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Hewlett-Packard chairman Ray Lane, along with three board members, will meet with some of his company's top investors to reassure them about the job they're doing, according to a new report.

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal in an interview published today, William Patterson, executive director of CtW Investment Group, a large HP shareholder, said that he and his supporters will lead a charge aimed at removing Lane and two of his fellow board members, John Hammergren and G. Kennedy Thompson, at the company's annual meeting on March 20.

That is, Patterson told the Journal, unless HP … Read more

It sounds ideal. Take all those DVDs and Blu-rays you own and, from the comfort of your own home, effortlessly gain digital copies for a low price. That's the promise of Vudu's new "In-Home Disc to Digital" service. Vudu delivers on that promise in some cases but disappoints in other ways.

Last year, Walmart-owned Vudu launched its Disc to Digital service that required people to go into Walmart stores for the conversion. Who wants to do that? This is where the "In-Home" version of Disc to Digital comes … Read more

Black holes are created when a supernova explosion destroys a massive star. Scientists have discovered dozens of black holes, but all of them are already formed. So, when scientists recently saw different distorted remains of a supernova, they knew it something special.

What the scientists believe they observed was the infant phases of a black hole, or the youngest black hole ever recorded in the Milky Way galaxy.

Caught on film by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, the "remnant," or W49B, is seen as a vibrant swirl of blues, greens, yellows, and pinks. As seen from Earth, it … Read more

Pop a properly manufactured CD into a CD player, and you'll hear music in a second or two. In more than 30 years of playing CDs I've never once encountered scanning, searching, or error messages; after I press "Play," the music starts. Stick a properly manufactured DVD or Blu-ray in a working player, and you always have to wait a while to start watching the movie -- or it might not play at all. You might have to do a firmware update to play the disc. With DVDs and Blu-rays, there's no such thing as … Read more

I don't know about you, but I never seem to have enough HDMI cables. Maybe Obviously it's because I live in a gear-heavy household (Roku boxes everywhere!), so I'm always looking to pad my supply.

Today's deal ought to last me awhile. Today only, and while supplies last, 1SaleADay has a six-pack of 10-foot gold-tip HDMI cables for $12.99 shipped. That works out to about $2.16 per cable, which is less than what you'd typically pay for a single 6-footer.

By now I suspect that most people (or at least most CNET readers) … Read more

Even by Oppo's high standards the BDP-105 is an extraordinary Blu-ray player. Sure, it's loaded with up-to-the-second features -- 4K upscaling, 2D-to-3D conversion, and a high-quality USB 2.0 digital-to-analog converter -- but what really makes the Oppo special is the sound. Pop the cover and look inside and you'll see why. Most of the 17-pound component's chassis space is devoted to the audio circuitry. That's nice, but the audio advantages will be completely irrelevant if you connect the BDP-105 to your receiver with a HDMI cable (the digital-to-analog conversion would then be handled in … Read more

Ray Kurzweil's vision of the "singularity" -- when nanobots make humans immortal and computer progress is so fast that the future becomes profoundly unknowable -- is a bad idea.

That's the perhaps surprisingly contrary opinion of Joichi Ito, who as a high-tech investor and director of the MIT Media Lab might be expected to be a natural ally. The lab, after all, aims to be at the center of today's technology revolution.

Ito, speaking today at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, said he believes the singularity vision puts the wrong priorities first.

"… Read more

Apologies for being a little tardy on updating our long-running list of must-have Blu-ray movies, but here it is, refreshed for 2013. This month's updates entries include "Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection," "The Avengers," "Finding Nemo," "Jaws," "Lawrence of Arabia," and "Titanic."

Though my face is at the top of the column, the list was compiled with input from editors John Falcone, Matthew Moskovciak, and David Katzmaier, who look at a lot of video content in their day-to-day testing of products. We also keep an eye on AVS Forum's Blu-ray picture-quality and audio-quality threads, and have always appreciated the site's tiered rating system.

This list is not set in stone, and we'll be adding and removing discs as new ones come out. As always, feel free to make comments and suggest your own personal favorites. They may get added to the list in the future. … Read more

It had been years since I actually bought a DVD or a Blu-ray copy of a movie. But over Christmas, I bought one. I really wanted those extra features that a physical disk provides. Why not get a Blu-ray with a digital copy, I thought, and have the best of both worlds?

Why not turned out to be because redeeming digital copies is a nightmare. Are you getting a copy for iTunes? Or for Amazon? Or whatever on earth UltraViolet is supposed to be, something that finally crashed into my awareness as a new Blu-ray owner?

The film in … Read more