Are you ready for Digital TV?

This week on Yahoo! Tech Tuesday, the topic is on the transition to digital TV from analog, a mandatory move that will be in place when 2006 ends. If you have an analog TV and you turned it on in 2007, you will not be able to see anything unless you have a separate digital-to-analog converter. Not even if you have rabbit ear antenna to receive off-air broadcasts, because even off-air channels will be digital. Yahoo! Tech Tuesday gives some recommendations on which TVs you will need to buy if you don't want to use the old boxy machines in place of the new flat-panel LCD/plasma TV/monitors out there. Goodbye, VHF. Goodbye, UHF. Hello DTV. And to HDTV: Hi, you are so beautiful, with your large resolution, so let's get married.

Some comparisons between analog and digital TV are listed below:

Analog

• 480 horizontal lines
• 68 off-air channels (2-69)
• 124 cable channels (2-125)
• subject to interference - snow, leaked signal, blurry picture

Digital

• up to 1080 horizontal lines
• practically unlimited channels, depending on provider
• HDTV - high definition picture and sound
• subject to copy protection, something that analog TV had advantage over with VHS tapes

Street Tech Divide --renewed--; Sony PSP=Mini PC?

Welcome to the New Street Tech Divide! Here's some new news on current and future technology:

By now, most people should know that the Sony PSP (PlayStation Portable) is well, a portable entertainment center, displaying pictures, playing movies, music, and of course, games. Through emulation, games from other game consoles can be played on the PSP. (Imagine the original Super Mario Bros. jumping around in Nintendo's rival console.) Anyways, not many people don't really assume video game consoles to be computers. THEY ARE.
So, imagine a certain operating system of say, 10 years ago. That's right, it's Windows 95. (Wait... 2005-10=1995 --- why did I do that? Oh yeah, tomorrow's the 10th anniversary of the release of Windows 95). Well, the PSP can now run Windows 95, which I can say very impressive. Source: Tom's Hardware

As for Internet access, the long awaited PSP 2.0 firmware update for North America has been delayed by Sony.
Sony PSPs were shipped with the 1.50 firmware originally, which many users tried to keep so they can run their homebrew applications, such as the port of Windows 95 (above). For those who wanted the Internet though, one had to go through such lengths such as using an alternate DNS (Domain Name Service) server when using the network option in the game Wipeout Pure. Instead of going to a locked Sony site where it's supposed to go, the update software is tricked to open a portal, that you can use the web browser then on freely, until you turn off the PSP.

Update: Sony has already released the firmware update; I'll update on this in a new post.