CNET.com has come up with a short, but helpful handbook on teaching about the telecommunication industry jargon you tend to hear. IF you ever wnated to know what “throttling” was you have come to the right place. The Beginner’s Guide to Telecom Jargon

Hulu Plus officially announced as open is now being dropped to $7.99 per month instead of the $9.99 a month all the suckers paid last month. New users will get 1 week free trial, while the ones that got shafted will get 2 free weeks out of the deal.

Did I say deal? Hulu is dead to me more or less with this subscription fee, and I assume it will be to many others. Of course there are a lot of dumb people out there that will gladly pay $7.99 a month for something the rest of us get for free elsewhere. I’ll spend it on my one a day vitamins and my next 1 TB hard drive.

The only benefit to the less internet and consumer-savvy out there is that Hulu will offer full seasons of all the shows they have on the site. Of course these are all shows that are on normal TV and not the actual shows people actually do pay for outside their basic cable. We can assume that they will have a small leg up on Netflix in this regard, but with Netflix you get so much more anyways with movies and TV that it doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense to go the Hulu route. Especially since the site is awful.

The U.S. Air Force has offerd a pair of grants to Shay Curran, associate professor of physics at the University of Houston, where his research team have demonstrated ultra-high electrical conductive properties in plastics, called polycarbonates, by mixing them with just the right amount and type of carbon nanotubes.

“While its mechanical and optical properties are very good, polycarbonate is a non-conductive plastic. That means its ability to carry an electrical charge is as good as a tree, which is pretty awful,” Curran said. “Imagine that this remarkable plastic can now not only have good optical and mechanical properties, but also good electrical characteristics. By being able to tailor the amount of nanotubes we can add to the composite, we also can change it from the conductivity of silicon to a few orders below that achieved by metals.”

For us this just means less cost for manufacturing what we want, and possibly lasting longer, which will also save us electronics money that we can use at Las Vegas hotels.

A month back there was the introduction of the “Netflix” box from Roku which allowed owners to stream the “Watch it Now” movies from Netflix onto a television. Obviously this isn’t anything groundbreaking, as anyone with any sense can just hook up their TV to their laptop and do the same thing. In fact the Playstation 3, or the XBox 360 is expected to announce that they also have a deal with Netflix int he works at E3 this summer to do the exact same thing.

What’s the point of this device I ask you? CNet and other places seem to by hyping this up for some odd reason. It isn’t like ostrich feathers and is going to be useful forever. Of course it is probably useful to morons, but I digress. Having this little box next to your TV that hooks to your internet connection rather than having to run it through a PC may seem like a great idea, but is it really worth it?

Apparently, Roku may be striking deals with other places as well such as Youtube, Hulu.com, and others. Again, is it really necessary? Why do we even need them to strike these deals? IS there something going on here I don’t get about all this? Internet connection + TV + PC with a cord to TV=Streaming video on TV. Duh…

One of the places that I use for a lot of my online shopping purchases is Buy.com so I figured I would go in and take a look at their Weekly Deals and see if we may be able to find something there at a great discount as like I said we weren’t looking to spend an arm and a leg on whatever it was we were going to try and cover this need with.

Right on the first page I ran into the Western Digital 1TB My Book World Edition II for $249.99. Slightly intrigued I looked a bit more into this way to access my work data from home.

The more I looked into this remote access storage system the more the features really sounded like something we could all use. In fact it had way more than what we needed it for, but the price was so low I figured I’d sahre it with my partners.

Check out what this thing can do:

-Securely access and edit your files on any computer.
-Get files from home while at the office.
-Listen to the music on your My Book World Edition drive while youre on vacation.
-Securely share photos with your friends anywhere in the world without uploading them to the web.
-Back up your laptop data to your home computer while youre traveling.
-Offer your clients an easy way to access business documents, designs, and artwork. Eliminates the need for a separate FTP server.
-Back up critical files to a remote drive for the ultimate protection from loss.
-Simplify your home network and access data from any computer or external hard drive in the house.
-Automatically back up all your PCs to one central location.

Besides just being able to share documents outside the office, we can back up important documents easily, as well as store tons of media for presentations that we all like to look over before we went out and made the presentations.

The extra options like file sharing of music and video was something my family really likes to do as well so I decided that we are likely going to buy one for home as well. Go to the My book World Edition page for an interactive look at how you can access data from work at home, share music and video easily. Considered the top of the line remote access storage system in the class it is an amazing piece fo equipment for small offices. It is a pretty darn handy remote access storage system for us at home too.

If you have never used Buy.com as your online store option, you are certainly missing out. I’m glad to see that more and more people are noticing them. They are a fantastic place to get electronics, computer supplies, and any other toy you desire at usually the best prices around. Their customer service is fantastic as well. I highly recommend them for your online shopping. Check out their other weekly deals where you can get the Best Deals every week. Just like this awesome remote access storage system we bought for $249.99. It was a huge deal as the retail price for it was Well over $300.

After being awarded the format victory earlier this year, it appears that blu-ray sales aren’t chugging along as one might expect. Sales were down 40% from January to February, and only increased by 2% in from February to March. This is for stand alone Blu-ray players and does not include the Playstation 3 version which is a complete steal for the cost.

HD-DVD players have fallen off the map. Dropping 65% from February to MArch, obviously due to the loss of the alleged format war., and the fact that no major studios are releasing in this format anymore.

Most agree that the pricing is probably the main culprit. Blu-Ray players were priced at an average of $300 over Christmas, but now are ranging closer to $400. When you can still get a DVD player for about $20, or just go out and buy a Playstation 3 for $399, what’s the point of spending $400 for just a Blu-ray player? There is none. I’d rather buy a PS3 that can play games, store music, photos, link to my peripherals like my ipods, and get me on the internet. Odds are that Blu-ray players need to be closer to $200 before I would consider buying one.

Probably the most anticipated game for me in quite some time. It is going to prompt me to buy a PS3 I guess too as I haven’t really found a need to get one yet. Just kind of trying to decide if I want to wait for the MEtal Gear Solid bundle in June, or just get the 40 GB system now and add a huge hard drive to it. I don’t need most of the crap on there like video, picture albums, and whatnot, so I don’t know if I want to wait since the 40 GB is the only one around right now. When a game makes you buy a new console you know you have a problem. Gaming for me is not as bad as it used to, but at one time I probably would use some sort of gaming help like most people need drug rehabilitation…lol

GTA IV got ranked a perfect 10 by IGN, who hasn’t given a perfect score out since the 90s. According to those guys the difference between the XBox 360 version and the Playstation 3 version are very minimal and the average person won’t notice the difference.

This game also showed me an interesting site that I had not been aware of before. Justin.tv which shows people playing games live. I watched people playing this in Online Mode yesterday for a bit and it looks pretty amazing. Pretty funny to watch as they have a chat window next to the video feed and people make comments. They have a moderator for the chat rooms, but they let most things slide so the little brats will annoy you at times.

As for the Grand Theft Auto IV Physics Engine, they have made some big changes from last releases. In this edition of GTA the physics engine showcases the Euphoria physics engine that was originally presented by Lucas Arts, the company that pumps out 50 Star Wars games per year.

Why bother wasting your time with reading when you can just watch the presentation of the physics engine from E3 a couple years ago?

Havok/euphoria physics engine:

Below you can see the Euphoria Physics engine used in Grand Theft Auto IV:

Also, the “revealing” of the mass media options isn’t necessarily big news either, but I felt it should be known that it is probably pretty close. XBox 360 already has the service so the Playstation 3 is just putting it out there. The system was designed as has been touted as a multimedia system forever and this just shows that it may be sooner rather than later.

In a recent interview with 1UP, Sony’s Phil Harrison revealed plans to expand the PlayStation 3’s functionality to include “not just games but movies, music, HD, standard definition TV,” as part of a 10-year plan for Sony’s latest console.Last November, Microsoft launched its own video download service, called Xbox Live Video Marketplace, which allows Xbox 360 Premium owners to purchase and download movies and TV shows. Analysts are predicting great success for Microsoft’s new service, estimating that it could generate $92 million in 2007 and as much as $762 million by 2011.read more

The interest to me comes a lot from the gaming consoles. With the release of the Playstation 3 in the last few months for roughly $600, which in turn has an internal blu-ray player in it, and the XBox 360 that utilizes an outside HD-DVD player, these machines have much mor influence on the format I will tend to end up with. $600 for a Blu-ray player is a bargain, but getting a gaming console on top of it is a major purchasing point for many. The console war is going to make this format war much more likely to just rage on for many years and eventually find us with a happy medium of machines that support both.

Sharp has taken the wraps off the first Blu-ray high-definition disc player that has recording capabilities. The device, set for release in Japan in March, can record content directly from a TV. Expected to sell for $1,200, the new player may advance the Blu-ray cause in the high-definition disc.read more