Charlie's Weblog

Just found out this new Wii game from Japan. Called Pii Pii, strap in and use your your Wii remote to get as much pee into the toilet in the allotted time. But its all in Japanese!

And so it ends. Blu-ray has won the HD-DVD v. Blu-ray format war. Could Dvorak be correct regarding the reason. The size of the player is still a little too tall for my tastes. I will wait until I can get a 1" tall Blu-ray player before I take the plunge.

I read a couple opinions in this Sunday's Washington Post Outlook section. In the first, The Dumbing of America, Susan Jacoby paints a pretty bleak picture of the effects of technology on our society. But The End of Literacy opinion attempts to discuss why it's not as bad as it may seem. Interesting reading and thought provoking. But only if you take the time to read them.

I read an interesting article on REST vs WS-* in SD Times by Sanjiva Weerawarana. He attempts to inject some reason into the rhetoric being spewed by both the REST vs WS-* camps.

I read today that the Wii out sold both the Microsoft XBox 360 and the Sony Playstation (both 2 and 3) sales during the holiday shopping season.

We love our Wii And Guitar Hero III !

I think I might like one of these gizmos. But I'm going to wait until they come out with HD iTunes content and an HD iPod & HD AppleTV.

Another interesting idea from Google. With Google My Maps you can create custom maps and link to them from your web site. Now I just have to find a cool use for this.

PC Magazine Article Date: 04.05.07

By Brian Heater

Google launched its My Maps service today, an added feature of the company's popular Maps application, which gives users the ability to create personalized, shareable map mash-ups with a few clicks. Among My Maps' features is the ability to view the map in Google Earth (including the Hybrid and Traffic map views); mark locations on maps using various icons; trace shapes, paths, and areas; add HTML code; and add text, images, and YouTube/Google Videos.

My Maps can either be kept private, or made public and searchable through Google Maps' search feature. Both private and public maps are assigned a URL that can be shared via e-mail or Web site. Current examples of public My Maps include maps of the 2004 presidential results, and monster sightings across the world. The service is available in 10 countries at maps.google.com.

Copyright (c) 2007 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Here's a PC Magazine article about EMI agreement wih Apple to allow Apple to release EMI catalog content free of DRM restrictions through iTunes. It's about time! EMI is the first producer to remove DRM restrictions. Jobs of course thinks all restrictions should be removed when purchasing on-line music content. Go get your iPods!

By Mark Hachman, ExtremeTech EMI and Apple agreed to a new contract Monday that will see EMI releasing all of its music catalog without DRM restrictions, for a slight premium. The Apple iTunes Music store will sell the unprotected AAC-encoded tracks at double the existing bitrate, or about 256 kilobits per second, for $1.29/€1.29/£0.99. Albums sold will automatically be upgraded to the higher bitrate for the same price, Apple said. If a customer wishes to upgrade his existing EMI music to the higher-bitrate/DRM free version, he will pay $0.30/€0.30/£0.20 per track.

The move follows trials where EMI released unprotected tracks into the marketplace. Executives said the decision was based upon market demand. Apple chief executive Steve Jobs, meanwhile, had publicly called upon labels to release their music without DRM restrictions.

"Selling digital music DRM-free is the right step forward for the music industry," said Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive, in a statement. "EMI has been a great partner for iTunes and is once again leading the industry as the first major music company to offer its entire digital catalogue DRM-free."

EMI executives said they now agreed with Jobs' stance.

"Our goal is to give consumers the best possible digital music experience," said Eric Nicoli, chief executive of the EMI Group, in a statement. "By providing DRM-free downloads, we aim to address the lack of interoperability which is frustrating for many music fans. We believe that offering consumers the opportunity to buy higher quality tracks and listen to them on the device or platform of their choice will boost sales of digital music."

A Scandinavian watchdog group also welcomed the move.

"No matter how the digital music market develops, today will always stand out [as] a very important date, the day when two of the really big market players finally took responsibility that follows from the position and made an interoperable solution available to consumers," said Torgeir Waterhouse, senior advisor to the Norwegian Consumer Council, in an email. "I applaud their move, and encourage all the other contenders in the digital music business to make the same important move."

Waterhouse said however that the decision between the two firms does not free Apple of its legal obligation to provide interoperable music, which the Norwegian government has demanded Apple do by the end of September. This month, the EU also spoke out.

"It's important to note that this move does not take the heat off iTunes for the end of September deadline," Waterhouse added. "By the end of September they need to alter the terms of service and DRM used in the iTunes Music Store to provide a fair deal to the consumers who legally buy music. Still, this move by EMI and Apple today should serve as proof that it really is possible to fix the problems the industry has chosen to introduce with DRM."

I saw this ExtremeTech article on the web a couple days ago. It talks about how speech recognition technology may finally be reaching the masses. It almost makes me want to install Vista on one of our computers so that I can give it a test drive.

By Jason Cross

If you have Windows Vista, even the Home Basic version, you already have one of the more powerful speech recognition systems available. Microsoft has invested many millions of dollars in research regarding speech recognition over the years. Some of what they study in the R&D labs is years away from being a product, but there's a lot of new fancy speech recognition technology built right into Vista.

To get started, all you need to do is click the start menu, type the word "speech," and click on "Windows Speech Recognition." If you do it that way, you'll just be stumbling around in the dark. To get the most out of speech recognition, you'll want to go to the control panel and run the wizards and tutorials.

We'll step you through some of the cooler features of speech recognition and give you some tips on how to use it. Before you know it, you'll be talking to your email. All you need is any version of the Vista operating system and a microphone. How good is it? Well, we only touched the keyboard a scant few times while making this entire article. Continued... Your computer can't do what you say if it can't hear you, so the first step is to get your microphone set up. In our experience, it certainly helps to use a higher-quality microphone. A poor mic can cause problems with Vista understanding what you say.

After plugging in your mic (or headset), you'll want to make sure it's working well. Open the Control Panel, click Hardware and Sound, and then under the Sound heading, click Manage Audio Devices. The Recording tab should show your microphone, though this may vary from one sound device to the next. Double-click the microphone to open its properties. Again, the dialog may be somewhat different from one sound card or integrated audio device to the next, but the general principles are the same. A Custom tab might list a +20dB boost option, and a Levels tab should show recording volume. For now, leave these as default, but remember where they are: Tweaking these settings can really come in handy.

Starting Out With Speech
Now that your mic is set up, let's get working with speech recognition. In the Control Panel, type "speech" into the search box or click the Ease of Access category, then choose Speech Recognition Options.

You'll see five options:

Start Speech Recognition
Set up microphone
Take Speech Tutorial
Train your computer to better understand you
Open the Speech Reference Card
You'll eventually want to use most of these, and if you click Start Speech Recognition for the first time on your computer, Vista will automatically walk you through the microphone setup and tutorial.

The microphone setup is really straightforward. It's just a wizard that asks you which type of microphone you have (headset, desktop boom, or "other") and then asks you to read a sentence so that Vista can adjust input levels. If the wizard keeps reporting that it can't hear you clearly, you might want to return to the microphone setup we described above and play around with the mic boost and input level yourself. Continued... Okay so you have the microphone set up, and you're ready to start surfing the web with verbal commands and dictating some email. Not so fast. Sure you can jump right into that, but you really want to run the Speech Tutorial. This is a slick, full-screen, step-by-step guide to the most common commands and conventions used by the built-in speech recognition. It'll show you everything you need to know to use this feature effectively, and it only takes about 10 or 15 minutes. You can do the entire thing by voice—no clicking required. If you run through the tutorial, you really don't need the rest of this article.

Still, we know the hardcore do-it-yourselfers that read ExtremeTech aren't exactly the "guided tutorial" types, so we'll go ahead and describe how speech recognition is used. Besides, most of you probably don't have Vista yet and want to see what you're missing. By its very nature, it is hard to describe speech recognition in a way that makes sense: It's much easier to just show someone. We'll do our best, but to fully appreciate all this, you need to see and hear it for yourself.

With the little speech recognition panel fixed at the top of your screen, you make Windows wake up and listen by saying "Start Listening." After that, your PC will try to interpret everything that comes into the mic as either a command or dictation. If you find you have to take a break, or talk to someone else, just say "Stop Listening." Simple.

Vista can interpret a host of commands to enable basic navigation around the desktop and simple application use. Say "Start" and the start menu pops open. The blinking text cursor sits in the search box, as it always does with the start menu is opened. So whatever you say will be entered as a search term. Say "Vista" and you'll get all the start menu items, emails, songs, photos, and other search hits with "Vista" in it. Then just say the name of the one you want to click on with your voice.

If you want to launch an application, you can skip the start menu entirely by saying "Start [app name]." Vista is smart enough to know that not everyone uses the same nomenclature—you'll see this throughout speech recognition, but there are times when you have to be careful what you say. You can say "Start calculator," "launch calculator," or "open calculator" interchangeably. If you're dictating, there is a distinct difference between "clear" and "delete," though. This works for non-Microsoft programs as well; "launch Firefox" works just as well as "launch Internet Explorer."

Scrolling up and down windows is as easy as saying "scroll up" or "scroll down." You can get more elaborate, like "scroll down three" to move further down, or "move to the end of the document" to go all the way to the bottom of the email, web page, word doc, or whatever you have open.

Vista recognizes common menu commands for the application you're using, and will reference the tooltip text on interface buttons. You can simply say "File … print" to open the File drop-down menu and select Print. Dialog boxes that have options like "Save/Don't Save/Cancel" can easily be dealt with by simply saying the text on the button you want to press. This can take some getting used to. In Firefox, for instance, the button to refresh the page is labeled "Reload current page." If you say that, it'll be just as if you hit that button. If you say "refresh," the speech recognition will get confused.

Want to click on something? Say "click [item]". This works for commands like "double click" and "right click" as well. At the desktop, for instance, you simply say "right click recycle bin" to get a context sensitive menu, and then "empty recycle bin" to perform that action.

If you're having trouble clicking on something, just say "show numbers." This will show a translucent box with a number over every clickable object in the current application—every button, link, and hyperlinked image. Say the number you want to click on, and Vista highlights it green to confirm that this is indeed where you want to click. Say "OK" and it clicks there.

Last but not least, you can directly simulate keystrokes by saying "press [key]." If the speech recognition just can't understand your command to refresh, say "press F5." Some keys can be virtually pressed without saying the word "press," like Enter, Home, End, PageUp, and PageDown. Vista recognizes fancier commands like "press right arrow three times" and "press control and U." Continued... Speech recognition is a fantastic feature for those with disabilities that make it hard to use a keyboard or mouse, but for those who aren't challenged in that way, it can still prove useful as a dictation tool. In virtually any application or dialog box you could type text into, Vista's speech recognition can take dictation from you.

You don't have to do anything special to enable dictation: If the cursor is in a text-entry box, just talk and it types. It works in most web forms, email programs, word processors, you name it. Dictating to your computer is a bit of an art, and an acquired taste. At first, the speech recognition is rarely as accurate as we would all like it to be. It gets better over time, but you can improve accuracy right from the start by running the training option in the speech control panel. You'll read a set of sentences, and Vista will listen to your voice and adapt its algorithms to improve its understanding of what you say - at least, that's the idea. It takes about 5 or 10 minutes and is well worth the effort.

When dictating, you'll want to annunciate and speak clearly, but not really slowly, and certainly not too quickly. The best advice comes from the built-in tutorial - speak like a newscaster. It helps to speak in complete sentences or at least entire phrases. Many words and pairs of words can sound like others, especially to a computer. By speaking in complete phrases, you give your PC a chance to interpret the context of what you say. It really improves accuracy greatly.

Your most useful command will certainly be "delete that." Whatever you say, whether it's a single word or a whole phrase, saying "delete that" will nuke the last thing Vista typed for you. It's a simple do-over command that you'll use frequently.

Punctuation is a tricky spot when dictating to your computer. For instance, if I wanted to capitalize the word "computer" in the previous sentence, I would say "select computer" and then simply "capitalize." Ending sentences is as easy as saying "period" and adding commas is as simple as saying "comma." Select a word or phrase and say "italicize," and you're golden. Vista's speech recognition is smart enough to understand phrases like "select the previous two sentences" or "delete the next paragraph," and this makes editing easy. It's often best to go ahead and ignore mistakes until you're done dictating a paragraph or two, and then go back and fix them.

Other punctuation is a little harder, though. Say "select harder" and it will highlight the word "harder". If you want to put it in quotes, the natural thing to do now is to say "put that in quotes" or "quotes" or "quotation." Doing any of these will simply replace the word "harder" with those words, though. You have to get the cursor in front of the word "harder" by saying "move to harder" and then say "open quote," then move it to the end of harder with "move after harder" and then "close quote." Phrases like "begin quote" and "end quote" are not recognized as such - you'll end up dictating those words.

When Vista can't understand you or is unsure about what you're trying to say, it may pop up a corrections box with a list of guesses. Just say the number that corresponds to the correct word or phrase and say "OK." If you don't see the correct thing listed, just try saying it over; the list will automatically update. As a last resort, you can say "spell it" to go letter-by-letter. Every time you do this, Vista learns more about what you say and when you say it, so accuracy improves. This is one reason why it's more important to use the "correct [word/phrase]" phrase than to "select [word/phrase]" and then replace it. Using "correct [word/phrase]" lets Vista know it made a mistake, using the "select [word/phrase]" feature just means you changed your mind.

Despite the kinks, the dictation in Vista is actually quite good. It takes about an hour to get yourself trained in the right way to navigate around a document and for the computer to learn the way you speak. If you're willing to invest that kind of time, you can dictate emails, forum posts, and blog comments much more quickly than you can type them. Continued... If you're going to use speech recognition to browse the web, it's probably best to use Internet Explorer. Other browsers like Firefox work, but most of the plain-language commands like "go to address," to move to the address bar, are understood in IE, but not in Firefox. What's more, we were unable to dictate in a couple of forum text-entry boxes in Firefox, while that feature worked in IE.

When browsing the web, you'll need a lot of the general window browsing commands used throughout windows. "Scroll down" and "scroll up" are common. To click on a link, just say "click [text of link]." On the ExtremeTech home page, for example, simply saying "Click five free online photo editors" will click on that headline, then once in the article, say "click discuss this now" to go to the discussion thread. The web can be tricky, though. If you say "click opinion" on the ExtremeTech home page, it won't click on that opinion button on the top navigation menu, because that's actually a graphic. You'll need to use the "show numbers" function to click that, and many other parts of most web pages.

Other handy commands are "back," "refresh," "right click [link]," and "google [words]" (if google is your search box provider).

To be frank, browsing the web using nothing but voice commands is quite frustrating at first. We found ourselves repeating the same phrases over and over, and awkwardly fumbling around with "spell it" corrections to web addresses. It gets better as the speech recognition becomes more accurate and as we learned to surf a bit differently, but it's still less than ideal. We'll stick to the mouse for web surfing, for now.

When All Else Fails
Sometimes, no matter what you try saying, you get stuck. You just can't get Vista to recognize your command, or to click on the thing you want it to. When this happens, you're not totally out of luck. The go-to command for help is "what can I say?" This will pop up a help menu about speech recognition, and you can drill down further in it with simple voice commands.

If you can't click on the thing you want, you can click anywhere on the screen with the mousegrid feature. Just say "mousegrid" and a 3x3 grid of numbered rectangles divide the screen. Say a number like "six" to zoom in, creating a new 3x3 grid in just that rectangle. Keep saying numbers until you get down to a small enough rectangle to click on the thing you want, then say "click [number]." With this, you can effectively click, double-click, or right-click on anything on the whole screen. It's a little slow, so it's sort of a last resort. Continued... The speech recognition in Vista isn't perfect - far from it - but it really is impressive just how well it works. It's clear that Microsoft has invested heavily in researching this area, and it's also clear that there is still a long way to go. For all its foibles, the Vista's speech recognition is good enough that anyone could find value in dictating a few emails now and then.

We wrote most of this article using voice, and while plenty of mistakes were made (and slowly corrected), it definitely went a lot smoother near the end. There were plenty of misunderstandings ("are" instead of "our") and wrong words, but the dictation started getting more accurate as both Vista learned my voice and I learned how to work with the peculiarities of speech recognition. You may notice the style of this article is a bit awkward—this is one of the dangers of dictating to your computer. The way that one is expected to write professionally is quite different from the way a person talks. It takes some practice to be mindful of "talking as you would write," because it doesn't sound natural in your head.

For this first attempt at a major article, I probably spent enough time correcting mistakes and fumbling with punctuation, all with voice commands, that it would have been faster and easier to just type it at my usual 75 words per minute. Then again, I have been typing articles for a living for nearly a decade, so I am certainly not the "average Joe" of typing vs. dictation. Personally, I'll stick to typing most of the time, but Vista's speech recognition is good enough that I wouldn't mind answering a few casual emails with it.

On some level, you get out of speech recognition what you are willing to put into it. You have to stick with it, letting Vista learn how you talk and making corrections, before it gets so accurate that it's a joy to use. For many users, that's simply asking too much. Still, how cool is it that this simply comes with every version of Vista - even the Home Basic edition? If you're a Vista user, you should set aside an afternoon one weekend to fiddling around with it. We think you'll be impressed; it's definitely one of those show-off features that impresses the "well what can Vista do that XP can't?" crowd. Hopefully, Microsoft will continue to improve speech recognition in updates and service packs, and continue to give away this helpful tool in all future Windows versions.

I read this review about Apple TV today. A copy is provided below. It's an iPod for your widescreen TV. With this, you can watch your iTunes video library on your widescreen TV. I've been waiting for this!

By Tim Gideon and Joel Santo Domingo Since the late 90s, Apple has attempted to make the technically complex simple. The iMac did it for personal computing and the iPod is a paragon of portable consumer electronics. Now with the $299 Apple TV, Steve Jobs and company want to simplify your home entertainment experience. But what, exactly, is it? The basic concept of this product is straightforward: wirelessly stream content from the iTunes libraries of up to five computers as well as play content directly from the box's 40 GB hard drive. This means you can enjoy almost anything on your PC, be it movies, photos, podcasts, or music, on your enhanced definition and high-definition widescreen televisions. Apple's slogan says, "if it's on iTunes, it's on Apple TV" - and this is mostly true. Those who don't mind hooking up a few cables and thinking a little about the set-up will enjoy this wireless extension to iTunes. Overall, it does a pretty damn good job, despite some limitations.

First, we'll quickly describe how the device works, then we'll get detailed about what you need to set it up. Connect the Apple TV box to your television (using either the HDMI 1.2 connection or component video) and make sure the computer you have your iTunes library on is connected to a wireless router. Once everything is powered up, Apple TV's menu will ask you to choose a language and then walk you through the incredibly simple - and, frankly, gratifying - process of pairing your computer with Apple TV. Apple TV appears as a device on the left hand menu in iTunes (just like an iPod) when you choose to add a library on Apple TV's menu. To set it up, you enter a 5-digit code, which should already be displaying on your television. Type it in and that's it: you can now stream iTunes content from your computer to your television.

If you wish to make this computer your "host", you can easily sync the computer to Apple TV and all the material on your iTunes (well, almost all - read on to find out about certain video roadblocks) will be transferred to the box's 40GB hard drive. Just as iTunes syncs with your iPod, iTunes will constantly update your Apple TV with new material you've downloaded. You can also stream content - either stuff that is in your iTunes library or content from other iTunes libraries connected to your wireless router.

Apple TV lets you stream from up to five different computers aside from your main host computer. Songs and videos are not put into one master library, but switching between the libraries on the Apple TV menu is a relatively short and painless process. When you stream content, Apple will stop synching and pick up where it left off when you finish. If you start watching a video on your iPod, then stop, attach your iPod to your Apple TV-connected iTunes library, it will keep the bookmark and play on your TV from where you left off.

You can view photos on Apple TV, but it uses iPhoto on Macs and Photoshop Elements on PCs and cannot stream files, so you'll have to sync photos or slideshows you've created in order to watch them on your television. That's basically it.

Read this article this morning about Blu-Ray v HD DVD format war. I included a copy of it below. Which will you get?

By Mark Hachman, ExtremeTech "Within three years it will just be Blu-ray." – Frank Simonis, the Blu-ray Disc Association's European chairman, at the CeBIT trade show.

According to the latest sales numbers from Nielsen VideoScan, the Blu-ray format appears to be gaining momentum.

The format war between Blu-ray and HD DVD has been relatively short, ugly, and brutal. And, given all of the interest in which format will control the multi-billion dollar market for next-generation DVD sales, each format's supporters are doing all they can to ensure their camp is the chosen one.

For many, a key move in the struggle was the inclusion of a gift certificate inside boxes of Sony PlayStation3 consoles, which began selling late last year. In an early assessment of the Blu-ray/HD-DVD race I wrote in early February, I noted that the certificate could have had an unbalancing effect on the sales of Blu-ray media. According to experts cited by USA Today, gift certificates sold during the holiday season should have been cashed in in January or early February.

It's now March, and Blu-ray appears to be holding its edge -- proving either that the assumption was incorrect, or that Blu-ray's apparent momentum didn't need the crutch. Moreover, the total of Blu-ray discs sold now outweighs the number of HD DVD discs sold, giving both the short-term and long-term edge to Sony's format.

Since inception, Blu-ray movie sales represent 52.2 percent of the total sold, versus 48.8 percent for HD DVD. This is a reversal from February, when HD DVD held the advantage.

As I've said before, Nielsen's analysis does have some holes. It excludes Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, and Sam's Club. However, the firm's findings represent the most comprehensive survey that I'm aware of, or at least that has been publicly released. (Note: Nielsen doesn't provide analysis, forcing me to try and do my own.)

I'm not sure that recent developments will have a great effect. The HD DVD association formed a European working group this week to promote the standard, and executives reportedly claimed that the technology holds a roughly 2:1 lead in sales of PC hardware, however slight that may be. Alpine reportedly is interested in manufacturing an HD DVD player for the car, to use the disc as a digital audio repository.

The Nielsen numbers also reflect the sales of movies, not hardware. I haven't been able to find publicly available data on next-gen DVD hardware sales, at least broken out by format.

I've asked NPD and IDC for data before; this time, I added the Consumer Electronics Association, the industry group responsible for the CES show, and which represents the entire consumer electronics industry. According to the CEA, just 250,000 next-gen DVD players were sold in 2006, with 1 million players forecast to be sold this year, and 4 million players in 2008.

Unfortunately, the CEA didn't break this down by format. But what we know, for now, is that it's a very small number of users who are serving as the foot soldiers in this format war. Continued...

Title fight

Meanwhile, the numbers seem to grow more convincing. Sure, there might be a slight softening in Blu-ray sales at the end of February, but that doesn't seem statistically significant. I'm banking quite a bit on the assertion that gift certificates handed out during the holiday season would be consumed by the end of February. But the numbers don't reflect any sort of decline; they're flat, constant, and steady. Reports that a Blu-ray version of Casino Royale cracked the top ten sales rankings at Amazon.com seem to support the claim.

Interestingly, in terms of titles, the disparity is closer than the sales figures would indicate. According to Nielsen, which tracked sales through March 4 (before Casino Royale was released) the top-selling title was an HD DVD title, Warner's Batman Begins. Close behind it, however, was Warner's The Departed, in the Blu-ray format. (The Departed, in HD DVD format, ranks sixth; a Blu-ray version of Batman Begins has not been released.)

Of the top twenty titles, nine support the HD DVD format, while eleven are in the Blu-ray format. However, two of the HD DVD discs (the fourth-ranked Superman Returns and the seventh-ranked The Departed are both in the hybrid DVD/HD DVD format, which allows either the standard-definition and high-definition formats to be played back, which allows for a transition between both formats.

Nielsen doesn't release sales figures, for movies, instead assigning them to an "index." Ranked at 100 and 99, respectively, are the HD DVD Batman Begins, followed by the Blu-ray-encoded The Departed. Superman Returns (Blu-ray), Superman Returns (HD DVD/DVD) and Underworld: Evolution (Blu-ray) rounded out the top five, with index scores of 89, 85, and 64, respectively.

I'm not sure how much more you can say about the titles' popularity as an indicator of the success of both formats, however. The Blu-ray format of The Departed holds a clear edge over the HD DVD version of the same movie (99 to 61, in the index). The Blu-ray version of Superman Returns slightly outsold (index: 89 to 85) the HD DVD version. But the HD DVD version of Mission: Impossible 3 outsold the Blu-ray version, 52 to 50. This is the stuff which fans of the formats can argue about, although the overall unit sales seem more compelling.

I think it's also time for some analyst firm, somewhere, to bite the bullet and start releasing hardware numbers. It's fairly obvious what's going on here: analysts firms like NPD and IDC count the major electronics companies as they're clients, and the losing camp doesn't want these numbers released.

In my previous column I argued that the format war would be won when either one of two conditions was fulfilled, creating a critical mass: either one format holds an 80 percent market share for three months; or, one format holds a two-thirds market share for six months. Well, Blu-ray's won the head-to-head battle for two months, and it clearly has the advantage.

Copyright (c) 2007 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved.

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.

Albert Einstein

What started as rumor, is now real. Are you gonna get one? This concept ad shows what it looked like in March 2006. It looks like Cingular may be the first network to make the phone available. But with a MSRP of $500, it better be a pretty good phone! Here's the actual phone.

Just found a Macintosh ad that you won't see on TV.

WOO WHOO! Check out what's new at the iTunes store! I better watch my wallet. At only $2.00 a show, I could be get into this deep. No "The Trouble with Tribbles" show yet. It came out in season 2. Guess I'll have to keep checking for new shows!

No... Those are not roman numerals. It's Vista vs. Mac OS X.

Watch NYT's David Pogue discuss why Microsoft did not rip off Mac OS X in construction of Vista.

Have you checked out twitter? It answers the question "what I am doing right now?"

But if I join, who would care? Perhaps I don't want to know... But it is certainly simplier than blogging.

I love these ads. The gift exchange and better results are my favorites. See mac ads for access to all of them. I added a link in the Links section also.