HomeWeekly News Roundup (6 April 2008)
A somewhat quiet week, well not that quiet but there has been a spate of news items that I just did not want to reference on the website due to the tendency for them to be April Fools Day pranks. When you go through the news as frequently as I do, you start noticing that most of them turn out to be false. That’s just the nature of Internet news these days I suppose, but with AFD happening in the same week, you just can’t trust anyone. I’m pretty sure at least one of the news items I will reference in this blog will have been a AFD prank turned into “real” news, so please bear with me.
In copyright news, and my April Fools news was that the MPAA was going to introduce a $10 download tax. It was just believable enough to have been true, since the MPAA’s step sister (both of the ugly type), the RIAA, has been touting something similar for ages. The sad thing is this might just become a reality some day. And in another case of copyright/trademarks gone wrong, Engadget has been sued for using a colour, magenta to be precise, on their website. T-Mobile, who also uses the colour magenta, is the company doing the suing because the mobile section of Engadget also uses magenta. If there is genuine confusion over Engadget and T-Mobile using the same colour, then fine, but where’s the confusion? Downloading the latest episode of South Park is equivalent to providing explosives to terrorists, according to the U.S. Attorney General at least. Both leads to terrorism, and if you do have pirated music or movies on your computer, I suggest you go to your nearest police station and hand yourself in. I hear Gitmo is quite nice this time of the year. Of course, you might want to walk to the police station instead of driving, because your car might be DRM protected and it probably won’t let terrorists like yourself start the car, that or if you haven’t been paying your car payment bills. I’m pretty sure this might be an April Fools Prank, but you just can’t tell the difference between real news from The Onion news these days. And that, my friend, is a very sad state of affairs.
Onto HD news now. Not much actually. That’s the sad thing about the ending of the format war, the news stories have really dried up. There’s still all sorts of rumours about Toshiba and Sony and even the Japanese government having all agreed to drop HD DVD back late last year. And continued stories about how great and lovely Blu-ray is. At best, speculation, and at worst, trying to beat the last drop of blood out of a story that is no longer interesting. Even the news items about Blu-ray price rises seem a bit stretched, since prices fluctuate all the time and are seasonal based. If Sony had increased the RRP of their Blu-ray players from $499 to $899, then you have a story, but they haven’t, so you don’t. So about the only really interesting piece of news this week has been the release of PowerDVD 8. What is most interesting is that the Ultra version, which is the version that supports HD playback, has apparently dropped HD DVD playback. I can understand hardware manufacturers dropping HD DVD production, but why drop something you’ve already spent a lot of money developing and which worked quite well in the previous version, especially when your competitors (WinDVD and Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre) both offer Blu-ray and HD DVD playback, and most say in a more superior fashion. A very strange decision by Cyberlink, and perhaps a developing story that could well end up with a happier ending (a free patch to re-enable HD DVD playback would be nice).
Onto gaming now. A poll by IGN has shown that most users want the Xbox 360 version of GTA IV compared to the PS3 version, by a 2-to-1 margin. Of course, Xbox 360 users outnumber PS3 users by, you guessed it, a 2-to-1 margin in the US. More disturbing is that the Australian version of GTA IV (both PS3 and Xbox 360 versions) might be censored, due to our previous government’s stupidity and inaction in allowing a 18+ certificate for mature gamers. Especially stupid when the average age of gamers in Australia is 28! Unless this turns out to be another AFD prank, it now looks like importing is the only option for most people. The PS3 being region-free will hand Sony a big GTA IV win in Australia, although importing the UK un-censored version is actually still cheaper than paying the Australian RRP price for the Xbox 360 version.
Okay, that’s it for this week’s slightly shortened and AFD-disclaimer-laden edition of the Weekly News Roundup. See you next week.