One dollar?! For 30 seconds of music!? I can preview songs that long at CD Universe for free! How can Sprint charge me the same price for what I already pay on iTunes?
I admit, I am a pretty adept computer enthusiast. So, when I discovered that my phone came with a USB-type tether, I scoured the manuals for a way to easily turn a simple MP3 file into a ringtone for my Samsung MM-A900 “Blade.” The problem was that it wasn’t so simple. In fact, it wasn’t even documented since doing so required a little complicated gray-hat hack.
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In my last article on the freeware review, I wrote about automatically saving multiple screenshots with smartision ScreenCopy. Try using this program with video. When I was trying to save a screen shot of one of my DVDs for my desktop wallpaper, I captured the entire screen … sans the actual video. Even when I tried pressing the manual “Print Screen” button on the keyboard I got the same result as I pasted the data in IrfanView.
Why is that? I can never dump the screen of any video content? My first response was that it was a copy-protection mechanism, sort of like DRM. But the real, underlying problem was the way my media player rendered the video content.
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Since the first time I saw the pristine, sharp quality of HDTV, I’ve become enamored with the technology. Imagine better-than-DVD-quality picture! You’ve got to see it to believe it. The best part is the same exact same television programming you see on a regular TV is, likewise, freely available in HDTV format at the exact same time. Why watch Grey’s Anatomy on regular low-resolution TV when you can watch it in high quality picture! Chances are, free HDTV frequencies are just bouncing about you as you read. The problem is … the equipment to receive these signals is not exactly free.
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