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Laptops at China Prices
Computers | May 26, 05
Back on December 08, 2004, I reported on the Chinese firm Lenovo's purchase of IBM's PC business, and speculated on whether lower production costs might result in the so-called "China price" effect, impacting the margins of rival producers like Dell (see "Can Dell Compete with the China Price"). The jury is still out on that, but in the months since that deal's announcement there has been a marked drop in Levono's IBM laptop prices.
For just one example, consider the IBM ThinkPad T42, a 4.9 pound,1.60 GHz Pentium M machine with 256MB of RAM, a 40 GB hard drive, a CDRW/DVD drive, modem, 100 BT and 802.11g wireless connectivity, 14.1 active matrix display and Windows XP Professional. As you can see from the graph below, at the end of last year this computer was going for north of $1,500, while right now it may be had for under $1,225, a drop of about 20% in just five months. There are quite a few other IBM models that have seen similar price drops – you can check these out here.
Time Period: 12/20/2004 through 5/23/2005
Each tick mark represents one week
Red = High Price, Blue = Average Price, Green = Low Price
Posted by jeffrey.trester at 4:46 PM | Comments (0)
The Console Wars have begun.......(again)
Video Games | May 23, 05
With the E3 show having run May 17 through May 20 in Los Angeles the details we have all waited for are coming our way. Not only have we gotten the information on the Xbox 360 (which everyone saw on MTV)
Image 2 Image 3 Image 4
(Images courtesy of IGN.com)
but also, the Nintendo Revolution
(Image courtesy of CNET.com)
and the Playstation 3
These are all touting very nice features and amazing specs. More info on these systems coming shortly.
Posted by tom.salvey at 8:47 AM | Comments (0)
No 911, No VoIP
Computers | May 20, 05
The FCC voted 4-0 yesterday to require certain providers of VoIP phone services to supply enhanced 911 (E911) emergency calling capabilities to their customers as a standard feature. This order applies to any VoIP service that enables customers to receive calls from and terminate calls to the public switched telephone network (PSTN). The order does not apply to software companies like Skype that only provide computer to computer connections.
Link to FCC announcement
Posted by david.cost at 5:37 PM | Comments (0)
Turning Your Computer Into A Digital Video Recorder For Under $70.
Computers | May 16, 05
If you don't feel like paying hundreds of dollars for a stand-alone digital video recorder, you should know how cheap its gotten to give your computer the same functionality, assuming your machine already has a DVD-RW drive.
Video-capture packages consisting of a TV tuner card and software can turn your laptop or desktop into a DVR. Further, you can do so for surprisingly little money. For example, the AverMedia UltraTV USB 300 External USB 2.0 is such a device. Designed to fit in your laptop case, its power is drawn from its USB connection so no separate transformer is required. The UltraTV software works with free TitanTV program scheduling and allows pause and replay of live shows, much as TiVo does. And what's really remarkable is the price – now available from vendors for less than seventy bucks.
Posted by jeffrey.trester at 3:52 PM | Comments (0)
Unforgettable Cartoons
Movies | May 10, 05
Just recently, the history of American "personality animation" has been emerging from obscurity onto DVD. Several years ago Image Entertainment brought out three volumes of "Cartoons that Time Forgot." These are currently selling very cheaply at some of the vendors listed on PriceSCAN, and they are truly not to be missed. For those who think that cartoons from the 30's mostly resemble Snow White and Mickey Mouse, these DVDs are an eye-opener.
The first two volumes feature cartoons by Ub Iwerks, who worked with Disney on the very first Mickey Mouse cartoons. He went on to produce a series of cartoons for MGM, mostly featuring a very un-frog-like character, Flip the Frog. There is also a "Comicolor" series which takes off on familiar nursery rhymes and fairy tales usually to comic effect. Detractors may point to the lack of coherent plot lines in some of these shorts. But it is the constant inventiveness of the transformations and the barrage of sight gags that make these cartoons so remarkable. Not to mention the sheer technical genius with which Iwerks brings it all off. Not that his gags are all brilliant, and many are just plain crude, but the way they just keep coming at you assures that sooner or later one will hit you. (They can't all be gems, as Groucho used to say.)
An added delight is the musical scores written by the young Carl Stalling, who went on to greater brilliance in the later Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series at Warner Brother. He doesn't have the Warner Brother catalog on hand here, but he makes good with mostly public domain songs. Certainly the best of the Flip cartoons are the ones that foreground music most emphatically. "Ragtime Romeo" is my favorite of these in which Flip comes to serenade his girlfriend (a cat?) on his piano, which he handily totes over in his tiny car. Soon all the tenants of the apartment building are swinging, except for a music-hating cow who calls the cops on the lot of them. This cartoon really rocks.
The fairy tales can be cloying at times, but they also have their surprising turns. In "Humpty Dumpty Jr." the emperilled heroine, a female egg, falls in a pot of boiling water. When she emerges, she has become "hard-boiled" and does a mean Mae West impersonation. Mary's little lamb sneaks on stage during a school talent show and stops the show with a riotous sheep shimmy dance. In "Balloonland" a civilization of balloons is menaced by an animated pin cushion. I'm not making any of this up.
The restorations are much better than you would expect, given that all of the cartoons are over 70 years old and that the color ones use an early two-strip color process. And the sources must be very rare - I don't think I had ever seen a single one of these cartoons before this. All in all quite an education and quite a package.
Posted by paul.hiles at 4:27 PM | Comments (0)
iPod Loss Of Cool Noted By NY Times
Electronics | May 10, 05
Back in March I speculated that as the iPod became more ubiquitous it risked losing its cache, and now Ken Belson of the New York Times is wondering the same thing.
You can also check out my earlier blog piece here, where you’ll find some interesting iPod alternatives as well.
Posted by jeffrey.trester at 11:23 AM | Comments (0)
