As reported by The Digital Bits, the upcoming hi-def format war began in earnest at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas: As the HD-DVD camp announced a slew of titles for 4Q 2005, Blu-Ray signed on more powerful allies, including EA and Vivendi Universal. It’s gonna get ugly soon, folks, ’cause one of these formats is going the way of Betamax and DivX. Right now, it seems Blu-Ray is probably the better product (66% higher capacity), but HD-DVD is closer to cornering the market. Either way, I doubt I’ll be buying all that many DVDs until the new format is chosen, Highlander-style.
Category: Tech
Rebel Fleet.
“‘Space is virgin territory,’ Branson says, trying out a prospective marketing line and shooting another grin. ‘Is that 21st-century enough for you?’” In this month’s cover story, Wired checks in with Richard Branson and his ambitions for Virgin Galactic. I am so loving this space race among the mega-rich.
Angel in America.
“A few years ago I started down this path of creating this 3D camera system and once I started working in that, I couldn’t imagine myself going back and shooting with the camera that I used before. It just seemed like going back from a car to a bicycle, and I don’t want to ride a bicycle again, so the question is, at what point can I use the kind of imaging that we’re able to do now for a feature film?” From the Rebel Billionaire to the King of the World, James Cameron (fresh off Aliens of the Deep), talks up 3D cinema and his next project, a live-action Battle Angel Alita.
Distance Learning.
By way of Cliopatria, Google announces an agreement to digitize the holdings of many of the world’s great libraries, including those of Harvard, Oxford, Michigan, Stanford, and the NYPL. My, that should be enormously useful for researchers the world over once they get it up and running. That noise you heard in the background was millions of historians’ frequent flier miles suddenly crying out in terror and then suddenly silenced.
X2.
After SpaceShipOne’s historic win yesterday, the X Prize becomes the X Cup. “Teams will compete in five different categories to win the overall cup: Fastest turnaround time between the first launch and second landing, maximum number of passengers per launch, total number of passengers during the competition, maximum altitude and fastest flight time.“
OneShip to Rule Them All.
Score one for the “model builders”! SpaceShipOne won the X Prize this morning, with nary a barrel roll in sight. This is big news, indeed. Might be time to start saving up my pennies.
The Mojave Run (in less than 12 Parsecs).
Despite an unplanned and disconcerting series of barrel rolls on the way up, FlightTwo and TripOne for SpaceShipOne was a rousing success. Now, if they can repeat the feat within the next ten days, the elusive X Prize is theirs, and the business of space tourism will have reached a watershed moment. (Indeed, Richard Branson has already announced he’ll be leasing SS1 tech to kick off Virgin Galactic.) But first, they might want to figure out what’s causing that roll.
Firedster.
While tooling around on Friendster the other day, I noticed I’d somehow lost a handful of friends very recently. Now I know why…one of them was fired for blogging. (More here.) Hmmm…given the innocuous content of Troutgirl’s posts, this would be lame in most any circumstance. But since Friendster’s whole bag is “social software,” this seems particularly pathetic. (Found via Plasticbag.)
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.
Blog Implosion.
Steve at Now This provides quality commentary on Dave Winer’s recent weblog meltdown, which I discovered while trying to access Tomb of Horrors. Since Winer has successfully parlayed his whole self-promoting Father of Weblogs schtick into a cushy Ivy League sinecure, you’d think he at least give all those blogs an early warning before he shut ’em down (or, perhaps, convince fair Harvard to pony up some server space.) Still, acting like a self-interested jerk has been Winer’s M.O. for years, so I guess something like this wasn’t unexpected. Update: Winer gets worse.