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Sony cuts rear-projection TV’s, allies with Samsung on future LCD production

January 17th, 2008
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As we’ve previously reported, the falling price of LCD TV’s in 2007 has driven a number of companies to form strategic alliances or partnerships with each other. Now Sony appears to be the latest company adopting the trend in an effort to cut costs and streamline production. Read more…

Current Events, Technology

The end of the cable set-top box? Yes, Comcast says

January 10th, 2008

Comcast, the United States’ largest cable operator, says the set-top box’s days are numbered.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Tuesday, CEO Brian Roberts predicted in a keynote address that by the end of the year, “virtually the entire cable industry will support Tru2way,” an “open cable” standard that would render the bulky boxes moot by directly integrating any U.S. cable provider’s service with a variety of devices. Initial partners in the Tru2way endeavor include Motorola, TiVo, Intel, Samsung Electronics, Microsoft, LG Electronics, Cisco Systems, and Sun Microsystems.

Photo: Comcast's AnyPlay device

Roberts also showed off a device, unveiled on Monday, that Comcast has co-branded with another partner, Matsushita Electric Industrial unit Panasonic. The AnyPlay, which has an 8.5-inch display screen, can record up to 60 hours of video, and it plays DVDs and CDs. It is slated to begin selling in the United States later this year.

Although Comcast CEO Brian Roberts indicated earlier to Reuters that Tru2way marks a step toward an “open, national, and interoperable structure between cable companies,” the Consumer Electronics Association has argued that Tru2way would not be the truly open system that the Federal Communications Commission wants because it would not be compatible with the technologies of noncable video suppliers.

Ahem, DirecTV and Verizon Fios? The “era of closed cable” may be coming to an end, as Roberts said, but the wars between providers of television, broadband, and telephone services are far from over.

Indeed, the AnyPlay device is designed to play and record shows from any U.S. cable operator’s system–but not those of satellite providers.

Originally Posted on Webware [dot] com by Zoë Slocum | January 8, 2008, 2:02 PM PST

Recent Entries, Technology

RIAA: Those CD rips of yours are still “unauthorized”

December 13th, 2007

Those MP3 and AAC files that you’ve ripped from your CD collection are still “unauthorized copies” in the eyes of the recording industry. In a brief filed late last week, the RIAA said that the MP3 files on a PC owned by a file-sharing defendant who had admitted to ripping them himself were “unauthorized copies.”

Atlantic v. Howell is a bit unusual because the defendants, husband and wife Jeffrey and Pamela Howell, are defending themselves against the recording industry’s lawsuit without the benefit of a lawyer. They were sued by the RIAA in August 2006 after an investigator from SafeNet discovered evidence of file-sharing over the KaZaA network. Read more…

Current Events, Entertainment

Random Flickr Goodness

December 5th, 2007

Earlier this morning I found an interesting article on having a single random image come from your Flickr photostream with out having to use all the “stuff” from the API. Seeing that this was something that I wanted to do for my main header photo, I decided to give it a try.
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Site Updates

Productive Arguing - from BBC Relationships

November 20th, 2007

Couple Cheesed-OffDifferences of opinion are normal and healthy in adult relationships and learning to compromise is a skill required in many areas of life. You might want to print out this page and pin it to your notice board to remind you both whenever a disagreement arises.
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Current Events, Documentation, Entertainment