Hasta La Gadget!

To achieve balance in all things, a new startup called Prima Cinema apparently figures while the proletariat are rejoicing over Netflix all you can eat $7.99 streaming and Redbox $1 rentals, there’s room at the high end and will offer a $20,000 digital delivery system to bring home first-run movies as soon as they come to theaters in theaters for $500 a pop. Beyond simply achieving the goal of making proposed $20-30 movie VODs on cable seem downright reasonable, The Wall Street Journal reports the company figures it can work this system into as many as 250,000 homes in the next five years. The idea is to deliver these flicks beyond the lucky few who currently receive copies for private screening to people whose home theaters make our Engadget HD Flickr group look low-rent, although theater industry insiders have already pointed out the increased risk of piracy. We’re not sure exactly what hardware that initial $20k buys, but at those prices we’ll probably still be looking at TS and cam rips for most bootlegged flicks after this service launches next year.

Prima Cinema plans to offer $500 first-run movie downloads, with a mere $20k setup fee originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Dec 2010 14:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Cinematical  |  Wall Street Journal  | Email this | Comments

Continue reading SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft successfully launches, returns from orbit (video)

SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft successfully launches, returns from orbit (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Dec 2010 14:35:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Spaceflight Now, NASA  | Email this | Comments

In an interview with Publisher’s Weekly, Barnes & Noble Chairman Len Riggio says the company’s producing Nook Colors as fast as it can.

I

It’s a title I can’t imagine too many people are fighting over, at present–the “world’s smallest solar powered movie theater.” If there is anyone else out that looking for the record, however, they’ve got some pretty stiff competition in the Sol Cinema, a movie theater in a trailer that is looking to reverse the industry’s trend toward increased power consumption.

The theater is run by the U.K.-based arts group, The Undercurrents. “We say any cinema could and should be 100 percent powered by renewable energy,” then group’s co-founder Paul O’Connor told AOL. “The U.K. isn’t famous for sunny days, yet [we] still manage to run our entire cinema, including video projectors, sound systems, laptops, hard drives and lights from the energy of the sun via solar panels. This means we have no utility bill each year and can perform anywhere at anytime.”

The theater sports an LED projector powered by solar panels. It screens documentaries, art films, animation, and dramas–it won’t show anything overly violent or mainstream, however, so if you want to check out the new Transformers flick when that comes out, you’ll have to find another solar-powered movie trailer.

The theater seats eight. It has screen 400 films since opening and is planning a 2011 tour of Europe and possibly the U.S.

This article was written on April 17, 2007 by CyberNet.

Less than a month ago I wrote about a new meta search engine called Younanimous that aggregated search results from Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. With each search result it would list the position on each particular search engine as well as the PageRank and Alexa Rank.

Younanimous has since been renamed to AfterVote and includes a lot of great customization options. In the upper-right you’ll see a “Settings” link that will give you a wealth of settings that you can configure to your liking. Among the options you’ll find things like creating your own whitelist/blacklist of URL’s and domains, add/remove plug-ins for various services, and even choose how to weight the three different search engines.

Above is a screenshot of what it looks like to choose the weights from the various search services. Since I prefer Google I put the weight of Yahoo! and MSN all the way down. I’m sure you’re asking yourself why I would even use this search engine if all I want to search is Google? Well, it is really nice being able to get the Alexa Ranks and PageRank for each search result without needing any additional tools to do so. There are also a bunch of other plug-ins that you can have AfterVote add to each search result:

This makes it really easy to, for example, bookmark a result on your Del.icio.us account or find out Whois information on the domain. People normally download extensions for Firefox in order to put these things in search engine results, but AfterVote incorporates them right into the site.

There is still one thing that is holding me back from using AfterVote more often. You can’t actually customize how many results show up on each page. On Google I have it setup to display 100 results per page which makes my browsing a lot more efficient. I don’t think AfterVote has to go as high as 100 because I typically look at a maximum of 50, but being able to see more than 10 results would definitely help.

Even if they did add that option I would still only use the service from time to time because of the few extra seconds it takes to load the results. I understand that it has to query Google, Yahoo!, and MSN to get the results and process them, but the few extra seconds makes a big difference when I’m looking to get an answer quickly.

AfterVote is on the right track for making the best meta search engine available, and I’m sure they will attract a pretty large number of visitors if they push to get the word out.

Thanks for the tip Chris!

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

Related Posts:

Is the Younanimous Search Engine too good to be true?Windows Live Gallery ReleasedGoogle’s Experimental Search Engine: SearchMash?Get A “Real” Bookstore Experience OnlineYahoo! Introducing Alpha (Beta) – Create your Own Custom Search Engine