HD Movies Free on Cable "Free" and "cable" don't usually go together. Yet about 80% of Comcast households are being offered a sprinkling of high-def video-on-demand movies free each month. April titles will include Cliffhanger, Desperado, and The Fifth Element.
"A guy walks into a talent agent's office.... " From that humble beginning spring 100 or so different riffs on perhaps the most vile, grotesque joke ever told. And the tellers here include everyone from Don Rickles, George Carlin, and Martin Mull to Whoopi Goldberg, Gilbert Gottfried, and Jon Stewart.
The maker of the world's most deliriously successful music player offers these words of advice: "If you expose your ears to excessive sound pressure, you can harm those small hair cells in your ears." Whether this has anything to do with the class-action lawsuit filed in Louisiana alleging hearing damage from iPods is, of course, just so much irresponsible speculation. According to my colleagues at Stereophile, a recent poll indicates hearing loss among the young is a real problem. What is certain is that Apple has announced a firmware upgrade that sets a top volume level deemed safe with Apple's supplied iPod earbuds and other products with similar sensitivity ratings.
The Consumer Electronics Show is all about the neatest, sexiest, highest-tech products we'll get to see in 2006, right? Well, sort of, because CES isn't just about hardware anymore. Getting all that neat, sexy, high-tech gear to play nice together has become just as important as the gear itself.
You've gotta wonder what Freud would say about all these TV makers trying to outdo each other with the biggest screen. Then again, you also have to admit that an 80-inch plasma TV is never just an 80-inch plasma TV - not when it's the biggest you can get. Taking plasma into the 80s is the (holy crap!) $150,000 Samsung HP-R8082, whose screen has 1,920 x 1,080 pixels.
Sure, the Onkyo CS-V720 minisystem ($400) is willing and able to serve as a DVD/CD player, but this sleek little number doesn't merely spin discs. It's also XM radio-ready, which means that when you get an XM Connect & Play antenna ($20) and a subscription to the satellite service ($12.95 a month), 160 channels of music, sports, news, and more will be at your fingertips.
