I GOT the lecture as a 10-year-old, from the father of one of my friends. “This is the future,” he said, waving his arms enthusiastically toward the squat box resting on a shelf in his living room. He had never before spoken to me with such fervor about anything, even his children. “Mark my words, kid,” he grinned. “This was the best $1,000 I ever spent.”

It was 1980. The man’s source of pride was a brand-new Betamax video cassette recorder.

Looking back, I realize that I learned something that day, and not just about unleashing one’s inner blowhard in the presence of children. It was an easily analogized lesson about the benefit of patience: of choosing the best horse in the race, not necessarily the first; of waiting for the dust to settle before staking one’s claim.

Last month, the dust settled.

Until then, two main formats competed for consumers’ high-definition DVD dollars — Blu-ray (backed by Sony, Samsung and Sharp, among others) and HD DVD, from Toshiba.

The recent avalanche of companies to side with Blu-ray (including Warner Brothers, Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Amazon) tipped the scales, and Toshiba, like Sony with its doomed Betamax players from the mid-’80s video wars, cried uncle and abandoned its format.

Perhaps it was the cautionary tale inadvertently taught by my friend’s father, but I have never been one to ride the vanguard of anything technological, preferring instead to wait for market stability and plunging prices before making a purchase. The news of Blu-ray’s victory, though, perked up my ears. As the owner of a high-definition L.C.D. television (bought, of course, once prices had dropped sufficiently), upgrading my home theater experience is at least of passing interest. As it turns out, companies that make Blu-ray machines are happy to urge me on.

“If you’re a consumer and you’ve invested in a high-definition television and you’re looking for alternative uses for it, Blu-ray is a way to expand your pleasure,” said Gene Kelsey, vice president for entertainment at Panasonic. “Based on the software and the hardware that’s available, particularly at these price points, now is a great time to buy.”

People in Mr. Kelsey’s position are paid to tell us it’s always a great time to buy. Marketing executives were saying something similar two years ago, when Blu-ray players cost $1,000. But should you buy one now that the lowest-priced models cost about $400?

There is no denying Blu-ray’s advantages. Because a dual-layer Blu-ray disc can store 50 gigabytes of data (more than five times the capacity of a standard dual-layer DVD), detail in a movie can be captured in a much higher quality, with plenty of room left over for a wealth of bonus features. And if watching the N.F.L. in high-def every Sunday is a much better experience than doing so on a regular TV (and it is; oh, it is), the same holds true for movies.

In the Blu-ray version of “300,” I discovered the female lead, Lena Headey, has fabulous pores, but Gerard Butler, who played the heroic King Leonidas, might have suffered from an ingrown hair at the base of his beard midway through the third act. Also, I found the granular sparkle of the lip gloss worn by the Oracle to be a bit distracting.

All of which is to say that the precision and clarity of picture was beyond anything I had ever seen on my TV. I wasn’t truly able to appreciate it, however, until I did a side-by-side comparison, loading up Pixar’s “Ratatouille” in both its Blu-ray version and as a standard DVD on my old player.

Samsung’s director for home product planning, Kevin Morrow, said that a Blu-ray picture contains “about a six times increase in picture quality” over that of a standard DVD, and as I toggled back and forth between them, this became glaringly apparent.

A tractor in the background in the opening shot went from fuzzy and insignificant on DVD to sharp, vibrant scenery on Blu-ray. A smooth piece of canvas turned into richly textured fabric. Every pebble, every blade of grass, every hair on every rat’s back — it was all just stunning in comparison.

You will get an intense experience on a 1080p HDTV and on a less expensive, and lower resolution, 720p TV.

Audio quality is consistently stellar across the Blu-ray platform. “Every Blu-ray model I’ve seen offers virtually the same thing,” said John Neff, a field engineer at Anderson Audio Visual East Bay, in Emeryville, Calif., which sells an assortment of Blu-ray players.

TAKEN FROM www.nytimes.com

Most speakers are built into large square boxes. This poses a problem for home theater buffs without much space to spare. JBL’s Control Now speakers are quarter-round, which means that four of them can fit together to make one round speaker.

The $250 indoor speakers come in black, and the $270 all-weather outdoor model comes in white.

But how do you mount these? They can fit on a wall or in a corner, or sit on a bookshelf. You can also suspend the speakers from the ceiling on a rod, creating a circular cone of sound with a look reminiscent of a high-quality train station announcement speaker. Very futuristic.

The speakers have three-quarter-inch tweeters and four-inch woofers and weigh 6.6 pounds apiece.

Clearly these odd-looking speakers are not for everyone. JBL recommends them for interior designers who might want to hide speakers in places where average speakers cannot go.

Geometry buffs might like to know that the Control Now is a quarter-toroid, a shape we rarely get to enjoy.

TAKEN FROM www.nytimes.com

Sometimes true surround sound is overkill. While chair-bouncing sound pumping out of a phalanx of speakers in the living room intensifies movie viewing in the living room, it’s often easier just to set up a smaller home theater system — like the Sony DAV-F200 — and call it a day.

The two 450-watt speakers and a subwoofer simulate surround sound. A glassy black central control panel that plays DVDs and CDs can sit on a stand or even be mounted to a wall. It converts standard DVDs to the high-definition 1080p standard and sends them over an H.D.M.I. cable to a high-definition TV. The speakers have a “dialogue enhancer mode” that isolates and heightens spoken parts of a film so the actors word can be heard over soaring soundtracks or explosions.

The device can also extract audio from compatible MP3 players and thumb drives. (Fans of MP3s can turn on the portable audio enhancer to smooth out compressed music files.) With an optional adapter, music lovers can connect their iPods and Bluetooth-enabled cellphones and laptops to the home theater system.

The DAV-F200 will be available next month, but Sony hasn’t yet set a price.

TAKEN FROM www.nytimes.com

One of the problems with digital video recorders like TiVo is that they eventually run out of room to record. And if you change out the internal hard drive to upgrade, you lose your library of programming.

Western Digital is offering what it thinks is a better solution. The company sells external hard drives that can add 60 hours of high-

Called My DVR Expander, the 500-gigabyte drives come in two models: a $200 eSATA model compatible with Scientific Atlanta, TiVo Series 3 and HDTV boxes, and a $150 U.S.B. device made to work with DISH Network.

The models have an important difference: the cable version can be chained to your existing drive, making the two drives work as one. With the DISH Network drive, you must first record a program on the internal drive and then transfer it over.

Both models run cooler, use one-third less power and are quieter than Western Digital’s regular models. So as you relax on the couch, you can continue to feel good about your environmental impact.

TAKEN FROM www.nytimes.com

Over the past week parts of the blogosphere have been buzzing over the discovery of a 1.5-meter Ethernet cable that is being sold for the insane price of $499.

The manufacturer is Denon, and the target customer is the “audio enthusiast.” Apparently “audio enthusiast” is Denonese for “sucker.”

The original listing for the product is unchanged, as if the company were unaware of the guffaws emanating from the geekier side of the Internet. It appears that the first discovery was publicized on CrunchGear, although I also saw listings on UberReview, Wired, and eventually Slashdot, among other places. You know how these things go.

Denon’s description of the cable is priceless:

“Denon’s 1.5 meter (59 in.) ultra premium Denon Link cable was designed for the audio enthusiast. Made from high purity copper wire and high performance connection parts, the AK-DL1 will bring out all the nuances in digital audio reproduction from any of our Denon DVD players with the Denon Link feature. Attention to detail when building this cable was used by employing high quality insulation, tin-bearing alloy shielding and woven jacketing to reduce vibration and to add durability. Additionally, signal directional markings are provided for optimum signal transfer. Rounded plug levers help prevent breakage.”

Nuances. In a digital signal, where bits are bits. And thank goodness the copper wire is high in purity. Maybe that’s where the high price comes from, what with copper costs being what they are today.

Obviously, this kind of inflated sense of worth isn’t something you can get away with in the enterprise networking realm. Or is it?

TAKEN FROM www.networkworld.com

It can’t be easy for a federal judge to admit that he was wrong when giving jury instructions in a high-profile case, but the judge in the Jammie Thomas file-swapping case has stepped up and cast serious doubt on his own actions. Following other court rulings around the country, Judge Michael Davis indicated that he may grant Thomas a new trial after telling the jury that simply “making available” a copyrighted song on P2P networks counted as infringement. Now, Davis has asked for public comment on “whether the Court committed a manifest error of law in instructing the jury.” The first public response to that question offers a resounding “yes” in response.

Nine copyright professors have filed a “friend of the court” brief (found via Threat Level) that addresses Davis’ question. While the “making available” issue can be tedious, technical, and contradictory (different court rulings have gone different ways), the brief actually does a fine job of making the debate accessible.

The main thrust of the argument is a simple one: a close look at the actual words of the relevant copyright statute show that rights holders have the exclusive prerogative to “distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public.” The key question concerns whether just making available a file in a shared directory counts as a distribution to the public, and the professors argue that it clearly does not.

Dictionaries are trotted out to define the word “distribute,” after which the professors conclude, “Although the act of making copies or phonorecords available may enable the public to acquire possession or ownership of the copies or phonorecords, unless and until members of the public actually obtain such possession or ownership the necessary final step for transforming the ‘making available’ into a distribution would be lacking.”

Jammie Thomas

The professors also argue that other cases in which judges have conflated “making available” with “distribution” are “with all due respect, incorrect” and not binding on the court. (In Atlantic v. Howell, the court indicated that “making available” was not enough to prove “distribution,” while in Elektra v. Barker, another court indicated that it was.)

The brief addresses only a question of law, not the broader question of whether Thomas is guilty of infringement. In fact, the professors suggest that copyright holders could pursue Thomas and others using a variety of different scenarios. Although simply making a file available might not count as infringement, the person who makes the file available may have violated the exclusive “reproduction right” held by copyright owners. This right is violated whenever someone copies in CD to a computer, but those cases are generally considered to be fair use. If someone copies a CD to a computer in order to do something “unfair” with it (uploading it to a P2P network), that person could be liable for infringement.

Other possible avenues of attack include charges of indirect infringement for helping others to download infringing files and charges of direct infringement for downloaders. The obvious problem here is that this sort of activity is very difficult for the RIAA to prove. Instead, the organization’s investigators generally look into shared KaZaA folders or grab the IP addresses of BitTorrent users who host parts of particular files.

It would be much simpler for the RIAA if “making available” were good enough to demonstrate copyright infringement, but if it isn’t, investigators can actually download the files in question. This isn’t the preferred alternative because it takes more time, bandwidth, and computing resources, but it does at least have the virtue of showing that an actual transmission of the file took place. 

But even this approach isn’t without problems, because the Copyright Act specifies that the distribution must be made “to the public.” There is currently some controversy about whether a rightsholder-sanctioned download counts as a “public distribution.” Many defendants argue that, since MediaSentry is employed by the RIAA to seek out and download files from P2P networks, the downloads done by the company are not unauthorized. 

If neither a MediaSentry download nor a list of files made available on P2P networks are good enough for the courts, then the RIAA could find itself in much more difficult territory.

Tokyo, Japan — Japanese police have arrested two Greenpeace activists for exposing a whale meat scandal involving the government-sponsored whaling programme. The two activists, Junichi Sato, 31, and Toru Suzuki, 41, are being investigated for allegedly stealing a box of whale meat which they presented as evidence.

West Lafayette (IN) – Researchers from Purdue University claim they are getting closer to develop a much more efficient cooling system that the traditional heatsink-fan design used in many computers today. Suresh Garimella and Eckhard Groll say they can miniaturize traditional refrigerator designs to become small enough to fit in desktop computers or even notebooks.

The design the two researchers are working on is a type of vapor-compression refrigeration, which is commonly used for large-scale air-conditioning as well as your refrigerator at home. The basic concept of this technology uses a circulating liquid in different pressure states to remove heat from a device.

Typically, vapor-compression refrigeration technology, involves four main components: An evaporator, a compressor, a condenser, and an expansion valve. A refrigeration cycle begins with the refrigerant entering the compressor as a superheated vapor at low pressure. The liquid exits the compressor as vapor with higher pressure and enters the condenser, where it is condensed as heat is removed to cooling water or via air and an assisting fan to the outside of a casing. The liquid exits the condenser as a high-pressure liquid. The pressure decreases as it flows through the expansion valve where portions of the liquid turn into cold vapor. The remaining liquid then is directed to the evaporator, where the low pressure liquid is vaporized as heat is transferred from the refrigerated space. The cycle is complete by sending the liquid back into the compressor.

The idea of using this common refrigeration technology for smaller electronic devices is not entirely new and has been discussed especially in the past 8 years in numerous scientific papers. However, the challenge appears to have been to understand how these systems can work on a small scale and how especially compressors can be miniaturized.
Garimella and Groll from Purdue now claim that they have succeeded in designing tiny compressors that pump refrigerants using penny-size diaphragms. The elastic membranes are made of ultra-thin sheets of a plastic called polyimide and coated with an electrically conducting metallic layer. The metal layer allows the diaphragm to be moved back and forth to produce a pumping action using electrical charges, or “electrostatic diaphragm compression.” So far, it is only one part of the refrigeration cycle, but the scientists believe that such a system can be made small enough to fit into laptops.

Unlike conventional cooling systems, which use a fan to circulate air through finned devices called heat sinks attached to computer chips, miniature refrigeration would dramatically increase how much heat could be removed, Garimella said.

TAKEN FROM www.tgdaily.com

There are numerous claims that rechargeable batteries are the way to go, but are they that much better than our everyday alkaline batteries? And are they truly worth all that extra money?

It’s a guarantee that batteries will die. After providing power to everything from cameras, to remote controls and your kids toys, there comes a point when batteries must move on to battery heaven. This year alone, one person will throw away an average of 8 batteries and Americans together will purchase close to 3 billion dry-cell batteries. So how do you stop yourself from following the crowd of battery tossers and buyers? RECHARGEABLE BATTERIES! Not only will you save money, but you will be taking advantage of renewable energy.

Clearly it is cheaper to reach for our old friend alkaline (whether it be those AA, AAA,C,D or 9-volts that we love so dearly), but once you pay the initial expense (Best Buy offers a Duracell 4 pack of AA batteries and charger stand for $12.99) for rechargeable batteries, there is no more expenses to owning these batteries. Rechargeable batteries can last up to 1,000 charges (longer if stored in the fridge) saving you about $80 a year, on average.

As for the environment, batteries can and will leak harmful chemicals (mercury, lead and cadmium) into landfills. Probably the best news is that rechargeable batteries are easy to recycle. And, because batteries can be recharged and reused numerous times, they contribute less waste to landfills, overall.

Nickel Cadmium (NiCd) - known for its long life but lower voltage potential than its competitors.

Nickel-Metal Hydride (NiMH) - higher voltage that the NiCd, but requires more charges.

Lithium-ion-more expensive than other rechargeable batteries, but stores more energy and lasts longer between charges. They’re perfect for battery-operated tools and they’re better for the environment because they don’t contain harmful toxins. And lithium is a natural metal therefore available in great quantities.

And even though rechargeable batteries live longer than alkaline, there comes a time when they will die as well. But don’t go throwing them away, check out the Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corporation (http://www.rbrc.org/call2recycle/) or call 877-273-2925. If there is not a site in your area to recycle your other rechargeable batteries, like those old cell phone batteries, check out EarthWorks website (http://earthworksboston.org/page/home) and they can send them off for you.

TAKEN FROM greenopolis.com