PS3 and Bluray is the way to go... for now

I'm a PS3 owner, but mostly for the opposite reasons according to a co-worker. Most people own a PS3 for the games and then the blu-ray movies is a big plus. I like it for the blu-ray movie playing ability, and then the games are a plus. And with the recent announcement that Warner is going to be blu-ray exclusive too, it pretty much seals the fate of the HDDVD.

The HD format war may be closing as to what the next-gen disc format, but the real future is not in these physical disc-- it's in digital downloads. But we are still years away from this. We don't yet have the bandwidth to download HD content on the fly, in a reasonable amount of time. Nor do we have a system that brings it all together.

My dream of this digital lifestyle, is one where we don't run PCs anymore. We all access data through advanced terminals. There will be no need to have a PC because our data isn't stored locally as the main storage. Instead, we will have "digital lockers" where we can keep all our files (movies, music, pictures, etc). When we buy a movie or a song, we store it in our account, and if need be, we can re-download it-- because we own it.

I hope this dream can come true within say, 10 years. The technology (hardware/software) is more or less ready, it's the politics and legal issues that's in the way.

Good Reads:

• New Blu-ray 2.0 spec makes PS3 the most future-proof player
• Gartner: Blu-ray to win in 2008, HD DVD price cuts are "useless resistance"
• Debunking the Microsoft/HD DVD conspiracy theories

Best Free Software of 2008 (so far)

I find myself reinstalling software on another friend's laptop yet again. What was the problem? Computer virii, trojan horses, adware, and spyware made the system unstable. How did it get this way? Overall, it's because of not having a good understanding of computers, but in particular, peer-to-peer(P2P) programs such as BearShare.

Here is a list of the most common FREE programs I recommend for typical users:

• Antivirus: Avast Home Edition or AVG Free
• Firewall: Comodo Firewall
• Web Browser: Mozilla Firefox
• Spyware detection: Microsoft Defender
• Image Editing: Paint.net
• Compression: 7 Zip
• Chat: Google Talk
• Picture manager: Google Picasa

Other notable programs are:

• Bittorrent client: utorrent (also get Peer Guardian)
• Media Players: Winamp, VLC, and Divx
• Office Suite: Open Office
• Email client: Mozilla Thunderbird
• FTP: Filezilla

If you feel this list is incomplete, check out: The 46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities

Comparing Miss Teen USA SC to politicians

In case you haven't seen one of the most popular videos from 2007, the Miss Teen USA SC answers, check it out here. But now I'd like to pick on politicians, leaders of the American people, and how they choked on questions they were asked:





In recent news though, I'm a little saddened by Dennis Kucinich's decision to Abandon White House Bid, but I think he's an intelligent man, and I think maybe it's a better path for him. I think he and Ron Paul are needed in times like these, to express outrage in the way our political system is being run. Although, on those merits alone, I don't think would be enough to get into the White House. For now, I enjoy listening to Barack Obama. He's young, intelligent, and he actually knows how to speak well. He may be inexperienced, but I'll take intelligence and integrity over an experienced liar. Here's to 2008.

Buy or Sell

I find this picture to be quite amusing, considering how we are heading into a recession.

There's no need to Idiot-Proof everything

The San Francisco Zoo Tiger Mauling was a sad event. I choose the word "sad" over "tragic" because not only was a boy's life lost, but also the tiger’s. It's not tragic because evidence seems to suggest that these boys taunted the tiger, not to mention they were also drunk and high off marijuana. And that makes all the difference.

I'm not saying that it's okay for a tiger to maul someone that chooses to be obnoxious person under some influences. Nor am I saying that the zoo shouldn’t take some responsibility in not making the animal’s enclosure and habitat more to standards. But this whole upcoming lawsuit against the zoo seems a bit much. The survivor’s family’s argument will be that the San Francisco zoo should have had up to standards enclosures. The zoos may be that the boy’s shouldn’t have taunted the tiger.

The fact of the matter is that these boys made poor decisions and did something stupid, and one of them was mauled to death because of it. The zoo, yes, something probably needs to be done to make the enclosures to standard, to make the zoo’s patrons safer. Of the two sides, clearly the boy’s are more at fault. Raising/increasing the distance between the tiger’s enclosure to zoo patrons won’t resolve the general issue of these boys doing something stupid, and some negative consequence following thereafter. They could have made a stupid decision to drink, get high, to drive and then get into an accident, possibly hurting/killing themselves or other people.

The point is: bad things can happen, especially to those who choose to act foolishly. I’d hate to see fools of any kind find some kind of monetary compensation for doing something stupid where something bad happens, and then getting a lawyer to exploit it.

Looking forward to 2008

As 2007 comes to a close, it marks the end of one year, and the beginning of another. So too does it bring an end more or less of my blogging on spong.org. It was a personal side project of I started 9 years ago before blogs and other free services were available. Now I'm reading to officially say that I'm stopping development on it as I have other things in my life I wish to focus on. I do plan on keeping the spong.org domain and hosting, but the vaporware known as spongblog 2.0 is closed.

The biggest reason behind this decision is that there are just too many other services that scale much better than whatever free hosting service I use (whether it be 1&1, godaddy, or discountasp.net). I'm looking to downgrade my service plan to save money, once I have properly migrated all the old posts to static HTML pages.

Anyway, sunpech.blogspot.com will be my new blog going forward.