The Smorgasbord

Is the Samsung BD-P3600 better than the Playstation 3?

Do you need a Blu-Ray player, but don’t want or need the gaming aspect of the Playstation 3? The Samsung BD-P3600 one of the highest rated non-PS3 Blu-Ray players on the market. The features on this player are a laundry list of what you will need to never leave your couch again (or so the marketing people say). According to cNET (the holy grail of tech reviews) “The Samsung BD-P3600 is a huge leap ahead for standalone Blu-Ray players with blazing-fast operational speed, tons of features and excellent image quality.” Well let’s see if this player reaches its potential, or lags back like the rest of standalone Blu-Ray players we’ve seen in the past.

The player claims to boast a new innovative Video Quality Enhancement (QVE) feature that further improves the picture quality by adjusting brightness, flickering and other visual “noise”. While this sounds like an awesome feature it really only goes so far to improve video quality. This feature is clearly targeting videophiles but most videophiles have manually tweaked their settings anyways. We’re talking about guys so geeked about their home entertainment that they’ll spend $120 on a single oxygen free gold plated HDMI cord. This is not a mark down, but a heads up.

Besides the QVE vido enhancement this player really shines when you see all the options for viewing your media. First it has your Blu-Ray player, of which the benchmarks of the loading times met or came close to the industry leader, PS3. Next, it has a Netflix instant streaming player, which in term of performance works only slightly as well PS3’s Netflix player (but at least it’s there). It also has a Pandora Internet radio player but it feels tacked on and load times are on the slow side. Finally, the player offers the ability to stream content from your PC or laptop. Once again the feature seems tacked on, and not as full featured as it could be. It seems like it is only there so Samsung can say “look what we did!”

I really wanted to like this player. It seems like for everything it does right, it does two things wrong. If you are in the market for a Blu-Ray player or you are looking to upgrade, get a Playstation 3. Its really easy and it offers all the features of this player and much more, but it does it all much better.

Has YouTube finally been caught allowing copyrighted content? This post on XBiz made me think so. In the major lawsuit Viacom has against YouTube (in a case that’s dragged on for years now) they saw some online reports how show that YouTube has been exposed as having emails indicating they were ignoring some copyrighted content. YouTube’s case all along has been “there’s so much content we can’t be expected to police it all”. Sure they can’t. As the article also points out, YouTube has always seemed to have the ability to remove adult content with surgical precision within minutes – but they can’t find music videos or the latest clips from Lost or The Tonight show? They can find boobs but not Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

The thing I find funniest about this is what kind of battle this is. Every media company should strike a deal with YouTube and just license that shit for public viewing and be done with it. It’s just pissing match now, because it’s not about “copyrighted content” or “pirated video” at all. It’s about where the videos are shown, and who benefits from it. I mean, the companies partnered with Hulu.com have an “exclusive arrangement” and won’t be allowed to also strike a deal on YouTube.

YouTube because popular because it was viral and anyone could publish WTF they wanted. The most engaging content and funniest shit rose to the top. Now it’s just a site awash in ads and fat kids dancing to Britney Spears hoping to become famous at school when they fall down and break the coffee table to bits. YouTube jumped the shark as the new “Funniest Home Videos” for the web. I hate to say it, these lawsuits may just drag on for years, but you can’t tell me (now) that YouTube (owned by google) will win. YouTube knows what the top searches and pageviews are daily – and they know that allowing people to upload TV and movie clips is wrong – but they’re not going to stop what keeps them successful for the masses. The video of the dog dragging his ass across the carpet to wipe off a poop nugget is funny, but 1,000 times more people will google Lady Gaga’s performance on the last Saturday Night Live episode. Sorry YouTube, we love you (and your content) but you just can’t put your head in the sand anymore and make us believe you can’t find the content (that legally isn’t allowed to be there) and filter it out. Everybody knows what you’re doing…

Ahhh – Google Street View. Remember when it first went online and it freaked everybody out and there were all kinds of privacy concerns? That didn’t seem to last very long did it? Now it seems like when I get directions I always check out street view so I know exactly what my destination will look like when I get there, it makes travel a whole lot easier! But there have been some Google street view fiascos for sure.

Today I was thinking of this because I read the post Angry villagers run Google street view out of town, and it cracked me up. In an affluent suburb in England there had been a few burglaries, and when they say the Google street view car in their neighborhood it freaked them out and pissed them off. So they surrounded the car and made it leave!

You can’t blame them really, but it’s funny how many things the google streetview cams have caught by accident just driving through our neighborhoods taking panorama pics of a “day in the life” or ordinary people. You can check some out at Mashable’s Top 15 Google Streetview Sightings, and here’s a Google Streetview Gallery and Street View gallery – with new things being posted all the time.

I guess google street view is just something we’ve gotten used to since it didn’t go away, and it’s not likely to anytime soon!

About 2 days ago, Dr. Edgar Mitchell, the astronaut who was the 6th person to walk on the moon in 1971 on the Apollo 14 mission, had a radio interview. He talked to “Kerrang Radio” in the UK, and he kind of stunned the host by saying that governments around the world have been covering up visitations by aliens for more than 60 years. He claims to have been on committees that were privy to knowledge of alien contact that the general public has been sheltered from. Place the video below (audio) to hear the radio interview for yourself.

So, you may now be thinking, well – this guy would know wouldn’t he? He his multiple doctorate degrees, he walked in the moon, he was in NASA? First of all – he grew up in Roswell, and you hear him in the interview say he “was very familiar with the lore…” Lore? That rumours – local legend and such. That’s like saying “I grew up there and heard people talking about it..”

Check out the Wikipedia entry for Edgar Mitchell. He believes that in 2003 he was cured of cancer remotely by a faith healer. A cancer that he was never diagnosed with in the first place. It also says that during his Apollo 14 flight to the moon he conducted “private ESP experiments” with friends on earth.

If you look at all the references on that wikipedia page (at the bottom), you’ll see all the “UFO” type ones for Mr. Mitchell are past the year 2000. He’s now 77 years old, so all of these happened when he was up in years. Even though his “ESP experiments” show he’s been nutty for years, why didn’t he call BS on the governments of the world during the 70′s, or 80′s, or 90′s about alien coverups?

Sorry Mr. Edgar Mitchell – I call “shenanigans” on you….

Ever looked for bargains on Craigslist? What if someone listed YOUR stuff on Craigslist – what would you do? I read this story a few weeks back about a cruel Craigslist Prank played on a man in Jacksonville, Oregon. Robert Salisbury is an independent contractor who was gone for the day at the lake. While he was gone – someone placed an ad on Craigslist saying “forced to leave the area suddenly and belongings, including a horse, free for the taking”.

He found out because he was at the lake, and he got a call from a woman who stopped by his house to claim his horse. On his way home he stopped a truck loaded down with lawn mowers, weed eaters, ladders and more – and he CONFRONTS them – and they REFUSE to give him his own stuff back! I want you to imagine this scenario for a second, you go away for a nice day at the lake, and come back to find people are basically “ransacking” your home and property. As he pulls into the driveway he finds more than 30 people going through his home and barn. All these people (basically tresspassers) had printouts of the ad they shoved in his face to fend him off.

Apparently he calls the police, and by the time they showed up most of the looters were gone. Everyone who read the ad on Craigslist – just assumed that “because it was on the Internet – it was true”! Unbelievable. This is not the first time I’ve heard of this. Another time, it was reported that a house was to be “torn down” and people came in and took it right down to the studs, including carpet, windows, sinks, toilet, lights, and all fixtures. I believe in that instance it was a couple divorcing and one party was trying to get back at the other before the house was sold.

It is funny how the Internet can be used in this way, but you can use traditional media in the same way. It also goes to show how much now people think that the Internet is just as much of an authority as television, radio, or the local newspaper. Have you ever heard of a story like this? Comment now!

Can Holographic Storage, a technology 20 years in the making, be the future BluRay killer?

Robin Harris wrote an article on his blog the other day about holographic storage shipping next month. The technology was in the works for decades before becoming a reality. Every now and then I read about something and go “wow – that’s the future!”. I remember when I was a kid in the 80′s and my day telling me about computer storage and memory doubling nearly every six months. He also told me “someday you’ll be able to carry your 30 albums or your entire record collection on a small postage stamp sized chip in your pocket.” It seemed like something out of the movies back then, and yet my 4GB SD Flash card for my digital camera can hold about 1,000 songs which I guess is about 75-80 CD’s (and it’s about the size of a postage stamp).

We’ve all seen a holograph in a sci-fi movie. A holograph is a projected image that, if you moved around it, would actually have perspective form different angles. A holograph is a true “3D image”. So, how do you turn a holograph into storage? Technically a holograph IS storage, because it stores information about the image to be projected. A hologram uses 2 laser beams. A reference and illumination beam create an interference pattern on photo sensitive media. Shine a laser on that reference pattern and get an image in 3D – simple as that. Robin Harris brings up to good points in that article, the first being that a small fraction of the reference data can reconstruct the entire 3D images (you just can’t move as far around it). This means that unlike a CD or DVD, if the photo sensitive media is scratched it doesn’t (completely) destroy the data. Imagine data that can “reconstruct itself” from the remaining bits. His other point was that the amount of storage is just about limitless. By changing the reference point and illumination of the beams different holographs can be produced – so hundreds (or more) could be stored in the exact same space on the media.

Oh – did I mention the fact that photographic media has a lifespan of over 100 years, so holographic storage has the longest lifespan of any media to date. The company that created this holographic storage technology is “InPhase” and the first units will be shipped for $18,000 next month. One disk costs $180 and stores 300GB.

Why do we care? For the same reason that both CD and DVD players were thousands when they first came out. This is the future of technology. Movie studios with long term storage needs will gladly pay $18,000 for this device, but as the prices drop I think that this kind of technology will be something that consumers need. You can buy a half-terabyte drive at your local Wal-Mart now for $100. I think it’s great to be able to back up all of our digital pictures and music on an external drive for our home network. But as time goes on I will need multiple ones, and eventually some will fail – and eventually I’ll lose some really cherished memories. I think that’s why a lot of people I know print out so many digital pictures on photo paper – they know that if somehow the digital copy is lost, the printed version should last a lifetime. If InPhase eventually created a consumer version holographic storage drive, wouldn’t you buy one? I mean come on, you could store you family digital photos knowing that the media would be good up to 100 years. I know of no other storage technology other than printed photos themselves that could give you that kind of piece of mind.

Think about the industry uses this could bring. Movie theaters could ship out their blockbusters to the theaters on these disks knowing the quality wouldn’t diminish no matter how many times they were rented out. Web hosts could practically offer “uncorruptable backups”. You may not know this, but your local cable company usually has movies “downloaded” on their local server for the video “on demand” services you can watch. With holographic storage they could store tens of thousands of movies for you to watch, and not just hundreds. Unbelievable amounts of data could be stored in black boxes of planes, trains, and automobiles. You could possibly take your entire entertainment system from your living room to your car on one disk. Entire textbooks could begin to be stored on disk cartridges to be read in standard readers and books in schools and universities would not only be cheaper, but the quality of the content would never diminish (just the hardware readers to view them).

So that’s why I think holographic storage is a future BluRay killer. How many years will that be? I don’t know. It took 20 years for holographic storage to become a real piece of hardware you could buy. I don’t think that it will be 20 more years before what I envision comes true, but it’s certainly possible within the next 5-10. But you never know, something might just come along that’s even better than this!

People who believe in Scientology are crazy. They really are. They can slice and dice it any way they want, but there’s no denying the fact that the crux of the religion is the fact that they believe in aliens, and it’s the source of all our troubles today. I find it no small laughing matter that so many celebrities are awash in Scientology because they all live in some kind of fantasy land anyway, and they have to believe in something that crazy just to justify their own life and lifestyle. Recently it was announced that the woman who does the voice for Bart Simpson donated 12 million dollars to her Scientology faith. When I saw this South Park clip below I laughed and laughed because every single shred of it is absolutely true. That’s what makes it so funny – you’d think they made some of that up for the cartoon, but they didn’t, it’s all completely true. After you read the clip, just visit Xenu.net and you will be shocked and amazed what a cult Scientology really is and how many people they have completely brainwashed over the years.

Clear Channel idiots think that satellite radio should be held to indency laws. WTF!??

Yesterday it was announced that the United States Department of Justice approved the Sirius and XM Satellite radio merger. While this is good news, the fight is far from over. The deal still has to be approved by the FCC. The Dept of Justice said the merger “won’t hurt consumers”, and that clearly there is competition from traditional radio and even iPods. It took over one year to arrive at this decision, which is one of the longest merger approvals in history. Jim Cramer (host of “Mad Money) is so pissed off he’s holding a crusade against anyone holding up the merger. There have been 4 separate hearings on this merger, and for the last 2 “big oil” mergers there was no hearing for the first and only one hearing for the second.

Why do you think this is? Could it be the fact that the “National Association of Broadcasters” (the NAB) regularly pays millions and millions and millions of dollars in political contributions annually? Could it be the fact that the NAB has an army of lobbyists in Washington? There a terrestrial broadcast radio station in every town in America and this is an election year. Would any politition want to piss off the owners of all these stations in an election year? Here – watch what Cramer has to say first hand:

Are you still a bit skeptical? Maybe this engadget post about Clear Channel wanting the FCC to hold Sirius and XM to indency laws will change your mind. It says they also want “another satellite competitor”, and “zero local programming or advertising”. WTF!!? Big fat Clear Channel has bought up a huge chunk (and maybe the bulk) of America’s traditional broadcast radio stations in the last so many years. Now when “something better comes along” they want to “regulate it” and spank it to death so it doesn’t impact them. What kind of petty whining in the new media world is this? Microsoft beat the hell out of Netscape the better part of a decade ago and you didn’t see them pining to the government. You didn’t see 4 hearings just so Google could buy YouTube. This is about as bad as the big oil companies making “record profits” the year of the Katrina hurricane, or big tobacco saying that cigarettes aren’t addictive. It’s as bad as that!

I’ve been angry about satellite radio from the very beginning because the NAB has had it out for them since the inception of XM and Sirius. Did you know that traditional broadcast radio PAYS NO ROYALTIES at all to artists and musicians? That’s right – nothing, nada, zip! Television pays, movies, pay, cable pays, many documentaries have problems getting made because of the steep royalty fees. If you make a documentary about dying cancer victims and one of them sings on camera “I Can’t Get No – Satisfaction” for 2 seconds – they have to pay a royalty or that film will never see the light of day. But terrestrial radio can play the entire Rolling Stones catalog for free, every bit of it. It’s always been a handshake gentleman’s agreement between the recording industry and the radio stations. You give us free music, and you’ll benefit from us playing it. But even that agreement soured in recent years from the fact that radio stations were caught in a payola scandal.

So when satellite radio was born, the NAB made sure that there would be no way in hell they could play music for free too. Do you know that the initial model for satellite radio was to be a commercial based service? There was going to be no montly fees at all, you would just buy a radio and listen. But the NAB lobbied the government to force them to pay music royalties and XM was forced to pony up 100 million before they even sold their first radio. This forced them to go to the subscription based model, and it would seem that the “no commercials” format (preferred by customers) has now big the NAB in the ass because they made lemons out of their lemonade.

I can only hope that this BS will not last much longer, but it’s hard to say since the FCC is now involved. Clear Channel must be morons to think that satellite radio should be regulated with “indecency laws”. I pay a montly subscription fee for my satellite radio and I’ll be damned if the government can tell me what’s decent or not for my money. Whether you like Howard Stern or not, you can’t seriously think that the government should have the ability to tell you what you can and cannot listen to. This is probably one of the only ways that radio compares to cable. The reason I can watch “Real Sex” or “Dave Chapelle” any time I want on HBO is because I pay a montly fee for that programming. If I don’t like it I can unsubscribe or turn it off, but the government does not have the ability to tell me that I can’t have it.

I’m sure you have an opinion – what do you say about all this?

I was checking my email today and I get my weekly email from NBC. I’m probably stuck getting emails from NBC in the first place because my wife used my email address voting for “Deal or No Deal” last year sometime. Usually just throw the email away without reading it, but the title was “The A-Team is back on NBC.com”. I mis-read that and thought they were “back on NBC” which kind of freaked me out. The first words out of my mouth were “Who’s playing Mr. T? It can’t be….like…Mr. T?” Right there – they got me! They sucked me in, I just had to know. I viewed the email and saw this:

Turns out the are putting old episodes of shows from 25 odd years ago on the NBC.com web site. They must have been targeting people from my demographic this week, because I grew up with most of those shows, like the A-Team, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, Miami Vice, and Emergency! They sucked me in even further, I click to see just how good the quality was on these – because let’s face it, who could resist watching an episode of the A-team online?

I was really surprised, when I clicked a got a web page, chose the “A-Team” and when the interface came up I chose an episode and was watching within seconds. I had the ability to choose from any season, any episode. The quality was good the movie was clear, and right away a commercial came up. I thought then that maybe I would be bombarded with commercials the entire time but the message said “very rew interruptions due to Sponsorshp from sprint…”. In fact, in the timeline under the movie I noticed that the “notches” in the line represented when the commercials played. You can’t forward past them, but they are only 30 seconds.

The flash interface that plays the movies works well, and there are “large” and “full screen” options to watch all the TV shows. The full screen option was a little lesser quality, but still completely watchable. Thank you NBC for doing something right. I only wish that the movie studios and record labels would wise up and do the same.