The Buzz

If you went to Best Buy and got the pitch for an expensive cable to hook up your new HDTV, I hope you skipped out on that and bought a cheap one elsewhere. While analog cables could be improved with technology, digital cables are transmitting simple binary data (1s and 0s), so there’s nothing that can be done to improve that data being transferred – it either works or doesn’t.

The great graphic makers at Mint assembled a nice graphic explaining just what’s changed.

See the graphic after the jump.

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Click to see the 500 most common passwords (WARNING: some are NSFW).

Someone with a lot of time on their hands compiled the 500 most common passwords in a handwritten list. It’s kind of cool looking, but if you have a password on this list, you should change it, as it’s one of the most used and therefore you are less secure than the average person; a hacker will try common passwords first, as it’ll get him or her in the most often.

Be warned: some of the words on the list are definitely not safe for work. Apparently a lot of you think curse words make good passwords. Bad news: pretty much all of them make the list.

Twitter used a similar list (possibly even from the same source) when they banned common passwords from their registration process awhile back.

SOURCE: Flickr via Gawker

UPDATED at 11:45 p.m. to reflect channel’s status.

It seemed slightly outlandish that Viacom would upload videos and later issue a takedown notice, as Google has asserted during the company’s ongoing skirmish with YouTube.

Now, BoingBoing has reported that Sony blocked Beyonce’s videos on copyright grounds. Sony owns Beyonce’s record label, and therefore blocked their *own* promotional channel. That’s genius.

Meanwhile, my attempts to access the channel this afternoon delivered a “Service Unavailable” message, meaning Sony may have asked YouTube to work on fixing it. However, late Sunday night, the channel was restored, but the videos were still inaccessible.

SOURCE: BoingBoing via Gawker

I’ve talked about Hulu’s potential plans to introduce a pay service, Apple’s patent request for ad injection into video downloads, and various other attempts media companies are making to make money and build revenue online. The biggest challenge is that right now, most streaming and download purchases aren’t replacing the income lost by declining viewership and DVD sales.

The CW is taking a drastic step in its hopes of building online revenue: they plan to play double the ads they are now after each segment, equating to effectively a full ad break in online streams.

The CW probably is the right network to try this experiment, as their target of a younger viewing demographic faces the most defection to online with tech-savvy youth. But four ads a break is unusual on the Web, and it doesn’t take much for people to start clicking to another location on a computer.

Would you watch a stream that had ad breaks of two minutes per segment?

SOURCE: AllThingsD (full story at Wall Street Journal, requires subscription)

Many believe that it’s cheaper to live in the suburbs than a big city, despite the commuter costs, because you can save on housing and other costs. However, that’s not always the case.

The Center for Neighborhood Technology has mapped costs in various areas throughout the country, including a number of areas where the suburbs have become a popular alternative to living in the city. Included in their analysis is the Bridgeport, Stamford/Norwalk and Danbury.

I found the gas comparison most eye-opening; the amount the average person is paying for gas leapt between 2000 and 2008, no matter where in the state you lived, and although gas prices have come down from those 2008 highs, they’re still very much higher than they were a decade ago, and as such raise expenses for a commuter.

It’s an informative comparison for those who are trying to figure out where to live vs. where they work, and as the maps show, it’s all about location, location, location.

SOURCE: CNT via Consumerist

I’ve covered pretty extensively the rights issue that both Netflix and Redbox have faced in being able to rent movies the day they’re released on DVD. Their financially-challenged competition was just given a small olive branch.

Blockbuster has announced that they have retained the right to rent Warner Bros. movies the day they hit DVD. This means Blockbuster store customers (and not kiosk customers, it should be noted) get a 4-week leg up over the others. This is good news for Blockbuster, which warned recently they could file for bankruptcy.

SOURCE: BusinessWeek via Consumerist

One question that’s been on the minds of many since the Toyota “unintended acceleration” problems broke is why the cars are so hard to stop? Putting it in neutral is the easiest way to begin gaining control of the car, but in a frightening moment, the first reaction is to slam on the brakes. But is that really effective?

The folks at Consumer Reports have released a video that offers quick information on why it’s so dangerous, why the fixes coming will work, and what actually happens. In the 5-minute video they demonstrate various scenarios and it offers a lot of great information about what happens and why.

SOURCE: YouTube/Consumer Reports via Consumerist

Photoshop’s 20th anniversary was celebrated recently, as I mentioned here, but one of the things that those of us who use it regularly always wrestle with is whether the new version of Photoshop is a good enough upgrade to warrant paying hundreds of dollars.

One feature for the upcoming CS 5 version, demonstrated recently in a video posted to YouTube and called Content-Aware Fill, will mean nothing to those of us working with news photos, but boy is it a cool feature. It effectively fills in gaps in photos and allows for certain types of corrections to be made on the fly instead of through a slow slog using the clone tool. This could save some Photoshop professionals hours on the fixing of certain photos.

Instead of explaining it further, I encourage you to watch the video below for what is an awe-inspiring demonstration:

SOURCE: YouTube via PC Pro