Monthly Archives: October 2008

ZD’s Robin Harris proclaims death of BD already?

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Blu-ray is dead – heckuva job, Sony! | Storage Bits | ZDNet.com

Robin, what gives?  Ok, it’s been 8 months since the format war ended, but jeez did you really expect the price to match those of DVDs already?  Seriously?  Eight months ago, BD players were $500.  Now you can get them for $270/$300 on average, cheaper if you look around.  Yes, BDs cost more now, but so did DVDs when they came out.  I bought my first DVD player, a Toshiba when prices hit the $250 mark.  That was close to 10 years ago.  (wow, has it really been that long?)  DVDs weren’t exactly cheap back then either.  It will take time, but the prices will eventually come down.  And about it not being worth it, puh-leeze!  Even if you’re not an AV snob, the picture is amazing.  Something a DVD (upconverted or not) certainly isn’t.  Don’t get me wrong.  DVDs are still great, but they’re from a different era.  480i is still going to look dull and blurry no matter what you do to it when compared with even 720p.  Robin makes some good points about the high price of production, but get real; this isn’t going to last forever.  A year from now, BDs will be a lot more mainstream.  DVDs are already on their way to the bargain bin and once the switch to DTV happens next year I think you’ll see a lot more people looking seriously at HD sets and media players.  I just have to add one last thing, HD content streaming in the U.S. is going nowhere.  As long as providers keep holding people back with their bandwidth caps and limited connectivity options, internet-based HD streaming won’t become a true alternative to disc.

New SC law requres mandatory DNA sampling at arrest

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I just heard about this on the evening news tonight. Basically the state legislature overrode the Governor’s veto passing a law that requires the police to collect DNA samples from people arrested on a felony charge. It seems like the focus is on getting the information to the lab quickly to run the results for possible matches on other crimes. The one big problem I see with this is that if you’re wrongly arrested, your DNA is in the system. While the government is supposed to purge the DNA records of the falsely accused there’s no guarantee that they actually will. There’s also another problem in that the larger these databases get, the higher the chance of a match between 2 unrelated profiles. I mentioned this before in another post linked to an article in the LA Times.

Love the new Macbook, but where’s the Firewire?

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With the announcement of a new line of Macbook and Macbook Pro laptops from Apple, I had to stop by the local Apple store and check them out.  From the website it looked like the Firewire port was missing from the entry level Macbook.  With video editing being such a large part of the iLife experience, I couldn’t believe this feature would be missing from a new product.  However, when I entered the store, my suspicions were confirmed, the Firewire port was indeed missing.  With all the thought that went into designing these new machines, it’s hard for me to believe Apple would leave this out.  Any video amateur or professional is now essentially forced into buying the $2k+ pro model if they want to plug in many digital video cameras.  After looking at the specs for both machines, it would seem the Firewire port is the largest differentiating factor now aside from size.  Apple’s even dropped the standard FW400 port on the Pro in favor of a single FW800 port.  This makes sense to me in that it seemed a bit redundant to have both.  Perhaps most Macbook users don’t use the FW400 port.  If so, this probably won’t turn out to be a problem.  I personally haven’t used mine except to hook up an external drive once, but if I ever wanted to get into video editing again it would certainly come in handy.  That said, the new Macbooks are quite a piece of engineering to behold.  Check out the video on the new Macbook site to see just how much went into its creation.