Is the cable box about to go by way of the VCR? Sony Electronics and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association announced today that they have signed an agreement that would allow Sony to add many of the functions performed by set-top boxes to their TVs.

Most TVs have a built-in coaxial connection, allowing you to connect a cable wire directly to the set, but there are many advanced "two-way" features that require the box, like pay-per-view and on-demand.

Sony could not say when the first such televisions might be appear in stores.

The NCTA's members include the nation's six largest cable companies: Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications, Charter Communications, Cablevision Systems and Bright House Networks. The six companies serve more than 82 percent of cable subscribers.

Customers will still be able to attach their own devices, like TiVo digital video recorders, according to the NCTA.

That's a good thing, because modern cable boxes have DVRs built into them. Ditching the cable box would mean losing the DVR. Of course, that's good news for TiVo, which has suffered for the addition of DVR capabilities to cable boxes, since people didn't need an add-on box any more.

I just hope Sony doesn't get the bright idea to add DVRs to its TVs. DVRs have a higher burn-out rate than TVs -- by several years -- because they use a hard drive, which is constantly running. Think about it. As long as your TV is on, that DVR hard drive is spinning as it records what you watch. The last thing anyone would want is for a dead DVR in their computer that needs repairs.

Still, it will be nice if I can dispense with one remote control and I can use the native channels in the TV rather than having to lock the TV on channel 3 and use the cable box. Now we need for more than just Sony to embrace the idea.

Since the end of the high-definition format battle, there have been stories in the press that Blu-ray is still not taking off with consumers. The latest to declare this is Microsoft. Shane Kim, head of Microsoft Game Studios, told Home Media magazine that Microsoft is "not seeing the format taking off."

Sour grapes, you say? Perhaps they do, but they also have a point. While Microsoft and several other articles I've seen always point to the hardware as the culprit, I believe that's wrong. Sure, there are DVD players under $100 while Blu-ray decks are $400 and up.

But I can't think of a DVD player under $100, or even $200, worth owning. The best and cheapest is Oppo, the Chinese import that's taken the Internet by storm (they have no retail presence and sell direct from a warehouse in Mountain View. I've been there.)

A quality DVD player with good output and a decent decoder chip is in the same price range as a Blu-ray deck. If you're in the market for a new deck, might as well go Blu-ray since it's backwards-compatible and will be a well-made player.

No, the problem is the lazy, pitiful effort on the part of the studios, a problem that has persisted for some time. I was the DVD portal editor for IGN for two years and saw this problem in the standard definition DVD space. The studios are their own worst enemy and then point at piracy or some other excuse to make up for their own idiocy.

Studios were lazy with their DVD releases, putting out poor quality movies with little or no extras, something people came to expect. Because DVD was digital video, there was room for error. It wasn't like VHS, an analog recording that all looked the same. You could do a DVD well, or poorly. When a DVD was poorly done, people would rent it rather than buy it.

Add to it the unbridled greed of studios. "Double dipping" was a term used almost daily as studios reissued the same movie with more extras, deleted scenes, director's cuts, etc. Some of them came months after the standard release, others came within weeks. At one point, a Miramax executive boasted to the New York Times about getting six special editions out of the "Kill Bill" movies, causing an uproar on DVD enthusiast sites.

The most egregious example was when Universal Studios announced a special edition of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" literally two days after the standard edition came out. Standard release came out on Tuesday, special edition announced on Thursday. My readers were furious and vented to me, since they had no one else to complain to, and I totally understood their anger.

The end result? Sales are falling off. Duh. You can only screw the public so many times before they get sick of it.

Blu-ray offers HDTV-quality video, resolution of 1920x1080. Standard def DVD is 740x480, which means Blu-ray should have six times the resolution of DVD. Plus, there are new lossless codecs and audio mixes that are even better than the Dolby Digital and DTS audio used on DVD.

So a disc prepared for Blu-ray should be head and shoulders better than standard definition. Instead, we're seeing laziness again. In the early days of DVD it was not uncommon for studios to take laser disc versions of a movie and slap it on a DVD disc. Laser disc was not a digital format and didn't have the resolution of DVD. The result was a poor quality movie that didn't take full advantage of DVD's capabilities.

While there are some tremendous discs out there that truly shine as demo discs (the documentary "Planet Earth" and the film "Curse of the Golden Flower" really stick out, as do the Pixar releases), too often the studios are taking their standard definition DVD master and sticking it on a Blu-ray disc.

The most recent example is the one that set me off to write this. Fox delayed the release of my favorite film, "Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World" twice, by almost a year. On picking it up two weeks ago, I was shocked to see and hear that Fox used their existing DVD master instead of giving it a full HD treatment.

The end result is a movie that looks and sounds no better than the original release. What's worse, Blu-ray discs are expensive, very expensive. The standard definition release of M&C is selling for $19 but the Blu-ray release is $39. So I wasted $40 (that's a half a tank of gas in San Francisco) to get the same thing I already have.

I am not pleased, and at least in part with myself. Had I been patient for one or two more days, I would have seen reviews warning me of this very problem. In the end, though, these poor efforts more than anything else are the true detriment of Blu-ray. It's not on-demand and it's not hackers whacking away at Blu-ray's DRM that are hurting the format, it's a lazy effort and an exorbitant price tag for it that will cripple Blu-ray when it should be taking off.

This thread shows a lot of people are holding off purchases due to the high price and not living up to the promise of the format. You can get people to part with their money when they perceive value in the purchase. Paying $40 for something you already have does not qualify as valuable, especially in this economy.

Most of these movie studios also owned record labels, and look at the sorry state they are in these days. I see the same thing happening again with DVD, standard and high definition. As Captain Aubrey (Russell Crowe) said in the movie, "Their greed will be their downfall."

Like every other technology, solid state drives (SSDs) are expanding in capabilities as the price drops. Samsung, the top Flash manufacturer in the world, introduced a 256GB SSD drive at the Samsung Mobile Solution Forum in Taipei on Monday, with plans for both a 2.5" and 1.8" unit by year end.

The 2.5" drive is the standard size of a laptop hard disk, while 1.8" drives are frequently found in ultra-mobile PCs and handheld devices.

The drives are based on Samsung's multi-level cell (MLC) technology, which increases storage density through multiple bits per cell. Early flash drive technology stored one bit of data per cell, but Samsung has been working on storing two or even three bits per cell, thus adding capacity to the same amount of flash memory space.

Samsung said the 2.5" drive will have data read rates of 200 MB/sec and sequential read rates of 160 MB/sec, much faster than your traditional platter-based hard drives, and double that of Samsung's existing SSD drives, for that matter.

Samsung did not say how much the drives would cost, but given that a 64GB drive is around $1,000, it won't be cheap. The company plans for mass production of the drives by year-end.

As Nelson from "The Simpsons" would say...

You've probably heard radio commercials from identity theft prevention service provider LifeLock, featuring CEO Todd Davis giving out his social security number of 457-55-5462, "the most famous Social Security number in the world," according to LifeLock's home page.

Davis proudly proclaimed that with LifeLock, your SSN would be secured from identity theft and online fraud. For just $10 a month, it will protect you from identity thieves and even help cut down on pre-approved credit offers. There was even a $1 million promise should you identity be stolen.

Well, it seems Davis owes himself $1 million. Last year, a Texas man used Davis's SSN to get a $500 payday advance loan. Davis argued that the check cashing company made no attempt to verify the identity, which is plausible. While many payday advance companies are aboveboard, some are not.

Even better, in this recent appearance on The Today Show, co-host Matt Lauer informed Davis that someone attempted to take out a driver's license with Davis's SSN under the name "Jabba T. Hutt."

LifeLock is under a fair amount of assault these days, and not just from identity thieves. Class action suits are pending in New Jersey, West Virginia, and Maryland, claiming false advertising. A separate lawsuit has also been filed in Arizona claiming fraud, and perhaps worst of all, credit reporting agency Experian has accused LifeLock of deception.

That's one way to cut memory oversupply.

Memory maker Hynix suffered a 15 hour power outage at its Wuxi fab in China, halting DRAM production and ruining all of the memory wafers under production. The memory manufacturing process cannot be interrupted, so if it's not finished, the whole wafer becomes scrap.

The outage, contrary to some reports, was not related to the horrible earthquakes that have killed so many in central China. According to Reuters, this particular plant manufactures roughly half of Hynix's total DRAM output, which will translate into up to $18 million in lost sales.

The plant is back up and running so it's not going to translate into a huge disruption in supply. If anything, it will cause a few days of lost supply, and Hynix is only one vendor. Some financial analysts think there may be a price spike this month or next, but it won't last. Last year, Samsung suffered a fire at one of its biggest plants, resulting in a few days of down time. Prices barely moved, and Samsung is the largest memory maker in the world.

The Taiwanese tech publication DigiTimes reports that Intel is planning to cut desktop CPU prices in the third quarter this year as it launches new processors. Considering that the Intel Developer Forum is in mid-August, that timing should jive nicely.

Intel does not comment on these sorts of speculation, so we're going to have to give DigiTimes and its sources at Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers the benefit of the doubt. Much of what they are predicting is in line with past behaviors.

According to the report, Intel will introduce the Core 2 Quad Q9650, a 3Ghz chip, at $530 in lots of 1,000. This will supplant the 2.8GHz Core 2 Quad Q9550, which will have its price trimmed from $530 to $316.

The Core 2 Quad 9450 will be phased out and replaced with the Core 2 Quad 9400 at 2.66GHz and a suggested price of $266. The Core 2 Quad Q9300 and Q6700 will also be phased out, leaving the 2.4GHz Q6600 as the only 65nm quad-core CPU left on Intel's active lineup. Its price will drop again, from $224 to $203.

A similar practice of phasing out 65nm parts for 45nm will take place in the dual-core line. Intel will launch the Core 2 Duo E8600 at 3.33GHz for $266 and will phase out the Core 2 Duo E8300. There will be a new midrange part, the Core 2 Duo E7300, which will clock at 2.66GHz and cost $133. Intel will cut the prices of the Core 2 Duo E8500, the E8400 and the Core 2 Duo E7200 to $183, $163 and $113, respectively.

Sounds like some good deals coming up, if it all pans out.

Remember the good old days when a virus infection meant bedrest, a fever and feeling run down, not someone trying to steal your bank information from your computer? Well, thanks to JavaOne, they're back. Imagine my reaction this morning on seeing this in my inbox:

"The JavaOne conference team has been notified by the San Francisco Department of Public Health about an identified outbreak of a virus in the San Francisco area. Testing is still underway to identify the specific virus in question, but they believe it to be the Norovirus, a common cause of the "stomach flu", which can cause temporary flu-like symptoms for up to 48 hours. Part of the San Francisco area impacted includes the Moscone Center, the site of the JavaOne conference which is being held this week."

The San Francisco Department of Public Health sent out the alert after "several" people became ill after attending or working at conferences at the Moscone Convention Center between April 30 and this Thursday, May 8.

The culprit specified in the alert was the Norovirus. Norovirus is rather common. It's spread through failure to wash one's hands and seems to have hit cruise ships especially hard. JavaOne is a great breeding ground for something like Noro, too. Sun puts out beanbags in the south hall around some XBox 360 consoles for people to play, there is a beanbag area where people can watch movies (during the conference they paid hundreds if not thousands of dollars to attend) and probably worst of all, they have a small collection of classic arcade. After four days, how many hands were on those consoles, or the XBox controllers?

The health department requested that people who believe they have a Norovirus-related illness -- symptoms include low-grade fever, chills, headache, muscle aches, and a general sense of tiredness -- to keep away from the Moscone Center until they have been symptom-free for 48 hours.

Oh shoot, now where will I hang out this weekend?