I’ll leave this up to you as to whether or not you consider this a good deal. In light of what retailers like Best Buy and Circuit City are offering to HD DVD refugees, Amazon’s decided to get in on the good-will action by offering the following; “For a limited time, receive two HD DVDs from the list below for free when you buy the Samsung BD-UP5000 1080p HD-DVD Blu-Ray Disc Combo Player and any two Blu-ray discs sold by Amazon.com.” As of right now, the BD-UP5000 is out of stock but it normally goes for around $450. You have five HD DVD movies to choose from; Batman Begins, Excalibur, Rio Bravo, The Road Warrior, and Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride. So in effect, you’ll have to spend almost $500 for the player and two Blu-ray discs to get two free HD DVDs from a list of five. I’ll reserve judgment but TechConsumer’s Bob Caswell says, “Gee, thanks, Amazon.” Get Two HD DVDs Free [Amazon.com] via TechConsumer → Read More
Apparently there’s some game called “Grand Theft Auto IV” coming out. I’ve never heard of such a game but so help me God if it’s violent or glorifies crime, I’m going to try to get on Fox News to talk about how bad it is for our nation’s youth. Maybe it’ll just be a courtroom style simulation where you play a lawyer who prosecutes people that steal cars. I’m guessing it’s that because Microsoft’s issued 500 Xbox 360 consoles with the game’s logo on the side and a briefcase containing various peripherals — much like a lawyer’s briefcase would contain various law-type things. Xbox Drops 500 Limited Edition GTA IV 360s [Complex.com] → Read More
Why is it the Brits have all the crazy-stupid ideas about how to screw up the music industry even more than it is already? British musician Billy Bragg argues in the New York Times today that some portion of Bebo’s $850 million sale price should go to the musicians who uploaded their music to the site. Note that Bragg neatly sidesteps the fact that music was uploaded to the site by artists (or their labels) themselves, with full knowledge that they would not receive payments of any kind (except free marketing, of course, and access to Bebo’s tens of millions of music loving users). His argument is based on the notion that Bebo’s success was based on the availability of streaming music on the site: “The musicians who posted their work on Bebo.com are no different from investors in a start-up enterprise…Now that the business has reaped huge benefits, surely they deserve a dividend.” Bragg also tries to take direct credit for Bebo’s success: Mr. Birch has cited me as an influence in Bebo’s attitude toward artists. He got in touch two years ago after I took MySpace to task over its proprietary rights clause. I was concerned that the site was harvesting residual rights from original songs posted there by unsigned musicians. As a result of my complaints, MySpace changed its terms and conditions to state clearly that all rights to material appearing on the site remain with the originator. A few weeks later, Mr. Birch came to see me at my home. He was hoping to expand his business by hosting music and wanted my advice on how to construct an artist-centered environment where musicians could post original songs without fear of losing control over their work. Following our talks, Mr. Birch told the press that he wanted Bebo to be a site that worked for artists and held their interests first and foremost. Bragg does attempt to argue his case, primarily by (1) saying that social networks are as much to blame for declining music sales as the people who are downloading songs in violation of copyrights, and (2) saying that arguments that social networks are doing musicians a favor by marketing their music are “disingenuous.” Both arguments have holes in them so large you could drive a BitTorrent stream through them. Social networks have absolutely nothing to do with the decline in music sales. The fact → Read More
Look what Master Chong (sweet name, by the way) found. It’s the A900 from Sony. Yum. It won’t be released until August or September but here are some of the specs; 24.6-megapixels, thumb and forefinger scroll wheels, and dedicated function buttons for things like ISO and white balance. There’s also a metering mode selection switch, slow sync button, and a full-frame sensor. Hit the jump for a look at the backside. → Read More
Activision/RedOctane’s hottest new addition to the Guitar Hero franchise will ship June 22 for a mere $50. That’s right, Guitar Hero: On Tour for Nintendo’s DS is now up for pre-order from Amazon so get it now! → Read More
I said “cable-laying,” get it? Anyhoo, if you’re in the market for a huge remote controlled submersible robot that weighs 50 tons and can bury oil and gas pipes at the bottom of the ocean, look no further than the Ultra Trencher 1 by a company called SMD. It uses propellers to submerge itself to depths up to a mile and then uses ninja-like high-pressure “jet swords” to cut a trench in the ocean floor. Pipes can then be safely buried out of the way of shipwrecks, fishing equipment, and currents. A Deeply Impressive Bit of Kit; World’s Biggest Subsea Robot [RedOrbit] via ZDNet → Read More
New platforms like Adobe Air and Mozilla Prism are evolving that combine the benefits of Internet flow with the flexibility and power of desktop applications. They are part browser, part desktop app and are extremely efficient for certain types of applications. Flash, Silverlight and Ajax get most web applications over the hump in terms of usability and are the technologies behind the fast transition of desktop applications to the web. But it’s not clear that they’ll ever kill off all desktop applications entirely. The bridge between them may very well be Air and/or Prism. Matthew Gertner, who was a co-founder and CTO of startup AllPeers before it shut down earlier this year, is now working with Mozilla on their Prism project. I asked him to write a guest post discussing Prism and how it fits into the ecosystem v. Air as well as a number of emerging technologies for using web applications offline (Firefox 3, Google Gears). Read Matthew’s blog, Just Browsing, here. Thanks to innovations like Ajax and Flash video, web apps are quickly gaining ground on their desktop counterparts. With a few notable exceptions like Firefox and Skype, the big software hits of recent years have been websites such as Flickr, YouTube and Facebook. And yet web-based software cannot yet equal the high-quality user experience of the best native apps. This is the reason why Apple was forced to reverse its original decision to make Safari the official SDK for the iPhone. It also explains why online productivity suites like Google Docs are still struggling to compete with stalwarts like Microsoft Office. Web apps simply don’t provide the responsiveness, performance, whizzy graphics and access to local data that users crave, and they only work when you’re connected to the internet. → Read More
http://www.gametrailers.com/remote_wrap.php?mid=32108 This is from the Japanese version and I won’t comment on it because I’ve chosen not to watch it. Leave your thoughts in comments. → Read More
Image snagged from here. Some time ago the AI claimed that Apple’s Mac Mini was going down the pooper and that it would soon be pulled from the lineup. Well, as anyone can tell that never happened. In fact, Apple is finally going to give the little white box a major overhaul instead of the measly changes it’s incurred over the last year or so. The overhaul entails a move to the 45-nanometer Core 2 Duo mobile chips with speeds starting at 2.1GHz with 3MB of shared L2 cache, 800MHz front-side bus and the MacBook’s current integrated graphics card, the Intel GMA X3100. No word on when this will hit the masses, though. The iMac is also looking to jump from Merom to Penryn chips in the near future. Eating our words: Apple’s Mac mini to rock on [AI] → Read More
Wall-E trailer from Pixar Nerdy Brit girls invent dope sunlight-sensitive nail polish to quash school rules NBA games coming to theaters in 3D Crazy classic XBox controller For AT&T, $1.33B due in 10 days for spectrum win → Read More
