The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
There are a few stories making the news, so it must be time for another round-up column of some of the tech news. First of all, my sincere hope is that you have yet to buy a high definition DVD player. Or, if you did, that youÕve bought a Blu-Ray. Toshiba last week announced that it was getting out of the HD DVD format race. This will allow SonyÕs Blu-Ray to be the one format that survives the war. People who own HD DVD players will have movies available by special order only and only for a limited time. Soon they will be no more. Your HD DVDs will have to go into your basement next to your Betamax video tape machine. Interestingly, when Toshiba announced that they were getting out, their stock price rose six per cent as people now expect them to be able to concentrate their business in other places. While the race for the format wars is ending, Sony still has to compete with online downloads in high definition formats, and that race is nowhere near over. YouTube is rumoured to be considering high definition films, as are other websites. Apple is opening its download store and satellites offer on demand video rentals. How all of these options will effect the business of renting actual DVDs still remains to be seen. A second piece of news surrounds the ongoing war between Microsoft and Yahoo over the future of their companies. Yahoo formally and officially rejected MicrosoftÕs offer to purchase the company for $44 billion dollars, saying it was too low. Scrambling behind the scenes to either secure the future of their company or sell to someone else, Yahoo has left Microsoft twisting in the wind. But Microsoft also made a brilliant move last week, allowing tens of thousands of college students to begin downloading many of their development software products for free. This kit of software called DreamSpark is a rich suite of software that is used to develop servers and rich Internet multimedia applications. Worth several thousand dollars, Microsoft will first allow this package to be downloaded by college students in registered programs and over the next several months open it up to a wider audience. Battling the great popularity of many free open source software tools, they are hoping to beat back this onslaught of development by simply giving their own tools away. This is a brilliant move that Microsoft is hoping will turn the tide on their favour, allowing people to write their own code and develop their own software products, which, of course, will only be available for machines running Windows. As winter finishes up, the computer industry (as allows) is constantly on the move. Many new things are coming up and out over the next bit of time. ([email protected]) Tech Notes runs Mondays.
