October 12, 2003

The New York Times reports on the continuing stand-off between movie theatres and film distributors over who will pay to convert theatres to digital projection, in which movies are stored digitally on hard drives and then beamed to the screen with a digital projector that has no moving parts. In addition to some quality concerns due to too low resolution, the main question is who will pay: the theatres who would need $150,000 digital projectors with an unknown lifespan or the distributors who benefit from no longer needing to create and distribute canisters of film at $1,200 US each. 11:32:01 PM

The Globe and Mail reports that the Los Alamitos Unified School District in Orange County, California is attempting to recoup grant money lost when a student is absent by asking parents to donate $40 (U.S.) to the district for every day the child is absent, including for religious holidays and doctor's appointments, but not necessarily for sick days. My only response given that they include doctor's appointments and religious holidays would be to tell the school district to get stuffed. 11:11:42 PM

DigiTimes reports that the wholesale price the 3.2 GHz P4 Processor Extreme Edition will be $925 US, hundreds of dollars more than the expected $700 US price. One reason for the high price is that Intel executives have decided that the extreme high-end enthusiast market will pay such extreme prices for yet a few more frames per second while playing 3D computer games or similar activities. One thing that such buyers should keep in mind is that their $925 chips will likely be obsolete in a few months when Intel releases their Prescott processors. While possibly delayed, the 3.40 GHz Prescott has a launch price of $637 US and will fall to $417 in Intel’s first post launch price drop. Yet more advanced chips with greater speed and more features are expected in late 2004 or 2005. Moore’s Law continues to reign. 10:49:29 PM