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Check out the full Blu-ray Statistics database. If you have any other suggested features for the site, or know of similar resources, share them in the comments.

(Credit:
Blu-ray Statistics)

The site hosts a huge database containing all released Blu-ray titles, and includes detailed information like what codec was used, whether it’s on a 50GB or 25GB Blu-ray disc, what kind of soundtrack is included, etc. Clicking on a title reveals even more information, like video bit rate, running time–even video and audio quality ratings by review sites such as High-Def Digest, Hi-Def Preview and High Def Disc News. Sure, maybe you already knew that 3:10 to Yuma features a 1080p VC-1 encode–but I bet you’d didn’t know the average bit rate was 23.94 Mbps, or that it used 47.94GB of the Blu-ray disc.

After you get get done browsing the giant list to your heart’s content, also be sure to check out the home page, which includes some interesting overall statistics for Blu-ray. For example, we were surprised to see that 54.6 percent of Blu-ray movies, so far, have used 50GB Blu-ray discs rather than the smaller 25GB discs. Maybe the extra storage capacity of Blu-ray over HD DVD really was important…

Alright, so there might not be much of a practical application for some of the data–and we can’t guarantee the accuracy of it, either–but it’s still a great tool to pick out a new Blu-ray disc, as it includes ratings from IMDB and links to retailers like Amazon and Deep Discount DVD. If we were making a wishlist of features the site could add, we’d love to be able to select our own filters from the database, so, for example, we could rank movies by the highest video quality score at High-Def Digest.

The number of people into Blu-ray may still be small, and the number of people who care about whether their favorite movie uses the AVC or MPEG-2 video codec may be even smaller, but if you are one of those nerdy videophiles, Blu-ray Statistics is a wish come true.

Solazyme, a South San Francisco, Calif.-based company that creates synthetic biological products, said Wednesday that its microalgae-derived fuel is the first renewable diesel to meet the American Society for Testing and Materials’ D-975 specifications.

But, in general, the technology is still experimental and algae-based diesel has not been produced at commercial scale.

The fuel is chemically the same as petroleum-derived diesel, Solazyme said, so it can be distributed using the existing infrastructure. But it burns cleaner than petroleum-derived diesel, with fewer particulates and sulfur levels.

The process can be used to make oils and chemicals from other forms of biomass, including wood chips, corn stover, and switchgrass.

Algae as a feedstock is more desirable than soy because it is not a food crop, yields more oil, and can grow on marginal land.

(Credit:
Solazyme)

A 100 percent blend of Solazyme’s diesel has been road-tested in a 2005 Jeep Liberty with a diesel engine, the company said in a statement.

Solazyme’s certification is a milestone in algae-based fuels, one of the hottest areas of biofuels.

Tiny algae is ready for some long-haul trucking.

In its fermentation process, the company puts large amounts of algae into a vat, mixes in sugar, and then controls the pressure and other environmental factors inside the vat to induce the algae to metabolize the sugar into oil.

Here is algae being grown in dishes at Solazyme's labs. The oil produced by the algae can be used for fuels, chemical, or food oils.

Solayzme’s process differs from most algae farming in that the microalgae is grown without sunlight in a setting more akin to a brewery than an open pond.

Like Matthew before him, Jim’s keynote promises to spark some fireworks. Here’s the abstract I just received:

In his keynote at the Open Source Business Conference, Red Hat President and CEO, Jim Whitehurst, will share his observations from his time with customers and partners around the world who put open source into real business practice. Whitehurst will discuss the drivers of why companies are considering open source for the long-term and why it is strategic to business objectives.

Open Source is the driving force behind the true innovation that happens daily in the community. True open source innovation is what drives value. Hybrid open source strategies cause confusion and sub-par customer experiences.

Jim Whitehurst is a quick study. Matthew Szulik delivered the opening keynote at the Open Source Business Conference 2007, while his successor, Jim Whitehurst, will be opening up OSBC 2008 (March 25-26, San Francisco).

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It remains to be seen whether Jim will be able to convey his thoughts as passionately and eloquently as Matthew did, but after talking with him once before and after reading through a few interviews he has delivered, I suspect the answer is “Yes.”

With Red Hat opening the conference and Microsoft’s Brad Smith giving the evening keynote (with many IT executives in between), it promises to be a killer show. Register now. If you want to try for a discount, ping me and I’ll see what I can do. InfoWorld runs the event but sometimes they let me hand out a limited number of discounts.

Open Source and True Innovation

Alfresco, my employer, went to a RHEL/Fedora model at roughly one-year old. A year later, we’re up 400% in sales (forecasting another 300% in 2008) and not far from where JBoss was when it was acquired. We’re actually making more money on fewer downloads than JBoss did.

I’m concerned with seeing faster growth in open-source companies, growth that doesn’t come at customers’ expense, and this is a model that works. It works because it drives ubiquity and then leaves room open to monetize a significant chunk of that ubiquity. It’s by no means the only model in open source (Zimbra made more money faster than any other open-source vendor with an open source plus proprietary extensions model), but it’s a viable, robust model.

Listen to what Marc says. But don’t discount the validity of the RHEL/Fedora model for your business, no matter how young.

That sounds like a viable business strategy to me, given that in my eyes JBoss was a tremendous success.

I have one quibble, though. Marc suggests that the RHEL/Fedora model is only for established companies:

Are we a better company? Absolutely not. We’re the beneficiary of all the hard work that JBoss did. My point is simply that it’s a great model. It’s a model that I’d like to see more open-source companies adopt. Marc calls it a proprietary distribution of a free product. OK. “Words, words, words,” as Hamlet might say. I’m not worried about the nomenclature here.

Much depends on what Marc means by “established products,” because my own experience with the model is directly contrary to Marc’s statement.

…[T]he ultimate license scheme for OSS is still RHEL/Fedora: a proprietary distribution of OSS software. It doesn’t matter if the software inside is GPL/BSD or whatever. Realistically speaking however, RHEL/FEDORA is not an option for young projects, this is only viable for established products and may snuff your growth in the early stages.

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Marc Fleury says something that doesn’t ring true for me in his analysis of which license - GPL or BSD - to use for a new startup. Marc gives a great answer, born of hard experience, and one that is definitely worth reading. (Teaser: Use GPL if you want protection of your code and BSD if you want to be free lunch for everyone else to achieve ubiquity.)

Pixily plans start at a free level (which requires you sending in documents on your own dime), all the way up to a $60/month plan that serves up four envelopes a month for you to stuff.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Everything that’s scanned goes through optical character recognition (OCR), so you can search for it in the built-in search tool. It also lets you tag, and make notations to documents for the sake of sorting. If you’ve got digital documents, you can upload them into the mix as well.

It’s worth noting that for things like school papers and general writing, Scribd.com has a free program called Paper-to-iPaper that lets you send in all sorts of paper items by mail (at your postal expense) complete with OCR. One thing to note, however is that you have to get the content pre-approved, and things like bills and notes scribbled on paper are not welcome.

Pixily is a cool scan-by-mail service that launched in early June. Like Shoeboxed, which I checked out last month, Pixily is all about taking paper clutter out of your life by scanning it in for you and making it both searchable, and able to be organized into buckets. The big difference between the two services is that Pixily is focused less on receipts and finances, and more on day-to-day papers like insurance claims, long cell phone bills (with call lists on them) and little things like birthday cards.

Pixily requires using the mail to get your documents online, although if you've got PDFs lying around, you can send those digitally to go alongside your scanned docs.

Like Netflix, Pixily works through the mail with similar pre-paid envelopes that you can stuff with as much paper as allows. Each paid plan has a higher number of envelopes you can send in each month, along with limits on how much scanned content the service will host for you. After it’s scanned, it’s sent back in the same mailer, which can be chucked in with your paper recycling–envelope and all.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Summer may be a time for fireworks and barbecues in America, but halfway across the globe there’s some serious bicycling under way. To celebrate the Tour de France as well as the recent inclusion of Street View in France proper, Google has created a custom Street View map for tracking the entire race route at eye level.

There's a reason it's called the Tour–there's a lot of biking involved, and now you can see it in Street View.

Google’s previous forays into organized racing events include the 2008 Olympic torch run, which launched back in April. You can track the torch’s progress, past and present here.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Sharp-eyed Google Maps users will also notice that the little yellow Street View person is now riding a bike (complete with head protection), although there’s no option to fly around like that cool Katsuomi Kobayashi creation we checked out last month. Maybe some enterprising developer can create something fun before the race is over.

Along for the ride are some of the newer Street View additions like face blurring and the ground filling technology that stitches multiple images together to get rid of noticeable seams. According to Google’s Lat Long blog, the Street View van is also using a higher-quality camera rig, so the images are coming in a little cleaner than usual.

Two models are available: a shorter strip with a total of eight outlets and a longer one with a total of 10 outlets and a coaxial RF input/output for cable and satellite TV feeds. Both models have 4-foot cords, and all outlets have a sliding safety switch that closes off the socket when not in use, which is good if you have small children or pets. The Conserve protectors are covered by a lifetime $100,000 connected-equipment warranty as well.

Both Conserve models also come with a light-switch-style wireless remote control that allows you to turn off your components with the flip of a conveniently placed switch (rather than having to bend down underneath a desk and hit an on/off switch on the surge protector itself).

The remote is wall-mountable and can also control multiple Conserve protectors, so you can shut everything down in your house at once. Belkin says the range on the remote is about 60 feet (line of sight is not required), but we only managed to have it work properly within a range of about 30 feet. Additional remotes will soon be available for $13 each.

Read the full review to find out.

Complete shutdown: Belkin's Conserve surge protector in action.

The idea behind Belkin’s Conserve surge protector is pretty simple. Instead of having your electronics sit there in standby mode and each sip a little bit of power, the Conserve lets you completely shut down components so power drain is cut to zero. At the same time, it leaves two outlets active for those products that you indeed want to keep on (or leave in standby mode)–items such as DVRs, wireless routers, fax machines, and cordless phones.

So, how long will the Conserve take to pay for itself?

(Credit:
Belkin)

The HDi grant, awarded in conjunction with the Sundance Institute, follows Microsoft’s other efforts to support independent films, the company said. Another example is the 1,000 HD DVD Indies Project, which gives indie filmmakers free access to HD DVD authoring and on-demand replication. Microsoft is also offering digital rentals of festival short films on its
Xbox 360 platform.

The grant, worth about $100,000, also includes support for production of the finished product on HD DVD.

Given the latter, he said he was excited to have been awarded a new grant from Microsoft, announced here Sunday night, that will allow him to create a disc using the software giant’s HDi technology. HDi enables him to complement the movie with interactive and Web-enabled features such as viewer polls, song downloads, or picture-in-picture commentary and character biographies.

“We never would have been able to afford this,” he said at a press conference at the Microsoft House, a Sundance Film Festival venue created to show off the company’s digital media technologies.

HDi is Microsoft’s implementation of the interactive layer in the HD DVD format, the company said in a statement. It takes advantage of mandatory features in every HD DVD player, including a secondary video decoder and an Internet connection.

“It fills a weird little niche that I didn’t even know existed,” he added, noting that in documentary filmmaking in particular, you often have lots of extra footage, which HDi can help showcase.

PARK CITY, Utah–Jason Kohn, director of last year’s prize-winning Sundance documentary Manda Bala, shot his every frame to be seen on the big screen, but now realizes “most people are going to experience it in DVD.”

First, as ReadWriteWeb rightly applauds, Google is dropping its name from its Gears project, a

In sum, it’s starting to look to me that Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto may be giving way to a much more positive (and useful) slogan: “Be open.”

Or look at Google’s App Engine, which is one area in which Google keeps trying to “mak[e] clouds of computing power more accessible to all developers.” Google is now opening up App Engine to everyone, not an elect few, at pricing that is very compelling.

In Google’s increasingly open world, Steve Ballmer’s insistence that Vista “is not a failure and it’s not a mistake” speaks to the wrong questions surrounding the much maligned operating system. What he should be protesting is that “It’s not irrelevant.”

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More open, much sooner.

symbolic move aimed at reinforcing Google’s commitment to working with existing standards communities and helping them to define better open standards for bridging online applications and the offline world.

There appears to be, however, a new Google afoot, and it’s one that I like quite a bit. Google may need to change its slogan from “Don’t be evil” to “Be open,” as this looks to be the direction it is going. At Google I/O today, Google announced a few things that make me feel like the future of the web is much safer in its hands than in Microsoft’s (if Microsoft ever figures out the web at all).

Unfortunately, Mr. Ballmer, it just might be, as Google makes the browser more and more powerful (Seen Google Earth lately?), and uses Gears to pick up the slack for browsers in the interim.

Consider, for example, MySpace’s announcement that it has integrated Gears into its messaging system to create a backup of messages (email) to a user’s computer and thereby enable faster searching and sorting of the messages. With 170 million messages sent each day on MySpace, this adds up to cost-savings as it needn’t process all of the email searching and sorting server-side. The consumer wins, and MySpace wins.

I’m liking this new Google much more than the old, secretive and arrogant Google. Well, it’s still arrogant, but one character flaw at a time.

Open APIs. Open hosting of things like Ajax libraries. Open data promises. Open-source Gears. And so on.

I’ve been an outspoken critic of Google over the years, admiring some of its products (Search, SMS, News, etc.) while deriding its relationship to open source and deprecating most of its products.

Indeed, Google’s Gears Engineer Aaron Boodman writes that Gears “aims to bring emerging web standards to as many devices as possible, as quickly as possible.”

The upshot is you’re trading a little tabletop footprint space for a more cinematic experience in a marginally larger chassis, and we’ve seen some not-yet-announced 18-inch laptops that are hardly larger than their current 17-inch versions. However, we also think the laptop industry could get swamped with too many screen sizes, causing consumer confusion–so maybe we should all agree to pick a handful and stick to them. So, the question to you is: What laptop sizes should we keep, and which ones should be retired to the great wire box in the sky?

An 18-inch Acer next to a 17-inch Gateway.

That may seem a little like overkill, but there is at least some method to the madness when it comes to the new 18-inch screen size (and these new sizes may eventually replace more traditional 15- and 17-inch displays). Take, for example, the very first 18-inch laptop we’ve gotten our hands on, the 18.4-inch Acer Aspire 8920.

The new screen sizes allow for true 16:9 aspect-ratio displays, which means Blu-ray or other HD content will fit the screen better. The native resolution of our 18-inch screen was 1,920×1080-pixel resolution (you know, like Blu-ray), while a high-end 17-inch laptop is usually 1,920×1200. To fit a lower, wider panel, the Acer Aspire 8920 is about 1.5-inches wider overall than a 17-inch Gateway P-172. Even though both of these laptops were equally deep (11.9-inches), the Acer has a hinge that pivots the entire lid back, making it about .75-inch shorter when you’ve got the screen open at a 90-degree angle (as pictured).

You may (or may not) have heard some buzz lately about new laptop sizes, as models with 16- and 18-inch screens join the traditional 12-, 13-, 14-, 15-, and 17-inch party (plus all those 7- and 9-inch mininotebooks).