Freesat is a new initiative from the BBC and ITV that, it claims, makes digital TV free. Boasting over 80 digital TV and radio channels it also gives “super fast digital text and enhanced interactivity, as well as digital subtitles and audio description”, all for free. Well actually that’s a bit of a con, you have to pay £150 for the full all-singing-all-dancing package, but its still cheaper than most other digital suppliers that work on contract.
And this contract free system is a great advantage of this nifty piece of technology. However, many of you may be thinking: whats the difference between that and freeview??? Well, for a start it offers more TV channels (numbers aren’t currently available but estimates put the number as higher) and digital radio channels. It also has a far bigger coverage, at 98% of the UK as opposed to the 73% that freeview has. Also it opens up opportunities for HD, and with these boxes comes the ability to store, pause and rewind TV, which is a big advantage on most freeview boxes.
Verdict: The jury is out, but it looks good and could have a promising future…
There are so many things in the Diamond that are iPhone-ish. Like Samsung’s Armani phone and LG’s Prada. Lotsa whistles.
However, the iPhone world order is such that the iPhone thrives on a lot of third-party apps and support, and pervasive decadent iPhone culture. For the competition, chipping away at such world order is tall order.
Verdict: Nevertheless, I like it. Very eye candy (if only because iPod has become so commonplace).
I know it may seem like most of my recent posts have been on the I-phone, and that is true, but it has to be said that the I-phone really is the product to beat. And if current rumors are true then it will be getting even better.
It is almost certain that the new I-phone will have the capacity for 3G, which will both make it easier and quicker to use, but make it more accessible to people in countries where 3G is less available than Wi-Fi, such as Italy. It also may include a QWERTY keyboard which is becoming very popular and would solve one of the problems with the I-phone, and that is that the keyboard is often quite difficult to use especially if you have large fingers! It will also (probably) come with the ever more popular GPS which will mean that it will be even MORE popular!!!
Things, it has to be said, aren’t looking as good for microsoft as they were 5 years ago. Revolts over Vista and the sustained demand for XP service packs leaves one thinking that Vista was a bit of a failure. This was preceeded by the sudden popularity boost in macs, and the i-pod is one thing that Microsoft can’t compete with. Neithers the i-phone. Or the I-mac. Oh and they’re great new security system had to be abondoned due to EU regulations regarding fair trade. And then they watched as the intenet slipped away from them thanks to google, myspace, youtube and yahoo (to name just a few). So what does Microsoft do? Use what they have a lot of: money. And even that didn’t really work.
In attempt to battle Google’s domination of the internet, Microsoft put in a bid to buy Yahoo, which would get them back into the internet game. However eventually they were forced to walk away due to the stubbornness of Yahoo and try something else, and what better than Facebook?
Microsoft already own a stake in Facebook (approxamatly $240 million of the $15 facebook values itself at) and according to the wall steet journal Micosoft bankers have been making subtle signals to Facebook to see if it would be open to a full acquisition. Who knows how this will play out… but there’s only one way to find out!
Yes, the years favorite phone/gadget/apple product has yet again made moves that will increase its ever fluctuating sales. This time its not price cuts, or promise of a 3G version but a move that will see the I-phone available to more people and will give more options. This is the news that British phone company Vodafone, having failed miserably in their bid to sell the i-phone in Britain and Germany, have secured a deal that will allow them to sell the ever popular handset in 10 countries: Australia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, India, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey.
This is good news in many ways: firstly those in the countries named will now be able to get this ‘revelation’ for themselves. It also means that, as normally happens when competition arrives, the prices (or rather the cost of the price plans available) may well decrease which in tern may make it more affordable for many people, thus increasing teh number those who can buy it.
All in all this is a positive move, but one that leaves us feeling a bit sorry for Microsoft. Not.
I forgot to blog about it a few days ago. Though only speculated a few decades back, the memristor is only discovered now.
Called the enigmatic 4th dimension of the electric circuit (the others are the resistor, capacitor and inductor), it’s a layer of titanium dioxide sandwiched by 2 electrodes. The HP geeks discovered that its resistance relies on the previous charge in it. The keyword here is previous. This means it can store data even when the power is shut off.
Yawn, just like flash memory.
But wait. The difference is that it stores data faster and at greater density.
Verdict: The difference is speculative at best. Pure science. Not much technology yet.
Let’s talk three things about movies for this once. Oh, the third thing is that there’s some high -tech issue in Iron Man that I have a bone to pick with.
1. Did you notice the pattern?
Gwyneth Paltrow, Robert Downey Jr., Jeff Bridges, and Favreau in Iron Man.
Sean Penn in Hulk.
Suddenly, it has become vogue-ish for acclaimed drama actors and directors to figure unabashedly in popcorn movies, movies that purvey the original reason why people go to cinema houses in the first place — to have fun.
Cinema is the natural evolution of the stage play and it maintained more or less the latter’s original objective — to provide fun and escapism for the majority of lowly mortals like us. And drama actors recently realized that, kindof.
Through time, however, cinema’s objective has been subverted, deconstructed, and diversified many times over to suit other purposes.
Hence, the emergence of pink movies (homos? hehe), art movies, porn, experimental cinema, propaganda, other so called highbrowed conceptual cinema that caters only to the tastes of narcissists and critics perched on their lofty ivory towers.
2. I just saw Iron Man. How do I rate it?
Two H’s: Iron Man is (1) human (after an epiphany, he was half the man he used to be to become Iron Man); (2) humorous.
Robert Downey Jr. is wonderful. The tomatometer for Iron Man at RottenTomatoes.com is at a staggering 95%+.
FYI, Rotten Tomatoes is popular for canvassing the opinions of known movie crtitcs worldwide and converting them into the convenient tomatometer.
I leave the reviewing to the critics. I’d say Iron Man compares well with the Spider-man trilogy and Batman begins. Good story and character development. Enough said.
One more thing. I feel that the Afghan scene in the middle of the movie where Iron Man revisits his captors is way more spectacular than the supposed climax at the end. That doesn’t distract me from praising Iron Man, though.
Now this is very important. Don’t fail to wait until the end of the credits!!!!!!
3.One small complaint: Funny physics. This is the Tech Don. Might as well discuss this. How hi-tech really is the Iron Man suit in terms of safety?
There are scenes in w/c Iron Man falls or gets shot down from the sky, or is rammed and smacked down by a giant robot (IronMonger), and Iron Man appears to go thru massive acceleration and deceleration (look ma, no parachute), and appears unscathed.
But survival is dubious at best because Mr. Starks, Downey Jr.’s character, is human, after all (e.g., is never mutant and wasn’t injected with some potion). What’s inside the Iron Man suit that helps stop his mortal body from hitting the Iron Man suit from the inside during the enormous positive and negative G’s?
If some hi-tech cushioning device is what is preventing Starks from hitting the Iron Man armor from the inside, his internal organs (they are matter) will still decelerate and accelerate.
This problem evokes the funny physics of Dr. Octopus, Spider-man’s enemy, in Spider-man 2. Note that Doc Oc can survive Spider-man’s mutant punch, although Doc Oc himself is no mutant .
These are geeky complaints, however. And the popcorn movie fan is no doubt unperturbed. See ya around, alligator.
The contest is now over and we have a winner. Of course we must apologize for the delay but we didn’t expect so many entries (and we had to check them all). But before we announce the winner we must thank all those who entered our contest and inform all of you that in 2 weeks we’re going to have another contest (the big prize will be a Home Cinema System with a Bigscreen Plasma + Blu-Ray player +7.1 sound system).
And now, the big moment… Our $3000 laptop winner is DOMPROFESOR with this entry:
The Air Jack , by using your car’s exhaust gas, is a hilarious attempt at paradigm-shifting the lowly car jack. Very unstable for a jack (the car will almost turn turtle) [picture from ajprindle.com]. I don’t know what the girl is smiling about (maybe she’s laughing). Priced at $129.95. Maybe I’d get one and motorists will slow down on my car being jacked up.
Verdict: I’ll use it to rescue earthquake victims pinned down under concrete, right? Or as a flotation device/lifesaver (quick! Find some exhaust gas!). Can be mistaken for a heavy-duty exercise ball. Otherwise, a dumb way to recycle exhaust gas (you’re not recycling gas if you deliberately inflate the jack with gas.
One big advantage, though: Can be used to jack up anything on uneven terrain.
“Yer… look at me, my MP3 player has 30Gb of memory!”
“Pah, I’ve got a new 80Gb I pod, that’s hours of music.”
“Hours??? Mine goes for 3 years.”
And he’s not kidding you know! (Sort of). Our friends at IBM have been developing what they are calling ‘racetrack memory’ which they say will be able to store over 100 times more than what our current storage of mediums can, which means MP3 players could be storing enough songs to play constantly for 3 years.
Using tiny magnetic boundaries to store data, this technology will be able to revolutionize (again) the size of our gadgets and what they can hold, which in the case of an MP3 player would mean half a million songs. It would also use less energy, so battery’s would take less time to go flat, and it would mean that the process would create less heat, good news for the computer industry.
However they predict that it will take them another 3-4 years to produce a prototype, and roughly the same amount of time to develop it so that it will be available for commercial use; so please don’t get too exited yet. However it is another great step into the technologically unknown, and who knows what this will develop into.
