CE Oh no he didn’t!: Time Warner chief likens Netflix threat to Albanian army
December 13, 2010 No Comment
Think the relationship between Netflix and cable and content executives is amicable? Not. Even. Close. Certainly not after Netflix CEO Reed Hastings blazed a trail into the living room on the strength of the company’s streaming television and movie content originally made possible by a shrewd 2008 deal with Starz. A move that netted streaming access rights to Sony and Disney content for an estimated $25 million — next to nothing compared to the traditional licensing fees charged to cable operators. That deal is set to expire in 2011 and could cost Netflix as much as $250 million a year to renew. Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes thinks that Netflix’s days at the top are numbered having been made possible by an era of experimentation that’s now ending. “It’s a little bit like, is the Albanian army going to take over the world?” said Bewkes, “I don’t think so.” According to the New York Times , the comments were made last week as UBS sponsored a media conference in New York that it says turned into a “platform for executives to express their grievances and emphasize that they will now aggressively try to tilt the economic balance between Netflix and content creators back toward the media conglomerates.” Wow. Don’t worry though Netflix subscribers, we’re sure that the implied collusion is the good kind. CE Oh no he didn’t!: Time Warner chief likens Netflix threat to Albanian army originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 13 Dec 2010 05:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
Continue reading …LG’s E90 monitor slims down to 7.3mm thickness by stuffing everything into its excessively glossy base
December 13, 2010 No Comment
LG’s just announced a new desktop visualizer for us all and it looks a promising proposition with its stupendously thin 7.3mm profile and minimal bezels surrounding the screen. But wait, it can’t be all good news and it’s not, as LG’s also decided to apply an ultra-glossy finish to the E90, which should easily neutralize any understated appeal it might otherwise have had. As usual with these ultraslim displays, most of the electronics are encased in the E90′s base, though the specs themselves don’t seem to be showing any sacrifices. You’re looking at an LED-backlit panel with a 2-millisecond response time, a 1920 x 1080 resolution (on the 21.5-inch E2290V), 250 nits of brightness, analog, digital and HDMI inputs, a 10,000,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio, and a €329 ($435) MSRP. It should be available at some point later this month, see video of its appearance at IFA this year after the break. Continue reading LG’s E90 monitor slims down to 7.3mm thickness by stuffing everything into its excessively glossy base LG’s E90 monitor slims down to 7.3mm thickness by stuffing everything into its excessively glossy base originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 13 Dec 2010 04:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
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Our British mates aboard the VOD ship may look a little cheerier today as The Guardian reports both ITV and Channel 4 — two of the nation’s foremost commercial channels — are bringing their video catchup services to the PlayStation 3 . The ITV Player and 4OD have been available as web-based services for a while, but they’ve both now agreed deals with Sony, who projects their overall traffic will improve by around 10 percent as a result. ITV’s leaving the door wide open for adding its content to “other consoles,” web-connected TVs, and tablets like the iPad, whereas Channel 4 has found Microsoft unforthcoming about Xbox 360 deals and the Wii inhospitable because it doesn’t support advertising. For its part, Sony’s clearly making a big content push, having recently welcomed Lovefilm into the fold and completed the rollout of its Qriocity on-demand facility across Europe . Does anyone even play games on these things anymore? PS3 to start streaming ITV and Channel 4 content in the UK this week originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 13 Dec 2010 03:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
Continue reading …Google’s Teach Parents Tech site to help mom and dad find the ‘any’ key this Christmas?
December 13, 2010 No Comment
It happens every December. You head home for the holidays only to be accosted by parents who need help fixing their computers. This year, it looks like Google will be lending a hand with its unannounced Teach Parents Tech series of public service videos. The Google-registered website teachparentstech.com still shows a “coming soon…” graphic and the videos are still unlisted on YouTube, but that shouldn’t stop you from sending the source link below to your parents right now. At the moment, we’re counting 54 cross-platform how-to videos covering topics as simple as as “how to copy and paste” and “how to attach a file to an email” to more advanced topics like “how to setup an email autoresponder” and “how to find cheap flights.” Unfortunately, even Google can’t explain to parents how to create a FAT32 hard drive partition. See what we mean after the break. [Thanks, Nathan G. ] Continue reading Google’s Teach Parents Tech site to help mom and dad find the ‘any’ key this Christmas? Google’s Teach Parents Tech site to help mom and dad find the ‘any’ key this Christmas? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 13 Dec 2010 02:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
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Apple’s iPod nano and the Sony Ericsson LiveView may have disappointed as wrist computers, but our Dick Tracy dream soldiers on, to the point where we found ourselves taking another look at that most dubious of converged devices: the watch phone . There, we discovered the Rebel, the latest creation from UK manufacturer Swap , a quad-band GSM wrist unit with a 1.46-inch color touchscreen and a built-in camera for both video and stills. It may look like a sterile medical wristband, but that silicone strap actually hides a USB port on one end, the better to let you transfer your MP3s and MP4 video to its paltry 2GB of expandable microSD storage. The watch also does FM radio, beams audio to your Bluetooth headset and comes with the typical smattering of basic apps. Still, there’s not a lot for the asking price of
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The US military has officially solidified its reputation as a flake, by banning the use of all removable media including thumb drives, CDs and DVDs again after relaxing the same policy in February. To prove they meant business this time, Senior officers in each branch relayed the orders and reaffirmed personnel would risk of court-martial if they failed to comply. This seems silly to us considering Uncle Sam feels comfortable giving some cell phones access to secure data, and we all know how much damage losing one can cause . But then again, if history and Transformers are any indication, sometimes it’s these little things that cause bigger breaches than anything Cyber Command focuses on stopping. US Military bans removable media again, this time probably for good originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 13 Dec 2010 01:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
Continue reading …Apple mysteriously kills jailbreak detection API while hacker boosts iOS security, irony restored
December 13, 2010 No Comment
It’s no secret that Apple’s been keen to monitor the lot of naughty jailbreakers, but it turns out the company has recently shelved iOS 4.0′s jailbreak detection API with no explanation given. While this has little effect on the average user, Network World explains that this is bad news for enterprise IT and MDM (mobile device management) vendors, who will now have one fewer channel for checking whether a user’s iOS device has been jailbroken and thus become vulnerable to attacks. That said, apparently this isn’t a huge loss for the MDM vendors, anyway; but the real question is why drop the API now? Could its presence alone be a threat? We’ll probably never know. Fear not, though, as some folks have put jailbreaking to good use. The Register reports that come Tuesday, Stefan Esser of Sektion Eins will demonstrate a tool called antid0te, which reportedly adds ASLR (address space layout randomization) onto jailbroken iOS devices. In a nutshell, ASLR randomizes key memory locations to make it more difficult for certain attacks to locate their target data. According to the famed white hat hacker Charlie Miller , this technique is already present on Windows Phone 7 and desktop Windows since Vista, but Apple’s only dabbled with it on OS X and not on iOS. Now, this doesn’t mean that jailbroken devices will be fully safeguarded, but some protection is better than no protection, right? [Thanks, wooba] Apple mysteriously kills jailbreak detection API while hacker boosts iOS security, irony restored originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 12 Dec 2010 23:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
Continue reading …CE-Oh no he didn’t!: GM’s Dan Akerson says he ‘wouldn’t be caught dead in a Prius’
December 13, 2010 No Comment
Think GM’s CEO sees the Toyota Prius as a worthy competitor that, in many ways, paved the the way for the Chevy Volt ? Think again. Speaking to the Economic Club of Washington, D.C. this week, GM CEO Dan Akerson described Toyota’s hybrid as a “geek-mobile,” and flatly declared that he “wouldn’t be caught dead in a Prius.” Not surprisingly, it didn’t long for Toyota to respond to that slam, with a company spokesman telling The New York Times that “Toyota has sold more than two million Prius hybrids worldwide, and counting. Those buyers can’t all be geeks.” What’s most troubling to us about all of this, however, is the implication that a “geek-mobile” is somehow a bad thing — it sounds pretty awesome to us… geeks. CE-Oh no he didn’t!: GM’s Dan Akerson says he ‘wouldn’t be caught dead in a Prius’ originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 12 Dec 2010 23:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
Continue reading …IDEO constructs RFID turntable, hearkens back to mixtaps of yore (video)
December 13, 2010 No Comment
Once upon a time, you could touch your music — or at least caress a 7- or 12-inch vinyl disc — but these days the cool kids stream MP3s (and OGGs, and APEs) off the internet. However, design studio IDEO recently decided to see if they could get back in touch with their audio roots, and — taking a page right out of the industrial design treatise I Miss My Pencil — they built the above machine. To put it simply, what you’re looking at is a box filled with specially-angled Arduino Pro Mini boards constantly searching for RFID tags on top, and a set of cards each with two RFID tags, with each tag representing one song. When you drop one on the turntable, it begins playing within a second, thanks to the clever array of Arduinos underneath, and you and your High Fidelity soulmate can leave multiple cards on the table to create an impromptu mixtape, or, presumably, flip one of the “cassettes” to play Side B. It’s a good thing IDEO isn’t selling the device and packs of cards, because we’re afraid we’d be compelled to collect them all , and our poor wallet doesn’t need any more heartbreak. Don’t miss the video below! Continue reading IDEO constructs RFID turntable, hearkens back to mixtaps of yore (video) IDEO constructs RFID turntable, hearkens back to mixtaps of yore (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 12 Dec 2010 22:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
Continue reading …Inhabitat’s Week in Green: electric vehicles gear up to race, Apple’s new HQ, and living architecture
December 13, 2010 No Comment
Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week’s most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us — it’s the Week in Green. This week we revved up Chevrolet’s Volt and hit the streets for an elusive test drive of the hotly-anticipated electric vehicle. We also saw electric aviation soar to new heights as the pint-sized Cri-Cri airplane broke the electric aircraft speed record . The world of EV racing is also picking up the pace as GreenGT unveiled an all-electric supercar for the Le Mans race and Honda’s CR-Z Hybrid beat out scores of gas-guzzling autos in a 25 hour vehicular marathon. High-tech architecture broke new ground as Apple announced that world-renowned architect Norman Foster is designing its new headquarters , and researchers revealed work on a living skin that could one day reinforce buildings and infrastructure with a hard, coral-like armored coating . We also watched as a crop of gorgeous bubble gardens popped up in the streets of Paris, and an abandoned warehouse in Brooklyn was updated with a high-tech transforming facade . In other news, this week the energy world was buzzing about a new type of organic solar cell inspired by wasp exoskeletons , and the largest photovoltaic plant in the United States officially opened in Nevada. We also saw several eco technologies take hold on the home front: researchers developed a hot solar-piezoelectric hybrid fiber that could be used to create energy-generating clothes, and Lavish & Lime rolled out a cute set of digital shower timers that are perfect for kids. Inhabitat’s Week in Green: electric vehicles gear up to race, Apple’s new HQ, and living architecture originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 12 Dec 2010 21:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
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