyone is worrying about these days, and NETGEAR is no exception. Having recently announced a new line of Wireless-N routers with the Prius driving consumer in mind, they’ve finally thrown their hat into the eco-friendly ring.

NETGEAR’s new routers will be shipping in packaging that has been made from at least 80% recycled materials, as well as boasting a fancy new on/off switch that will allow users to save energy when the network isn’t in use. There’s also a separate on/off switch that will allow users to turn off only the router’s wireless component.

The inside of the routers will be getting quite a makeover as well, "The enhanced wireless speeds and greater coverage provided by Wireless-N technology enables the simultaneous use of applications such as voice-over-IP, video and multimedia streaming, console gaming, and Web surfing. The launch of these new Wireless-N networking solutions makes it easier and more affordable for consumers to replace their existing routers or modem routers and upgrade their WiFi networks to support these more bandwidth-intensive applications. The new product family is feature-rich in terms of performance capabilities and ease of use as well as energy-efficiency,” says Som Pal Choudhury, NETGEAR’s senior product line manager for advanced wireless products. And when he says affordable, he means it. These bad boys will run you only $89 for the router, and $119 for the router with a built in DSL modem.

There’s no secret that GPUs have some extreme muscle behind them, and a team of researchers at Michigan Technological University are harnessing this power to better understand the most complicated of real-life systems.

The project, lead by Roshan D’Souza is supercharging agent-based modeling, a powerful and computationally massive forecasting technique, with the goal of modeling complex biological systems such as the human immune response to the tuberculosis bacterium.

Mikola Lysenko, the computer science student that wrote the software demonstrated the ability of the program. A demo showing an impressive swarm of bright green immune cells surrounding and containing yellow tuberculosis bacterium was the product of millions of real-time calculations. D’Souza claims “I've been asked if we ran this on a supercomputer or if it's a movie.”

D’Souza’s only real concern is being able to do more with the technology, “We can do it much bigger,” he says. He hopes to model how a tuberculosis bacterium infection could spread from the lung to a patient’s lymphatic system, blood and vital organs.

Agent-based modeling is something that will be used to revolutionize medical research. Dr. Gary An, a surgeon specializing in trauma and critical care at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine is pioneering its use. He’s doing so by modeling another matter of life and death, sepsis. These infections, which consist of billions of agents (including cells and bacteria), have had too complex of a model to map – until now.

While admittedly most of us will need our own supercomputer to decipher the medical jargon used to simply describe the actions of the GPU powered agent-based modeling, there’s no doubt that the results will be astonishing. And it appears that they’re not the only ones taking advantage of this supreme power.