President's Message
May 2001

1. For a long time I have wanted a means of using my computor for timer recording of radio broadcasts. Now DART is offering a free utility "TimerRecorder" that allows that. It will record a single event or daily, weekly, monthly, or Monday-Friday. You can choose sampling rate, number of channels and resolution. Note that if you turn your computer off, then TimerRecorder has to be re-opened to be active. http://www.dartpro.com/New.asp  and click on "free stuff."

2. Fans of vintage Gilbert and Sullivan will be glad to hear that an enterprising collector is selling by mail CDR copies of acoustic discs starting with "The Mikado" (1917), "The Pirates of Penzance" (1921) etc, and electrics starting in 1929. Prices are about $19 per CD. James Lockwood, POB l9173, San Diego CA 92159-0173. email: 78s2cd@home.com. [the website is no longer active - Webmaster]

3. Ultimate Entertainment is offering a home theater system for $700,000. It features a modified Vidikron video projector and the TeraNex data processor. Conventional video systems add lines by interpolating from those already present, which can look a little fuzzy. TeraNex makes processors for the military "smart bombs" and in this application is able to track the pixels — the microscopic dots — of a video image. Using a time delay, each pixel is followed for seven frames of film simultaneously — four frames in the past, three in the future. "It creates a motion vector for each pixel It knows precisely what's missing. It knows precisely what to fill in." This gadget is $50,000. "If you want something as good as your neighborhood movie theater, this is it. But if you want something as good as a print taken straight off the film's negative, you need about 4000 lines--that's four times the resolution of the best you can do with video today. We'll get there. But we have a ways to go before we hit the Holy Grail." [Boston Globe 24Ja01]

4. "Mad [magazine] has suffered one of the most precipitous circulation declines in publishing history. Mad's newstand and subscriber base fell from 2.3 million in the early 1970's ...to the current 250,000." They have decided to accept advertisements in the current issue. [Interestingly the BAS Speaker has had the same decline (as a ratio) in the same period, though it continues to not take ads....][Boston Globe 20Fe01]

5. "If all goes as planned, Charley Pride will make music history in April. After selling more than 70 million records, Pride, one of the last great figures from the pre-Garth, twang-box radio glory days of country music, is set to release America’s first copy-protected compact disk. A tribute to singer Jim Reeves, who died in a plane crash in 1964, Pride’s CD will incorporate technology that, in theory, will stop listeners from ripping its tracks into MP3s." When similar discs were issued in Europe, 3% of CD players were unable to play them, and the run was re-pressed. [msnbc.com, 27Mr01]


 

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updated 11/11/04