Other Tech

Guy walks into a Tweeter (no, this isn't a dirty joke) and asks if they can design a multiroom entertainment system for the house he's building. So an installer visits the construction site and comes up with a plan. But then the guy blows him off, taking the installer's ideas and having his own electrician do the work instead.

To the acclaim of filmmaking luminaries like George Lucas and James Cameron, the Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) group has released Version 1.0 of its Digital Cinema System Specification, which details how a filmless, fully digital movie theater will work. Because the Hollywood studios formed DCI, the standard has their full blessing and stands a good chance of revolutionizing moviegoing.

As I was listening to the group commentary on the Season 1 pilot, it seemed like the cast had a genuine camaraderie. We had a lot of fun. Yet we're all such different people - and we're not in the same age category either.

Did you know you can get a plasma HDTV for $1,800? That's right - TV technology that a few years ago cost more than a Hyundai is now within reach of most middle-class American budgets. Prices for entry-level big-screen HDTVs, including those flat-panel plasmas and LCDs as well as advanced DLP and LCD projectors, are falling at near-terminal velocity and have yet to hit bottom.

Digital sound from FM and AM? It's here, in the form of HD Radio, which drapes digital data like saddlebags over the existing FM and AM carrier waves. Broadcasters already use that added digital capacity to enhance their signals' sonics, to carry several programs at once, and to tell you what they're transmitting.

There were a lot of announcements at Apple's recent gala press event touting the iPod nano, but conspicuously absent was any news about a video iPod. Apple, it seems, is content to let everybody else fight over the small market for portable video players (PVPs) - at least for now.

Not too long ago, if you wanted to record an HDTV program, you had to take a quaint step back in time and use a VCR - a digital VCR, but still a VCR. Today, there are a number of hard-disk options for recording HD, but if you want to save the program so it won't be accidentally erased from the hard drive, you have to resort to - you guessed it - a VCR.