Category: Tech

Dishing on the Dash

Sony’s new Internet appliance, the Dash, looks very slick, and Sony’s using a Beatles song to promote it. They can do that because they own the publishing rights to most of the Beatles catalog, but not the performance rights to the EMI/Apple recordings.

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Discussions about flexible-yet-limited Net appliances, like the Chumby and the Sony Dash, include a lot of naysayers. They call them glorified alarm clock radios, and for now they’re right, but in the big picture they’re wrong. Eventually you’ll see touch screen devices like these built into refrigerator doors.

Netflix flub

As you can see, I’ve been using Netflix for over six years.

In all this time I’ve never had a problem with Netflix. Until now.

We rented ‘Blade Runner: The Final Cut’ on Blu-ray, and the disc was defective. It froze at a certain spot and wouldn’t recover. (Yeah, yeah… I cleaned it and tried again, etc.) So I returned it and asked for a replacement. They sent a high-def disc, but it was in the defunct HD-DVD format! I returned the disc, indicating it had been mislabeled. So what did they send? Another HD-DVD copy. Grrrr…

This time I called and actually got to speak with someone. “Destroy this disc!” I told him. I’m not going to bother asking for another copy from Netflix. I think Bismo owns ‘Blade Runner: The Final Cut’ on DVD. We’ll watch that.

BTW, Best Buy and the Sony outlet stores have stacks of the BDP-N460 Blu-ray player for only $140. If you can use Ethernet instead of Wifi for streaming video, that’s an incredible deal.

McAfee’s broken protection racket

Security software is a necessary evil. Sometimes the problems it causes are almost as bad as what it’s supposedly protecting against. For example, in the process of preventing spyware from slowing down Windows, anti-spyware software tends to… slow down Windows.

You’re lucky if slowness is the only downside to running real-time protection. McAfee has managed to cripple thousands of Windows XP users with its latest security update, which mistakenly quarantines an essential system file:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-20003074-83.html

This is what I do for Windows security at home:

That’s it. And none of them cost anything except the time and effort to set up. Oh, and something else. If you use a mail client like Outlook Express or Thunderbird, pre-screen your mail with a web browser and delete anything suspicious before downloading it.

Dying to run, running to die!

It’s seemed that over the past few years more runners are dropping dead during races. Yesterday’s Boston Marathon had such an incident, but fortunately the victim was revived. He had a stent installed a few years ago for a blocked artery, yet he continued to run marathon distance races! I can’t imagine his doctor thought that was a great idea.

Something else about yesterday’s marathon was that it was the first to use disposable transponders for tracking the runners.

Hasta la Vista RTM

Today was it for (all three or four of) you Windows Vista lovers who can’t bear to update your original RTM (release to manufacturer) installation with the broken Control Panel. After today support ends you’ll get no more security updates unless you update to Service Pack 1 or 2. And you XP SP2 diehards (you know who you are — or maybe you don’t!) have until July 13 to embrace SP3.