Sung's Blog

A new German ship called MV Beluga SkySails will set sail with a new concept for saving costs and saving the Earth. They are attaching very large kites to help move large boats. They say that it can cut fuel use up to 20% or $1,600 a day. Also, burning less fuel means less emissions into the atmosphere for a smaller carbon footprint. The Skysails will be the guinea pig and if it is successful other companies will be able to buy this technology.

Also, Britney Spears' 16-year-old sister is pregnant.

Labels: green, news, technology, world

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NME has released the first HD VMD player and is now available to purchase on Amazon. HD VMD, unlike HD-DVD and Blu-ray, uses current DVD technology to store and play HD movies. A regular DVD has one layer for around 5GB or two layers for almost 10GB. HD VMD uses four layers for around 20GB. They also say that they can reach ten layers for 50GB, which is pretty much what Sony claims for their Blu-ray discs.

There aren't many downfalls for HD VMD but a major one might be the lack of Hollywood movie studio support. The launch title are Hostage, Apocalypto, Pulp Fiction, Babel, Saw II and Saw III. These movies are more independent movies. You can't have a successful format without any content, especially without big summer blockbuster movies. Also, I can't find HD VMD movies to buy them. Amazon which sells the player doesn't seem to have any movies.

Another downfall, which might be important to the early adopter that would buy this, is that it doesn't support the higher quality surround sound like Dolby TrueHD. This might be because of the four layer, early VMD disc's size as TrueHD is uncompressed and takes up a lot of space. The later ten layer disc might include it.

Labels: electronics, movies, technology

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Friday I went to DigitalLife at the Jacob Javits Center. I wasn't sure what it was. I read that there was going to be keynotes from the consumer electronics industry leaders, so I thought it might be a non end-user type of deal. I also knew DigitalLife was a show hosted by Patrick Norton, who was a co-host on the Screensavers when G4TV was TechTV.

Norton and the rest of the cast from The Screensavers was pretty much kicked out when Comcast merged G4 and TechTV together and moved the set from San Fransisco to Los Angelos. Norton left before the move but a few other stayed, like Kevin Rose, Sarah Lane and Yoshi. Although the show got weird and they eventually changed it to the Kevin Pereira show...I mean Attack of the Show. I'm guessing they changed the name to "AOTS" to show that it's a different show even though they keep pretty much the same format. I guess the main difference is that the show is no longer helpful. Even though the technical content of the Screensavers was the entertainment part of the show.

Anyway, back to DigitalLife. On the website for the show, they showed how there would be lots of celebrities and athletes. It was mostly a video game show so I guess celebrities and athletes had to be there to promote games. When I went, no one was there. I guess I went on an off day. I did manage to see a couple of people that made me feel star-struck. The Pac-Man and the giant robot.

I also got to see some demos of the Xbox 360 in person. I think the graphics are impressive from what they show. People have been critical, but as long as everything was rendered real-time, it's leaps and bounds above regular Xbox graphics.

Labels: electronics, gadget, technology, Video Games

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