electronics

Three of the biggest makers of TVs have formed a company to help manage the wave of electronics waste set to swell with the onset of digital television. Panasonic, Sharp, and Toshiba have launched the Manufacturers Recycling Management Co. in Minnesota.

That state last year enacted a law making vendors responsible for their brands' discarded electronics. MRM contracts with third-party recyclers including CRT Processing and Materials Processing Corporation, which specialize in handling tired monitors and televisions.

Old televisions and monitors are laced with lead, cadmium, and toxic flame retardants, but careful recycling can recover valuable and reusable metals and plastics.… Read more

If dust could ever gather on a blog, Living with the iPhone would probably be a prime candidate. However, the good folks at CNET have made sure the dust is blown off by sending yours truly to the CES--Consumer Electronics Show--in Las Vegas. One of the directives to the cadre of bloggers fortunate enough to go was to blog excessively, but also not to go wildly afield from my blog's purpose.

So, rather than taking pictures of the iPhone next to neat gadgets (maybe I'll use the iPhone to take pictures of the gadgets I see), the … Read more

UPDATE: Jammie Thomas is going to have to sell a lot more thongs.

Thomas, the woman ordered by a federal court in October to pay the recording industry $222,000 for pirating music, doesn't have enough money to fund an upcoming appeal and has been forced to look for a new lawyer, according to her current attorney, Brian Toder.

Thomas was the first person sued by the recording industry for copyright violations to argue a case before a jury and was found to have illegally shared 24 digital-music files.

Toder, who represented Thomas in the civil case, told CNET … Read more

Think Secret, the Apple rumor Web site, will no longer be published, under the terms of an undisclosed settlelment with Apple Inc. The site issued a small press release on the matter late last night, with Think Secret's publisher Nick Ciarelli noting, "I'm pleased to have reached this amicable settlement, and will now be able to move forward with my college studies and broader journalistic pursuits."

The site was sued by Apple in 2005 regarding leaks about upcoming hardware and software products that later came to fruition, including an updated iLife software suite and the Mac … Read more

All my ranting and whining must have finally paid off because this week I finally got some time with Yamaha's mystery-enshrouded Tenori-On music sequencer.

Prototypes of the Tenori-On have traveled the globe, popping up in the U.K. and Germany, but rarely in the United States. I couldn't believe my luck when San Francisco electronic musician retailer Robotspeak (my former employer) gave me the heads-up that Yamaha would be dropping by the shop for a rare demonstration.… Read more

NICASIO, Calif.--Search for sounds tagged with the word "funny" in Skywalker Sound's library of more than 120,000 effects, and you get precisely 510 results.

Among them are "animal cow," eight different forms of "human hiccup," six forms of "tuba comedy," and many, many more.

It's vital that the sound design and post-production arm of George Lucas' Lucasfilm empire has such a massive proprietary database of sounds. Its sound designers are tasked with coming up with just the right effects to create things like "rat (point of view)&… Read more

Twelve percent of Americans are willing to pay more for greener electronics, according to a Forrester Research survey of 5,000 people. The study forecast that electronics companies will learn to target this segment of the population, equivalent to 25 million consumers.

The report broke down shoppers into three categories: "bright" green, green, and un-green. Another 41 percent may care about environmental woes, but not enough to pay more for greener gadgets, while green issues were of little or no concern to another 47 percent of people surveyed.

"Bright" green consumers are otherwise known by the … Read more

I woke up this morning to news that France's Vivendi has agreed to buy a controlling interest in Activision, perhaps creating the world's-largest independent video game company.

The new entity will be known as Activision Blizzard--a suitable name based on the fact that Activision has the best-known video game brand in the new company, but that Vivendi's Blizzard Entertainment unit also produces World of Warcraft, one of the most successful massively multiplayer online games of all time.

But what is not clear is whether the new company will be able to achieve something that is clearly part … Read more

If you've followed virtual worlds at all over the last four years, the name Urizenus Sklar will probably mean something to you.

Uri, as he was known, was the muckraking journalist who founded the Alphaville Herald, a blog that reported on, among other things, the seedy underbelly of Electronic Arts' disappointing virtual world, The Sims Online.

In late 2003, he was banned from TSO by EA for what the company called terms of service violations, but which was widely seen as retaliation for Uri's critical coverage of EA and its approach to specific in-world issues. Smelling a free-speech … Read more