Yesterday, Panasonic released info on their new HD home theatre setup, which included a blu-ray disc player. Blue-ray, for the uninitiated can store up to 5 times the capacity of a DVD drive, which equates to a massive 50Gb on a dual-layer disc. This is really important, considering the increase (and soon to be mandatory in the UK) use of HD TVs and home theatre equipment in homes, as these devices need a lot more bandwidth to display HD in all it’s glory.

Blu-ray is the standard set-forth by Sony and is directly competing with other, worthy standards such as HD-DVD, to gain the industry standard model that is held by CD and DVD. Time will tell who gains the top spot, although as we’ve seen historically with the VHS/Beta Max war, it might not be the best quality format (Blu-ray) that wins.

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Just a quick note before my big post. The antblog is running again after some new “volunteers” arrived today. Even if you’re not interested in ants, you might be interested in me making an arse of myself trying to look after them!!

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Recently on boing boing, there was post an article regarding a letter from John G. Malcolm addressed to the Swedish State Secretary regarding the closing down of the site that allows users to share illegal films, software and music. This letter is available [here]

Now it’s pretty obvious this sort of thing is frowned on by many people, and embraced by (probably) more. And to say this sort of activity hasn’t had an impact on the profits of record/movie companies would be stupid. So what is my issue with The Pirate Bay raid that this letter sparked? Well firstly, as the boing boing article points out, it’s the obvious feeling that the Swedish State Secretary was being used as a puppet by the MPA. The use of language within this letter is probably enough to make me, if I were in his position, to stick two fingers up at John G. Malcolm and the MPA.

For instance, “…it is certainly not in Sweden’s best interests to earn a reputation amongst other nations and trading partners where utter lawlessness with respect to intellectual property rights is tolerated…” WHAT? What other nations? Trading partners? “utter lawlessness.” A direct threat from somebody who doesn’t have the political push to do anything about it. Even the American Embassy apparently asked Sweden to bring the admins of The Pirate Bay to justice, which even they didn’t have the push to do (according to the letter.)

Another quote, “…attesting to how wide spread contempt for intellectual property rights appears to have grown in Sweden.” - Don’t fool yourselves, it’s not the contempt for property rights, and it’s not just Sweden, it’s the contempt by the globe as a whole for a large corporation thinking it can push the little man about. I am sure that the population at large will feel their rights infringed just hearing of such underhand bully-boy tactics.

It’s just a shame the Swedish State Secretary couldn’t see the letter for the school yard shoving it represented and the lack of physical backing it so obviously had. Also, as far as I can tell, the owners of the website are providing a place for people to exchange data. The people ACTUALLY downloading the data are the ones breaking the law. Of course, if maybe the MPA weren’t taking such a big cut to pay their lawyers for ridiculous letters to bully State Secretaries then maybe the movies would be cheaper and people would pay to watch, rather than download.

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As the third ROBOlympics finishes in San Franciso, there are videos available on their website (link below) of some pretty impressive AI in action. Since 2004 every year the world’s robots come together in the name of sport with events ranging from boxing, football, sumo wrestling and even a robot that can play a mean game of connect-four.

My personal favourites are the standing robots that could do what looked like tai-chi (although a little shakily) - as part of the “robo-one” events.

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I know this is pretty old news (like a week or so) but I thought I must mention it after the previous post.. It appears that Google Earth has gone linux..! If anybody’s had a chance to try it out, let me know. I myself am going to install it this weekend in Ubuntu (hopefully) and let you know how it works.

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So it’s been a while and it’s been an experience. I’m not saying that I’ve lived in Ubuntu, but I’ve had fun exploring every now and again.

First things first, I don’t care if you aim this operating system at the general public or not, it’s still not quite escaped the geek feel. It still requires above-average computing knowledge to do even the most generic things, like installing new apps - and to be fair I even had problems installing some normal linux apps, that weren’t part of the standard user-friendly installer.

Secondly, if you want to play games then you’ve almost come to the wrong place.. If I rephrase that to “off-the-shelf” games, you’ve definately come to the wrong place. If you want to play an absolute ton of open-source/freeware games then you have almost definately arrived. I did, however, notice markedly slower frame rates on linux than windows with 3D games, although I’m sure that’s down to driver versions (more on that in a minute.) Don’t expect to play anything other than games that were popular between ten to twenty years ago and certainly nothing you’ll find on the front page of PC Gamer.

Now on to the drivers… All drivers were supported and loaded during installation (I don’t know if that’s just luck or what.) I did however notice that the best way to install ANYTHING is with the “Synaptic Package Manager” or the “Add Applications” entry from the menus. If you try to install things off the net by downloading them, you will wind up in all sorts of trouble and very lost. Hence the utilities I guess.. One big problem however - it seems that the most popular games/packages are a bit behind in Ubuntu. You can browse the net and find version y, but only poor old version x is availble from Ubuntu. I’m sure this will only improve with time. eg. Firefox in Ubuntu is 1.0.8, latest net version is 1.5.0.4. Scorched Earth 3D in Ubuntu is 38.1b (bc), latest net version is 39.1.

So after a few weeks, what do I think? I think if you want an operating system that is robust, quick (not graphics!) and usable out of the box then choose Ubuntu - but if you want to customise it expect a steep learning curve. If you want games, an easier learning curve and a corporate rip-off choose Windows. Horses for courses I guess - if only I didn’t have bf2.

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I’ve just found this firefox extension. Thankfully it’s pretty new (6th June?) so I’m not too far behind.

Anyway, the extension will store all of your bookmarks/history/passwords etc on the google server - and if you have issues with google having all of your passwords to the websites you visit (and who wouldn’t!), you can choose what to sync and what to not in the settings.

I’ve already downloaded, installed and synced all of my settings between my work laptop and my home PC minutes after finding the website and I’m sure within a week or so I’ll wonder how I ever coped without it..!!!

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I had to share this. Very clever and cool, check it out..!

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Looking at the complexity of the link, I don’t know how long this is going to be available to visit!

Anyway, here I am sat on my bed, not quite tired enough to go to sleep, doing a bit of surfing on the laptop. And I start to think “…I wonder if something exists to put my laptop on my lap without burning the family jewels?” So I checked out kelkoo which threw up a link to amazon (below.)

It looks like a pretty simple design, although I can’t comment on how good it is (neither can anybody who bought it from amazon either according to the [lack of] reviews.

If anyone’s bought one, let me know how good they are! Anything’s got to be better than stooping over a laptop burning up with a duvet underneath it!

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After blogging about media player 11 and the proposed ideas about it (April 17th,) I thought it only fair to download it and give it a go. I think the beta’s been out a couple of weeks now so I’m sure loads of people have already given their two cents. My slant is my needs, so how does it fair?

First impressions
Install was a little painful. It seemed to take forever on a laptop, whether that’s down to my laptop remains to be seen. I’m sure that will be changed for the better before release though. The other thing that strikes you obviously is the Vista look, all shiny black.

Other impressions
It’s basically still Windows Media Player 10 in my opinion - with the addition of Vista bells and whistles. There is an online store capability though, which doesn’t work in the beta, which is a possible iTunes store beater??

The biggest problem I do have with it though is the exclusion of anything remotely RSS. This is a real shame because I felt Microsoft have seriously missed the boat on the whole podcast/RSS revolution. This new form of media is taking internet users by storm - Microsoft allowing it to be less accessible to the end user with wmp11 can only be a bad thing. Not that podcasting or anything else within the same bracket will suffer, it will just mean that users will stick with their current aggregator and not bother migrating to another iTunes.

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