Thanks to the efforts of Toshiba and Microsoft’s support campaign for HD-DVD, many more European film studios are adopting HD-DVD than Sony’s Blu-Ray. So far HD-DVD player sales have been ahead of Blu-Ray in Europe, although the launch of Sony’s Playstation 3 game console may change this. The late start and exurbanite cost of the PS3 in most European countries has put HD-DVD on track to win the format war in the territory. HD-DVD’s continuing market penetration in foreign countries will play a big role in determining the ultimate winner of this epic battle.

History in the Making

Since 1983, Sony has created one format that was adopted as a standard, the floppy disk. During that same period Microsoft has produced software compatible with every widely adopted format. This time their not putting their weight behind Blu-Ray. This lack of support is further illustrated by the release of the Toshiba produced Xbox 360 HD-DVD adapter. Media and hardware prices must come down to a reasonable level, then it will be up to the masses to decide.

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Even if you are Bill Gates you will not be allowed to purchase Intel’s 3 GHz Quad Core Xeon quite yet, even though it is already included in a shipping product. The Mac Pro. These days Steve Jobs seems to be running three companies, Apple, Pixar, and Intel. Thanks to its recent transition from PowerPC to Intel Apple has gained some serious drug-like influence over Intel. If you are a Mac enthusiast, Apple’s updated Mac Pro with Intel’s yet to be released Xeon workstation-class processor running at 3Ghz is right up your alley. If you are part of the other 95% of the market not using Mac, Intel’s special treatment to Mac heads might be a bit overwhelming for you.

Apple & Intel Sitting in a Tree

No longer can early adopters boast about bleeding edge hardware that puts all other hardware to shame without first buying Apple’s hardware. Where’s Microsoft intervention when you need it? The 3 GHz quad core CPU at the heart of the fastest desktop system available to common man is currently an unannounced model that sits at the top of the company’s performance range and is presently used only by Apple. We confirmed this with limited availability with Apple and Intel. Are you ready to congregate with the Apple cult or will you wait for Intel to snap out of it?

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I am no fanboy but I have used Linux since the 90s. I am not quite a kernel hacker, but I administer my fair share of LAMP servers. This is different, Ubuntu is not just Linux, it’s Linux all grown up wearing something very sexy. I had not touched Linux on the desktop since Redhat 7, but all the Feisty Fawn hype caught up with me and I just had to try it. I’ve become a really busy guy, so troubleshooting a Linux install on a personal computer for something that would be trivial on Windows won’t ever be acceptable. I think that’s the same boat most users are in.

The Experience

The install for Feisty Fawn fits onto a single CD, although I burnt it to DVD. It installs very quickly. Ubuntu’s install disk boots into a live environment, like Knoppix, so you can evaluate before proceeding with the install or you could use it to fix a broken Windows installation. Dare I say that it’s easier to install than Windows Vista? After the install everything just worked on my laptop. I used the new “Restricted Device” setting to automatically install the proprietary ATI driver which can be a painful process otherwise. The only thing I’ve had to break a text editor for is to edit a configuration file to enable the native resolution of 1680×1050 on my LCD. After that I got to the really good stuff, Beryl & Wine. To install Beryl and Wine was as easy as clicking “Add / Remove Programs” and typing in Beryl, then Wine. A few clicks later I had a beautiful fully animated 3D desktop that rivals the looks of Vista and can run Windows programs. All of this software is free and very easy to use. There are thousands more features to explore use and a database of constantly updated free software that can be automatically downloaded and installed. Linux is finally ready for the desktop. If Ubuntu plays its cards right, it can be the next Firefox and make it in the mainstream. Prepare for a true disruption to the Redmond stronghold.

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Every couple of years the technology industry is pressed to find inventive new ways to decrease our shiny new computers and consumer electronics product lifecycle. But do not fear, when standards change good companies like Monster Cable are always there to sell you $100 converter cables that costs pennies to manufacture. I guess someone has got to pay for all the marketing fluff.

Not the Sweet Kind of Port

DisplayPort 1.1 is a new VESA-approved digital interface standard that is meant to replace DVI and VGA ports while co-existing with HDMI for HDTV connectivity. It’s about the size of a USB connector and offers double the throughput of DVI.

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The 45nm Intel Core 3 Duo & Quad line of processors will arrive later this year. They will be packing a punch with loads of new features and some big numbers. Chips will be clocked as high as 3.2 GHz and front side bus speeds will peek at 1.6 GHz. One big feature, SSE4, the obvious successor to SSE3, will improve the speed of tasks like video encoding by up to 40%. Virtualization will see a speed bump of up to 75% depending upon conditions.

Worth the Wait

Other improvements to virtualization might mean that we will be seeing the doors open up for multiple operating systems running simultaneously at the hardware level. The standard L2 cache will be 6MB, and Intel Core 3 Duo & Quad processors will consume up to 50% less power than Core 2 Duo equivalents. Looks like we are in for a treat.

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Microsoft said that it has sold more than 20 million copies of Windows Vista in the first month since the operating system hit shelves on January 30. The world’s biggest software maker said the pace of Vista adoption is at more than twice the rate of its predecessor, which had sold 17 million licenses after its first two months.

Mixed Signals

The numbers released by Microsoft follow mixed messages from the company about the pace of adoption for Windows Vista, the company’s first major operating system upgrade in more than five years. Only weeks after the Vista release, Steve Ballmer said analysts’ expectations were “overly aggressive.” Prior to Vista’s general release, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer had predicted that consumers would move to Vista faster than past Windows upgrades.

The Windows franchise is the centerpiece of Microsoft’s business, because the company makes more than 75 cents in operating profit for every dollar of sales. The cash flow generated by Windows allows Microsoft to make investments in new businesses like digital music players and online services.

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Google is not developing a Google branded phone. If Google were to make its own phone it would be directly competing with its own partners. According to Google’s most recent SEC filling more than 99% of profits came directly from advertising. If there was a Google phone, Google’s services wouldn’t be included with most competing cell phones, which would mean missing a big piece of the mobile advertising pie and doing shareholders a major disservice.

Apple and Google are Friends

Steve Jobs and Google CEO Eric Schmidt play nicely together. In fact, Eric sits on Apples board of directors. It is simply a conflict of interest for Google to compete with Apples iPhone. What Google might do is license out its technology and develop mobile applications to compliment its services. Maybe Phone manufactures will even brand certain phones “Google Editions”, but there is certainly not going to be a GooPhone.

Don’t Pull a Microsoft

With the exception of some commodity hardware Google sells with its search software, Google is thus far a service company. To break into hardware seems evil, which goes against the actual Google motto, “Don’t be Evil!” A Google phone would alienate allies and force those companies to work with another provider, such as Yahoo, which could prove devastating to Google profits. It would be as if a software company, like Microsoft, was to create a software platform for MP3 players then compete with partners by releasing its own player… like the Zune. Hold please… that did happen and it is bad business. Remember, only evil monopolies compete with their own customers.

Google Juice

Google’s first tangible product, Google Gulp was released to much fanfare on April Fools Day. There is an equal amount of hope for the Google Phone.

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Sony contends the next generation DVD format war is over. Although uninformed consumers and press might agree, we think Sony is still upset about losing the first major format war. If history repeats itself then welcome back to the 1980s. This is VHS verses Betamax all over again. Betamax was a proprietary Sony format that rivaled VHS and although Sony claimed better resolution and clarity it apparently didn’t matter.

One Hit Wonder

Sony has a heck of a history with failing media formats. In fact, of almost 20 Sony formats only one has been successful with the masses, the now obsolete 3.5″ diskette, also known as the floppy disk.

Hey Sony, Nice Try

By now Sony surely expected to sell boatloads of Playstation 3 game consoles, which could have possibly been the spark that would have given Blu-ray its fire, but sales have been dismal when compared to the Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii. Even so, the PS3 is the only console that includes support for next generation DVDs out of the box. The PS3 comes bundled with the Blu-Ray movie Talladega Nights which is an expected and monopolistic tactic that has dramatically and artificially inflated adoption of the media format. In essence Sony bought the right to claim itself preliminary winner of the next generation high definition DVD war, for the time being. It is a short term strategy to boost sales numbers and hardware saturation in hopes to sign studios and release more films on the format. Sony did this before with the UMD format on the PSP with Spiderman 2. It didn’t work then and I sincerely doubt it will work now. That’s not to say Blu-Ray will completely fail, just that Sony continues using proven ineffective strategies. If you take the bundled Blu-Ray DVDs out of the picture, HD-DVD is moving significantly more units.

The not so Minor Detail of 1080p

Literally more than 99% of Americans don’t have televisions capable of displaying 1080p resolution, or 1920 x 1080, which is really necessary to fully appreciate the difference between DVD and HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. The success of high definition DVDs is contingent upon the adoption of HDTVs, and as long as standard definition televisions are for sale, so will DVDs. Until such a time, there will be no clear winner of this seemingly epic battle.

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“Windows Vista Service Pack 1 will be a standard service pack that will include security updates, hotfixes, as well as limited other changes focused on improving quality.” - Microsoft

Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer wants you to think that first major update to Windows Vista, Service Pack 1, won’t be released for a long, long time. That’s because he knows that an overwhelming number of businesses and institutions won’t make the jump to Vista until they perceive it as reliable, which traditionally begins with Service Pack 1. Microsoft wants you to upgrade sooner than later. Although Ballmer swears Microsoft hasn’t set a date, and routinely avoids answering questions about updates to Windows Vista, an official timeframe has been set. Microsoft has invited a select group of customers and partners with whom Microsoft is interested in holding “an ongoing dialogue on pre-release code” to test alpha and beta builds. The invitations included that the update will ship in the latter half of 2007.

What’s Really Holding Vista Adoption Back

The business release of Windows Vista in November 2006 proved many computer makers were unprepared for Windows Vista and did not deliver drivers to customers. Today some major manufactures still haven’t provided working device drivers, and this has many customers fuming. It seems that even some “Windows Vista Certified” products don’t yet have drivers. In some cases customers have found Windows Vista Update automatically installs the wrong system drivers putting a system into an infinite cycle of crash-reboot-crash. Microsoft should have been more proactive in working with system manufactures, or made Vista backwards compatible with Windows XP drivers.

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When you start Microsoft Windows Vista, you may receive the following error message:

Activate Windows Now

Your activation period has expired and Windows is no longer working.

To use Windows you must activate this copy of Windows.

If you’re like most people with Windows Vista you’ve installed device drivers and new applications. Unfortunately this common behavior can cause Windows Vista to require reactivation. Depending upon the type of installation and the license type, Retail, OEM, or VLK, the operating system may limit the amount of time it can be used without activation. If you fail to activate within 30 days Windows Vista may limit itself to very basic functionality or lock even you out all together.

“You may be prompted to activate Windows Vista on a computer on which Windows Vista activation was not previously required. Although this problem rarely occurs, it may occur during typical use of a Windows Vista-based computer.”

Microsoft Knowledgebase Article 931573

The Fix

The Microsoft recommend fix is to attempt reactivation online, which doesn’t always work, or to call Microsoft’s Activation Hotline at (888) 571-2048. Once activated you need to install update 931573 via Windows Update. Microsoft claims this only affects a small number of users, but I’ve personally experienced this problem with a retail installation, and so has one of my associates.

Prevent Deactivation

Use Windows Update to install update 931573 or visit the following Microsoft Web site http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com.

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