Just when things look bleak, technology comes to the rescue — maybe. HP, unknown to us, has a digital content unit. Their task? Provide content on demand. No not pay per view. Ala NetFlix but as a buy not a rental. So all those movies of yore that have never made it to DVD may now have a chance.

There are a number of film titles that I store in the My Movies section of IMDB that have inexplicably not been published on DVD, and I use the list to periodically check to see if they’ve finally surfaced. And it looks like I’ve got an inkling of hope of marking some titles off of my list, thanks to movie studios looking to the long tail to counter falling DVD sales. This week, Sony (which owns such studios as Columbia, Tri-Star, and Screen Gems) announced that it would license older DVD titles not currently released for production and distribution through HP’s manufactured-on-demand service. As Studio Briefing notes:

The deal will allow consumers to order movies that ordinarily would not be stocked by dealers because they are too obscure or too old. HP indicated that it expects to sign similar deals with other studios. "We're hoping this provides another option to make available products that wouldn't necessarily garner widespread retail shelf space," Jason Spivak, head of strategic development at Sony Home Entertainment, told the Times. Added Doug Warner, head of HP's digital content business, "If studios can sell more catalog than previously, they can generate more money."

For the Studios this only stems their slow slide to irrelevance. But for the consumer, this is a boon. All those old Steward Grainger and Errol Flynn flicks will now have a chance to make to a DVD. Yes, showing my age. But many of the old films are better than the ‘new stuff’ passed off as film.

Its a Good Thing.

Linky

Generally when one thinks of RFID (Radio Frequency ID) one thinks of consumer purchase support, Asset tracking and for the paranoid loss of civil liberties. Well Cool Gadgets has identified an interesting twist for use on portable drives –

If you have a portable drive that you carry around, there’s a good chance you’ve worried about your data being stolen, especially if you have sensitive information stored on it. There are a few ways you can keep it secure. While there’s no foolproof way to make sure that a thief won’t be able to pick it up and run off, you can make sure that they won’t get to your precious files. There are many methods from simple passwords to biometric locks, however, this is the first RFID-protective drive I’ve seen thus far.

The STYSEN E08 RFID Security 2.5 Inch HDD Enclosure comes with two RFID keychains that will act as the keys to your data. Until you scan one of them over the enclosure, the data stored on the drive will be useless. The best part is that if someone tries to simply remove the drive, it will automatically be formatted. Personally I wouldn’t want to have to carry around another keychain, but if you don’t mind, it sounds like a good way to go. The enclosure will set you back $56 and will work with any 2.5-inch SATA drive.

One could extend this to the laptop or data center as well. The drives don’t work except in the presence of the RFID fob. Or in the case of the data center, the hot swapable drives don’t power up till they are in the proper enabling enclosure.

More here.
HT: Cool Gadgets.

Any of our Readers remember the American Express commerical where the little boy ‘fed’ the VCR a meal of mush? Well it looks like the Daily Mirror out of the UK has done the same for Mac users there. Sony and Toshiba have both developed a starch based bioderived CD that is devoid of plastic substrates and works just like a regular CD. Except when it gets hot –

British computer magazine PC Plus is reporting that Mac repair shops around the country are doing ‘brisk trade’ after a free DVD in the Daily Mirror newspaper got stuck in unknown quantities of Apple Macs.

The ‘Ecodisc’, was distributed to millions of Britons free of charge with their Sunday newspaper.

The disc is only half as thick as a regular DVD, and made of biodegradable materials, which meant was supposed to reduce the environmental impact of producing that many DVDs, which — let’s face it — were mostly destined for the dustbin.

So the question is, is that eco-friendly or just eco-stupid?

Linky.

Amazon is running with a relatively new service UnBox. Has all the usual services we have come to expect from Amazon for over the wire video downloads and rentals. 1-click buys, customer reviews, etc. Heck they even have Episode 1 of the Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles up for free.

What’s the down side? Well my first gripe (and its personal) is it requires a amazon only player. Now that’s ok, but there is not a Linux/Unix variant of the player available. They are targeting Windoze users. The other of course is with Time Warner testing ‘pay by the byte’, depending on the rates provisioning online services like UnBox might die before they get off the ground.

Funny, wireless voice services are slowly reaching the point that it would be cheaper on the backend to go flat rate. Give it 2 years and one of the majors will do so. Countries like South Korea, Germany and France are getting fiercely competitive. Yet here we sit in the US with talk from one of the carriers about raising rates under a tiered pricing scheme.

CongressCritters talk a good game about a broadband future. But its countries like Australia, France and the UK that are DOING it. I have a excellent suggestion for Congress. Throw away the latest CAFE standards. Fact get rid of all of them. Instead change the tax law for the following inducement:

1) Institute the equivalent of the Railroad Act of the 1840’s for Telecom. For every residence that is wired for 1Gb flat rated fiber they get = full deduction of the expense of deploy + $100 housing unit + 12% return for 5 years.

2) Institute a deduction for both the employer and the employee to have home offices. Sliding scale, the more employees that are telecommuters daily the higher the % deduction for both parties.

Imagine what would happen to fuel prices if half, nay even a quarter of the daily commuters went from behind the wheel to behind the keyboard? Hugo Chavez would have a cow. America we talk a good game but we ain’t doin’ it you understand? Entrenched interests and political gamesmanship have trumped innovation and common sense.

Now where was I?

Do you do business on the Internet using a debit card account? Or do you have an account with someone using automatic debit? I would advise you reconsider. –

Dreamhost would like you to know that its very very sorry for accidentally billing its customers $7.5 million it wasn’t actually owed. You see, someone typed 2008 when they really meant 2007 and their billing system decided to charge all of their customers in advance for the entire 2008 calendar year. This included debiting huge amounts of money from people’s checking accounts and all the “worst possible scenario” situations you could possibly imagine.

Tom, friend of the blog, and master of the internet, was among those affected:

Well, this morning I got a billing email from them:

This is just a notice that your DreamHost [redacted] (”zug’s Account”) has a balance of $380.87 (including any charges not due until 2009-01-14), with $340.97 due (since 2008-12-14).

Dreamhost is a very reputable hosting service and has been around longer than most. But they billed out erroneously $7.5m to all their customers. Granted its not a lot of money nor is any individual account a lot of money. But many live on the financial edge. So getting hit with a $500 unexpected withdrawal on the 20th could be the difference between paying the rent or mortgage or not.

Alternatives –

1. Get a low value credit card, say no more than $500. Use it only for internet purchase/services. Any merchant who is unwilling to take it does not deserve your business.
2. Along a similiar vein get a reloadable cash card with MC/Visa linkage. WalMart, Walgreens and others have these available. Just walk in and reload it in any increment you desire.

Keep in mind that credit cards have certain protections that debit cards lack. Like total exposure is $50 if fraud is reported quickly. But the bigger issue is the debit system is in the merchants favor. Try to get a debit cycle cancelled. It near impossible. So they can keep sending you erroneous bills even after you have terminated service. Eliminate the credit card account however and there is little the merchant can do.

Someday an intelligent secure payment system will arise. But till then be very wary.

[Update] Just to reinforce the point. Read this over at Consumerist.

In what has to be the oddest event from the Microsoft Shop a customer gets a tech response 10 years later!

On 1/8/08, 10 years after he placed a call to Microsoft tech support, they called Brian back to see if his problem had been resolved. Are they just that backed up? Latent Y2K error? Phishing attempt? The truth is much more banal, and potentially, more frightening. See if you can figure out the solution before continuing on to the answer…

Here’s what happened. The original call was placed on January 7th, 1998. The rep meant to put in a note to have someone call Brian back the next day, but instead of typing “1/8/98″ they probably typed “1/8/08.” Most likely because 9 and 0 are right next to each other on the computer keyboard and their finger slipped. The result? A followup call a decade late!

Lets see 1998 we were using Win95, LanMan 1.0, Windows NT 3.5 was in beta, NT workstation would not be born till a year later. Which brings up a couple of interesting scenarios:

• The caller was still at that same number a decade later? God they must work for a telco.
• All of these products have long since been on the nonsupport list.
• Could you imagine if this person was still USING these products? Talk about IT atrophy.

Go here for the whole story.

By rights this would not even rate being on this blog. I mean we cover technology and more specifically broadband technology. But we also have a heavy male audience. So just this once –

Draft beer in your own home is most beer drinkers’ preferred way of having their pint (no tinny taste from the can). Krups are now about to launch in the USA the BeerTender which delivers a crisp, fresh perfectly chilled draft beer which will stay fresh for upto 30 days. The unit has been engineered to work exclusively with Heineken and Heineken Premium Light DraftKegs.

The BeerTender is simple to set up and operate, and you have a choice of chill temperature settings depending on your preference. It also has a display which tells you how much you have left, and how long you have before you need to re-stock. It’s the perfect thing to have when you’re having a summer BBQ or a bit of a gathering (which we seem to do rather too often, particularly when we decide to have a poker night!)

Now there is a reason this is a significant development. Think back, college days, usual setup was galvanized tub, ice, beer keg well centered and firmly tapped. You know darn well your wife won’t stand for that setup in the kitchen. And your dorm fridge kludge won’t quite make it either next to all the stainless appliances. Guys its all in the label — Krups — its chromed, its sleek, it fits in with the Mrs decor. Get it?

Around $400, due out in March.

Linky.

USA Today is reporting that DVD media sales have declined for the first time since the format was introduced. Truthfully I am a little bit puzzled considering the plethora of system bases that use DVD’s — software, games, movies, etc. But with everything going into the Cloud it makes sense that the DVD is not immune to the shift –

Total sales and rentals of DVDs amounted to $23.4 billion in 2007, about 3% lower than in 2006, according to industry figures that the Digital Entertainment Group will release today at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

The largest factor in the dip? Economic hurdles that challenged the home-video industry just as it did other businesses, says Amy Jo Smith, the group’s president. “Consumers have less disposable income, but they still choose to buy and rent DVDs,” she says.

Consumers spent $16 billion buying DVDs, about $600 million less than in 2006. But rentals matched last year’s total of $7.5 billion.

Hollywood shipped 1.7 billion discs — about 30 million more than in 2006 — a sign that DVD remains strong, Smith says. “There is a natural progression to lower price points due to the maturing market,” she says. “But there are still titles — big blockbuster releases, collector sets and, mostly, TV DVD compilations — that are generating high price points.”

The average selling price of a DVD dropped 0.5% to $14.63.

Despite the downturn in DVD sales, the $23.7 billion total spending on home video dwarfs Hollywood’s $9.6 billion box-office total for 2007.

USAToday article.

We have all known that family member or friend that could not find themselves out of wet paper bag. Well they now have relief. –

BEDFORD HILLS, New York (AP) — A Global Positioning System can tell a driver a lot of things — but apparently not when a train is coming.

A computer consultant driving a rental car drove onto train tracks Wednesday using the instructions his GPS unit gave him. A train was barreling toward him, but he escaped in time and no one was injured.

The driver had turned right, as the system advised, and the car somehow got stuck on the tracks at the crossing. He jumped out and tried to warn the engineer by waving. He got out of the way just before the train slammed into the car at 60 mph, Metro-North railroad spokesman Dan Brucker said Thursday.

The car was pushed more than 100 feet during the fiery crash.

Some 500 train passengers were stranded for more than two hours during the Wednesday evening rush hour. The accident also heavily damaged 250 feet of rail, Brucker said.

The point is as our machines get smarter we need to be just as cognizant of our dependency on them so we are not the fool looking down the lights of a 200 ton train!

Linky.

The New Year is upon us and changes are afoot. Two items –

Fujitsu

Another week, another one bites the dust: although the company the first to introduce plasma televisions, Japan’s Fujitsu group has said it will cease production of plasma TVs because it simply can’t make enough money at it. Fujitsu once offered a broad range of plasma models, but had recently scaled back to offering only high-end units via exclusive European and U.S. retailers, and in 2005 sold off control of a plasma joint venture to Hitachi.

“During the past several years, the pricing and profitability of this segment has compressed beyond the point which our company could realize a satisfactory return on investment,” Fujitsu General said in a statement. Fujitsu General will close out its plasma business by March, and focus on it remaining business in the heating and ventilation market. Fujitsu General is separate from Fujitsu’s operations in consumer electronics and computer manufacturing.

Fujitsu started the whole plasma biz so many years ago. Times change and LCD panels have gotten cheaper and more competitive. They also lack the plasma burn associated with plasma displays.

Link

Netscape

AOL has a long history on the internet, being one of the first companies to really get people online. Throughout its lifetime, it has been involved with a number of high profile acquisitions, perhaps the largest of which was the 1999 acquisition of the Netscape Communications Corporation. Netscape was known to many as the thought leader in web browsing, and had developed a number of complementary pieces of software that allowed for a rich suite of internet tools.

At the time of the acquisition, the Netscape team had begun working on converting their flagship product - the Netscape Communicator web suite - into open source software, under a new name: Mozilla. AOL played a significant role in the launch of the Netscape 6 browser, the first Mozilla-based, Netscape-branded browser that was released in 2000 and continued to solely fund the development and marketing efforts of Netscape-branded browsers. In 2003, an independent foundation was created to support the continued development of the open source web suite. AOL was a major source of support for the Mozilla Foundation and the company continued to develop versions of the Netscape browser based on the work of the foundation.

From AOL’s press release. This sadly closes a chapter in the internet space. Netscape’s browser initiated a sea change in how computing was to be done. It was also one of the few technologies that caused Microsoft to change their direction. Development stops in February.

Link

au revoir, to both of them.