DVD Is Dead

The DVD may have died this week.

Walmart is now selling Blu-Ray high-definition optical disk players for $68 in the U. S. Sure, plain old DVD players are cheaper still, but why would you buy one? Blu-Ray players can be used with your old DVD collection just fine and will line-double and up-shift your old disks a bit so they’ll look nice (but not as nice as 1080p Blu-Ray) on your new LCD or plasma TV. So unless the Blu-Ray can’t connect to your old TV for some reason, I can’t imagine why anyone would buy the old standard.

These things happen: Moore’s Law, remember? But in this case it feels to me like […]

By |December 22nd, 2009|2009|183 Comments
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The Day AT&T Learned Moore's Law (it's not when you think it was)

att_logo copyLast weekend a story in the New York Times blamed the bad reputation of AT&T’s wireless network on iPhone technical problems, not the AT&T network at all. Going further, Global Wireless Solutions, a network testing company, said the AT&T network is actually faster than Verizon’s, backing to a certain extent AT&T’s now-aborted legal effort to silence Verizon Wireless commercials that said otherwise. I doubt this is actually the case. Last summer as my family and I wandered across the United States in our old Winnebago motor home equipped with two iPhones from AT&T but also cellular data from Verizon, I can say with some certainty that Verizon coverage was consistently better, […]

By |December 16th, 2009|2009|132 Comments
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FedEx Kinkos Won't Print Our Christmas Card

Update — Good news!  Reader Scott Hall, who owns a card printing web site called Babyshere.com, offered to print our Christmas cards for less than FedEx-Kinkos would have charged.  Only a few hours later my cards are now literally in the mail.  Thanks, Scott!

Tonight I walked into the Fedex Kinkos store on Calhoun Street here in Charleston, SC to print our Christmas cards, only to have the clerk, Tammy Johnson, reject my order as obscene.

We Cringelys are known for our Christmas cards, I admit, because we make them ourselves and we’re naked. The tradition began by accident and now our cards are so popular friends remind us to send them.  Making naked Christmas cards that are tasteful isn’t easy, either, but we […]

By |December 15th, 2009|2009|818 Comments
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AOL Real Estate

AOLrealestateToday I started moonlighting for AOL Real Estate where I’ll be posting twice a week.

By |December 10th, 2009|2009|84 Comments
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Intel Will Buy nVIDIA

There is a funky dance going on right now between chip giants Intel and nVIDIA and I just want to cut through the crap and tell you that no matter what the companies are saying it is likely to end with nVIDIA being purchased by Intel. Both parties know it and the only thing that hasn’t been determined yet is the price, which is what all this posturing is about.
Intel this week cancelled Larrabee, its proposed graphics processing unit (GPU) that was intended to compete with both nVIDIA and ATi (now a part of AMD). The moment AMD bought ATi Intel had to decide whether to build or buy its own GPU to stay in contention. […]

By |December 8th, 2009|2009|193 Comments
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