By Luke Anderson

Are you one of those people that needs all of their appliances to be as high-tech and powerful as possible? When I first saw this 1200 watt toaster from Philips, I immediately pictured Tim Allen pushing down the lever and grunting something about more power. Seriously, my microwave doesn’t even have that much juice.

The 1200W HD2618 toaster not only looks fancy, but has fancy features like one-sided toasting for bagels and a digital display that counts down the seconds until your toast is ready. This powerful manly toaster will set you back $120.

[ Philips ] VIA [ UberReview ]

Applicances, gadgets, Kitchen

By Luke Anderson

Remember back when the Billy Bass was popular back in 2000 or so? Since then there have been a number of similar items on the market that are equally as annoying as the singing fish. However, these robot trophies have to be the coolest ones I have seen.

Since I’m fully expecting a robot uprising within the next decade or so, I would love to put one of these on my wall. That way when a robot breaks into my house to kill me, it knows that I’m someone that’s not to be messed with. There are 11 different robotic animals which have sensors that will make the robots come to life and become aggressive towards anyone who comes near. Unfortunately there’s no word on pricing or availability.

[ France Cadet ] VIA [ GearFuse ]

Novelty, Robotics, Robots

By Luke Anderson

I’ve really never put much thought into how I store my DVDs and CDs. Movies are stored in their original boxes in cabinets sitting in my living room. Most CDs are either strewn about on my desk or arranged neatly in binders. Unfortunately none of these methods is all that great for long term disc storge.

Mitsubishi has created the ARLEDIA DVD-R discs that are said to have twice the life expectancy of regular DVDs. They accomplish this by using a gold and silver reflective film which prevents oxidation. No word on pricing or availability.

[ Impress ] VIA [ UberGizmo ]

Concept, Technology

Same old control-freak Apple: they ll be gatekeeper for third-party iPhone apps ZDNet Blogs
Civil rights groups: FCC should allow network management InfoWorld.com
Vonage spent $1.4 million to lobby federal government on telecomms competition and consumer issues AP
Cable s wireless future Lightreading.com
2008, the year the mobile market gets touch-y GigaOm
EU OKs Ofcom wholesale broadband regulation proposal Lightreading.com
Telecom price war could lift BlackBerry sales TheStreet.com
XM, Sirius extend their merger plans InformationWeek.com

* For those interested, DSLReports.com now hosts some blogs for your reading pleasure. Please be sure to check out the “About DSLReports.com” Site Blog by DSLR owner Justin; keep up with MS related news in DSLR resident Microsoft MVP MSeng’s blog “Microsoft Watch“; read about various interesting computer related tidbits in “The Burnfolder” blog from DSLR moderator rjackson, and you can also catch industry news and commentary in the “Broadband Bytes” blog. The blogs can be found by opening the “News” tab on your DSLR control panel and clicking on the blog you are interested in.

It’s Friday. So put up your feet and empty your head into the comment section below.
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For centuries, people were able to picture only a two-dimensional image when taking photo. Even today, the most expensive and powerful cameras still give us a clear and beautiful, but flat image. We can’t feel the depth in them, can’t say how far the objects are from the camera. People tried to bring the stereo effect to photography in many ways, from a stereo slides to 3D glasses, but it always required image to be taken with two lenses. However, something that thought to be impossible before, now is one step closer from being real - Stanford University engineers have made a lens system capable of capturing the distance of subjects within a snapshot!

Nowadays many people clearly understanding that all the major natural resources are very limited started to pay even more attention to the energy they use. Moreover some of them worry about their impact on the environment. As a consequence we try to use different alternative energy sources. It’s obvious that the easiest “green” power source which can be incorporated into many gadgets is that of the sun. Some practical solar designs for recharging phones have been already produced, however, the latest product from Strap-Ya looks much worthier.

The FCC today made it official: if you’re a cable operator you cannot own more than 30% of the paid-TV market. Comcast currently sits at around 27%, which is why, as you’d expect, they’re not too keen on the new guidelines. Though the FCC voted to cap cable ownership last December, it was only today that the rules became official by being published in the Federal Register, according to Multichannel News.

Comcast can now officially challenge the new rule in court with a good shot at reversal, given a U.S. Court of Appeals rejected the same rule back in 2001. Under the cap Comcast (26.1 million subs) couldn’t currently do larger deals like acquiring Charter (5.3 million) or Time Warner Cable (13.3 million), though they could still conduct some smaller deals like acquiring Cablevision (3.1 million). Comcast exec David Cohen promised a suit earlier this month:

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To help you solve cooking problems Chinese designer Zhu Fei invented a very strange gun. His gadget is a spice gun that helps you make the process of cooking funnier and more interesting. Thus, this gun fires with special bullets that are filled with spice. Using an air bag that compresses when the trigger is pressed, the Spice Gun allows for the bottom of the seasoning bottle to be hit by the handspike, blasting seasoning all over your food.

Former FCC boss Reed Hundt talks to Telephony Online about the FCC’s 700Mhz auction, expanding the USF to cover broadband deployment, the controversy over baby bell wiretap immunity, and other industry topics. Hundt, who is pushing (so far unsuccessfully) for a national emergency broadband network at the behest of Frontline Wireless, takes a shot at the current FCC and complains about a lack of any comprehensive national broadband policy:

Hundt has complained that the line-sharing system he implemented in the 90’s worked well in France to bring about competition (and $40 IPTV & broadband bundles), but failed here due to shoddy implementation and enforcement (and because incumbents wanted it to). Hundt also has this to say about Comcast’s traffic shaping PR problem:

100Mbps isn’t necessary for the average Joe, but he is right that adequate bandwidth keeps providers from needing to throttle P2P (see: FiOS). Of course were there adequate competition, capping and throttling issues (and probably net neutrality) would be taken care of by market forces organically. Comcast can get away with throttling upstream P2P traffic because many of their customers lack other options that would allow them to vote with their wallet.
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Last Summer, Comcast started charging customers in many markets an additional $1.99 fee if they wanted to pay their bill at the local Comcast office. Last January, they started charging users $4 if they wanted to speak to a live human being on the phone to pay their bill. Now, the Consumerist claims they’ve found another way to make a profit: charging users a $1.99 “change of service” fee if you want the company to stop sending you junk mail:

We’ve fired off an inquiry to Comcast to see if this is standard practice or a billing error.
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Sprint’s announcement yesterday that they’re offering a $100 unlimited voice/SMS/MMS tier couldn’t overshadow the fact that their merger with Nextel has been, to quote the Wall Street Journal, a “deal from hell.”

New CEO Dan Hesse tried to calm investors during the conference call, but judging from analysis, didn’t do very well. Hesse did unveil a handful of news, including plans to release a iDEN WiFi BlackBerry, acknowledgment that they’re still working on a deal with Clearwire, and the announcement that dual-mode CDMA/WiMAX handsets should be out sometime this year. He also took time out of his busy day to make a few understatements:

Hesse didn’t particularly instill confidence by telling investors the company planned to lose another 1.2 million post-paid subscribers in the first quarter. We assume this doesn’t include the customer defections from Qwest’s plan to ditch Sprint and instead sign on with Verizon Wireless as a reseller.
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Comcast is leading the charge in DOCSIS 3.0 deployment, saying they’ll have 20% of their footprint wired by the end of this year. Most other providers, however, seem fairly content to take a wait-and-see attitude on the technology (particularly if FiOS has seen limited deployment in their territory). While many Charter customers are still waiting for Charter to unveil their DOCSIS 1.x 16Mbps tier, the company says they’ll start testing DOCSIS 3.0 technology in the second half of this year. Actual deployment won’t occur until 2009.
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Though the company just received the regulatory approval it needs to sell its DSL lines in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, Verizon apparently wants to keep the more profitable (and less rural) Massachusetts. The telco has announcing they’ll be investing $200 million in the State to extend their DSL and FiOS networks to an additional 23 communities.

At first glance it doesn’t appear that Shutesbury and Leverett (on second glance Leverett is) are on the list; they’re two rural Massachusetts towns whose unsuccessful fight to get DSL or cable we’ve been tracking for years. Verizon’s effort will try to get some level of DSL connectivity to two-thirds of the 32 towns that the state has said lack access to broadband.

The problem we’ve seen over the years is that after these promises are made, nobody really gets out into the field to see if they’re kept, and companies are very rarely held accountable if they aren’t. The State recently unveiled a $25 million effort to both map and bring service to the State’s broadband black holes, which brought attention to Verizon’s deployment shortcomings.
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RIAA penalty charges don’t make it to the artists The Inquirer
New York City Broadband Advisory Committee looks to bring high speed public Internet access Queens Chronicle
Broadband big boys waiting on data pimping The Register
Broadband Dominates 90% of UK Internet Connections ISPreview.co.uk
Intel Money for WiMAX Sign of Changing 4G Market Cellular-News.com
High-tech stars falling in investors’ eyes Yahoo News
Symantec and Trend grapple with buffer overflow bugs The Inquirer

* For those interested, DSLReports.com now hosts some blogs for your reading pleasure. Please be sure to check out the “About DSLReports.com” Site Blog by DSLR owner Justin; keep up with MS related news in DSLR resident Microsoft MVP MSeng’s blog “Microsoft Watch“; read about various interesting computer related tidbits in “The Burnfolder” blog from DSLR moderator rjackson, and you can also catch industry news and commentary in the “Broadband Bytes” blog. The blogs can be found by opening the “News” tab on your DSLR control panel and clicking on the blog you are interested in.
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