Tag: bbweblog

Audioholics.com have an interesting article ’10 Reasons why HD DVD Formats have Already Failed’, listing reasons why neither of the HD-DVD or BluRay DVD formats will succeed, and why the author thinks they are already dead in the water, making comparisons with the much hyped SuperAudioCD and DVD-Audio DVD formats which never reached mainstream despite both having vastly superior audio quality.

The author makes some good points. The only one I am not completely sold on is the point about the PS3 will not help sell BluRay because it includes a BLuRay DVD player. I believe this will be a significant selling point, and as history has shown with the PS2 – many PS2 when it was originally launched were sold because it was the cheapest DVD player available at the time – for your money you got a state of the art game console plus a DVD player for cheaper than any comparable DVD players that were available at the same time.

The author does make good points though. Technology for technology sake does not sell products – there has to be a significant selling point for the average consumer to invest in this new technology.

This article describes how Toshiba is still looking to work with Sony and Panasonic to work on a unified next-gen DVD format, but in the meantime the two incompatible and competing fortmats, HD-DVD and BluRay DVD will still be hitting the streets first.

Want to take a look at Ruby on Rails but don’t want to spend the time downloading and installing softwware to get started? Then check out the RailsLiveCD – it’s a Linux distro bootable from the CD that includes everything you need installed and ready to go!

Not to be left out, IBM are providing a database adapter for DB2 to allow you to build Ruby on Rails applications using DB2 as your database.

Read the article here for more info.

One of the most exciting and interesting new features to be included in Longhorn/Windows Vista, but removed from the list of new features some time back, was the planned inclusion of a new file system, named WinFS, that was to replace the hierarchical file structure that we have lived with in Windows since MS-DOS.

WinFS was supposed to be a radical departure from current file system thinking, where application data (files) would be stored and managed by a database engine.

Well, according to this blog entry by the WinFS team, not only will WinFS not ship as an included component of Windows Vista, it is now no longer being developed as a Windows conponent as an optional add-on. Development has shifted and it may now find itself integrated into SQL Server.