Archive for the ‘blu-ray’ tag
Sleeping Beauty’s EULA #
Disney’s 57 page EULA before you can watch Sleeping Beauty on Blu-ray is why we should remove any legal force from EULAs. Or ban them outright. Or at least require an executive summary so that people will know what cr*p they’re accepting before they (inevitably) blindly do so.
(via BBG)
The Real Origin of “Bug” #
PBS’s Cringley can be a little sloppy. This week, after a long column about how Apple really should include Blu-ray drives on it’s computers (true, but only moderately interesting), he dropped something of a bomb. I’d always heard that this was origin of the word “bug” in technology:
was that a malfunction in the Mark II computer at Harvard in 1947 was traced to a dead moth that in its last living act had shorted out a circuit card. They taped the moth carcass in the computer logbook and history was made.
It turns out, the moth story isn’t right. Bug “was a common term for hardware glitches and dates back to the 19th century and possibly before. Edison used the term in a letter he wrote in 1878.”
HD DVD is Dead #
In case you’ve missed it, nearly everyone — even Toshiba, the chief advocate for the format — now agrees that if there’s to be a next generation of video discs — something Apple especially would prefer didn’t happen — it will be on Blu-ray.
The Future of High Definition #
As today is probably the most important television day of the year in the United States, it’s worth considering the future of high definition media, about which The Economist’s Tech.view column has a number of interesting things to say. On of the most interesting to me:
The human eye can discern over 500 pixels per inch horizontally and vertically (say, 26,000 by 14,500 pixels on a 60-inch screen). To achieve true immersive reality—the “killer app” that consumer electronics makers see on the horizon—requires displays a dozen times sharper than today’s HDTV sets.
The Japanese have made a start. The Ultra-HDTV technology that NHK, Japan’s public broadcasting network, is currently investigating has 16 times more pixels (7,680 by 4,320) than an HDTV set. And that’s just the beginning. The betting is that both Blu-ray and HD DVD will go the way of the VHS tape, as ever sharper images begin to grab our attention.