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Circuit City's Offer to Take My HD DVD Drive
Tweet Share on Facebook March 7, 2008 Comment (3)I'm not biting. Circuit City is quietly offering to let customers return their HD DVD players and apply the cost toward one that plays the Blu-ray format, which recently won a two-year format war. The offer covers any HD DVD drive bought in the past 90 days. It's a nice gesture by Circuit City.
But the math doesn't work.
A low-end Blu-ray player costs $400 at Circuit City. My HD DVD drive cost me about $100 a few months back. So I'd pay $300 for the upgrade.
For now, I've got HD DVD disks that I can rent from Netflix. And by the holidays, even Sony's Blu-ray drives should cost only $300 or so. Cheaper players could be as little as $200 by then.
I'll wait. The HD DVD drive does a good job of upconverting standard DVDs. Plus it's supposed to play my home videos in high definition, though I haven't tried it yet. It'd be nice if I can burn a few minutes of HD-quality video to a standard DVD and play it in the HD DVD drive.
Seems like a keeper, even if it is a loser.
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Apple Opens the iPhone
Tweet Share on Facebook March 7, 2008 Comment (2)The swooning seems rampant and the criticism little: Apple has a hit with its description yesterday of how it would open iPhones to third-party software.
The move finally justifies all the iPhone hype, writes Farhad Manjoo on his Salon blog. "Apple CEO Steve Jobs unlocked the iPhone's true capabilities," which he describes as a "the first fully-mobile general-purpose computer. It was a Mac you could carry around with you, and that was a very big deal."
And the same can be said for the iPod Touch, the phoneless version of the iPhone. It's clear that Apple has much larger plans for its hand-helds than just cellphones and music players.
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Data Thieves Unlikely to Freeze Your PC
Tweet Share on Facebook March 6, 2008 Comment (1)Calling it the "popsicle hack," a PC market analyst is throwing cold water on concerns that computers are widely vulnerable to a new security breach. Princeton researchers (.pdf) drew widespread attention when they said that freezing a computer's memory chips preserves data that normally disappear when a computer is turned off. Someone who chills the chips can retrieve data after the PC has been powered down.
Roger Kay of Endpoint Technologies makes the process sound at least far-fetched and maybe laughable in the real world. Someone would have to have access to a notebook when it's running or sleeping (not turned off) and then spray liquid nitrogen to freeze the chips. Then the thief would have to abscond with the memory sticks to another machine to sniff out the precious data—and return to the target machine to apply the revealed password. Only then could the bad guy open an encrypted hard drive.
While possible, the attack remains much less likely than much more mundane methods of cracking a computer, Kay says. "Anyone who knows the security biz knows that there is no such thing as absolute security, only reasonable security for a given situation," he adds. "Commercial-grade security is good enough for most businesses, but spooks need a higher grade."
So maybe James Bond has to worry about keeping his laptop out of the freezer. But not the rest of us.
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33 Million U.S. Homes Could Stream HD by 2012
Tweet Share on Facebook March 6, 2008 Comment (2)One of the practical arguments against streaming HDTV from the Internet is the narrowness of the pipes into most American homes. A study from Parks Associates says that a 10-megabit connection is needed to stream HD content and that only about 9 million U.S. homes would qualify this year.
But that number should leap to 33 million homes by 2012, says the report by Yuanzhe Cai at Parks.
For now, according to a report from In-Stat, the average download speed at U.S. homes is 3.8 Mbps. That connection is costing us an average of $38 a month.
According to Vudu, those average speeds should be enough to stream its HD movies. But to squeeze through the pipe, Vudu must be compressing the signal dramatically. What Vudu calls HD looks only marginally better than DVD quality on my 42-inch plasma set.
By the way, these numbers are for streaming, which means near-instant watching. Downloading high-quality HD for watching later is easier, depending on a viewer's patience.
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Yes, It’s a Tool for Clamshells
Tweet Share on Facebook March 6, 2008 Comment (4)Here's one of the more outrageous products that I've seen at tech shows: the Open It ($11) package opener. It isn't the product itself but the need for it that's contemptible: that we'd need a gadget to protect us from the packaging on other products.
Way too much electronic gear comes in those despicable clamshell blister packs. Marketers say the plastic displays well and discourages theft. But we've all cut our hands from trying to rip them open, even cautiously with scissors.
The Open It offsets its clippers to help protect your vulnerable flesh. The makers call it "Wrap Rage." Indeed.
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Amazon’s Music Store Beats Apple’s
Tweet Share on Facebook March 5, 2008 Comment (2)Six months after it launched, Amazon's music store has become my favorite. It's easy to navigate, usually has what I'm looking for, and is beautifully consistent in selling songs without copy restrictions.
I worried that the buying process would be more cumbersome than at Apple's iTunes store. I use iTunes as my primary music program, and the iTunes store works seamlessly with the software.
But Amazon has crafted a nifty piece of software that downloads music from its store directly to iTunes. It works without a hitch.
Yes, it requires an extra click or two compared with buying from the iTunes store. But on occasion, I've bought a song or two from iTunes by accident that comes with copy protection. And like many consumers, I'd just as soon skip buying at all rather than have that "digital rights management" gum up the works.
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Olympus Shrinks Its Digital SLR
Tweet Share on Facebook March 5, 2008 CommentSerious digital photographers love their single-lens-reflex models, partly because they can switch out lenses—and partly for the cameras' more sophisticated electronics. Shutter lag, for example, all but disappears with most SLRs.
But the cameras also come with more heft. So it's promising to see that Olympus has trimmed more size from its latest model. The E420 ($500, body only) is about 5 inches by 3.5 inches by 2 inches. That's not quite small enough to slip into a typical pocket, but it's getting close. Olympus also says that at 13.4 ounces, the camera is at least 20 percent lighter than competitors'.
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Books Yearn to Be Free of Copy Protection
Tweet Share on Facebook March 5, 2008 CommentRandom House and Penguin have said they'll soon start selling audiobooks without copy protection, making it easier to play their books on the same hand-helds that play our music. The publishers seem worried that their audiobooks with digital rights management aren't selling.
I can only hope the same will happen for specialized E-book readers from Sony and Amazon. They just don't do enough to justify the hassles of their copy protection.
Those devices offer great screens and innovative features for reading electronic books, writes Michael McGuire at Gartner. But in the end, consumers mostly want the content and have resisted the cost of books that can play in only one device.
Maybe some consumers are drawn by add-ons, such as bookmarking and highlighting. But McGuire says consumer electronics makers seem overly fixated on adding things, including all the hype about the extra capabilities of Blu-ray disk players. "Truly, some of these features are nice to have, but really, isn't the movie, the TV show, or the book what matters?"
In my life, features get trumped by convenience. Lifting copy protection from audiobooks is a step in that direction. We can only hope the E-book readers aren't far behind.
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Fortune Finds Trouble With Steve Jobs
Tweet Share on Facebook March 4, 2008 Comment (1)Maybe I misspoke yesterday when I referred to Apple as Jobs & Co. Maybe it should be "Jobs Co." At least that's the impression left by another story in this week's issue of Fortune magazine, a profile of Apple's CEO titled "The Trouble With Steve Jobs."
It's in the same issue, dated March 17, that names Apple the most admired company. The separate profile of Jobs describes his singular impact on the tech company and risks generated by his "combustible genius."
An overview says: "Jobs likes to make his own rules, whether the topic is computers, stock options, or even pancreatic cancer. The same traits that make him a great CEO drive him to put his company, and his investors, at risk." Author Peter Elkind describes, for example, how Jobs delayed surgery on his pancreatic cancer for nine months as he pursued alternative treatments, all the while keeping his illness from the public.
While giving Jobs his due as an artist who has managed to turn around a major company, Elkind writes that "it is also important to understand the ways in which Jobs' attempts to manipulate his world pose risks for Apple and thus its investors."
Jobs, not surprisingly, refused to comment for the article.
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Deloitte: Patients Want Electronic Health Records
Tweet Share on Facebook March 4, 2008 Comment (13)There should be no doubt that that Google, Microsoft, and others are on to something with their efforts to enable electronic health records, according to a survey by the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions. The center reports that 3 of 4 consumers want their doctors to provide online access to an integrated medical record and that 1 in 4 would pay more for the service.
More than 70 percent of consumers want their hospitals to provide online access to their medical records and test results. Again, 1 in 4 would pay more for the service.
And nearly half of consumers would be willing to use a software program or website to create a personal health record of the sort envisioned by Google, Microsoft, Revolution Health, and others.
A key to success, says Paul Keckley, the Deloitte center's executive director, is to keep physicians at the middle of any electronic record-keeping. Doctors want to be a coach of sorts for consumers in managing their healthcare, Keckley says, "and the consumer wants the physician to be the coach."
But doctors are likely to resist the push to electronic records, which they may view as threatening their role. The issue illustrates a broader disconnect between what doctors do with technology to help their patients and what consumers want them to do, Keckley says.
