Sent: Friday, February 06, 2009 9:43 AM
Subject: [Lo mejor] Pagar en Internet sin usar las tarjetas de cr?dito | La tortilla de patata, ?muchas calor?as? | H?bitos de estudio, a examen |
Friday, February 6, 2009
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
WiFi básico.
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| COPYRIGHT © 2008 DePapaya.com All rights reserved. |
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Cine por Internet. Streaming.
 TECHNOLOGY: STREAMING State of the Art | |||
| Awash in a Stream of Movies By DAVID POGUE Published: January 28, 2009 | |||
 Stuart Goldenberg | |||
| Any movie, any time. Is that too much to ask? It's technically possible. It's what the people want. It will make the movie companies rich. And yet not a single legal source of movies — hotel, plane, pay-per-view, video store, Apple TV, Vudu box, Internet downloads, nothing — offers instant delivery of any movie you want. Netflix comes close. It's got the "any movie" part covered, since it stocks virtually every movie ever released on DVD — about 100,000 titles. As for "any time," well, Netflix is best known as a DVD-by-mail company. You can freely rent and return DVD movies all month long for a fixed monthly fee ($9 to check out one movie, $14 for two at a time); they come and go in bright red, postage-already-paid mailing envelopes. There are no late fees or penalties. But "any time" boils down to "in a day or two," because you have to wait for the movie to come in the mail. But Netflix has been clawing its way out of its dependence on the postal system with a feature called Watch Now — and it's especially worth watching now. Phase 1. Twelve months ago, Netflix revealed the original Watch Now. It let you, a regular Netflix subscriber, watch any of 1,000 streaming movies on your Windows PC, on demand, without having to download them first. In the following months, the catalog grew to 12,000 movies; more are constantly added. Mac software came next. The monthly hours-of-watching limit was eliminated; now any Netflix member with a plan of $9 or more can watch unlimited streaming movies, for no extra charge. No extra charge is a crazy, game-changing concept. It transforms movie consumption from à la carte into all you can eat. You can watch favorite scenes of individual movies, or try a movie for 15 minutes and then change your mind. In short, you can movie surf, without ever worrying about running up your bill. Still, a desk chair in front of a PC is not what most people would call the ultimate home theater setup. | |||
Phase 2. Eight months ago, Netflix and Roku introduced a tiny TV-connected box ($100) that does only one thing, but very well: it lets you watch Netflix streaming movies on your TV instead of your PC. Since a remote control and a TV screen make a clumsy system for browsing and searching the catalog, you still pick the movies you want using your Mac or PC, at Netflix.com. Whatever assortment of titles you choose online appears instantly on your TV's list of available movies. The Roku box is great. But let's face it: It's another remote to learn, another gadget to connect and more wires around the TV. | |||
 Para ver el video, haga "click" sobre la imagen. | |||
| Phase 3. About six months ago, things began to get really interesting. The Roku box was basically just a plastic box o' software — software that could be built into machines that are already connected to your TV. One by one, the announcements came: Netflix instant movies became a TiVo feature. An Xbox 360 feature. A Blu-ray DVD player feature (LG and Samsung). Even a feature built right into the TV sets themselves (LG and Vizio, starting this spring). There's genius to this master plan; everybody, apparently, wins. Consumers get a better on-demand movie deal than they'll find anywhere else: $9 a month, unlimited. Netflix attracts millions more subscribers. And the equipment manufacturers gain a marketable new feature without having to spend another nickel on hardware. You shouldn't be surprised, in other words, if this instant Netflix thing becomes a huge, megalithic hit, a dominant movie delivery system, a more-or-less standard feature of home theater setups. To find out what that future will look like, I've made an enormous sacrifice in the name of science. I've spent several months watching movies, using three of the first Netflix-enhanced products: my own TiVo, an Xbox 360 and an LG Blu-ray player (the BD300). Here's what I found.
On all of these machines, each movie remembers exactly where you left off watching, even if it was on a different machine. Amazing. Now, instant fixed-fee access to 12,000 movies and TV shows is giddy and life-changing. There are, however, some disappointments. First, you need a high-speed Internet connection to your TV setup. The faster the service, the better video quality you get; hi-def TV shows, in particular, look fantastic on a decent cable modem. Second, remember that these movies are streaming. They're not stored on a hard drive (unlike the Apple TV, Vudu box or Blockbuster's rival MediaPoint box). So every time you fast-forward or rewind, there's a 10-second pause for "rebuffering." Fortunately, most people don't scan through movies often; usually, you just sit back and let them play. And when you do scan, little thumbnail images of the movie scenes flash by, one for every 10 seconds of movie, so you have some guidance as you skim. The third problem is that, as with all Internet downloads, you miss out on a lot: surround sound, subtitles, alternative endings, director's commentaries and other DVD supplements. Fourth, and biggest, problem: not all of those 12,000 movies are, ahem, what you'd call Oscar material. There's an awful lot of chaff, and no new DVD releases at all. (Thanks to the ridiculous Hollywood system of "release windows," Internet services can't offer new movies until after they have had their runs on pay-per-view, hotels, DVD "new release" periods and so on.) On the other hand, that still leaves several thousand great marquee movies to choose from (including the entire Starz Play catalog of 1,200 fairly recent hits: "Ratatouille," "Superbad," "No Country for Old Men" and the like). Furthermore, you're still a Netflix DVD-by-mail customer; if you're craving a movie that just came out on DVD, you can still get it by mail. Actually, there's one more point worth noting — not a technical one, but a psychological one. There's a side effect of "any movie, any time" that not many people consider. Once you stop having to pay for movies individually, once you're able to freely movie surf, you lose the risk of making the wrong decision — and some of the joy at having made a good one. In short, movies become a little less special. Nonetheless, the industry has been trying to sell us on Internet movie downloads for years, and yet it's remained a techie niche until now. It took Netflix to figure out how to crack the technology code, bringing us tantalizingly close to the "any movie, any time" future that's surely just around the corner. | |||
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La computadora-smartphone.
Web2.0, Smartphones. |
| Smartphone From Dell? Just Maybe By By ASHLEE VANCE and MATT RICHTEL Published:January 30, 2009 |
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| The compact keyboard of Research in Motion's BlackBerry turned mobile e-mail messaging into an addictive pastime. The slick touchscreen on Apple's iPhone turned consumers on to phones as pocket-size Web portals. Now Dell and other personal computer makers face a major test as they contemplate entering the mobile phone market: can they come up with that next great feature that will turn their products into the latest object of desire rather than the latest flop from a clumsy PC maker grasping at a new market? For months, rumors have swirled that Dell — like its rivals Acer, Lenovo, and AsusTek — will jump into the booming market for sophisticated smartphones. While brutally competitive and fashion-conscious, the mobile phone market holds an obvious attraction for PC makers: high growth at a time when computer sales are expected to decline for just the second time in the last 20 years. In addition, the devices could open opportunities for PC companies, weighted down by low margins, to team up with telecommunications companies on profitable business and media services. Computer firms, however, have suffered a string of defeats when it comes to consumer devices. And even savvy phone makers like Nokia, Motorola and Palmhave struggled in the smartphone arena, which is dominated by R.I.M. and Apple. Phones "are very different and much tougher than PCs," said Ed Snyder, a telecommunications industry analyst with Charter Equity Research. The small devices place a premium on engineering and require attention to unfamiliar details like the inclusion of sensitive, always-on cellular radios. "It's a much more difficult engineering problem, especially on a mass scale," Mr. Snyder said. Dell has been working on phone prototypes for months and evaluated both Google's Android software and Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system to run it. Recently, some reports have suggested that company, which is based in Round Rock, Tex., will unveil a smartphone next month at a prominent mobile technology conference in Europe. But people knowledgeable about the company's plans say the company does not plan to announce a product anytime soon. Dell continues to debate whether its current design, said to be based on an ARM processor like the one in the iPhone, will prove unusual enough to impress consumers and worthy of putting into the market. Meanwhile, the company is also exploring how to create a more powerful product that could ship in 2010 and introduce new features capable of challenging rivals. For example, Dell could put its Zing music software, originally intended for use in a line of portable music players, onto a smartphone. Dell's consumer device efforts are led by Ronald G. Garriques, who used to run the mobile device division at Motorola, and Dell has a team in Chicago, made up in part of former Motorola executives, dedicated to making smaller devices like netbooks, a popular type of bare-bones laptop. Dell declined to comment Friday on "rumors and speculation." It is unclear if Dell could make a ground-breaking move in the mobile phone market, although the company has shown off several sleek new computers, including one of the thinnest laptops ever made. Dell's new attention to design has helped it gain ground in the consumer market. Dell's previous struggles with consumer devices have become the stuff of legend. It shipped a hand-held digital assistant called the Axim, but dropped the device because of lackluster demand. The company entered and exited the television market in short order. Dell has also ventured into the market for MP3 music players. Its first device, the Dell DJ, was a bigger dud than the Zune from Microsoft. A second player, based on Zing, was sent to product testers last year but was never commercially released. "Dell has been nursing along a digital music effort for a long time that did not bear fruit," said Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies, which analyzes the technology industry. Phones present a fresh challenge.Dell may have an edge over its PC rivals, however, given that a vast majority of its existing computer sales go to large corporations and government customers, said Roger Entner, an industry analyst with Nielsen Research. The phone could be tied to Dell's computers and other services like e-mail management. "If any PC manufacturer can come into the phone market, it's Dell," Mr. Entner said. But it will not be easy. "Dell has to show on the business side the same level of integration that Apple has shown on the consumer side." |
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