Archive for January, 2008

Netflix? Directly to my television? I don’t even want them delivering DVD’s to my mailbox, why would I want to give them access to my television? Plus, I think I already have that service, you know, the ability to pay for movies through the box on my television set.

Oh sure, I can’t watch any one of 50,000 movies, but the ones I have seen, that I may want to see again, have already been purchased, so I don’t need to download or rent the old ones anyway.

DVD-by-mail service Netflix Inc. will begin delivering movies and other programming directly to televisions later this year through a set-top box that will pipe entertainment over a high-speed Internet connection.

The set-top box, to be made by LG Electronics Inc. as part of a partnership announced late Wednesday, is designed to broaden the appeal of a year-old streaming service that Netflix provides to its 7 million subscribers at no additional charge.

LG Electronics didn’t reveal how much the set-top box will cost when it hits the market in the summer or early autumn. Similar devices made by Apple Inc. and Vudu Inc. cost $299 to $399.

My bet? It tanks. Why? Because people don’t want another box, in addition to all of the others they already have, sitting on their television. Oh yeah, and people only want to see so many older movies, once the newness wears off, they’ll never use it.

Drivers talking on cell phones are probably making your commute even longer, concludes a new study.

Motorists yakking away, even with handsfree devices, just don’t keep up with the flow of traffic, said study author David Strayer, a psychology professor at the University of Utah.

They also crawl about 2 mph slower on commuter-clogged roads than people not on the phone, he said.

They needed a study for this? Don’t we all know that people drive slower when talking on the phone? Don’t we know those people are poster children for highway safety? Heck, they could have done a study on drug rehabilitation and told us that people who enter rehab usually end up back in rehab again. Come on! Let’s study something important, like why alpacas spit or something like that.

Okay, well, it’s not so new. But it is a flaw.

Microsoft is making great headway on a great 2008!

A flaw in Microsoft’s Windows Home Server could lead to data loss under certain circumstances, the company has confirmed.

Windows Home Server, released over the summer, aims to offer home users centralized media storage and home backup capabilities for networked PCs.

Microsoft last week updated a support document acknowledging that files edited using certain programs and then stored on Windows Home Server could become corrupted.

Does anyone really wonder why people are sticking with XP as long as they can? With Home Server and Vista acting the way they do, why would anyone use them?