Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Ben Fogle and his glorious beard


I do like his beard. Ben seems like a great guy.....well he has to be really growing a beard that that....well done Ben.

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Brookfield


I do enjoy going to brookfield and seein david beckham. I am a member of Brookfield gym and leisure center. Nice place it was busy actually Tuesday.

Thursday, February 5, 2009

Juggling


Juggling is a physical human skill involving the movement of one or more objects, usually through the air, for entertainment (see object manipulation). The most recognizable form of juggling is toss juggling, where the juggler throws objects through the air. Jugglers often refer to the objects they juggle as props. The most common props are balls, beanbags, rings, clubs, and bouncing balls. Some performers use dramatic objects such as chainsaws, knives and fire torches. The term juggling can also refer to other prop-based circus skills such as diabolo, devil sticks, poi, cigar box manipulation, fire-dancing, contact juggling, hooping and hat manipulation.

The word juggling derives from the Middle English jogelen to entertain by performing tricks, in turn from the French jongleur and the Old French jogler. There is also the Late Latin form joculare of Latin joculari, meaning to jest. "Juggling" has come to mean, colloquially, any activity which requires a constant refocusing of one's attention from an overall goal to multiple subsidiary tasks, for example "Juggling Work and Family", the title of a PBS documentary, This colloquial meaning is similar to the non-computer use of the word multitasking.

Friday, January 30, 2009

Shoes


A shoe is an item of footwear evolved at first to protect the human foot and later, additionally, as an item of decoration in itself. The foot contains more bones than any other single part of the body, and has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in relation to vastly varied terrain and climatic conditions. Together with the proprioceptive system, it is what makes possible balance and ambulation.

Most of the time there have been people, most people have not worn shoes. Until recent years, shoes were not worn by most of the world's population—largely because they could not afford them. Only with the advent of mass production, making available for the first time the cheap flip-flop-type sandal, for example, has shoe-wearing become more or less universal.

Appearance and design have varied enormously through time, and from culture to culture. They may, for example, have very high heels or no heels at all. Contemporary footwear varies in style, complexity and cost, from the most basic sandal, via high fashion shoes for women sometimes costing thousands of dollars a pair, through to complex boots specially designed for mountaineering or skiing. Shoes have traditionally been made from leather, wood or canvas, but are increasingly made from rubber, plastics and other petrochemical-derived materials.

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Xbox 360


The Xbox 360 is the second video game console produced by Microsoft, and the successor to the Xbox. The Xbox 360 competes with Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii as part of the seventh generation of video game consoles. The integrated Xbox Live service allows players to compete online and download content such as arcade games, game demos, trailers, TV shows, and movies.

The Xbox 360 was officially unveiled on MTV on May 12, 2005, with detailed launch and game information divulged later that month at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). The console sold out completely at the release in all regions except in Japan,[3][4][5] and, as of January 5, 2009, 28 million units have been sold worldwide according to Microsoft.[1] The Xbox 360 is available in three configurations: the "Arcade", the "Xbox 360", and the "Elite" console, each with its own selection of accessories.

Monday, January 5, 2009

Digital Pirates Winning Battle With Studios


On the day last July when “The Dark Knight” arrived in theaters, Warner Brothers was ready with an ambitious antipiracy campaign that involved months of planning and steps to monitor each physical copy of the film.

A high-quality streaming video version of "Slumdog Millionaire" as seen on a secondary site reached through a "link farm" featuring pirated movies.

The campaign failed miserably. By the end of the year, illegal copies of the Batman movie had been downloaded more than seven million times around the world, according to the media measurement firm BigChampagne, turning it into a visible symbol of Hollywood’s helplessness against the growing problem of online video piracy.

The culprits, in this case, are the anonymous pirates who put the film online and enabled millions of Internet users to view it. Because of widely available broadband access and a new wave of streaming sites, it has become surprisingly easy to watch pirated video online — a troubling development for entertainment executives and copyright lawyers.

Hollywood may at last be having its Napster moment — struggling against the video version of the digital looting that capsized the music business. Media companies say that piracy — some prefer to call it “digital theft” to emphasize the criminal nature of the act — is an increasingly mainstream pursuit. At the same time, DVD sales, a huge source of revenue for film studios, are sagging. In 2008, DVD shipments dropped to their lowest levels in five years. Executives worry that the economic downturn will persuade more users to watch stolen shows and movies.

“Young people, in particular, conclude that if it’s so easy, it can’t be wrong,” said Richard Cotton, the general counsel for NBC Universal.

People have swapped illegal copies of songs, television shows and movies on the Internet for years. The slow download process, often using a peer-to-peer technology called BitTorrent, required patience and a modicum of sophistication by users. Now, users do not even have to download. Using a search engine, anyone can find free copies of movies, still in theaters, in a matter of minutes. Classic TV, like every “Seinfeld” episode ever produced, is also free for the streaming. Some of these digital copies are derived from bootlegs, while others are replicas of the advance review videos that studios send out before a release.

TorrentFreak.com, a Web site based in Germany that tracks which shows are most downloaded, estimates that each episode of “Heroes,” a series on NBC, is downloaded five million times, representing a substantial loss for the network. (On TV, “Heroes” averages 10 million American viewers each week).

A wave of streaming sites, which allow people to start watching video immediately without transferring a full copy of the movie or show to their hard drive, are making it easier than ever to watch free Hollywood content online. Many of these sites are located in countries with lackluster piracy enforcement efforts, like China, and are hard to monitor, so media companies do not have a clear sense of how much content is being stolen.

But many industry experts say the practice is becoming much more prevalent. “Streaming has gotten efficient and cheap enough and it gives users more control than downloads do. This is where piracy is headed,” said James L. McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research. “Consumers are under the impression that everything they want to watch should be easily streamable.”

Some of the first fights over video piracy on the Internet involved YouTube, the Google-owned Web site that introduced many people to streaming. Some legal disputes between YouTube and copyright owners remain, most notably a $1 billion lawsuit filed by Viacom, but the landscape “has improved markedly,” Mr. Cotton said. YouTube uses filters and digital flags to weed out illegal content.

But if media companies are winning the battle against illegal video clips, they are losing the battle over illicit copies of full-length TV episodes and films. The Motion Picture Association of America says that illegal downloads and streams are now responsible for about 40 percent of the revenue the industry loses annually as a result of piracy.

“It is becoming, among some demographics, a very mainstream behavior,” said Eric Garland, the chief executive of BigChampagne.

The files are surprisingly easy to find, partly because of efforts by people like Mohy Mir, the 23-year-old founder of the Toronto based video streaming site SuperNova Tube. The site, run by Mr. Mir and one other employee, allows anyone to post a video clip of any length. As the site has grown more popular, SuperNova Tube has become a repository for copyrighted content. On a recent day, the new movies “Paul Blart: Mall Cop” and “Taken” could easily be found on the site by following links from other sites, called “link farms,” which guide users to secret stashes of copyrighted content spread around the Web.

Mr. Mir says he did not know these files were there and that his company promptly responds to any request from major rights- holders. He also says that piracy is actually his largest problem — advertisers flee when they are alerted to infringing material — and that he is constantly removing files at the request of Hollywood studios.

His reluctance is seemingly belied by his site’s name, which is based on the popular SuperNova BitTorrent hub, and its slogan: “We Work with uploaders, not against them.”

The piracy problem, however, does seem to weigh on him. He removed a copy of the movie “Twilight” from his site after a reporter pointed it out to him recently. “I think about getting sued every day. If that happens it will definitely take us out of business,” he said.

Mr. Mir has reason for concern. In December, the motion picture association sued three Web sites that it said were facilitating copyright infringement by identifying and indexing links to pirated material around the Web.

John Malcolm, the association’s director of worldwide antipiracy operations, said that although the group does not sue individuals for watching pirated videos, other lawsuits against Web sites are forthcoming, and he acknowledged that the challenge is stiff.

“There are a lot of very technologically sophisticated people out there who are very good at this and very good at hiding,” Mr. Malcolm said. “We have limited resources to bring to the fight.”

With so much pirated material online, Hollywood is turning to technological solutions. Perhaps most important, media companies are learning from the music industry’s mistakes and trying to avert broader adoption of piracy techniques. The No. 1 lesson: provide the video on the platform that users want it.

Mark Ishikawa, BayTSP’s founder and chief executive, sees a correlation between the availability of content through traditional legal channels and their popularity on pirate networks.

“When DVD releases are postponed, demand always goes up, because people don’t have an authorized channel to buy,” he said.

Partly in response to the piracy problem, a cornucopia of video Web sites now feature the latest episodes of virtually every broadcast TV show. Movie studios are experimenting with video-on-demand releases and other ways to offer films on demand. Legal alternatives, the companies hope, will stifle the stealing. The music industry, by comparison, waited years to provide legal options for online listeners.

“That’s how you start to marginalize piracy — not just by using the stick, but by using the carrot,” Mr. Garland said.