HomeWeekly News Roundup (1 June 2008) – The Late Edition
“Better late than never” is probably the best phrase to use right now. As you may have read about elsewhere, the server in which this site/blog was hosted went down around Saturday evening (US central time) and did not come back up until late Sunday evening, a downtime of about 30 hours. You can read the details of this incident here.
Anyway, the show must go on and I bring you this late edition of the WNR. The last few days haven’t been very pleasant, and I’m sure it was more unpleasant for the people who worked hard to restore services.
In copyright news, in a reverse of what normally happens, someone working for a bittorrent tracker has managed to infiltrate into an anti-piracy lobby. I’m sure very useful information was obtained which would help protect trackers from further assaults in the future. And these assaults are gathering pace too, with Usenet indexers the next target. These lobby groups and organisations, such as the MPAA, are very powerful indeed and somewhat shady in their dealings with various government bodies around the world (but then again, which lobby group isn’t?). Even the big boys, this time Google, is struggling to deal with the assuault by anti-piracy groups which could threaten the very foundations of the modern Internet. I know Google have their own self interests to take care of, but when they say the situation is this serious, I tend to believe them. There will be a day when lawmakers and judges make a new law or ruling that will threaten the very existence of the Internet, because if linking to (but not hosting) questionable content is illegal, then the Internet itself is under thread. 
The nature of the Internet is a web of links, so every site can be linked eventually to any other site. Google’s search engine links to probably every site in the world … some of them are indeed questionable, but does that make Google liable for these bad links, or the people who actually created and host the bad content?
And what about when people download something illegal. Is it the fault of the person who did it, or the fault of the ISP who allowed the person to do it? Groups like the RIAA or MPAA seem to want ISPs to take action and filter out “bad” content, as it’s much easier to control (and sue) ISPs than it is to tackle individuals. When big businesses force other businesses such as ISPs to determine what you can and cannot do with services you’ve paid for, then we’re in real trouble folks!
Onto HD news, good news for Michael Bay’s Transformers fans, the Blu-ray version of Transformers is coming to a store near you in September. Michael Bay has been a proponent of Blu-ray for quite a while, even though Transformers up until now has only been available in HD exclusively on the HD DVD format. It will be interesting to see if Blu-ray technology can turn a bad piece of filmmaking and scripting into a good movie. 
More good news, but this time for a good Director’s good movies, is that Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy is being worked on for Blu-ray as I type, with a tentative release date of 2009. I already have 2 copies of each movie (standard and the collector’s edition), but I think I might want this third copy too.
There are also some good news in hardware too, with Wal-Mart introducing $298 Blu-ray players. The players, under the Magnavox brand and manufactured by Funai (as reported in the WNR two editions ago), are only Profile 1.1 though, which lacks support for Internet connected features (Profile 2.0) found in quite a few new movie releases. And for $50 more, you can pick up a Samsung Blu-ray player that does support Profile 2.0 and more audio decoding features, so perhaps it isn’t a bargain after all. Once players reach down to $198, then we might see a surge in sales. At the other end of the hardware pricing scale, is this new Blu-ray/HDD (500 GB) recorder by Panasonic. 
Retailing for more than $2,000, it is strictly in the realm of early adopters, and with news of a new 1 TB (that’s 1,000 GB) disc format that is backwards compatible with Blu-ray, perhaps Blu-ray as a recording format won’t even get off the ground. Even Sony is moving away from Blu-ray based camcorders to use solid state storage, which is cheaper, faster and comes in larger capacities (and less prone to damage too). And what about Blu-ray audio-only discs? One is available already, and there’s no technical reason why they cannot be produced en mass since it’s basically just a normal Blu-ray movie with a static video track.
Toshiba (haven’t mentioned them in a while) is trying to get back into the digital video scene by releasing updated specs for the DVD format, which allows HD content to be stored on regular DVDs and played back on enhanced DVD players. Toshiba is a major player in the DVD industry, having received most of the royalties from the format, so is Blu-ray fails, then enhanced DVD+HD might be more attractive to consumers. I doubt it though, because I think the boat has been missed in regards to upgrading the DVD format, which was Toshiba first suggestion when Sony came up with Blu-ray. But there is no reason why you cannot store 720p content onto a dual layer DVD and still get excellent quality. But it will mean an upgrade to the hardware anyway to add new video decoding suppoirt, even though the disc format hasn’t changed.
In gaming news, the Xbox 360 has basically won the GTA IV war as more and mores stats indicate it has benefited more than the PS3. One will have to wait to see if this is a long term victory, or just the last hurrah before the PS3 takes over as the dominant console of this generation, but only if you completely ignore that little white box with the blue glowing lights and funny controllers. Microsoft and Sony likes to dismiss it as a fad, even though both are working on similar style controllers for their own systems.
And how everything could have been so different, with Sony finally admitting that the PS3 was on life support during it’s very much trouble launch. Had the PS3 failed then, albeit very unlikely to happen in any case due to the PS2’s dominance, Blu-ray would have lost too and who knows what other changes there might have been. A HD DVD based Toshiba GameStation? A Sony PS4 that is basically a clone of the Wii? An Xbox 720 that still RRoDs within the first three months? Actually that last part might not be too far off from the truth …
Okay, that’s it for “this” week. More WNR in 5 days time, hopefully the server will still be online at that time.