Not all directors are as enthusiastic about Hollywood's 3D push as James Cameron of Avatar fame. Some are against 3D while others are ambivalent about it.
Lawsuits from the RIAA are not the only hazards for the intrepid file sharer. Simply downloading P2P software can pollute your PC with nuisance software. The most notorious example remains Kazaa, which paid more than $100 million to settle music-industry lawsuits, but is still listed as badware by stopbadware.org. That report is a few months old, but according to the McAfee SiteAdvisor, the Kazaa site still exposes PC users to what "some people consider adware, spyware, or other unwanted programs." In addition, it links to firstadsolution.com, "which our analysis found to be deceptive or fraudulent." SiteAdvisor gives similar warnings about BearShare. Limewire and Morpheus get a clean bill of health, but beware of other sites that offer free downloads of Limewire and Morpheus software—and that includes most of those listed as Google-sponsored links! By the way, the SiteAdvisor is a free plug-in for Internet Explorer or Firefox that festoons Google, Yahoo, or MSN search results with green- or red-light bugs to warn you of PC health hazards. Click on the bugs and they'll give you information like that quoted above. SiteAdvisor is totally goodware—it costs nothing to install and may keep you out of loads of trouble.
Yesterday we reported a Nielsen survey showing that TV ownership has dropped two percent. Unmentioned were a couple of other TV ownership patterns, both reported by DisplaySearch: Consumers who do own TVs are replacing their sets more frequently. And those who own flat panel sets are likely to own multiple sets.
Worldwide, consumers are replacing both tube-based and flat-panel sets at a faster rate than they had in the previous 10- to 15-year average. What's attracting them are not the latest technologies, such as 3DTV or IPTV, but more basic things such as picture quality and price. See press release.
A problem was looming in the kitchen--aside from my rudimentary cooking skills and haphazard sanitary habits, that is. I found myself avoiding my kitchen system. The kitchen rig seemed like a good idea at the time. By combining a mass-market mini-system with a sat/sub set, and wall-mounting the satellites, I'd squeeze music into a tight L-shaped place where only radio had gone before. Anyway, I soon tired of the system's rudimentary and haphazard performance and it devolved into a glorified radio. After a decade I threw in the dish towel and replaced the radio function with, well, a radio. Then I set about brainstorming a new music system for the kitchen.
The world is well supplied with iPod-compatible micro-systems. Unfortunately, many of them don't look so good. An exception is Sonic Impact's curvaceous T24.
Next-generation audiophiles-in-the-making are plugging their iPods into tube amps. So building an iPod dock into a tube amp is a logical progression. Sonic Integrity's Tube Pod (shown by System Audio, $1000) includes 13-wpc amp, dock, and speakers. Long live the revolution. For more details: tube-pod.com.
Sonneteer's Morpheus audio server will play anything your home network dishes up through a PC or other device. You can supplement it with Sonneteer's 3TB external hard drive, which adds the convenience of a slot-load CD drive for burning. The basic unit has 50 watts times two and sells for $3995. Double that if you add the extra drive. One angle that came up in our discussion was the fact that the system rips with metadata from free providers; a more deluxe service costs extra. If you're buying a pricey audio server, find out where it's getting its metadata and consider how that will affect the experience of using it.
Sonoro is a German audio manufacturer. The company recently commissioned a survey on the listening habits of 560 consumers. Thirty-nine percent of them named FM radio as their number one audio entertainment source, beating iPods and other MP3 players at 23 percent. That was interesting, but when I visited the Sonoro site, I found something even more interesting: the Cubo system.
Getting Sirius got a little easier last week with the announcement that the Sonos Digital Music System would support the internet version of Sirius satellite radio. Connect your Sonos system to the net and you can get 80 Sirius channels--for a fee, of course.