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Hey, where else are you going to get that? Not from here anymore!

Thanks for stopping by, though!

So, what does this mean for gadgets? It could mean nothing, but then again, gadgets do contain a lot of plastic, which is a petroleum product and gadgets do cost money to buy. What this may mean eventually for us is more expensive gadgets. In fact, it’s a little surprising that we haven’t seen at least small price jumps in the years since oil began it’s astronomical rise and the dollar’s long fall. However, there are certain physical laws when it comes to money and they can’t be ignored forever.

Here’s how price jumps will work when they come (and they will):

As the cost of oil goes up, that cost will be passed on to people producing plastic from the oil. The cost of that plastic will then have gone up for the manufacturer of electronics. Then that company will hike prices to the distributor who will then hike up the prices that we will have to pay to get the electronics. Since the US dollar is so weak, it’s likely that the costs and respective prices will go up even higher than they would have were it just the oil we were dealing with.

Sadly, this is the basic physics of money and capitalism. In order to make the same amount of money you did yesterday (or more) you have to charge more than what you paid for the gadget. If the cost of that gadget goes up for you, you’ve got to pass that loss onto someone else or you’ll get your “Good Capitalist Club” card revoked at the next quarterly clubhouse meeting.

So, in the end, it’s just a matter of time before we all see more of our money gone for the same amount of gadgety goodness.

[FT.com]

Other items available include Karaoke machines, headphones, wireless cameras, PDAs, DVD players, and more. All of the items I saw were under $200.

So, where do all of these electronics come from? Well, this is the kinda creepy part. As the name suggests, the items in police auctions usually come from police evidence rooms. Which, of course, means that they originally come from criminal investigations. In some cases they may be things that were stolen by a criminal and for whatever reason were unreturnable to the original owner (cringe!).

Other times these items may have belonged to the criminals, themselves. Either possibility might make you feel bad for the original owner of the item, but hey, if you didn’t buy that Sidekick 3 for $55 someone else would have.

Check out all of the electronics auctions PropertyRoom.com has to offer here.

According to a PCWorld.com article from yesterday at Yahoo News, “Security researchers studying the latest Internet crime trends have discovered a new Eastern European website that uses a large botnet to infect vulnerable PCs. The operators of the botnet and website charge clients for each successful PC infection.“

Pretty cold, huh? And it’s much worse than you might think, too.

The idea here is to really make the capitalism-part pay off–really bring a powerful service like hacking PCs to the masses. In this case, the mysterious, probably-based-in-Russia hacking company offers up their services to anyone who wants them, apparently, allowing unscrupulous people with no knowledge of hacking to hack. Isn’t that cool?

/sarcasm.

Look at it this way: you want to know what’s going on inside someone’s home. You find a guy who has wired up a home with cameras and he’ll charge you for the footage those cameras shoot. That’s basically what’s going on here. Is it illegal? If you consider applications being installed on your PC without you agreeing to install them, then yes. Imagine someone sneaking into your car and attaching a GPS unit somewhere you couldn’t see it and then selling the tracking data to, well, whomever wanted it.

Wait–I may be putting ideas in bad people’s minds. I’d better end this post.

(Hey, you bad people! If you want to use any of these ideas, fine–just make sure I get a cut! Honor among thieves, don’t forget!)

Oh and FYI, you can check out the site the PCWorld.com article mentions as the front-end of the nefarious company for yourself–the above image is a screencap of the site taken after navigating to it via a proxy service called Anonymouse.org. I’m on a Mac, but with sites like this, you can’t be too careful. Check it out at your own peril.

[Yahoo]

Well, have no fear–Cory Doctorow, over at BoingBoing.Net points readers to a huge post at Consumerist.com all about how you, the consumer, can fight back when anything you’ve bought is less than what you’ve expected. The Consumerist post is vast and informative. There are lots of tips here–some are obvious (I remember doing a few of them on instinct during my iBook Adventure™) and some are not (the one that teaches you “How To Get Your Problem Solved By Posting It To A Company’s Stock Forums” looks particularly intriguing).

These days, corporations are getting more and more powerful and, seemingly, less and less interested in customer satisfaction. Remember that story from July of 2007 about how Sprint had cut off service to over 1000 customers who were lodging too many complaints? Back in 2004, I posted in my blog about the very good reasons I was leaving Cingular. With no advertising, that post has gotten over 1300 views and over thirty comments from people chiming in about how Cingular sucks.

Don’t take a bad consumer experience sitting down. If you’ve been wronged, do something about it!

[BoingBoing and Consumerist]

Matt Worden penned an article at TheStreet.com yesterday that suggests Hulu’s real victim will be Cable TV, itself. Worden says that Hulu provides a way around having to bother with the hassle of having cable TV at all. Which is something not many people are addressing. However, it’s obvious that this is precisely what will happen. Why pay for cable when you have DSL and can watch just what you want without paying a dime more?

Also, if you look at the big picture you can see that even if every network started offering up their shows online, the real trend here isn’t simply just a network’s migration from the old delivery system to a new one. It’s a move that is a desperate cry for help in a world where TV networks are needed less and less each day. In today’s world, if you’re looking for something interesting or entertaining to watch, you don’t need to bother with anything a giant corporation has created. You can just sit down in front of your computer, iPod or other media-player-of-choice and watch any number of worthwhile, quality videos. You can also watch worthless, low-quality videos if you’re entertained by them. There is room for all niches and all interests on the Internet and that scares the crap out of old media companies.

NBC wants to cling to their livelihood and they’re doing it by offering up their shows online. Their plan makes sense, but with video technology so inexpensive anyone can literally have a show and an audience with very little cash spent.

With that in mind, how can you not wonder why NBC doesn’t just sell it’s holdings and close up shop? They’d be leading the trend!

[TheStreet.com, Yahoo, Guardian]

Just yesterday, Jim Finkle wrote an article for Reuters pointing out, quite cynically how “A computer developed for the world’s poor children, dubbed “the $100 laptop,” has reached a milestone: It is now selling for $200.“

The catch is that the XO had it’s price hiked a couple of weeks ago and despite that has already been put in front of handfuls of poor kids in poor countries, runs on a tiny amount of power, is environmentally friendly, has a huge battery life, can do all the basic stuff you expect from computers and has inspired copycats like the eeePC from Asus. So why the hate?

That’s a good question. Especially since there is good news to report about the XO. Agam Shah reports for IDGNS that the OLPC folks are working on a new “supercharger” that will power 15 XO batteries at once and run off of cows and yo-yos.

OK, so it’s not the most dramatic story in the world, but it seems odd to report 2-week-old news that makes the OLPC folks seem like losers when there’s positive news and they’re actually doing a good thing for humanity. Hell, even if they fail and never ship a single laptop, they’re still doing something good for humanity by drawing attention to the unmet need Third World kids have for computers.

UPDATE 2:11AM: BBC News just reported that Uruguay has just ordered 100,000 XOs for children in Uruguayan schools. The article says “The South American country has bought 100,000 of the machines for schoolchildren aged six to 12,” and that “A further 300,000 may be purchased to provide a machine for every child in the country by 2009.”

Even more positive news.

[Yahoo, Yahoo and BBC News]

Now, it turns out that a lot of people actually use Java on Macs. I, myself, use it to manage music on a Sony thumb drive Walkman I picked up on sale. However, programmers who work in Java are now thoroughly screwed until Apple can put out a fix and since Apple isn’t used to putting out fixes as often as good old Microsoft is, who knows when a patch will become available?

As a RegDeveloper.co.uk article points out, “Apple marketing monkeys, trying to woo developers to OS X, like to refer to the OS as “the only major consumer operating system that comes complete with a fully configured and ready-to-use Java runtime and development environment.”“

Whoopsie!

Kind of tough when one of the very things you put in bold face on the brochure you end up being unable to deliver.

[RegDeveloper.co.uk]

PLEASE KEEP IN MIND that this rumor goes almost COMPLETELY unsourced beyond this one dude on Twitter. The thing is, something like an iPhone eXtreme and NOT something like an iPhone Nano, makes sense.

So, you’ve seen the current iPhone and, if you’re honest, you know that the iPhone has, in a practical sense, the same function-set as the Sidekick 3. That may sound sacrilegious, but realistically, the one thing the iPhone does that the SK3 can’t is connect via wifi, play videos and store in excess of 4GB of data (depending on which iPhone you get). OK, so that’s more than one thing, but you get the point. Generally speaking, the iPhone is just a really slick Sidekick 3 (which is really a pretty sad thing to say, considering the SK3′s reputation as the Fisher-Price not-so-smart phone).

Both mobiles let you surf, make phone calls, send emails, take still pictures, etc. Doesn’t that seem weird to you? Like, maybe, the iPhone should do more than just provide a few “neat” bells and whistles above and beyond a virtually identical function-set? Well, since the iPhone is an Apple product, it’s no surprise that rumors are about a new iPhone are pretty common–but how many are about a better iPhone?

So far, everyone seems to predicting a step down, not a step up. What if Steve Jobs had put out the iPhone Nano first and has another phone on the way that actually is deserving of the nickname “the Jesus Phone”?

January seems so very far away!

The deuce, you say, Eliot!

The point of his piece on Wired, which posted just hours ago, is that vinyl is slowly hammering the nails into the coffin of the compact disc. One of the reasons he says is the very thing we were told CDs were good for: sound quality. Eliot says:

Although CDs have a wider dynamic range, mastering houses are often encouraged to compress the audio on CDs to make it as loud as possible: It’s the so-called loudness war. Since the audio on vinyl can’t be compressed to such extremes, records generally offer a more nuanced sound.

Another reason for vinyl’s sonic superiority is that no matter how high a sampling rate is, it can never contain all of the data present in an analog groove, Nyquist’s theorem to the contrary.

“The digital world will never get there,” said Chris Ashworth, owner of United Record Pressing, the country’s largest record pressing plant.

As a result, Eliot says, vinyl is making a comeback.

Well, this is one tech blogger who won’t be trading in his iPod for a turntable any time soon–not until they invent oversampling technology for record players.

Of course, that would defeat the purpose of going analog in the first place… SIGH.

..OH, WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS!!

[Wired]