A Chinese national consortium (consisting of university engineers, government officials, and a Chinese video standards group) alongside the DVD Forum (arbitor of the HD-DVD standard) has come to an agreement regarding the components to be used in China's forthcoming CH-DVD standard. Why is this an important development?
Apart from differences such as encoding formats (the Chinese favor their own AVS codec), this means that a country with roughly 20% of the population of the earth is behind a standard that is mechanically and optically favorable to HD-DVD. With Chinese manufacturing capability behind it, CH-DVD should be a huge success there. With the Chinese economy being what it is, prices for such a format have to be within the reach of its indigenous customer base. Given these premises, HD-DVD will be a huge beneficiary of the economies of scale that will come into play here.
It is still too early to tell who will win the high definition format war. The two leading formats, HD-DVD and BlueRay, barely account for single digit percentages of worldwide video sales. Still, if history is to be our guide, one or the other of the formats will indeed take off when players cross the $200 and $100 price thresholds. With this new development, it appears likely that HD-DVD will get there first.
Ubisoft has released totally free versions of the games Far Cry , Prince Of Persia: Sands Of Time , and Rayman Raving Rabbids on Fileplanet today. These releases may be part of a growing trend to recycle content through ingame advertising, something all 3 of these releases utilize to be "free". With the explosive growth of online advertising revenue, perhaps this will become a sustainable business model? The Inquirer reports...
Out of these three games, Far Cry is the most well known one. The game
appeared from nowhere - actually, from German studio ran by Turkish
brothers- and single-handedly wiped out launch effects of Doom 3 and
Half-Life 2. This is the game that surprised the market, and with later
appearance of 64-bit enhancements and graphical tweaks, this game still
looks rather actual. This was also the very first title to offer HDR
(High Dynamic Range) - in a form of manual controls.
Proper system cooling is a big concern for the high end system builder. One area often overlooked from a
thermal load standpoint is hard disk storage. Today
we will address this issue by taking a look at Vantec's Vortex Hard Drive Cooling System.
NEW YORK - Armed with a soldering iron and a large supply of energy drinks, a slight, curly haired teenager has developed a way to make the iPhone, arguably the gadget of the year, available to a much wider audience.
George Hotz of Glen Rock, N.J., spent his last summer before college figuring out how to "unlock" the iPhone, freeing it from being restricted to a single carrier, AT&T Inc.
The procedure, which the 17-year-old posted on his blog Thursday, raises the possibility of a cottage industry springing up to buy iPhones, unlocking them and then selling them to people who don't want AT&T service or can't get it, particularly overseas.
The GlobeAndMail reports a somewhat misguided story about internet domain registrars, like Register and Tucows, allowing registrars to pay an additional fee that allows them to keep their registration records anonymous. In this age of decreasing privacy and increasing fraud, it is just a good idea. Consider that any 13 year old can WHOIS an open DNS record.
In the article, the argument is being made that this helps terrorists stay anonymous, too. Now let us pretend to be a little rational. The last time we checked, you are innocent until proven guilty, at least in the U.S.. Espousing racist, terrorist FUD on a website does not make you a criminal, it merely makes you intolerant and stupid. Locked registrar records can be unlocked with a court order, as we well know. We have had to do this ourselves, after recieving threats from a nutcase last year. Do we give up the tenants of liberty and the rule of law because we are afraid of what the boogeyman might do? Benjamin Franklin put it succinctly;"those who would sacrifice a little liberty to obtane temporary safety deserve neither liberty, nor safety."
People who use loopholes and weaknesses in law to stay hidden will always do so. People with criminal intent cannot be controlled by anything less than due diligence and hard work. It will always be this way. This is a fools argument, leveraging people's fear of the terrorist boogeyman to make an argument with no merit. The GlobeAndMail reports...
This service is hugely popular: Civil-liberties advocates and anyone else who values their privacy flock to it. But it's also very useful to another group of people, halfway around the globe: On one of the world's largest pro-Hamas websites, viewers can download martyrdom videos that feature the diatribes of masked men shortly before they launch deadly attacks. Look up the registration info for that site, and you'll get that Yarmouth address and phone number.
The challenge this situation poses is not unprecedented. Years ago, authorities noticed that child pornography websites, though often operated from outside North America, made use of North American anonymous-registration services. In response, a large number of watchdog groups began hunting down such sites to force the registration firms to shut them down.
“There's nothing near that level [of public monitoring] with terrorist websites,” says Wade Deisman, Director of the National Security Working Group at the University of Ottawa. Government intelligence services don't have the resources to manage the scale of the problem. “I haven't seen anything that comes even close to addressing this issue,” he says.
NEW YORK - Armed with a soldering iron and a large supply of energy drinks, a slight, curly haired teenager has developed a way to make the iPhone, arguably the gadget of the year, available to a much wider audience.