Atom’s Antics

Came across the gang over at Revision 3 having some fun with an INXS song and their shiny new recording studio.

Lip Dub - Need You Tonight by INXS from sarahlane on Vimeo.

HDDVD is dead, long live BLU-RAY! So I backed the wrong horse. A few months back I invested in a new HD TV and picked up the HD DVD drive for my Xbox 360….oppsie. For those that don’t know the format war is done.

At the begining of January Warner Brothers studio announced that they would begin to release films on Blu-Ray exclusivly starting in May. This effectivly shifted 80% of the studios into Blue-Ray exclusivity. Then in the following weeks Netflix, Best Buy and Walmart all announced Blu-Ray exclusivity.

 Well as of earlier this week Toshiba has throwen up the white flag. The press release is below.

“TOKYO–Toshiba Corporation today announced that it has undertaken a thorough review of its overall strategy for HD DVD and has decided it will no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players and recorders. This decision has been made following recent major changes in the market. Toshiba will continue, however, to provide full product support and after-sales service for all owners of Toshiba HD DVD products.

HD DVD was developed to offer consumers access at an affordable price to high-quality, high definition content and prepare them for the digital convergence of tomorrow where the fusion of consumer electronics and IT will continue to progress.

“We carefully assessed the long-term impact of continuing the so-called ‘next-generation format war’ and concluded that a swift decision will best help the market develop,” said Atsutoshi Nishida, President and CEO of Toshiba Corporation. “While we are disappointed for the company and more importantly, for the consumer, the real mass market opportunity for high definition content remains untapped and Toshiba is both able and determined to use our talent, technology and intellectual property to make digital convergence a reality.”

Toshiba will continue to lead innovation, in a wide range of technologies that will drive mass market access to high definition content. These include high capacity NAND flash memory, small form factor hard disk drives, next generation CPUs, visual processing, and wireless and encryption technologies. The company expects to make forthcoming announcements around strategic progress in these convergence technologies.

Toshiba will begin to reduce shipments of HD DVD players and recorders to retail channels, aiming for cessation of these businesses by the end of March 2008. Toshiba also plans to end volume production of HD DVD disk drives for such applications as PCs and games in the same timeframe, yet will continue to make efforts to meet customer requirements. The company will continue to assess the position of notebook PCs with integrated HD DVD drives within the overall PC business relative to future market demand.

This decision will not impact on Toshiba’s commitment to standard DVD, and the company will continue to market conventional DVD players and recorders. Toshiba intends to continue to contribute to the development of the DVD industry, as a member of the DVD Forum, an international organization with some 200 member companies, committed to the discussion and defining of optimum optical disc formats for the consumer and the related industries.

Toshiba also intends to maintain collaborative relations with the companies who joined with Toshiba in working to build up the HD DVD market, including Universal Studios, Paramount Pictures, and DreamWorks Animation and major Japanese and European content providers on the entertainment side, as well as leaders in the IT industry, including Microsoft, Intel, and HP. Toshiba will study possible collaboration with these companies for future business opportunities, utilizing the many assets generated through the development of HD DVD.”

Well my friend Jim C. was right, Blu-Ray won and I backed the wrong horse. (There you go Jim, it’s on the web for all to see.)

The first images of the moon in HD as well as video footage has been released by the Japan Aerospace  Exploration Agency.

From their Press Release:

“The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) have successfully performed the world’s first high-definition image taking by the lunar explorer “KAGUYA” (SELENE,) which was injected into a lunar orbit at an altitude of about 100 km on October 18, 2007, (Japan Standard Time. Following times and dates are all JST.)

The image shooting was carried out by the onboard high definition television (HDTV) of the KAGUYA, and it is the world’s first high definition image data acquisition of the Moon from an altitude about 100 kilometers away from the Moon.

The image taking was performed twice on October 31. Both were eight-fold speed intermittent shooting (eight minutes is converged to one minute.) The first shooting covered from the northern area of the “Oceanus Procellarum” toward the center of the North Pole, then the second one was from the south to the north on the western side of the “Oceanus Procellarum.” The moving image data acquired by the KAGUYA was received at the JAXA Usuda Deep Space Center, and processed by NHK.

The satellite was confirmed to be in good health through telemetry data received at the Usuda station. ”

You can check it out for yourself here.

John C. Dvorak quietly slipped a new podshow up a few months ago and now that I have found his patent brand of crankiness in audio format I wanted to share it with you folks. It is well worth checking out and it’s short and to the point. easily the most important 5 minutes of your day as he puts it. Click here to listen.

So in John’s own words:

“Hi. I’m John C. Dvorak and this is the Tech5 Reports home page.

Tech5 is my daily five minutes of tech news and trend analysis will hopefully benefit the listeners in some way each and every weekday morning.

I’ll include special reports, interviews and lots of trend analysis. One or two tidbits alone can make this the most important five minutes of you life. Please subscribe and listen to the report through your iPOD daily.”

Not sure who he is, here is his bio from his blog:

“Current PC Magazine Columnist writing Inside Track, an essay and a weekly online column. These articles are licensed around the world. Also a weekly columnist for Dow-Jones Marketwatch, Info! (Brazil) and BUG Magazine (Croatia). Previously a columnist for Forbes, Forbes Digital, PC World, MacUser, PC/Computing, Barrons, Smart Business and other magazines and newspapers. Former editor and consulting editor for Infoworld. Has appeared in the New York Times, LA Times, SF Examiner, Vancouver Sun. Was on the start-up team for CNet TV as well as ZDTV. At ZDTV (and TechTV) was host of Silicon Spin for four years doing 1000 live and live-to-tape TV shows. Also was on public radio for 8 years. Written over 4000 articles and columns as well as authoring or co-authoring 14 books.

2004 Award winner of the American Business Editors Association’s national gold award for best online column of 2003. That was followed up by an unprecedented second national gold award from the ABEA in 2005, again for the best online column (for 2004).”

And of course if you like his point of view he has a weekly video show called Cranky Geeks and his blog.

Well Martin Sargent is at it again. Not capable of keeping his unique and sometimes caustic view of the digital lifestyle contained to one show, Revision3 has given the green light to his show “Web Drifter”. Web Drifter has Martin actually going in person to these strange, unique and usually downright odd web sights. martin is an aquired taste and not for everyone one but if you get him he can be pretty funny in a very dry and caustic way.

This week Martin visits the founder of the Church of Tom Jones. Yes you read that right, Tom Jones. The episode is embedded below, but beware Martin is never work safe. You just never know what he’ll say or show you.

Next week he will be visiting a guy who thinks he is Peter Pan. Oh boy.

Who would have thought that Tom Green would have one of the most cutting edge shows being broadcast today. Seriously, Tom Green. It’s not that I have never liked Tom Green but I always thought alot of his antics where silly and juvenile but it turns out he is actually doing a fairly compeling talk show these days.”Tom Green Live” broadcasts out of his home from a studio he built out of his home Monday thru Thursday. 8 PM Western and 11PM Eastern. Taking his fascination with online culture and mixing it with his love of the fans he has really cultivated an online and very interactive community around the show. He takes live calls on his home phone (which he makes publicly available), video calls via skyp and on occasion has even taken to inviting his fans down to the house.

The show is a very straightforward talk show in the vein of Jack Parr or the Tonight show but generally only has the one guest that night. The show runs on average 60 to 90 mins long with very minimal commercial breaks. Beacuse of the informal and non commercial nature of the show the interviews tend to be very compelling and entertaining even if it is someone you are normally not in too.

The show has an energy that is real hard to find and is well worth giving a look. Tom Green just signed a deal to syndicate the show on broadcast TV. You can read all of those details at Tom’s Blog and of course you can visit an archive of his older shows here.

I have embedded a show here for viewing, it was hard to pick one because like I said they are all pretty good so I settled on an interesting one, Tom interviews Tom Bergeron. Tom Bergeron? Yes, Tom Bergeron, he brings a lifetime of broadcasting history as well as a great sense of humor to the interview.

I have gotten a few emails wondering how the iPhone hack went. It went flawlessly and I will post more on that in the next few days. Things are busy here as I am switching from one computer to the other but I will be back in to the full swing tomorrow with Pics! Have a good one.

Patrick Norton and Jessica Corbin host Revision3’s newest show, Tekzilla. The show set is a bit bare looking at the moment but I expect it will grow quite a bit once the new studio space is done. It is nice to see Pat back on screen and reunited with Jessica no less. They are saying viewer content and will be a big part of the show, I am already shopping around for my camera.

I have of course embedded the video in the post. Enjoy. Not work safe for an F bomb early in the show.

For most I am sure this is dull, but in case you are into this sort of thing, Revision 3 has put up studio cameras so we can watch it being built.  The cameras will stay up after the building is done so we can continue to stalk watch the crew during the day. You can see it for yourself here.