Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD

Microsoft and Intel (Wintel duopoly) announced that they are backing Toshiba's format over Sony's.

Sony has created their own Blu-Ray format and will be putting it inside their playstation 3 box.

Microsoft has not announced official support of HD-DVD on Xbox 360 but presumably it will happen.

Sony and Toshiba have divy up the market pretty much with both content and makers regarding Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD (kind of half-half). However, I'm willing to put my money on on the HD-DVD side, now that Wintel is behind it. If Xbox 360 takes off as I would think (over PS3 and Revolution) then HD-DVD is going to snuff out Blu-Ray.

Sony "lost" with beta format, moved ahead with CD, tried to compete against Toshiba (MMCD vs SD) but ended up merging as DVD, and now back to competing with Toshiba again but no one strong enough to force two companies to get together. With Microsoft siding with HD-DVD, the die has been cast, in my opinion! (Only time will tell, however.)

Update (10:30PM):

Tom's hardware has a very good explanations on why Wintel picked HD-DVD. The straw that will break the camel's back is: Chinese DVD makers will back HD-DVD!

RIP PalmOS

News today is sad: Palm will now run Windows OS. Sigh. I have been a long time buyer of Palm (actually Handspring) devices (I bought 4 devices: Visor Deluxe, Visor Edge, Treo 180, Treo 600 and got two free Visor (original)).

(But then again, I own several Windows boxes and no Macs. I do run Linux on one box but only occasionally.)

Design Patterns 101

I'm boning up to understand Design Patterns. For some reasons I could never grok the GoF but this article has much better chance: "Non-Software Examples of Software Design Patterns."

Squeak and stumbling

I've tried to teach my sons Squeak for writing games but I'm not able to find a good SDK or class sets. I've looked into Tweak and Croquet but none are appropriate for youngster's to learn.

Arrrgh!

Keyboard Snooping

ITworld has an article on how the audio clicks from the keyboard typing can be turned into keyboard sniffing tool!

Keyboard snooping used to require a software (spyware) installed or a hardware intercept device inserted between keyboard and hardware. Now with this research results, one just needs a really good high gain microphone and sniffying can be done remote and anonymously.

Security via ignorance

I enjoyed this list of Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security.