A little late but Blu-ray has officially become the de facto standard medium for the sale and distribution of high definition content. Circuit City in the US is letting customers trade in any HD-DVD players they bought within the last 90 days (which includes late Christmas shoppers as well) for credit towards a Blu-ray player. Microsoft is basically giving away their HD-DVD add-on drive now. The movie studios, which sealed HD-DVDs fate, are all releasing their content on Blu-ray only now as well. The PS3 gets an obvious boost from this as well since it’s the best Blu-ray player out there thanks to it’s upgradability via firmware updates. The original Blu-ray 1.0 format has already been superseded by 1.1 which the PS3 can properly play. First generation Blu-ray players are unable to play all the content on a 1.1 disc and probably never will be able to.

Anyway, the entire HD-DVD and Blu-ray debacle is all Sony’s fault. HD-DVD is the successor to DVD standard from the makers of the DVD standard. Sony just crashed the party with their Blu-ray format and threw they weight around to get it widely accepted. The consortium of companies behind HD-DVD (mainly Toshiba and NEC) just don’t have the financial backing that Sony has. Personally, I think the PS3 played a big part it in too. The PS2 remains my only DVD player and a PS3 will probably my only player for HD content.

We need another war now.

For 30 seconds during yesterday night’s Oscar award ceremony, the World saw the Wii:

[EDIT: Aw, YouTube took down the video and broke my page . ]

No one is commenting if any money was exchanged between the parties involved or if the writers for the show were just highlighting tidbits of popular culture since earlier in the show Jon Stewart was fiddling with an iPod of some sorts as well. Funnily enough, Phil Harrison announced his resignation from his position at SCEA just after making remarks about him being upset with SCEJ (I’m honestly sure if that abbreviation is correct but he was mad at the execs in Japan) with regards to their stance against family gaming which the Wii has clearly shown is being accepted by gamers and non-gamers alike.

So Toronto has been getting pummeled with snow lately and supposedly even more snow freezing rain is hitting the city tomorrow. I haven’t seen snow like this since I was a child. The mounds of snow decorating the street come up to my shoulders and take up about half of the parking spaces on the street. The most annoying thing about the snow is driving around though, which luckily I don’t do that much of. Nothing is quite as frustrating as telling your car to move forward and have it just squeal at you, unable to to comply. One of the guys at work blew out his tires out because he burned so much tread trying to get out of the spot behind the office the other day. We need some more of that Global Warming…

Someone should pull this at Union Station:

So it seems that AOL is discontinuing all development and support for all Netscape browser products February 1st 2007. You could say that the Netscape browser is still around, it’s just called Firefox now. Even the latest versions of Netscape are just versions of Firefox made to look more Netscapish. I’ve been using the Internet for a very long time and always felt that Netscape was supperior to Internet Explorer and way back in the day it clearly was. Way back then, you actually went to a store and bought Netscape in a retail box. Microsoft decided to give Internet Explorer 3 for free to anyone that wanted it. Not limited to just free downloads but free CDs were available all over the place too. I probably have one of the CDs I picked up way back then lying around somewhere. Those CDs always used to come with other Microsoft applications as well. Like trail versions of Word and Publisher… easily used in other nefarious schemes. Sadly, Netscape couldn’t compete  against a product bundled with Windows (much like ICQ and it’s battle against MSN) so we arrive at where we’re at today.  This is making me feel old… rest in peace Netscape.