Blog

Sonia, Rent-a-Center’s Public & Community Affairs person, popular post, “How Predatory Lending Works, From Payday Loans To Rent-To-Own” and has a rebuttal that shows how they do math. I showed it to Jess, the creator of the infographic, and he has a rebuttal to the rebuttal. Let the chips fall where they may:

Sonia writes:

The graphic shows Rent-A-Center selling a mattress for $1000 at 90 days Same as Cash but we don’t carry a mattress that costs $1000 at 90 days. In fact, a customer can walk in our stores today and acquire a brand new queen-sized mattress at 90 days for $467. (Even if you were to use their example, a good FYI is that $500 wholesale cost on a mattress going at $1000 retail is not uncommon in the retail world as furniture generally has a 2 to 3x mark up for suggested retail pricing.)

Since some people don’t have $467 on hand, yes, we break the cost up into weekly payments like the graphic shows, but we don’t have any mattress that would have a 104 week agreement. Our longest weekly mattress term is 65 weeks, and 12 months is a lot more common and even then, people can pay off earlier to pay less.

And customers being locked into agreements? No way! And since customers can stop their rental at any time, that means if they have a change of circumstance, they can return the item and stop making payments. If they want to pick the rental back up in the future, they pick up payments where they left off. They don’t lose what they paid in.

The graphic says that customers have to pay sales tax on the higher price? No, like all businesses, we charge tax only on what a customer pays. If they pay $467 at 90 days, they pay tax on $467.

And insurance…well, many of our customers who don’t have existing insurance opt for our liability damage waiver so that if the rented item is stolen or damaged by flood or fire, they don’t have to keep paying rent on something they no longer own. We don’t require any customer purchase the waiver.

I shared Sonia’s email with the graphic’s designer. He rebuts:

Ben,

Thanks for the fwd. The mattress example was taken directly from a former Rentacenter manager.

I just called my local rent-a-center and asked how much the Serta Grand Choice Queen mattress was which is advertised on the RAC site. They told me it was $19.95 a week for 104 weeks. Due the math, its $2,074 plus all the extras. So I am not sure what fine point the RAC is trying to convey here as they are either giving false info, or are not in tune with their retail location policies.

The locked-in thing is splitting hairs. Sure, if you don’t make payments they will come and repo your mattress. You either pay it off in full, or lose everything you paid in.

As for the tax, if you pay off your matress at the 90 day price, yes its only $467, if you pay if off weekly its $2,074 and you pay the tax on what the price is. The problem is, when they sell you a $467 mattress, I doubt they mention that the taxes could be $150 if they opt to string the payments along.

If anything, I think I took it easy on RAC, which offers all the services in the graphic. Not only Rent-to-own schemes, but cash advances, payday loans, check cashing, pre-paid visa cards, money orders, and just about any financial service that allows people in need to part with their money.

Credit to Sonia and Rent-A-Center for engaging in the discussion, but I think I’ll still pass on renting my bureaus from them.

PREVIOUSLY: How Predatory Lending Works, From Payday Loans To Rent-To-Own

PALATINE, IL – The Harper College Board of Trustees has approved the appointment of Dr. Judith Marwick as the College’s Provost, effective July 1, 2010. Dr. Marwick, currently Executive Vice President of Instruction and Student Services at Kankakee Community College, has more than 20 years of higher education experience, having served on both the faculty and administrative ranks at two- and four-year colleges in Illinois and Indiana.

Dr. Marwick began her higher education career as a graduate student and mathematics instructor at Purdue University’s campus in Hammond, Ind. She also has served as Associate Professor of Mathematics and Chair of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Prairie State College in Chicago Heights, Ill; Dean of Arts and Sciences at Morton College in Cicero, Ill.; and Assistant Vice President for Academic Programs at Moraine Valley Community College in Palos Hills, Ill.

Dr. Marwick holds a doctorate in community college executive leadership from the University of Illinois and a master’s degree from Purdue University. She has presented at local, national and international conferences and workshops, authored numerous academic publications and helped champion a number of community college initiatives in her previous posts. Those include developing new curriculum; launching a new student orientation program; creating a student tutoring center; collaborating with high schools to improve college readiness; developing a summer program allowing talented high school students to learn more about college; creating weekend college and accelerated courses for adults; and installing smart, technology-rich classrooms.

She is a member of the Illinois Community College Board’s Program Advisory Board, a board member and Midwest regional representative of the National Council of Instructional Administrators, and a systems appraiser and site visitor for the Higher Learning Commission. She was a 2001 University of Illinois Community College Leadership Fellow.

Dr. Marwick was chosen for the Harper position following a national search, and spent two days on campus with administrators, student leaders, faculty and other employees as part of her interview process.

She was formally appointed at the Harper College Board of Trustees’ regular meeting on Wednesday, May 19.

For well over a month, I’ve been looking forward to an opulent birthday dinner reservation. But the day before the celebration, I canceled it over a single tweet. More »










Twitter – Online Communities – Social Networking – Trending and Popularity – Celebrities

Filed under: Classics, Convertible, Performance, Auctions, Videos, Ford

The Ford GTX1 Prototype – as in, the car claimed to be the first GTX1 built – in its blemish-free debut color, Valencia Orange with Tungsten stripes, is being offered for sale on eBay. This car was to become a limited-run evolution of the Ford GT built by the Gennadi Design Group, the same folks who built the prototype. Gennadi planned to build 600: one hundred SEMA show cars, five hundred customer cars. That didn’t happen, and only 100 ever made it to the road.

According to the seller, this very first GTX1 was created from the second Ford GT built in 2005, sold to Gennadi, who built it, and Gennadi sold it to its current owner in Atlanta. Recent dyno results paint a picture with 626 horsepower and 585 foot-pounds of torque at the rear wheels, which should keep you in the game even five years on.

At the time of writing, there are no takers on the opening bid stands at $300,000. If your well heeled fancy is being tickled, though, you can save yourself some time and click on the Buy It Now price of $525,000. Those not in the market can have less expensive fun in the gallery of high-res photos below, as well as the video after the jump in which one Jeremy Clarkson flogs this exact car (ProTip: fast-forward to 3:30). Top tip, Kip!

[Source: eBay Motors]

Continue reading eBay Find of the Day: 2005 Ford GTX1 prototype

eBay Find of the Day: 2005 Ford GTX1 prototype originally appeared on Autoblog on Thu, 20 May 2010 09:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Google Buzz certainly made a splash when it came out, but it wasn’t the kind of attention Google was looking for. The company’s latest crack at the social web proved to be a privacy nightmare and subsequent fixes and changes still haven’t erased those first memories. But Google is in it for the long haul and has unveiled the Google Buzz API, in … (read more)

The latest and newest 2011 Ford Mustang GT features the new 5.0L Ti-VCT V8 engine.
Packing 412 horsepower and 390 lb-ft of torque, the engine produces 97 hp and 65 lb-ft more than the 4.6-liter V8 used in the 2010 Mustang GT.

Despite the added power, Ford projects fuel economy will rise to 17 city / 25 highway (up from 17 city / 23 highway) for models equipped with a six-speed automatic transmission.

The fuel economy rating for the six-speed manual will remain unchanged at 16 city / 24 mpg highway.

To squeeze out the extra mileage, Ford equipped the car with Twin Independent Variable Camshaft Timing (Ti-VCT), an Electric Power Assist Steering (EPAS) system, and an additional rear decklid seal (to improve aerodynamics).

Source

BrightSource: A green energy success story

BrightSource Energy announced this morning that it is tapping the deep pockets of the California State Teachers Retirement System and Alstom, among others, for $150 million in equity financing.

BrightSource plans to use the cash to build 14 solar power plants in the U.S. Southwest by 2016 that will generate 2,610 megawatts that are already contracted to Pacific Gas and Electric and Southern California Edison.

The Oakland-based company has become a bona fide green energy success story in recent months.

Earlier this year, BrightSource won approval to build the Ivanpah Solar Electric plant in the Mojave Desert –despite facing objections from conservationists – and received a $1.37 billion loan guarantee from the Department of Energy in February. Construction on Ivanpah slated to begin later this year.

The company also has plans for international expansion.

Today’s Series D financing includes investments from VantagePoint Venture Partners, Morgan Stanley and Draper Fisher Jurvetson and brings the total equity financing to $300 million.

Alstom is putting up $55 million in its first investment in the solar space, according to the BrightSource release.

BrightSource Chief Executive John Woolard said,

A Series D capital raise of this magnitude reflects the market’s confidence in our world-class team and the important role of our Luz Power Tower technology in meeting the growing global demand for cost-effective and reliable solar power.

BrightSource’s technology uses thousands of mirrors, or heliostats, to reflect sunlight onto a liquid-filled boiler on top of a metal tower. The liquid turns to steam and is piped from the boiler to a turbine to generate electricity.

iCab Mobile is the browser for the iPad I’ve been waiting for. Using the same WebKit rendering engine as Mobile Safari, iCab brings a true “desktop” class browser to the iPad. Where Mobile Safari scales up from the iPhone, iCab Mobile has scaled down from the desktop version of iCab, one of the oldest Mac browsers still around.

For additional learning on Safari for Mac, checkout Safari 101 and Mac Browsers (subscription required).

Tabs

The first noticeable thing about iCab is that it actually uses real tabs. The UI borrows heavily from Mobile Safari; the URL bar looks almost identical. However, underneath the URL bar is a bookmarks bar, and underneath that is the tab bar, which seems to function just like the tab bar in any desktop browser.

The tab bar does two things to the interface: one, it adds what some might consider “clutter” to the window. When compared to Safari, iCab has more of the “chrome” around the web page because of the additional buttons. The second thing the tab bar does is far more important: it reduces friction. Hiding tabs as Mobile Safari does puts them out of the thought process, it creates an independent experience for each tab. In iCab, when all the tabs are grouped together in the tab bar, I can see immediately what I have open, what I still have to read, and what I need to close. I can’t count how many times I’ve opened up the tab window in Mobile Safari and found eight tabs that are already open in the background of sites I forgot to read. Keeping all of the tabs visible means that I have one less step to go through to get to the tab that I want. In iCab, it’s simple; just look and touch. In Mobile Safari, I first have to remember which icon is the tab icon, then find the tab I’m looking for from the collection of website screenshots. It’s pretty, but adds friction.

Settings

iCab has many more settings than Mobile Safari, allowing your browsing experience to be customized to your liking. My favorite setting is the ability to open links to other domains in a background tab. This is by far the best browsing experience on any platform. Have a list of Google search results to check? Just tap each one and it opens in a background tab automatically. Reading through Daring Fireball’s Linked List? It’s as simple as scanning Gruber’s summary and tapping the link to open the tab in the background and on to the next one. This is how I’ve browsed for years on the desktop.

Another favorite setting are the filters. iCab comes out of the box with 142 filters to help block annoying ads. The filters are not enabled by default, but can be easily. Customizing filters is also very easy, assuming you know some basic wildcards.

Instapaper and Twitter are supported via modules. Modules are similar to Firefox’s extensions, but much simpler. They are more like bookmarklets on steroids. iCab does not have a very large collection of modules right now, but it does have a fairly simple tutorial on how to develop them. The repository has modules for jumping to the bottom of the page or the top of the page, and a handful of others, but if someone whips up a Readability module, I think that will have all the important stuff covered.

iCab may not be for everyone, since not everyone is going to need all of the features. I’ve just touched on some of the features that I’ve found useful, I didn’t even mention ScrollPad (place three fingers on the screen to scroll super fast!), the multiple privacy options, support for downloading files and opening them in another installed app, import and export of bookmarks, or full screen and kiosk mode. iCab is $1.99 in the App Store for a universal iPad/iPhone app. If you care about your browsing experience on the iPad, go get it.

Palm has really been out and pounding the pavement to get in touch with developers lately. In addition to having a booth at Google IO to show off the Ares development environment, they also recently presented at the CELF Embedded Linux Conference.

The presentation was called "Engaging Developer Communities, Lessons and Opportunity from webOS" and from looking at the slides (PDF link), the title doesn’t lie. Matthew Tippett of Palm (and formerly of AMD) gave the talk and in addition to talking about Palm’s own efforts, the presentation drills down into communities. Specifically, Tippet talks up WebOS-Internals, patches, themes, and the like. The key from Palm’s perspective is that webOS doesn’t require rooting, jailbreaking, or other extreme hackery in order to get into hombrew, instead you just put the sucker into development mode, plug it into your computer, and you’re in. In other words, webOS is open, almost radically open.

The key for us (besides the warm fuzzy feeling from seeing PreCentral called out) is that the ratio of devices in the field to excited and engaged developers and hackers is as high as we’ve ever seen on any platform. 

If you’re interesting in learning how to install Homebrew apps and patches, here’s a nice how-to article for you.

It’s not every day that you see Dell Streaks in the wild.  Actually, considering that the phone isn’t released, it’s more like never.

Seattle Times writer Brier Dudley spotted four of the Android-powered MIDs strapped to a plank, along with two computers.  Apparently, AT&T network technicians were testing their ability to send correct E-911 information across Big Blue’s airwaves.  From what I can tell, there were three black units and one crimson red one in testing, leading me to believe that the pink and orange versions may be coming at a later date.

With a public showing like this, we can’t be too far off from an official release.  Anyone planning on picking one up?

Via Engadget

Tras el incidente sucedido en la última vuelta del GP de Mónaco 2010 cuyos protagonistas fueron Fernando Alonso, Michael Schumacher y el Safety Car (coche de seguridad). La FIA ha anunciado que modificará dicha normativa para evitar que vuelva a suceder lo mismo.

Recordemos que Schumacher adelantó a Alonso en la última curva cuando el reglamento afirma que al haber salido el Safety Car a pista debería esperar hasta crucar la línea de meta. Aun así, el comunicado publicado por la FIA cita lo siguiente:

Los problemas detectados durante la última vuelta del Gran Premio de Mónaco mostraron la falta de claridad en la aplicación de la norma que prohibe los adelantamientos detrás del coche de seguridad. Se aclarará el procedimiento que deben cumplir los monoplazas cuando la última vuelta esté controlada por el coche de seguridad al tiempo que se garantiza que la señalización a los equipos y pilotos se muestre más clara.

Por último y para aquellas personas que no pudieron ver esa carrera, aquí os dejo el vídeo en el que se puede ver toda la polémica:

Related posts:

1. Mercedes SLS AMG, el Safety Car de la Fórmula 1
2. Kimi Raikkonen afirma que la Fórmula 1 es monótona
3. La FIA confirma cambios en el reglamento de la Fórmula 1

As expected, the quiet brouhaha over Google accidentally collecting personal Wi-Fi network details when cruising in the Street View cars has turned into a lawsuit, with two Oregon citizens suing them for potentially millions. More »










Google – Searching – Search Engines – Google StreetView – Companies

Is the recovery running out of steam? You might think so, considering that the Conference Board’s Leading Economic Indicators Index fell in April. Last month it decreased for the first time in more than a year. The drop was slight — just 0.1%, but it contrasts with the 0.2% increase expected by economists. What happened?

The index is made up of ten indicators that can help to predict how the U.S. business cycle is trending. They are aggregated at certain weights depending on their relevance to the economy. Here’s a chart from the Conference Board showing some history:

The red line, titled LEI, is the Leading Economic Indicator Index. That’s where there was a decline for April. The blue line is the Coincident Economic Indicator Index, which shows how the economy is doing currently. It continued to rise, as expected.

According to the report, the decline in building permits and supplier deliveries (vendor performance) played a huge part in index’s April small fall. Other components that had a negative effect included real money supply, average weekly initial unemployment claims, consumer expectations, and manufacturers’ new orders for consumer goods. The positive indicators included the interest rate spread, stock prices, average weekly manufacturing hours, and manufacturers’ new orders for nondefense capital goods.

This is not particularly good news. The index had been growing significantly for the past year. Even if it doesn’t continue to trend negative, hitting a plateau would imply a weak recovery going forward. Of course April’s decline was small and could just be a blip. If the index continues to move downward, however, then there is definitely reason to worry.

Conference Board – Money supply – Economic – Economic indicator – Leading Economic Indicator Index

There are three amendments to watch today before Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) calls another vote to end debate of Sen. Chris Dodd’s (D-Conn.) financial regulatory reform bill.

The first is Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Carl Levin’s (D-Mich.) bill strengthening the Volcker Rule, which would force banks to separate their commercial and investment banking functions by banning depository banks from trading with their own funds. The second is Sen. Maria Cantwell’s (D-Wash.) amendment closing a major loophole in Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s (D-Ark.) derivatives proposal. The final is Sen. Susan Collins’ (R-Maine) amendment requiring higher capital requirements for some financial firms.

I’ll turn to Mike Konczal, a Roosevelt Institute fellow, for an explanation of what Collins’ amendment does:

First off, this amendment makes it clear that bank holding companies follow capital rules that are at least as tough as those imposed on banks. This is the essence of the shadow banking problem: if you want to act like a bank you have to be regulated like a bank.

This amendment also makes clear that if you are engaged in riskier activities than a bank, you must hold more capital. Examples it gives of risky activities it mentions are “significant volumes of activity in derivatives, securitized products purchased and sold, financial guarantees purchased and sold, securities borrowing and lending, and repurchase agreements and reverse repurchase agreements.” You know, the things that caused the last crisis and could cause it all over again.

This amendment also implies, in conjunction with the last paragraph, that banks will need to hold more capital when it comes to scope of businesses. The more high-risk business lines that a bank has, including ones that we can’t even think of yet, the more capital it has to hold. It tells the regulators that, when they aren’t certain, to require more capital….

This is probably the real fight. “Yes we’ll hold more capital as long as massive amount of risky debt turned into ’safe’ equity through the shenanigans of our financial engineers can count as that capital.” Do we need to do that all over again?

That last paragraph gets at how important these amendments are. The Merkley-Levin proposal — initially one the Obama administration supported — clearly reduces risk in the banking system. So does Collins’ amendment. And Cantwell’s provision needs to be in the final bill, to ensure that the derivatives language is not toothless. These aren’t fringe priorities. These aren’t window-dressing. These aren’t amendments to score political points. They are provisions to make sure the bill works — provisions that in the first place should not have been tabled to the last minute.

Via Prison Planet.com » Prison Planet

JOHN F. HARRIS & JIM VANDEHEI
Politico
Thursday, May 20, 2010

For any politician with the usual instincts for self-protection, the lessons of Tuesday’s primaries could not be more clear: This could happen to you.

Arlen Specter lost in Pennsylvania even though the party-switching Democrat was recruited and backed by a sitting president. Rand Paul won in Kentucky even though the Republican was regarded as an eccentric renegade by that state’s political establishment.

The 2010 electorate has swallowed an emetic — disgorging in a series of retching convulsions officeholders in both parties who seem to embody conventional Washington politics.

(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)

The anti-establishment, anti-incumbent fevers on display Tuesday are not new. The ideologically charged, grass-roots activists flexing their muscle in this week’s primary showdowns are the same breed as primary voters who four years ago stripped the Democratic nomination away from Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who later won as an independent.

What’s now clear, in a way that wasn’t before, is that these results reflect a genuine national phenomenon, not simply isolated spasms in response to single issues or local circumstances.

This is a stark and potentially durable change in politics. The old structures that protected incumbent power are weakening. New structures, from partisan news outlets to online social networks, are giving anti-establishment politicians access to two essential elements of effective campaigns: publicity and financial support.

Full story here.

Just in January this year, we reported about a very special magnetic tape that was developed by Fujifilm and IBM and that stores a whopping 35TB of data. But yesterday Hitachi Maxell has announced that its new high-capacity magnetic tape even offers 50TB. No wonder Maxell and and its partner in the development of the tape, the Tokyo Institute of Technology, are speaking of a “world record”.

The tape boasts a density of 45.0Gb/in² (69.8Mb/mm²), as opposed to the 29.5 billion bits per square inch Fujifilm/IBM offered. Maxell says that by using a special, super-thin film that was developed by the Tokyo Institute of Technology, future tape cartridges could even exceed 50TB in storage capacity.

Expect the new tapes to be used by data centers in the not too distant future.

Via Akihabara News

The Environmental Protection Agency informed BP officials late Wednesday that the company has 24 hours to choose a less toxic form of chemical dispersants to break up its oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, according to government sources familiar with the decision, and must apply the new form of dispersants within 72 hours of submitting the list of alternatives.

Well, better 600,000 gallons (!) late than never (see “Out of Sight: BP’s dispersants are toxic — but not as toxic as dispersed oil” and “BP chooses more toxic, less effective dispersants“).

While this is clearly uncharted waters for many federal agencies, EPA should never have approved the Corexit dispersants for use in this quantity.  It just shows one more time that nobody is planning for the worst-case scenario — hint, hint swing Senators who stand in the way of climate action this year (see “Lisa Murkowski proposes to fiddle while Alaska burns” — and everybody swallowed the BP self-certified, self-delusion (see BP calls blowout disaster ‘inconceivable,’ ‘unprecedented,’ and unforeseeable).

The WashPost has more on this point:

The move is significant, because it suggests federal officials are now concerned that the unprecedented use of chemical dispersants could pose a significant threat to the Gulf of Mexico’s marine life. BP has been using two forms of dispersants, Corexit 9500A and Corexit 9527A, and so far has applied 600,000 gallons on the surface and 55,000 underwater.

“Dispersants have never been used in this volume before,” said an administration official spoke on condition of anonymity because the decision hasn’t been formally announced. “This is a large amount of dispersants being used, larger amounts than have ever been used, on a pipe that continues to leak oil and that BP is still trying to cap.”

The new policy applies to both surface and undersea application, according to sources, and comes as EPA has just posted BP’s own results from monitoring the effect underwater application of chemical dispersants has had in terms of toxicity, dissolved oxygen and effectiveness.

An EPA official said the agency would make an announcement on the matter later today.

After BP conducted three rounds of testing, federal officials approved the use of underwater dispersants late last week, but environmentalists and some lawmakers have questioned the potential dangers of such a strategy.

On Monday, Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) sent a letter to EPA administrator Lisa P. Jackson questioning the approach, given that Britain banned some formulations of the dispersant the government is now using, Corexit, more than a decade ago.

In the letter, Markey warned, The release of hundreds of thousands of gallons of chemicals into the Gulf of Mexico could be an unprecedented, large and aggressive experiment on our oceans, and requires careful oversight by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other appropriate federal agencies.”

EPA has a list of its approved dispersants on its Web site.

I’m not certain why we need a constant reminder that worst-case scenarios often play out.  That’s especially true if people’s  believe that they can’t occur lead them to take actions that make such scenarios more likely, as in the case of BP (see “The three causes of BP’s Titanic oil disaster: Recklessness, Arrogance, and Hubris“) or as in case of the nation and the world when it comes to human-caused global warming.

Responsible government planning must be based around plausible worst-case scenarios.  Indeed, in most other areas of national security, like military planning, it is.

I’m an admitted Blu-ray whore and adore the format for its glorious picture and sound, but there are nagging shortcomings of the newfangled HD format that prevent me from prosthelytizing its virtues to all who will listen.

Here are 7 ways that I’m still longing for DVDs when I’m watching Blu-rays:

Blu-rays are more expensive. Most new Blu-rays are north of $20, while DVDs are generally less than the figure. When you buy a lot of movies the extra charges add up. Which leads me to my next point…

You’ve already bought all these movies a million times. I’ve purchased The Princess Bride at least three times on incrementally better DVD releases, then did so again when the movie came out on Blu. And I paid more for the movie the fourth time than I did the first three. If you want to update your collection to HD, it will take a while, cost a lot and remind you of the pain you felt when you realized your VHS collection was worthless.

Blu-rays won’t play on most computers. Unless you spring for a new PC with a Blu-ray drive or buy a cumbersome dongle, you won’t get to catch up on Breaking Bad on your laptop while you’re using your TV to play Tecmo Bowl Kickoff late at night.

You can’t rip Blu-rays to your hard drive. Unless you’ve got access to some double-secret stealth programs, a ton of hard drive space and the hacking skills to allow your Blu-ray enabled PC to copy the movies, you’re out of luck. With a DVD, you just pop it in, open that mildly sketchy program your tech geek friend told you about, and you’ve got a back-up copy to stream or watch on your PC whenever you like. Ripping DVDs isn’t legal, but if you’re just keeping the copy for yourself, what’s the harm?

Blu-rays rarely pick up where you left off. When I’m watching a DVD on my Xbox 360 or PS3 and I turn off the film to come back to it later, the system always remembers how far into the film I was before I had to bail. With Blu-rays, this magic kicks in maybe 20 percent of the time. Sure, you can set manual bookmarks, then pull them up through a cumbersome process, but DVDs only require you to press “play.”

HD bells and whistles only benefit works of art. My favorite genre is the dumb comedy, which doesn’t get funnier in anamorphic 1080p in Dolby digital 5.1. I own Clerks on Blu-ray but it feels unnatural to watch it that way. I long for the grainy VHS copy of the movie taped off of cable that found its way into my freshman year dorm.

You can’t lend Blu-rays to non-geek friends. Unless the Blu-ray comes in an all-to-rare — although growing in popularity — Blu-ray/DVD combo pack, you’re not going to be able to let Blu-less friends borrow them. As someone who loves to discover obscure movies and then pressure coworkers to watch them, I often have to end my spirited raves with “yeah, you really should rent it” rather than “I’ll bring it in tomorrow and force you to watch it.”

If you too are a Blu-ray fanatic, what do you miss about DVD?

Who knew that R2D2 was such an accomplished DJ? Mixing in soundbites and robot blip bleep bloops from sci-fi films, this music video is definitely worth your attention. More »










starwars – Games – Science fiction – Roleplaying – Television and Movies

Sony is definitely set to debut a new television during the Google I/O conference, according to our most trusted sources. This will be the most advanced TV ever released by Sony to date, and was built in collaboration with Google and Intel as previously reported. The TV will be based on the current monolithic design influenced Sony BRAVIA NX800 (shown above), and will most likely come in 46″ and 52″ screen sizes – although we would not be surprised if it only came in one size.

The most interesting aspect of the television will be the Intel Atom processor inside; we’re nearly certain that it will have the 45nm-based Intel Atom 1.2GHz CE4100 series processor (PDF). What are the capabilities of this processor?

More than one would think.

The CE4100 has full MPEG-4/H.264 support, Flash 10.1 support, 3D graphics capability, high-end audio and can also capture and decode uncompressed 1080p video. The chip also features an integrated NAND controller, along with support for DDR2 and DDR3 memory. The TV will also run the Google Chrome internet browser, and have the full version of Flash 10.1. However, the real power play is that the TV will most likely support the upcoming Chrome Web Store, as well. This could open up the opportunity for the TV to run thousands of applications later this year. We were not able to confirm if the TV will have built-in flash/hdd storage.

Other specifications of the TV include full HD 1080p playback (of course), built-in Wi-Fi, 4 HDMI connections, USB, Motionflow 240Hz refresh rate, Edge LED lighting, BRAVIA Engine 3, BRAVIA Internet Video/Widgets, and is DLNA Certified.