There are two kinds of TV owners in the world: HDTV owners and everybody else. HDTV owners know how much high definition enhances the TV viewing experience. It’s so good that many HDTV owners (myself included) will watch practically anything as long as it is in HD. Daytime soaps, the 10 o’clock news, even mindless reality fare—shows one would never even consider watching previously—suddenly become riveting entertainment, solely for the fact that they are in high definition. That’s how compelling High Def is.

But what HD owners really want to watch on their expensive TV sets are movies, and lots of them. The HD movie selection on cable is meager at best, and DVD’s don’t offer the capacity to deliver movies in HD on a large scale. Enter HD DVD. This next-generation optical disc format uses a blue laser to greatly increase the capacity of a disc (DVD’s top out at 9.6GB whereas the smallest 12cm HD DVD’s start at 15GB) and next-generation video codecs to enable HD movies on a disc the same size as a regular DVD. Both HD DVD and its competitor Blu-ray Disc use the same blue laser technologies, and consequently, both require consumers to go out and buy new hardware to play those respective formats. But the hardware is expensive, with HD DVD players starting at $450 and Blu-ray players going for a wallet-emptying $999. Not exactly mass-market prices.

The Xbox 360 HD DVD Player

Microsoft thinks it has a solution. It has released the Xbox…
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Well 2006 is almost over, and we can’t help but look around the corner to what is coming up in 2007. January is going to be a huge month for the technology community. To start off the new year, we have two gigantic events. Both taking place during the week of January 8, CES and Macworld Expo San Francisco are going to make us dizzy. Then, just in time for the end of the month, Microsoft will be releasing its long overdue Windows Vista.

Macwold San Francisco is the biggest Mac event of the year, and is always a platform for many releases from Apple, such as new iPods, new Macs, and the new year’s software. Last year, Apple introduced the FM tuner remote for the iPod, the Intel iMac, and the MacBook Pro, as well as iLife and iWork 2006. The upcoming Apple phone is also suspected this year, but as it is with Apple, we won’t know till it happens.

CES, or Consumer Electronics Show, is always one of the biggest tech events of the year and is always a big launch time for a multitude of exciting new products. Last year, Bill Gates/Microsoft introduced Urge (whatever happened to Urge?), Creative launched its Zen Vision:M, Pioneer went Blu-Ray, and thousands (yes, thousands) of other products were released. CES 2007 will be lighting up Vegas from January eighth to the eleventh, and is sure to make a big splash.

This gives us technology addicts just 12 days to catch our…
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In today’s world, everything is copyrighted; the TV shows you watch, the shampoo you use, and even the patterns on the clothes you’re wearing. One non-profit organization has created a way for everyone to share the fun. It’s called Creative Commons. The basic premise of Creative Commons ("CC" for short) is that you can give others the right to use your artistic work easily and quickly. If you are clicking at normal speed, it takes about one-and-a-half minutes to get a HTML code sporting the customized license you have chosen for your work. The concept and process of CC really is a brilliant thing for artists. Deviant Art currently employs an easy DHTML plug-in on their submit art page that give you the power to use the CC license, as opposed to applying a full copyright.

I’m not going to even attempt the whole legality of CC, because I’m not a lawyer. However, the CC lawyers have written up this page to help us who don’t understand it. As I said earlier, CC is very quick to use, and quite nice with its clean HTML codes that it outputs. Heres a test CC code i generated.

Clicking on the image takes you to a page that…
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Editor’s note:  Pilky originally published this on his personal blog.  He agreed to republish it here at our request.  We have edited it to a minimal degree for formatting and minor changes like capitalization.

Database design is becoming key to developing applications. Almost all web applications are driven by a database, and with Core Data, Cocoa applications are starting to have true database back ends. Therefore it is surprising that so many programmers don’t know anything about database design. So here is a simple overview of the theory behind database design.

What is the benefit of using a database? Well, for one, it is fast. If you were using XML file stores for lots of data then you will know just how slow they are. SQL is much faster as it only loads the data that is needed. Another benefit is data redundancy, or rather the lack of it in a well designed database. There are 3 main bits of database design that I am going to go through: keys, relationships and normalisation. The first two are very simple, but normalisation is a little hard to get your head round at first, but it is fundamental to a well designed database, both in terms of speed and redundancy.

Terminology

First off, lets get the basic terminology out of the way. A database is a central pool of data, simple as that. Within a database there can be several tables. A table (or entity) is a subset of this data, e.g. a…
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In the world of digital cameras, it’s all about megapixels and storage. Today I got my hands on the Cannon PowerShot A540, this is how it stacks up.

In the Box

The box contents were your average digital camera junk: a USB cable, an A/V-out cable, a 2 pack of batteries with no brand on them, a 16 MB memory card, and the camera. I’d say you got a nice average product. As for documentation, Canon has gone far beyond the normal bulk of instruction manuals. You will find an English manual, an English quick-start guide, a Spanish instruction manual, and a Spanish quick-start guide among the papers. Also you get two (English and Spanish) fold-out diagrams on how to connect your new camera.

Software

The camera comes with a software CD. I’ve used this software before when I got my old PowerShot A300. Most of the programs on the disk are plainly trivial in use, and serve no real purpose. One program, however, allows stitching of pictures to create a panoramic picture. This utility takes your pictures and finds the similar edges, just like in Adobe Photoshop‘s photomerge script. The only issue with this program is that your images will vary in brightness when using a flash. This means fewer lines in darker pictures, so your going to get bad results from this.  Other than that utility, the other software ranges from a photo browser and USB drivers (in-case you’re still using Windows 95). The photo browser that is included…
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