Not all piracy represents lost sales: many pirates would never have paid, and would rather go without whatever they can’t easily pirate. That’s not a market worth worrying too much about, because there’s not much anyone can do to stop it, and any attempts to slow it down usually just limit, inconvenience, frustrate, and anger the paying customers.

But there are a lot of people who will pay to get content legally, even if it’s easy to pirate, when getting it legally is easier. (This is now the case, to a large extent, with music.)

So let me explain exactly what I mean by it: Short (a few hundred words) summaries or explainers about a major news event covered more in depth by somebody else. In its best form, we wrote short little decoders of a big  story, and tried to link generously to the original source. At its worst, we monitored Twitter and Google for trending topics, and dispatched an intern to cobble together our own summary, posted it quickly, then prayed to the Google gods that the effort would win, if only briefly, their favor. 

I'm not proud of that last approach, a mandate from above, which we were able to quietly scuttle after it was proven to have absolutely zero impact.

The Junkyard Jumbotron lets you take a bunch of random displays and instantly stitch them together into a large, virtual display, simply by taking a photograph of them. It works with laptops, smartphones, tablets --- anything that runs a web browser. It also highlights a new way of connecting a large number of heterogenous devices to each other in the field, on an ad-hoc basis.

DAVE700 är en kommande trådlös mediaspelare från Netgear. Jag önskar att Apple kunde göra en sådan här produkt.

En open-source-plattform för hemmabio-pc (htpc) som körs på Linux.

Mike Davidson ger en utförlig kommentar till MacWorld San Francisco 2005, det som är bra, det som är dåligt och det som är riktigt dåligt.

Rokus nätverksmediaspelare som kan visa HD-upplösning och har stöd för mac.

CNET sammanfattar de nätverksmediaspelare som finns och som de recenserat.

Macworld recenserar Roku SoundBridge M1000 och M2000, två produkter för att strömma ljud från dator (mac) till stereo. De jämför även med Squeezebox från Slim Devices.

En fräck Windows Media Center PC i läcker design från Italien. Den har bland annat en 7 tums färgskärm.

En beskrivning av XML-importfunktionen i Quicktime 5.