The Digital Home

You're seeing it in theaters, rather than DVD.

(Credit: Avatar)

It hasn't happened since 2002, but box office sales beat out disc sales in 2009, market research firm Adams Media Research said in a report released on Tuesday.

According to Adams, U.S. viewers weren't so keen on buying DVDs in 2009. While it found that consumers spent $250 million buying movies online in 2009, the firm found that physical disc sales dropped by 13 percent year over year, from $10.06 billion in 2008 to $8.73 billion in 2009. Those figures include Blu-ray Disc sales.

Adams said box office spending increased to $9.87 billion in 2009, up 10 percent from $8.99 billion in 2008. Flms such as "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" and "Up" were among those films that lured consumers to theaters.

Adams also looked at movie rentals. The firm found that $1.27 billion was spent on rentals through cable and satellite services in 2009. Consumers spent just $111 million renting films online. All told, rental transactions increased by 5.5 percent in 2009, but overall rental revenue, which includes online, on-demand, and physical-media rentals, grew by less than 1 percent, to $8.15 billion.

These figures do not bode well for the film industry. While box office sales are higher than DVD sales, Hollywood itself is dealing with a revenue crunch that, so far, it hasn't been able to overcome. And as the video game industry continues to evolve as an entertainment alternative to movies, the pressure seems to be on moviemakers to right the ship.

NASA's depiction of an exoplanet discovered last year.

(Credit: NASA)

NASA's Kepler space telescope, which searches for Earth-like planets in habitable zones beyond our solar system, has found five new exoplanets.

NASA said on Monday that the exoplanets, planets outside of our solar system, are called Kepler 4b, 5b, 6b, 7b, and 8b. Finding those planets, NASA says, justifies using Kepler as a means of finding another Earth-like planet. The space agency also said the telescope "will meet all its science goals."

NASA's Kepler mission, which launched on March 6 last year, is designed to observe more than 150,000 stars to find Earth-like planets. NASA said in a statement that although it has announced five discoveries, Kepler has already identified "hundreds of possible planet signatures that are being analyzed." In the end, Kepler's goal is to determine if we really are alone in our galaxy.

The five planets NASA found are being called "hot Jupiters" by scientists and range from the size of Neptune to even larger than Jupiter. Their orbits range from 3.3 days to 4.9 days. They get their "hot" moniker thanks to temperatures ranging from 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Unfortunately, that means that all five planets are too hot for human life.

"It's gratifying to see the first Kepler discoveries rolling off the assembly line," Jon Morse, director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA headquarters in Washington, said in a statement. "We expected Jupiter-size planets in short orbits to be the first planets Kepler could detect. It's only a matter of time before more Kepler observations lead to smaller planets with longer period orbits, coming closer and closer to the discovery of the first Earth analog."

Kepler is one of NASA's most sophisticated tools for identifying planets. The instrument looks for planets by measuring dips in the brightness of stars. As planets move around their stars, they block starlight, a phenomenon that can therefore be used as an indication of their presence. Kepler will continue searching until at least November 2012. NASA believes it could take at least three years for it to locate and verify an Earth-size planet.

BeautifulPeople.com, a social-networking and dating site for "attractive people," announced on Monday that it has removed 5,000 members from around the world for putting on too much weight over the holiday season.

According to the site, "many members posted photos of themselves celebrating Christmas and the New Year--revealing that they have let themselves go. Vigilant members, who take pride in the standards demanded by the site, called for action."

Greg Hodge, the site's managing director, said in a statement that the service "responded to complaints by moving the newly chubby members back to the rating stage. This is the same as having them re-apply. Their re-applications were reviewed by existing members and only a few hundred were voted back in. Over 5,000 were rejected."

The United States led the list of ousted members with 1,520 people being told to leave the social network. The site also let go of 832 people from the U.K. and 533 from Canada. Russia lost the fewest people with just 88 being told to find a new social network.

"Every year we see that some of our members from western cultures eat and drink to excess over the holidays and clearly their looks suffer," Hodge said in a statement. "The USA has been grossly over-indulging since Thanksgiving--it's no wonder that so many members have been expelled from the network. We hope they will be back after shedding the festive pounds."

"As a business, we mourn the loss of any member, but the fact remains that our members demand the high standard of beauty be upheld," BeautifulPeople.com founder Robert Hintze said in a statement. He went on to say that allowing those members to stay on the site "is a direct threat to [the company's] business model and the very concept for which BeautifulPeople.com was founded."

Now it's time to hear from you. Did BeautifulPeople go overboard? Is the site itself troubling, since users are judged by their looks? Let us know in the comments below.

A new Nokia device to lead the way in 2010?

(Credit: Nokia)

Nokia is a rather interesting company. The firm is still a major player in the mobile space, holding on to the largest share of the market. But 2009 was a difficult year for Nokia as its grip on the space continued to slip.

Worst of all, Apple's iPhone and RIM's BlackBerry models have made Nokia devices look old and obsolete.

Perhaps that's why the company's new mobile chief, Rick Simonson, decided to speak with the India Times on Monday to clear the air. Simonson acknowledges that things aren't great, but he's not willing to throw in the towel.

"Yes, we have lost ground in the smartphone space over the past 18 months, but the decline has stopped and stablized in the second and third quarters of 2009," Simonson told the India Times. "The new year will see [our] recovery in smartphones with the introduction of Maemo and the stabilization of the Symbian operating system, which by the way, continues to be the platform for the largest number of smartphones, globally."

Simonson went on to say that Nokia shipped over 200 million smartphones in 2009. The main problem for Nokia, Simonson said, is that it's "not well positioned in North America, which is a huge market."

But his company has a plan.

Over 4 million unauthorized downloads...and counting.

(Credit: Infinity Ward)

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has set several records this year, including the most units sold in a single month (over 6 million in November alone). But according to TorrentFreak, a site that covers the world of torrent downloads, the game was also the most pirated title of 2009.

According to the site, Modern Warfare 2's PC version was downloaded on torrent sites a whopping 4.1 million times, which is more than twice as many downloads as 2008's most-pirated game, Spore. The Xbox 360 version of Modern Warfare 2 was downloaded 970,000 times.

Those numbers are all the more impressive when one considers that the game was downloaded over a period of just two months.

TorrentFreak also released its findings for other top pirated games. The Sims 3, Prototype, Need for Speed Shift, and Street Fighter IV rounded out the list of most-pirated PC games. Street Fighter IV and Prototype were second and third on the most-pirated Xbox 360 games, following Modern Warfare 2. Dirt 2 and UFC 2009 Undisputed placed in fourth and fifth places, respectively.

TorrentFreak also evaluated the most pirated games on the Wii. Not surprisingly, it was the New Super Mario Bros. that took the top spot with 1.15 million downloads. It was followed by Punch-Out, Wii Sports Resort, House of the Dead: Overkill, and Mario Power Tennis.

In the tech industry, the terms "nerds" and "geeks" are thrown around a lot. For some, those terms are offensive. For others, they're endearing. And for some they are simply accurate descriptors for who they are. But a professor from Bennington College, who was recently profiled by The New York Times, believes that those two words need to be avoided at all cost.

How would Steve Jobs feel about the title, King of Nerds?

According to David Anderegg, using terms like nerd and geek "perpetuate the stereotype" that nerds are "socially inept" and geeks are people with a "special expertise." They are so damaging, the Times reported, that Anderegg believes that "much like racial epithets, he says, [they] should be avoided."

The problem, the professor contends, is that those words are not used to define "cool" people. Instead, they are often times associated with "math, science, and computer science." He told the Times that because of that negative association, young people who consider themselves geeks and nerds "sabotage themselves in these fields, and the nation's work force is suffering."

Of course, Anderegg has a solution. He believes that "the best way to combat [those issues] is put it to bed." He wants nerd and geek removed from the public lexicon, like other unacceptable epithets.

It's an interesting take. For some, being a geek is a badge of honor. It means that the respective person is part of a group of folks that have similar interests and expertise in a field. Others might say the same about nerds.

But perhaps what's most puzzling about Anderegg's opinion is the title of a book he wrote about this very topic. He called it, "Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them."

As someone who wants to eliminate the use of the words geek and nerd, isn't it surprising that he would use nerd in the title of his book?

Regardless, it's an interesting topic. Do you believe nerd and geek are damaging terms that should be avoided? Let us know in the comments below.

A 14-year-old boy's mother had enough with her son's gaming over the weekend. After turning off the console hoping he would stop gaming, she called police to ask for their help in solving her son's "addiction."

According to the story first reported in the Boston Herald, Angela Mejia had enough with her son's gaming when she found him playing Grand Theft Auto at 2:30 a.m. She told him to go to sleep, but he refused.

"Sometimes I want to run away, too," Mejia told the Boston Herald. "I have support from my church, but I'm alone. I want to help my son, but I can't find a way."

After unplugging her son's game console, she decided to call 911. Police came to Mejia's home and coaxed the boy into going to sleep.

"[The police] were just like, 'Chill out. Go to bed,'" Mejia's son told the Herald.

What Mejia's son did when he woke up is unknown. My guess: he played a video game. Yours?

Mass Effect 2

(Credit: BioWare)

In recent years, the U.S. role-playing game landscape has become decidedly dominated by Western-based games, like Mass Effect 2 and the recently released Dragon Age: Origins. But according to Greg Zeschuk, co-founder of role-playing game company BioWare, Japanese developers might have only themselves to blame.

Speaking in an interview with Destructoid, Zeschuk said "the fall of the Japanese RPG (JRPG) in large part is due to a lack of evolution, a lack of progression." Zeschuk added that developers "kept delivering the same thing over and over. They make the dressing better, they look prettier, but it's still the same experience."

But Zeschuk wasn't done. He said the same methods used years ago to advance a story are still being employed in today's Japanese RPGs.

"My favorite thing, it's funny when you still see it, but the joke of some of the dialogue systems where it asks, 'do you wanna do this or this,' and you say no. 'Do you wanna do this or this?' No. 'Do you wanna do this or this?' No. Lemme think--you want me to say 'yes.' And that, unfortunately, really characterized the JRPG."

As someone who absolutely loves role-playing games, that's a tough pill to swallow. I can still remember the good ol' days playing Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete to its completion in an almost nonstop gaming session.

At the same time, Zeschuk makes a point. RPGs are not what they used to be. They have evolved. And so far, the vast majority of Japanese-based RPGs that I've played recently reflect that same, old-school feeling. It's not always a bad thing, of course, but for the broader U.S. audience, if Zeschuk can be believed, it's starting to hurt sales.

Although there is no conclusive proof that mobile phones cause cancer, a Maine legislator wants to require all mobile phones sold in the state to carry warnings that say mobile phones may do so.

State Rep. Andrea Boland, a Democrat, told the Associated Press that "numerous studies point to the cancer risk." She has worked her proposal into the upcoming schedule for the 2010 session in Maine's legislature. Boland said that she uses a speaker, so she can keep her mobile phone away from her head. She also keeps it off unless she knows someone will call her.

If Boland's bill makes it through the state legislature, vendors would be forced to place labels on all mobile phones and packaging that tell customers they could get brain cancer from using the device. Those warnings would also recommend those people keep phones as far away from their bodies as possible.

Boland is apparently acting in what she believes is her constituents' best interest. But the debate over whether or not mobile phones really cause brain cancer rages on. So far, there is no conclusive evidence on either side of the debate for legislators to summarily require all mobile phones within the state to carry a cancer warning.