Sony, purveyor of extremely expensive consoles and rootkits, has launched an interesting portable media player that just has to be seen to be believed. Is it too quirky for western markets? Perhaps. The following video does some justice to understanding what it is, and how freaky it is too. {Update: The estimated retail for this device with only 1GB of storage, currently only available in Japan is ~$350 U.S. Whatever Sony is smoking, I WANT SOME!!!}
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.
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.
Some key inaccuracies in the PCWorld story...
"This is not commercial HD content being blocked, this is the users' own content," Gutmann said. "The more premium content you have, the more output is disabled."
We have been playing non commercial HD content on our Vista PCs since.....Vista was in beta. Heck, I am playing some right now, a 1280x720p h.264 encoded capture of a television program, on my new Emerson 32" HDTV. Mr. Gutmann is basing his assumptions on long-past issues with early Vista betas that *did* exhibit issues with unprotected HD content. A year has passed, Mr. Gutmann. Try to update your fear mongering with some updated facts. We have implored you to do this for quite some time.
After being modestly harassed for covering the Xbox360 $1 Billion warranty extension, we were still left scratching our heads, given that Microsoft went out of its way to NOT be forthcoming as to exactly what the design flaw in the Xbox360 was. It is really no secret in the community that the flaw revolved around inadequate cooling for the graphics LSI. Vast anecdotal testimony on numerous blogs illustrates this point on a grand scale. Still, it's nice to see that Nikkei's Tech-On portal decided to perform a moderately scientific analysis. We tend to agree with these guys. An 80-90c temperature differential on the LSI heatsink is a wee bit too much. Worse, however, is that they found no attempts to mitigate this problem on a repaired Xbox360 console. Tech-On reports...
Finally, we opened the chassis of the Xbox 360 repaired in May 2007 and compared it with the other Xbox 360 we purchased in late 2005.
"Huh? The heat sinks and fans are completely identical, aren't they?"
To our surprise, the composition of the repaired Xbox 360 looked completely the same as that of the Xbox 360 purchased in late 2005. It turned out that Microsoft provided repair without changing the Xbox 360's thermo design at least until May 2007.
I get these things all the time. I fail to see why people fall for them. If someone sends me a bill I do not owe through the mail, do I pay it? Of course not. The basic lesson, not to trust any transaction you did not personally initiate, has not been well recieved with the American public. Consumer Reports latest survey puts the tally at $7 billion dollars lost to phishing, and other scams, over the past two years. Sigh... this can easily be avoided, employing common sense. VNUNET Reports...
A million US victims lost "billions of dollars" to email phishing scams in the past two years, new research has warned.
According to Consumer Reports's latest State of the Net survey, American consumers lost more than $7 billion over the last two years to viruses, spyware, and phishing scams.
Additionally, the survey shows that consumers face a one in four chance of succumbing to an online threat, a number that has slightly decreased since last year.
After showcasing its Tech 5 engine technology at MacWorld, iD Software has finally come out and told the world what they are going to do with Tech 5. They have announced an entirely new game franchise, Rage. Rage is expected to deviate from iD's long love affair with First Person Shooters by offering wide open outdoor sections with adventure and RPG elements. Rage will not, however, deviate from John Carmack's long standing refusal to embrace DirectX. We suspect that this is probably a result of it being simultaneously developed for PC, Mac, Xbox360, and PS3 environments. According to John, in his keynote address, "There's no DX10 feature that's going to be driven in Rage." Here is a small sample below. Head over to Fileshack here for a much larger, and much longer full developer walkthru version.
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.
