Breaking Windows

The team can win, lose, or tie. That's it. Sports movies have no other options. It's something that really defeats the purpose of filming one in the first place. If it's a true story, then it's excusable. "Mr. 3000" is not, so you can easily fault it for falling into the rut that so many of these films do. If it tried to do anything different it might be worthwhile, but it doesn't.

I have seen the commercials, I am sure you have as well, but I didn't think much of it when I went to Staples recently. To my sunrise they had DVD-R 40 packs for a mere $5! This was after a $4 in store and $9 online rebate! I only went in to buy a flatbed scanner, HP Deskjet ink, and look at Palm PDAs but at that price, heck yea.

Staples has an Easy Rebates site where you put in two numbers, and your rebates are done. One number is a unique number per item, and the other is a ID number from that entire receipt. If you buy more then one of an item (DVD-R 40 pack, for example) you only have to input it once. Thats pretty nice.

The waiting is still the same, but you no longer have to slap a stamp on a letter and drop it in the mail. Online rebates are so cool. More stores should think about online rebates.

This is not print, but I've heard this is a decent magazine. Covers gaming and computers.

Editors Note: This is a Zinio subscription. If you don't have an account, you can get one for free (I think). I have an account as half my magazines I get via Zinio. PC Magazine's ExtremeTech web site is pretty cool, and from flipping through this magazine has info on all kinds of mods and in depth technical stuff. Just like the web site.

For many TV shows, costs to license the original music for DVD are prohibitively high, so rights owners replace the music with cheaper tunes, much to the irritation of avid fans. And some shows, like WKRP, which is full of music, will probably never make it to DVD because of high licensing costs.

UPN has planned to cancel the Star Trek Enterprise series due to slumping ratings. Obviously because they have way too much money and are obviously not too charitable, three people have pledged $3 million to keep it on the air... really. No, those tsunami people should be fine. They'll be enjoying Enterprise for years to come now! That's assuming of course they can ever restore electricity and I'm thinking $3 million might just help that cause.

I got my Xbox replacement cord in the mail today. It has instructions on how to use it.

No. I am not kidding.

Credit has to be given to actors and/or actresses who star in a movie like this. To get through even a short shoot without cracking a smile on a screen has to be brutal. No one in their right mind could take a movie like this seriously. It doesn't even matter how old you are. This insipid piece of work is, almost without question, the worst thing to happen to the Sci-Fi Channel since Farscape fans started writing hate mail.

Not content with allowing legal jackals like Jack Thompson to attempt to sue the freedom of expression out of gaming companies, lawmakers in Washington State want to hold the makers and sellers of violent video games liable for the actions of idiot teenagers.

House Bill 2178 would make game developers and publishers responsible for the actions of any one under 17 who commits a crime, due in any part to playing a game. Just how a person would go about proving that the law breaking was due to a game is beyond me.

This opinion piece has a point. What if you apply this same wacked idea to music and movies. But lets not stop there, what about books?

What the hell is wrong with our society that people can no longer be held responsible for their own actions?

Could open-source tools be behind Microsoft's own MSN service?

An image posted online indicates that some of Microsoft's own developers apparently prefer open-source products to build Web pages than Microsoft's own proprietary software.

What? You mean that ASP and SQL Server isn't used for all Microsoft sites? Heaven forbid that LAMP be involved. My guess is that this site is outsourced and these subcontractors don't really like Microsoft's web tools. Or is the image just a hoax. Either way, its pretty funny. Especially since Microsoft has a passion for hating on Open Source.

The Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) on Wednesday introduced a new video game rating category -- E10+. The new rating has been developed to help consumers more easily differentiate between games that have content appropriate for the whole family and games that are suitable for ages 10 and over, according to a statement from the organization.

So now there is a stop gap between a 10 year old and a 13 year old, where the Teen rating kicks in. This new E10+ rating is good because Everyone is for kids 6 years and older. E10+ fits in the right spot in the middle of Everyone and Teen. I just hope that parents actually take note of this change. So what is the difference between E10+ and Teen you may ask? I am so glad you did:

Titles rated E10+ (Everyone 10 and older) have content that may be suitable for ages 10 and older. Titles in this category may contain more cartoon, fantasy or mild violence, mild language, and/or minimal suggestive themes.

Titles rated T (Teen) have content that may be suitable for ages 13 and older. Titles in this category may contain violence, suggestive themes, crude humor, minimal blood and/or infrequent use of strong language.

So E10+ has less drugs, sex, and violence then Teen does. Everyone just has "minimal" drugs, sex, and volence. Clear as pea soup to be sure. Regardless, kudos to the ESRB.

Will Smith should be covered. He's been to the past ("Ali"), and alternate present day ("Men in Black"), did an animated film ("Shark Tale"), went to a futuristic past ("Wild Wild West"), and now he's made his way into the future. "I, Robot" is a typical summer blockbuster, filled with all sorts of fancy effects and one-liners. It's entertaining compared to other films of the same vein, just not one that's very insightful even though it could (make that should) be.

Maybe classic isn't the word that will be going through your mind when you're done traveling down memory lane, but you can't pass up an opportunity to watch the Super Mario Bros. Super Show now can you? Oddly, the episodes they have include the Lou Albano segments which were cut from most of the DVD releases. Go figure. If Mario isn't your thing, check out Zelda, Inspector Gadget, and other stuff I've never heard of, all streaming and all free.

If there's one thing you can always count on, it's a strong performance by Billy Bob Thorton. It never seems to matter what role he takes on, he owns each and every character he plays. Less than a year after playing a sex-a-holic Santa Claus in "Bad Santa," Thorton took it upon himself to portray an American icon. That's a role change if there ever was one. It's a real shame the movie isn't as good as his performance.

And the dealer doesn't even have a clue. Warning: Total stupidity ahead (yet strangely entertaining)!

They don't make them like this anymore. From the production values, witty script, to the booming soundtrack by Klaus Badelt, "Pirates of the Caribbean" is an incredible, wild ride worthy of the term "new classic." Regardless of its flaws, this is a movie that will sneak right into your memory and stay there for countless reasons, not the least of which is Johnny Depp's performance.

Though he is heavily looked down upon for ruining the "Batman" franchise, Joel Schumacher has done some fine work lately. Two Colin Farrell vehicles, "Phone Booth" and "Tigerland," are just as under appreciated as the director. His skills are put to good use in the excellent "Veronica Guerin," a film that not only helps the aging directors career, but Cate Blanchetts as well.

Most in the industry were certain that Apple would choose Be, whose operating system, BeOS, already ran on Apple's newest computers. Amongst Apple's other options were to license Solaris from Sun, NT from Microsoft, or to purchase a burgeoning software (it had dropped its hardware years before), NeXT.

For those of you who do not know this history of OS X, and how it was almost BeOS and not NeXT, or if you didn't know that Be and NeXT was involved, this is a great article. The timeline is fleshed out well, and was a good read.

Microsoft has won the latest round in its long running battle with Eolas Technologies over the ownership of the patents regarding plug-ins for browsers.

Now Microsoft can try and claim prior art again. I really do not see how they can do that.

This has been going on for a while, and I don't see it ending anytime soon. Microsoft survived the DOJ, they will probably survive Eolas.

This has gone on so long that I have lost count on who is winning and who is losing. I just don't want to have to change the way I use the OBJECT and EMBED tags.

At Big Blue's USA PartnerWorld conference Steve Welch used software on the iPod to save the crashed ThinkPad. The software is One-touch Rescue & Recovery On Linux and is not as yet an announced IBM product.

iTunes on both the Mac and PC is a terrific application, but it has a singular advantage on the Mac—its support of Apple’s scripting language, AppleScript. Regrettably, writing AppleScripts is beyond the ken of a lot of Mac users. Fortunately, that makes not a whit of difference thanks to Doug Adams and his invaluable site, Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes.

It is not really fair to boil down the scripts on Doug's site to 10, but the list here is pretty good. If you have not thought of extending iTunes with AppleScripts, you may find yourself wasting a lot of time. There are a great many things you can do with Doug's AppleScripts. What's more is that he is not the type of person who does not support his work. I have emailed him regarding a couple of his scripts, and he has gotten back to me fairly quickly.

Apple has been running a Dashboard contest (I guess I forgot to post about it) and it has just ended. the two winners are Send SMS and WikityWidget.

Send SMS provides the ability to send a message on the spur of the moment to someone without having to launch the Address Book application. Send SMS combines the instantly available Tiger Dashboard with Short Message Service, or SMS.

WikityWidget is a personal notepad with automatic linking. Using a simple notebook-style interface, WikityWidget lets you easily jot down and organize notes with hypertext links so they're easy to find and instantly available via the Mac OS X Tiger Dashboard.

If you have been lucky enough to score yourself a developer key for Tiger, you already know how cool Dashboard is. For those who will have to wait until Tiger goes on sale, :P

No no, just kidding. Just like Expose has become something I use every day, Dashboard is going to be another part of the Mac OS that I will soon say "how did I live without it."

Talking about Dashboard widgets, you should check out the Widget Archive at Dashboarder.com. as well as others at Dashboard Developer.

I know at least two of you have wanted this back, as I have gotten emails about it, so the Bloglet form is back. You can use Bloglet to subscribe (or unsubscribe) to my blog. You get a daily email of updates. You will find this form on the About Us page now. I will add a link to the sidebar sometime soon.

But for now just go to the About Us portion of this site.

Sony Pictures' vice chairman Yair Landau told attendees of the iHollywood Digital Living Room forum that his company will release software allowing its PlayStation Portable (PSP) hand-held game console to connect to Macs and PCs, according to a recent report. What's more, the device will also be able to work with Connect, Sony's music download service, offering potential competition for Apple's iPod.

And it looks like Sony already is going to have competition on the Mac, with iPSP, a 3rd party application that transfers photos and music to your PSP.

Sony has announced nine new flash-based MP3 players to compete with Apple's iPod shuffle. "The lineup includes a set of cigarette lighter-sized models, a bit more expensive than the iPod Shuffle but with a much longer advertised battery life--50 hours of playback time with a rechargeable battery compared to Apple's 12 hours. And unlike the Shuffle, the Sony players have bright, 3-line screens to display song information...

If Sony cannot undercut Apple in the price department, I wonder if they will sell many at all. Sure it will sell, its got the Sony name on it. But will it dent Apple's stronghold on the MP3 player market?

It is great to see that Sony is finally embracing MP3 in their new flash based players. Their worst decision with that new Network Walkman was only supporting the ATRAC format. Sony finally saw the error of its ways, but to think they could make a proprietary format like ATRAC work in the first place...

Relations between the users of Apple and Microsoft computers have never been particularly cordial. Windows users claim they've won the war for the desktop: all you have to do is look at the numbers and you find the most of the world using a Microsoft OS. Mac users point out a near total lack of security problems, along with a bombproof operating system that never seems to crash. (Then they sneer at the Windows masses.)

Patrick Norton (a moment of silence for The Screen Savers please) has written this comprehensive look at what's to come from both Tiger and Longhorn. Oddly I could not find this on the ExtremeTech site, even though it is credited as such.

Russian online music site Allofmp3.com will continue to operate, after Russian prosecutors concluded they cannot take legal action against the music store. Finally prodded into motion by continuous lobbying by the RIAA, International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, and other copyright holders, Russian law enforcement officials began an investigtation of the service two weeks ago.

Did you hear that? That was the sound of the entire world's sigh of relief. It helps when you find a loophole in a law. There has been quite a lot of ink splattering from publications such as WIRED Magazine as to the validity and legality of Allofmp3.com. If anything, this investigation has proven what most had feared: it is legal under Russian law.

Allofmp3.com offers high-quality recordings (even lossless if that's what you want) at a low price to anyone, anywhere, on any platform. If the site continues to grow in popularity, it may give the labels second thoughts about raising their prices.

I just wonder how long the service will last now that it has hit mainstream news.

Lots to choose from. Take your pick.

They don't much funnier than this. We should give you a warning that the content is extreme and potentially offensive (it really is), but all that's going to do is make all the 8 year olds want to click on it more. So, if your kids are watching this, it's not our fault. Thanks for your consideration and for not suing.

I don't have anything on this poor guy in this Java based physics demo. Pick "The Wall" course for maximum enjoyment. There was another version of this on a recent episode of the Screen Savers that involved boulders and it had better graphics. If anyone knows what it was called, or better yet, where to play it, do tell. A google search came up short for me.

Taiwanese company Luxpro Corp. is showing off an iPod shuffle clone called Super shuffle at this week's CeBit trade show in Hannover, Germany. From the front, the device is physically identical to Apple's iPod shuffle, straight down to the control pad and white earbuds. It touts features the iPod shuffle lacks, however, including an FM tuner and a voice recorder.

This is not your ordinary rip off, this is a RIP OFF. Apple has sued for less. This should be a fun lawsuit.

You can count the number of memorable basketball movies on one hand. Thankfully, for every piece of dredge like "The Fish that Saved Pittsburgh," we get something like "Hoosiers." ESPN ranked it as the #1 sports film of all time, and it's tough to argue that call.

In a joint release, Apple Computer and the Blu-ray Disc Association announced on Thursday that Apple would become a member of the consortium's Board of Directors. The Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) is responsible for establishing format standards and promoting and further developing business opportunities for Blu-ray Disc.

It looks like Apple might be taking sides in this upcoming war between Blue-ray and HD-DVD. This should be fun. HD isn't even settled yet. Lets just face it, there will be two standards. I mean we live with DVD+ and - R formats.

I'm still not sold on online video/game rentals. There's nothing inconvenient about running down the video store unless you don't have one close to your home. The biggest discrepancy though is in selection. For a gamer, portables are out of reach. Unless you have a specialty store in your area, you're out of luck. That's where Gamefly.com comes in.

Why are there so few firefighting films? So many movies take the route of showing the police force in action with the firefighters in the background. It's not that the police are any less worthy, it just seems like people who run into burning buildings deserve a bit more credit then they get. "Ladder 49" is probably one of the most personal, heartfelt, and emotional films ever done on the subject, choosing to ignore the all out action of some its predecessors. The movie is better because of it.

Some store employees are forever going to hate them for this one.

Well, we should get it out of the way now. This is not work safe and if you have small children, sensitive ears, or you're not a fan of naughty language, don't click. If that's the case, you probably shouldn't be on the internet either, but I digress.

Anyway, by now you've likely heard of how Warner Brothers is butchering the Looney Tunes into some stupid futuristic fantasy where all the famous characters have super powers. To see one persons interpretation on just how EXTREME things are going to get, you need to see this gut-bustingly funny flash.

How many times can you say you've seen a man in a movie have his innards ripped out? A few times maybe? Ok, how many times have you seen that same man have a hungry dog take a small string of his still connected intestines while he's still alive and try to eat them? That's one of the many highlights for gore and horror fans in the totally surprising "Dog Soldiers," one of the best werewolf movies in years.

I have bought two Nikon Coolscan V ED film scanners for Student Publications. This has been a long time coming. We have a couple SprintScan 35s that we bought off of eBay years ago. The SprintScan is SCSI, and we now only have one SCSI capable Mac in The BG News currently. And one more in The KEY Yearbook. Not to mention that OS X does not really like SCSI. Add to that the fact that Polaroid does not even make OS X drivers, and you can start to see my headache with the SprintScan 35.

So, let's look at what humans have been turned into over the years. Human-like Alligators made an appearance in the "Alligator People," John Agar fought against "The Mole People," man turns into giant mutant-thing in "War of the Colossal Beast," and now we have man turned radioactive mosquito in the hideously titled "Mansquito." Nothing more than standard Sci-Fi Channel fare, this is a basic creature feature that's only going to be enjoyed by those who found any of the above-mentioned films enjoyable or those looking for a few laughs.

CLEVELAND - Mountain? Climbed. Demons? Exorcised.

Championship? Won.

Bowling Green State University claimed its first Mid-American Conference women's basketball tournament title since 1994 with a thrilling 81-75 victory over Kent State at Gund Arena yesterday.

I could not believe they won Friday. Now they get to go to the NCAA tourny. Good job Lady Falcons! Now I just hope they make it past their first game.

You hear it all the time. "I don't read reviews; I make up my own mind." Well, a lot of good that does. If more people took the time to read reviews from critics, they would discover films like this. A box office bomb but a critical success, "Titan A.E." is a magical ride, on par with most of the stuff Disney has pumped out over the years. Actually, it's probably better.

Tilt has been a good series, it has kept me interested each week. The acting has not been too over the top. The amount of cameos has been unreal. It sure helps to sell the series to have real poker players like David Williams, Daniel Negreanu, and Phil Hellmuth. Throw in the humor of Norman Chad, and that faux telecast look, and Tilt has some lofty production values. Michael Madsen is always a solid actor, and plays yet another great antagonist. Good acting all around, really.

Talk about your pointless releases. Created simply to take advantage of a system launch, "Madden 2005" may have been another solid edition on the home consoles, but here on the DS, things are shaky all around. Everything here feels rushed, pieced together quickly due to a short development time and minimal experience with the console. It may be a step up from the Game Boy Advance versions; that's just not really saying very much.

Updated: America Online quells public criticism of changes to its AIM terms of service, insisting the controversial privacy clause does not pertain to user-to-user instant messaging communication.

America Online Inc. on Sunday moved to quell public criticism of the terms of service for its AIM service, insisting the controversial privacy clause does not pertain to user-to-user instant messaging communication.

A few days I saw a