NASA photo, video collection to be digitized

With a 50-year collection of photos, videos, films and other material, NASA's archives from manned and unmanned space missions is almost as vast as outer space.

And now, NASA is undertaking a project to put all of that material into a central archive that can be searched by space flight aficionados.

In an announcement Thursday, NASA said it has reached a deal with the nonprofit, San Francisco-based Internet Archive to scan, archive and manage the agency's vast collection. The effort will be paid for solely through grants, foundations and individual contributions received by the Internet Archive.

NASA already has much of its collection online, but the material is divided up into more than 20 different imagery categories, making it hard to find specific images or archives unless a user knows exactly where it is, said spokesman Bob Jacobs. "One of the challenges, and the thing that interested the Internet Archive, is that the agency didn't have digital media storage [procedures in place] as one of its core competencies," he said. "The bottom line here is that we have lots of assets ... but we had no real coordinated and certainly no comprehensive search capability ... to find the best of our images."

That will change with the creation of a single resource online where visitors can search and find the high- and low-resolution images and information they want, he said.

The agency will begin by providing the most easily accessible images and other resources so they can be put into the new online database, with additional material added as it is unearthed. "There's 50 years' worth of materials here, and it's in a variety of media and locations," including 10 NASA field centers, Jacobs said.

Much of what is in the collection may be surprising when it is released as the five-year project gets up to speed, he said. "I don't think that any of us know the depth to which a lot of these assets are stored. You finish one project and you open up another box filled with things you've never seen before."

Paul Hickman, office manager for the Internet Archive, said the group will house the digitized collection on its high-capacity redundant servers in San Francisco, Europe and Egypt. Presently, the group handles an estimated 5 petabytes of storage, but more capacity can be added. "Whatever they have, we'll have the capacity for it," he said.

The Internet Archive was selected by NASA for the project following a competitive process, he said.

The images and other data will likely be provided to the Internet Archive on hard drives so that it can be transferred to the group's archives for storage, Hickman said. Other materials, including printed documents, microfilm, books, computer presentations, audio files and VHS video, will be scanned or copied and then digitized for the online archive.

Initial plans for the project call for the Internet Archive to consolidate NASA's major image collections in the first year, with more to come the year after that. In the third year, NASA and the Internet Archive will identify analog imagery that needs to be digitized and added. The two partners will also work to build a system to automatically capture, catalog and store future material in the online archive.

The project will allow the space agency to more easily share and showcase its unique achievements, including remarkable photos from its Mars rover missions and from its manned and unmanned voyages to the Moon and beyond.

"Any opportunity that we have to allow the public to experience these missions, well, they're just incredible opportunities for us to do that," Jacobs said. "We have some of the most amazing imagery of anyone on the planet."

Seagate to offer solid-state drives in 2008

Seagate Technology LLC plans to add solid-state drives based on flash memory chips to its lineup of storage products sometime in 2008, the company said Thursday.

Seagate will introduce the drives across a range of products including desktop and notebook PCs, offering various storage capacities, said Woody Monroy, a Seagate spokesman. Monroy confirmed comments made by the company in published reports earlier in the day.

"We have solid-state drives on every road map that we have," Bill Watkins, the company's CEO, told The Wall Street Journal in an interview.

SSDs, as solid-state drives are also known, use flash memory instead of magnetic disks to store information. Flash is a type of non-volatile memory, which means the chips retain stored information when power is off. Other memory types, such as DRAM, lose data when the power goes off.

SSDs offer a couple advantages over disk-based drives: they're lighter, consume less power, and more rugged, making them ideal for laptops and mobile devices. They are also more expensive, but the price gap is narrowing as flash memory becomes increasingly cheaper.

Seagate already makes hybrid drives, which combine flash memory with magnetic disks. Its Momentus 5400 PSD hybrid drive stores the most commonly accessed data on flash memory instead of on disks, which improves read time and speeds up the process of booting a computer, the company said.

The drives are intended to be used in laptops and are available in capacities up to 160GB, according to Seagate's Web site.

Seagate will use the new flash drives to augment its product lineup for certain applications, but predicts far greater demand for its hybrid, or "flash-embedded," drives. "We have a pretty compelling product in hybrid drives; that's where we see a large part of the storage market going in the future, much bigger than SSD," Monroy said.

In January, Seagate joined an industry alliance of storage vendors promoting hybrid drive technology, also including Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Inc., Fujitsu Ltd., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and Toshiba Corp. That capability also complements a feature of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Vista OS, designed to remove the delay often encountered while a computer searches for and retrieves files from its hard drive. Intel Corp. also uses a similar approach to speed the performance of its Centrino Duo notebook platform.

As the high cost of flash and hybrid drives drops closer to traditional hard drives, consumers will soon fuel increased demand for the superior performance of solid state, analysts said. In June, iSuppli Corp. forecasted that by the end of 2009, 12% of notebooks would include SSDs, and 35% of notebooks would use hybrid hard drives.

Microsoft uses Silverlight for experimental search site

Microsoft Corp. has launched an experimental Web site that plays with two technologies the company plans to make a big part of its Web strategy: Internet-based search and Silverlight.

The site, called "Tafiti," which in Swahili means "do research," provides a combination of Microsoft's Live Search with an uncommon interface built using Silverlight. Microsoft launched Silverlight -- a combination of player and development technology -- in April as a way to embed multimedia graphics within Web browsers. The technology competes with Adobe Systems Inc.'s Flash and Flash Player. Live Search is Microsoft's search engine, which the company has completely overhauled in the past two years and continues to optimize in an effort to compete with Google Inc. and others.

Microsoft developed Tafiti with Seattle-based design firm Jackson Fish Market LLC as a way for people to organize information and do research for a project that would entail searching for various topics from different resources on the Web, including Web pages, images and books. Microsoft also wanted to show how its nascent Silverlight technology could create a new Web experience for search, the company said. Microsoft has not said whether it plans to use the site in a commercial way.

The search experience Microsoft presents in Tafiti is unlike most currently found on the Web. The graphics on the home page have a similar look and feel to the graphical user interface of Windows Vista -- after all, Silverlight is based on Windows Presentation Foundation, the graphical subsystem contained in Vista. The page includes a box for entering a search topic on the left side of the screen, which is created to look like the top of a piece of looseleaf paper, with a blank white section in the center with the heading "Web" where search results appear. On the right is a notepad-like application that Microsoft calls a "shelf," with thumbnail-size screen shots of what look like Web pages.

Once a search topic is entered, the results come up in the center. Users can drag and drop searches they want to look more closely to one of the search shelves on the right side of the screen. These searches can be stacked on top of each other on each shelf, and when a user clicks on the notepad with the saved searches, they appear in the center of the screen on graphics that look like torn pieces of paper. Users then have the option to create a link to the page in a blog through the "Blog it" command or to e-mail the Web site to someone via the "E-mail it" command.

Previous searches also are saved in a similar way, with a new box appearing on the left to begin a new search that is stacked on top of the previous search so that it can be accessed if a user so chooses.

Users also can look at search results in a "Tree View" by clicking on that command on top of the search results page. That takes users to a page on which a tree appears with the first few words of all of the different search results appearing as various branches. Mousing over a search result makes a notepad pop up with some information from the search result and a link to the Web page.

Tafiti runs on Windows Vista and XP SP 2, and is accessible through Internet Explorer Versions 6 and 7 and Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.8 and 2.0.x on these operating systems. It's also available on Firefox 1.5.0.8, 2.0.x and Apple Safari 2.0.4 on Apple Inc.'s Mac OS X.