What is a Receiver?
A receiver is that big, heavy thing that you plug your speakers and other components into (like a DVD player, TV, CD player, Xbox, PlayStation, iPod, and etc.). Its the “brain” of the show, really. The idea of connecting all your components to a receiver is the concept of audio/video switching, allowing [...]
Regular Sony watchers will know that the gap between Sony announcing something new for the PS3 and actually delivering it is like watching a mirage: sometimes there’s something there but most of the time there isn’t.
This week, it’s another delay for the interesting ‘Life with Playstation’ service but this one comes with a bit of good news attached: the service will be free.
Life with Playstation, announced in June, shows you a very cool satellite shot of the Earth and delivers news feeds and weather reports relevant to different cities directly to your TV screen via the PS3.
Sony’s Noam Rimon scribbled on the official Playstation blog:
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Vivendi cheered investors yesterday with a rise in second-quarter profits thanks to strong growth at its videogame and pay-TV businesses, and news that it will not be launching a refinancing to fund a recent spate of deals.
But Universal Music, the world’s largest music company and part of the Paris-based Vivendi empire, saw revenues decline 5.3% and profits drop 9.2% in the three months to the end of June, as CD sales continued to slide and revenues from digital downloads failed to plug the gap.
Chairman Jean-Bernard Lévy said that despite “a tighter economic environment” the company would stick to its forecast of profit growth similar to last year.
The company had shown “very good resistance to this slightly tense economic situation”, he said, although analysts admitted they still had reservations about the potential impact of a prolonged period of economic downturn on the company.
Vivendi has been beefing itself up through acquisitions this year. In April it spent €4.5bn (£3.6bn) buying out Neuf Cegetel, the French fixed-line telecoms company, so it could add residential broadband services to the portfolio of products offered by its SFR mobile phone unit.
Vodafone has a 44% stake in SFR and has long wanted full control, as France is the only major western economy in which it does not own a mobile phone business. Vivendi, however, also wants control of the business.
In July Vivendi merged its computer games business, the creator of the world’s most popular online role-playing game World of Warcraft, with its US rival Activision, owner of the popular Guitar Hero franchise, to create Activision Blizzard.
Vivendi had suggested it would finance these two deals through a rights issue of as much as €2bn. But yesterday Levy said: “We are today in a position to affirm that we won’t need to call on the market to finance these acquisitions.”
The company is not, however, looking for any more acquisitions.
The Cegetel and Activision deals helped boost Vivendi’s second-quarter results. SFR saw sales increase by a third to just under €3bn, but profits before financial charges were roughly flat at €716m as a result of the cost of integrating the Neuf Cegetel business. Vivendi’s computer games business saw revenues rise 6.7% to €223m with profits of €42m. Its French pay-TV business Canal Plus increased revenues by almost 5% to just over €1.1bn, with profits up 31% at €181m. Last year it snapped up Television Par Satellite.
But Universal Music, which recently signed a deal with the Rolling Stones, snatching the band from EMI, saw revenues ease 5.3% to just over €1bn and profits drop 9.2% to €148m.
Overall Vivendi yesterday reported a 15.1% increase in revenues to just under €6bn for the three months to the end of June, and a 3.2% increase in profits to €1.36bn.
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Now you can take that round-the-world trip from the comfort of your home, and see not just the obvious tourist sites but people having parties or playing with their kids in the back garden. All you need is a web browser and Earth Album – an online photo album that covers the whole world.
Earth Album doesn’t actually have any of its own photos, of course: it takes them from Flickr, the popular photo-sharing website. Nor does it have a map of the world: it uses Google Maps with a hybrid satellite view. What Earth Album does is take these two giant internet properties and link them together in what’s called a mashup.
It’s easy to use. You start with a map of the world and zoom in on the area you want. Earth Album takes any Flickr photos associated with that place – perhaps by geotagging – and displays them in a scrolling strip across the screen. You can click on any photo to see a larger version, along with its caption, if it has one.
The results vary according to what’s available. If you focus on a small or desolate region you may not find anything. Zooming out increases the chance of finding at least a few images, and the country-level views have some stunning images. The major cities and tourist spots are well covered, as you’d expect, but some areas are very badly served. Google Maps’ coverage of Georgia, for example, is poor, and it can be hard to find many photos except for Tbilisi.
There are shortcuts, and you can find a place by typing in the name or entering an address. If you want London Ontario, Paris Texas or Boston Lincs, you have to be specific. Curiously, York takes you to New York instead of the city in Yorkshire.
You can also search by keywords and find things like mountains and sunsets. In this case, Earth Album seems to be picking up cues from titles and captions.
There are one or two annoyances. The main one for me is the scrolling of the picture selection. This works well as you go from right to left, bringing up more photos, but clicking the left arrow takes you right back to the beginning. This seems bizarre on a site that has been around for two years.
A very minor complaint is that there should be a more obvious way to jump from any photo to its home on Flickr (clicking the title works). Flickr often gives you the background to a picture, and access to a stream of related images.
Earth Album’s results may seem somewhat voyeuristic, because they can include personal snaps taken at parties and weddings, at work, at home or in pubs. On the other hand, it’s interesting to see the same sort of snaps from Santiago, Singapore, Sapporo and similar places. In the end, Earth Album is giving us the chance to see and share our common humanity, and that must be a force for good.
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Apparently, the head of the British Cartographic Society is no fan of Google Maps. She’s complaining that Google Maps doesn’t include the additional geographic information that makes maps so great, claiming:
“We’re in real danger of losing what makes maps so unique, giving us a feel for a place even if we’ve never been there.”
Except, that’s not quite true. After all, Google Maps allows all sorts of overlays and additional info. With Google Maps you can also get the satellite view, which is likely to give you a much greater feel for a place than a map. And, of course, many areas have the “Street View” feature as well — again, providing a much greater feel for a place you’ve never been. As for certain landmarks and such not being added to Google Maps, more seem to be added every day, and with Google letting people add their own information to maps as well, it’s only going to get better and better.
If anything, it seems like this guy is complaining not because Google Maps isn’t useful, but because she’s afraid that the need for traditional cartographers may not be as strong (which I doubt will actually be the case). Besides, if she’s so worried that certain information isn’t included on Google Maps, why not create a mashup overlaying all the info she feels has been left out — because that’s rather easy to do with Google Maps.
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Are you tired of paying those high monthly bills; and every time you turn around it seems as though your cable company is raising the prices on their services again? Well you do not have to take it anymore and this article is going to explain how to watch television online with PC satellite TV.
That [...]
About Bose Corporation
Based in Framingham, Massachusetts, Bose was founded by Dr Amar G Bose in 1964. Bose Corporation is an American specialist in high-end audio systems. Bose is world’s leading manufacturer in home theater speakers and professional audio market. It manufactures variety of model for home theater system including its own patented Wave radio system. [...]
Integrated home systems may include all or any of the following:-
Video sources to various rooms using display equipment from TFT, Plasma, Projection and PC connectivity.
Audio distribution of CD based music, digital radio, digital TV broadcasts from terrestrial and satellite broadcasters, cable and increasingly over the internet.
Data connections for the use of home networked computers access [...]
As the French president Nicolas Sarkozy thrashed out a ceasefire between the Kremlin and Georgia this month, a Georgian Airways plane touched down in Tbilisi carrying a team of his fellow countrymen who have been among the first on the ground in disaster areas and war zones for the past decade.
The charity they work for has provided a vital service for bodies from the UN and World Health Organisation to Oxfam and Save the Children and has directly helped hundreds of thousands of people caught up in earthquakes, mud slides, famines and wars.
The French team were taking telecoms equipment into the Georgian capital. Télécoms Sans Frontières (TSF) has provided a vital link for aid agencies and a lifeline to friends and relatives from Iraq and Niger to Sri Lanka and Nicaragua.
TSF - which has no connection with the medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières - is the brainchild of former caterer Jean-François Cazenave, whose only previous connection with the world of communications had been a brief stint with the French postal service that eventually split to form France Télécom.
Cazenave, transfixed by television news footage about the plight of the Kurds, got talking with a friend who worked for a British frozen foods company about how they could help.
Ten days later, with $10,000 and 40 volunteers, they were ready to ship out clothes and other supplies in two lorries, one bound for Iran and the other heading for the Turkish border. In unmistakably French style, that first consignment also included 100,000 pieces of cheese. The trip to Kurdistan was followed by mercy missions to the Balkans the following year. But what surprised Cazenave on every trip was the reaction of the people he had come to help when it came time for the trucks to roll out again.
“When we left the camp they all gave us pieces of paper with a telephone number on them saying ‘when you get back to France phone my friend, phone my father, phone my brother, say we are here, that their uncle is dead and that we are here and they have to help us’. That is how it began. During the war in Bosnia it was the same. In the 45 times I went there, every time we have come back from Mostar or Sarajevo and so on we had a list of people to call when we got home.”
He started to look into whether there were ways of setting up communications facilities into the refugee camps that had sprung up all over the Balkans and realised there was nothing.
“Every time we saw the same thing - there is a need for victims to be able to communicate. And all the non-governmental organisations (NGOs) also need telecommunications.”
So he went back to his local council with a proposal and the mayor bought Cazenave his first satellite phone.
Now 53, the doughty Cazenave would not look out of place running a vineyard. The early days of TSF, officially started in 1998, confirms his job is a lot harder than it first appears. On one of his first outings he was threatened by an angry Albanian who put a gun to his head and the following year was taken hostage by Bosnian Serbs.
“Part of the problem is that I have a big mouth,” he jokes in his heavily accented English. “Now I am more, not relaxed, but careful about what I say.”
His first trip, to Albania in 1998, proved him right. He had gone out there with one satellite phone to help refugees from Bosnia.
“We opened our little centre, in a village school, and a load of people came. What was fantastic was that a few days later I remember seeing people arriving in cars to take away their family and we thought ‘this idea is good’.”
When he got back, he founded TSF along with some of his former colleagues, including Monique Lanne-Petit, who remains a director.
On one mission the following year in Macedonia, TSF had 400 people turn up to make calls the first day. Two days later there were 25,000 and a queue a mile long and the media started to take notice of the Frenchman with a satellite phone. From there the team went to Kosovo. Cazenove had 6,000 francs (£700) in his pocket and plans to stay for two weeks. He ended up staying for more than a year and by the end of it, TSF was operating under a UN mandate.
TSF then became involved in disaster relief after the 1999 earthquake that struck Izmit in western Turkey. TSF volunteers took some of the kit from Kosovo to help out. “It was our first intervention for a natural disaster. We stayed there for 10 days.”
Since then TSF has been out on more than 70 missions to 50-odd countries. It has attracted the backing of the Vodafone Group Foundation, the United Nations Foundation, the European Commission Humanitarian Office (ECHO), satellite communications groups Inmarsat, Eutelsat and Vizada, telecoms companies AT&T and Cable & Wireless and the Regional Council of Aquitaine. It now has 20 full-time staff and twice that number of volunteers.
Only two countries have defeated TSF. It reluctantly pulled out of Iraq, because the queues of people waiting to use the phone could attract suicide bombers, and Burma, where the regime refused it access to the Irrawaddy delta after the cyclone hit the region this year.
TSF has expanded its operations in recent years, not just setting up communications hubs for NGOs, but also using the latest generation of satellite phones - which provide internet and send pictures - to put people in remote areas in touch with distant medical facilities.
In the west African state of Niger, ravaged by famine, TSF has put in place communication services in 37 locations to help the government’s national food crisis prevention system. In South America it trains people in impoverished areas to use the latest IT systems.
At its core TSF does exactly what it started out doing 10 years ago and is doing it right now in Georgia: providing vital communications to people who have lost absolutely everything.
During that 10 years, TSF has suffered only two accidents - give or take the odd kidnapping. One volunteer was injured in Iraq and more recently one of the team in Niger contracted malaria.
Cazenave says: “The most dangerous thing we do is use the local equipment, like cars and helicopters. We go to poor countries and the cars are old and we drive very fast because we have to arrive very quickly. The helicopters we have to use are sometimes helicopters that should not be made to fly but in an emergency you have no choice.”
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You may recall a few years back, prior to the RIAA embracing the concept of “pre-litigation letters,” that DirecTV was a huge proponent of using them. The company had sued some companies that sold smart card readers — which could be used for a variety of purposes, only one of which was potentially unauthorized access of satellite TV signals. However, DirecTV was still given access to those company’s full customer lists, and proceeded to send most of them one of those pre-litigation letters, demanding $3,500 or saying that a lawsuit would be filed. Of course, plenty of buyers had perfectly legitimate reasons for purchasing a smart card reader that had nothing at all to do with pirating satellite TV. But, no matter, pay up or go to court. And, in fact, many people just paid up.
Eventually, a court finally told DirecTV to knock it off.
However, it appears that DirecTV’s main competitors, Echostar never got the message. The EFF is pointing out that Echostar is trying to gain access to the customer lists of a bunch of sellers of a satellite receiver even if there’s no evidence that the individual buyers used the satellite receivers to pirate Echostar’s DISH Network satellite TV service.
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