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

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.

Adobe AIR, a downloadable platform for running web-friendly apps on any operating system, is still pretty fresh on the market, but it already has a healthy number of applications in development or near completion. While many of them are simply desktop translations of web interfaces that were easy to use already, a handful of AIR apps truly make work and play easier, or just more interesting. Let’s take a look at 10 applications that make it worth the effort of downloading and installing Adobe AIR.

Note: Not every AIR app we’ve tested works nicely with the Linux alpha of AIR, so we’ve noted where at least one Linux system (Ubuntu 8.04) had problems running the app.

10. Pandora

(Windows/Mac only) The officially sanctioned desktop client for Pandora has awkwardly-placed ads and not a lot more features than the web client. Avoid a permanently-open tab and get right-click access to your favorite streams and artists with the Pandora desktop AIR client.

9. eBay Desktop

For eBay deal hunters, the eBay Desktop is a time- and frustration-saving interface to the auction site’s search and purchase functions. Sellers have extremely limited functionality at the moment, something the official eBay developers are working on, but buyers get real-time auction prices and time-remaining counts, can click item-by-item on a search results page like a feed reader, and quickly flip through item photos. No refreshing at all, which for quick-trigger buying can make a serious difference.

8. Snackr RSS Ticker

Hardcore readers of important feeds won’t flock to the Snackr news feed ticker, but anyone who wants a passive scroll of hit-or-miss RSS feeds might just love it. You can dock or hide the ticker-tape-like scroll at your screen’s edges, import OPML files from your reader of choice, and customize what’s shown. (Original post).

7. DiggTop

(Windows/Mac only) Like Digg itself, the DiggTop app is really just an efficient means of procrastinating with popular web links. But DiggTop lets you filter by, and get alerts for, certain key words that show up on the social bookmarking site, and also grabs embedded videos and pictures in the links you hover over for convenient previews.

6. Doomi Task Manager

Don’t let its unfortunate name deter you from giving the elegantly simple to-do list app Doomi a try. Add tasks by simply typing and hitting Enter. Deadlines and seeing completed tasks are optional features. The app can sit in the background as a list, or roll up into a little bar. That’s all most people really need, but the author is looking to add custom color schemes and drag/drop reorganization to make it just a bit more convenient.

5. Twhirl Twitter Client

The Twhirl full-featured Twitter client adds enough features and convenience to the mini-messaging social network that it almost starts to seem, well, productive. Quickly browse your followers and those you’re following, direct message and reply with ease, get specific message alerts, and treat tweets like feed items with a “Mark all as seen” button. If you’re going to use Twitter during your workday, you might as well make it quick and simple.

4. Klok Time Tracker

There are lots of web sites that claim to make project and time tracking easy for freelancers and by-the-minute workers, but Klok really delivers intuitive tracking to the desktop. Set up your own project aspects or use a template like “Web” or “Writing,” then time your work by hitting the “Work On …” button. The best part may be the graphs, charts, and reports produced by the little app, which are commonly restricted on “free” tracking sites. (Original post).

3. DestroyFlickr

Ok, so there’s nothing in DestroyFlickr’s interface for the photo-sharing site that you can’t do on Flickr’s web page—it just won’t look as pretty, or move so quickly. DestroyFlickr (the name comes from a mind hack concept, not vengeance) shuttles quickly around Flickr streams, making downloads and uploads drag-and-drop “affAIRs,” and offering quick editing, commenting, and re-organization. The Darkroom-inspired black background focuses attention, and multi-account users can work in all their streams at once using workspaces. In other words, it’s simple for casual Flickr fans, but strong enough for power users.

2. ReadAir Google Reader client

(Windows/Mac only) There’s a lot to like about Google Reader’s features, but some folks can’t quite get used to reading their RSS in a browser (or just don’t dig the blue-on-white template itself). ReadAir, a Mac-styled desktop app, gives you the best of both worlds, putting your GReader material into a three-paned browser. They’ve added the j/k keyboard shortcuts that Adam lamented in his original post, and next up are custom themes for XP/Vista.

1. Google Analytics Reporting Suite

If you own a piece of web real estate, Google Analytics is, as Gina pointed out, a seriously useful tracking tool. The Analytics Reporting Suite puts all the great data tools offered up free by Google into an easy-to-navigate, all-in-one container. Move fluidly from unique visits to pageviews, escape the wait for new data pages to load, and quickly filter data for specific time spans. This kind of interface-improving app is precisely what Adobe AIR was built for.
Which AIR apps are worth the spot on your own desktop? What apps are you still waiting to see before committing to a download? Let’s hear both sides in the comments.

TAKEN FROM lifehacker.com

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

2008 June 19  

The Star Streams of NGC 5907
Image Credit & Copyright: R Jay Gabany (Blackbird Observatory) - collaboration; D.Martínez-Delgado(IAC, MPIA),
J.Peñarrubia (U.Victoria) I. Trujillo (IAC) S.Majewski (U.Virginia), M.Pohlen (Cardiff),Explanation: Grand tidal streams of stars seem to surround galaxy NGC 5907. The arcing structures form tenuous loops extending more than 150,000 light-years from the narrow, edge-on spiral, also known as the Splinter or Knife Edge Galaxy. Recorded only in very deep exposures, the streams likely represent the ghostly trail of a dwarf galaxy — debris left along the orbit of a smaller satellite galaxy that was gradually torn apart and merged with NGC 5907 over four billion years ago. Ultimately this remarkable discovery image, from a small robotic observatory in New Mexico, supports the cosmological scenario in which large spiral galaxies, including our own Milky Way, were formed by the accretion of smaller ones. NGC 5907 lies about 40 million light-years distant in the northern constellation Draco.

TAKEN FROM apod.nasa.gov

On Wednesday evening the Swedish parliament voted yes to a bill that allows FRA, National Defense Radio Agency, to monitor all phone traffic and e-mail traffic in the name of national security. Unlike the police, FRA can listen in on anyone for any purpose without a court order, bringing the level of personal integrity in Sweden to an all-time-low.

The bill was passed after it was debated in parliament, with 143 votes in favor, 138 opposed and 1 representative abstaining. Before the debate the situation was crystal clear. The four party government alliance would win the vote if all party members voted in favor of the bill, but with the seven seat majority the government currently holds, only four representatives had to vote against the party line in order for the bill to fail.

With all the editorials and statements regarding integrity, copyright and online-rights published during the last months by members of these parties, surely there would be four members of the parties that would follow their convictions rather than the party line? In fact, there were four representatives who have been crystal clear in these kinds of issues: Birgitta Ohlsson (Liberal Party), Karl Sigfrid (Moderate Party), Annie Johansson and Fredrick Federley (both Centre Party). They have profiled themselves on these issues and in some cases even campaigned on them. Surely, Fredrick Federley couldn’t let down his everyone of his voters?

Things proved more complex.

Leading up to Tuesday’s debate, the bill had been heavily criticized by journalists, pirates, lawyers, bloggers, all political parties’ youth organizations - as well as the head of the Swedish intelligence agency Säpo. Rick Falkvinge of The Pirate Party was one of the voices that spoke most strongly against the bill. Also, all of the four daily newspapers’ senior political editors were heavily opposed. Rumours had begun circulating that Karl Sigfrid was indeed going to vote against the bill while Fredrick Federley wrote an ambivalent blog post that indicated where this was heading.

The debate was intense with defense minister Sten Tolgfors of the Moderate Party showing his arrogance, ignorance and lack of understanding time and again (if the bill was not passed, he said, parliament would be risking the lives of Swedish UN troops in Afghanistan).

Towards the end of the debate, Fredrick Federley was on the speakers list. He pulled off a tear-filled act (including sentimentalities about his mother) in which he said he had to follow his conviction but at the same time didn’t want to let his party down. He motioned for the bill to be sent back to parliament’s defense committee for expanding the safeguards of individual rights. This was a carefully orchestrated piece of political theater designed to keep the government alliance together while at the same time allow the Centre Party (which until yesterday held high integrity and online rights) not to lose face. At this time, Federley knew that the bill was being reworked on an initiative from the Liberal Party to a new version that had a new authority controlling the controllers.

The original vote was due to be held on Wednesday morning and following an initiative from The Pirate Party, a crowd of hundreds was gathered in front of parliament to protest the bill and try to convince representatives to vote against it. The crowd was a mixture of pirates, the journalists’ union, the political parties’ youth organizations and worried citizens. Following the debate on Tuesday, the morning vote only considered if the bill should be sent back for revision and the vote was in favor.

In a farce of democracy, it was announced that the bill was to be revised in record time and a new vote be taken later in the evening. “I think the law needs to be re-written. It is not enough to create a few checks and balances … It is the law itself there is something wrong with,” Anders Eriksson, former Chief of Swedish intelligence agency Säpo, told Swedish radio before the vote.

By now, Fredrick Federley and Annie Johansson of the Centre Party had put themselves in a position where they could show to their voters that they had “improved” the bill while at the same time they could vote for the revised version to the happiness and joy of their party colleagues. So, what about the other possible nay-sayers?

According to the buzz on the blogs, Karl Sigfrid of the Moderate Party had decided to vote against the bill and was taken into a party meeting where 30 representatives from the Moderate Party along with party leader and Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt were on a speech list, bashing him one after the other until he couldn’t take it anymore.

And the remaining? Birgitta Ohlsson of the Liberal Party was as lame as her Centre Party counterparts: She abstained her vote, according to an interview in Dagens Nyheter “with respect to my liberal consciousness and to my voters but also to my party colleagues”.

When the FRA bill version 1.01 was brought back into the chamber on Wednesday evening, the outcome could only go one way. The Government parties along with PM Fredrik Reinfeldt had decided that this bill should go through and with the internal critics effectively silenced the bill was voted through, plunging Sweden into DDR era lack of privacy. How the bill is compatible with Human Rights (The right to respect privacy, family, home and correspondence) will be decided later in the court of the European Union where a number of opposition representatives will bring it to be tried.

The only liberal voting according to her ideology rather than her party line was Camilla Lindberg of the Liberal Party. In an editorial in today’s Expressen she explains why: “My loyalty is with my voters. And with myself and my conviction. I couldn’t get myself to vote in favour of the bill, regardless of the arguments from my colleagues and the last-minutes improvements. [...] If the surveillance poses a threat for integrity and freedom without having a proved positive effect, I can’t support such a bill.”

TAKEN FROM torrentfreak.com