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This is a fish story--complete with attacking sharks, high-velocity steak, and ninjas with poison darts, no less.

This is the story of my Wednesday spent hanging out with the MythBusters-- Jamie Hyneman, Adam Savage, Kari Byron, Grant Imahara, and Tory Belleci--at their workshops in San Francisco.

MythBusters, for those who aren't aware, is a hit Discovery Channel show in which the five stars tackle famous myths--such as that frozen chickens pose a greater danger to airplanes than thawed poultry, or that a single postage stamp on a helicopter's rotors can cause it to crash and burn--and attempt to … Read more

Like the MythBusters? Then you'll probably like this small Flash-based movie viewer created by the folks at the Discovery Channel. It lets viewers pick from four clips of high speed footage from the show, including one massive explosion, two clips of sliding into baseball bases, and crash test dummy Buster bursting into flames--all in frame-by-frame goodness.

Users can toggle the viewer to work either with their mouse, or use their keyboard to go frame by frame. The mouse gives slightly better results, letting viewers go back and forth quickly for great effect. Which one is your favorite?

[via Digg]… Read more

The open-source, DRM-free video platform called Miro (download for Windows and Mac) has just released an upgrade with two small but useful improvements. A new search feature lets you search all available sites simultaneously, and torrent support has been greatly improved.

… Read more

The FBI has teamed up with Phoenix-based Clear Channel Outdoor to air mug shots of most wanted criminals on 150 digital billboards in 20 cities nationwide, the Associated Press is reporting.

The effort follows a successful test run in Philadelphia that led to several arrests.

Read the full AP story via Google, among other places: "FBI mug shots to hit digital billboards."

Intel has released source code for a server software project that lets Fibre Channel communications run on a more ordinary Ethernet network.

Fibre Channel is a higher-end network technology used to connect storage systems to servers. Intel and networking giant Cisco Systems are among those working to adapt it for ordinary and ubiquitous Ethernet technology, a technology called Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), appropriately enough.

To further the project, Intel on Tuesday announced the Open-FCoE.org to house the source code. It's governed by version 2 of the General Public License.

The code itself was announced in November on the project mailing list … Read more

Just wanted to let you all know that I will be on Computer America tonight from 10-11 eastern, 7-8 pacific. Carey Holzman and I will be discussing a host of topics and get more in-depth about some of the things I wrote about on The Digital Home. Hope you enjoy it!

Todd Barr (Director of Marketing at Red Hat) has a great post about open-source revenue mechanics and how they shift as an open-source company becomes an established player. Net net: giving away free software is great for driving adoption, but an open-source vendor needs to figure out more than how to give things away to build a great business.

Sound simplistic? Just try it. Sexy as open source is, you spend far longer ramping revenue (revenue, mind you, not bookings/sales) to cover expenses than you would in a typical proprietary license-based software model, as Todd points out. I've argued that open-source startups have benefits that proprietary vendors can't match (a focus on ubiquity, for one thing, and the attendant benefits that derive from "abundance"), but it's not easy sailing.

Todd writes:

So, start-up open source companies necessarily need low-cost, high-impact marketing tactics. And, by golly, providing awesome software to download for free is a great tactic - it drives a lot of web traffic, builds your brand, helps you get your early adopters, and quickly builds a community of advocates that might buy your value-added services in the future. But the free download tactic is less relevant to the challenges of a mid-sized company:… Read more

First things first--center channel speakers do one thing really well--they anchor dialog to the screen for listeners sitting over to the left or right sides of home theaters. So if your family or friends watch movies together, I'd definitely recommend using a center channel speaker.

But for one or two people sitting directly in front of their TV a center isn't necessary, and almost always sounds less good than the left and right speakers. Center speakers tend to sound boxy, so Denzel Washington sounds like he's in a box. Ditch the center and your A/V receiver … Read more

Tomorrow the Weather Channel is officially launching a new Interactive Local Maps service. If you live in a city where the weather tends to vary by several degrees while just a short distance away, this new tool lets you to scope out the lay of the land--literally. The tool uses The Weather Channel's HiRAD (High Resolution Aggregated Data) technology which pulls in its weather information from several different integrated tracking services.

Like any other mapping tool, you can search for a specific location or just browse around. You can also turn on and off various layers, similar to Google Earth, … Read more