Paralyzingly Beautiful

For those of you with hard-to-shop-for parents, you may want to consider botox injections. It is important first to make sure that the last will and testament is in order and life insurance policies are up-to-date.
What price beauty?

Clearly someone has an employee problem

But for the time being everyone on my Christmas list is taken care of. (…and I SOOOO qualified for the Free Shipping.)

Falling flat

If you’re considering buying an LCD TV this Christmas, you might want to get a TiVo now and wait on the bigger screen. Manufacturers have been building factories by the dozen, which means you’ll be paying 30% less by this time next year. Smaller screens (around 20 inches) will probably drop even farther, down to around $300 instead of the $700-$800 you’ll pay now.

Everyone from Philips to Sony to Samsung to Thomson have been putting up new factories to manufacture the wall-mounted screens, anticipating a big demand that has, so far, not materialized. And if the laws of supply and demand continue to be laws, you could be the proud owner of a 50” flatscreen in time for SuperBowl XL in 2005.

Video on demand

CNET is reporting that Google is working on a search engine for video that’ll scour through video clips in archives of the thousands and thousands of hours of video available now and give up that slice of TV you remember that had that guy from Twin Peaks doing that thing with that stuff where that one thing happened and everybody loved it.

Microsoft is working on a similar technology which it will reveal at CES in January. Its engine will tie-in with Windows Media Center edition and scrub the internet looking for stuff to show you, like when that chimp picked its ass and fell off the tree or that funny cartoon of that kid hitting his dad in the balls.

Barbecued chips

There won’t be a Playstation 3 until 2006, and we won’t get a look at it until next year, but Sony (along with partners Toshiba and IBM) released a few stats on the the PS3 chip today, and if this vaporware makes it to market, it’s a hell of a powerhouse that’ll end up inside workstations, HDTVs and a whole host of new products that need extra horsepower to keep cranking out the pixels.

The Cell chip will be 10 times more powerful than existing processors, able to handle 16 trillion floating point operations per second. The consortium was formed in March of 2001 announcing that it would build a “supercomputer on a chip.” More details will be announced at a tech meeting next year, including (hopefully) how they plan on cooling the sucker so it doesn’t melt the motherboard.