Warning: squirrels.

*NOW* it's officially dead

News from Tokyo this morning:

Toshiba Announces Discontinuation of HD DVD Businesses
Company Remains Focused on Championing Consumer Access to High Definition Content

TOKYO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--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.

Young people not so good at searching, should get off my lawn

One of the common urban legends in the education world is that that children are born with the innate ability to operate electronics but, sometime in their early to mid-twenties, these [former] children go through some sort of technological menopause and become technologically-challenged like you and me.  Researchers at the British Library and the Joint Information Systems Committee decided to investigate the validity of the first part of that theory by measuring how well [British] children born after 2003 perform certain internet tasks. 

The results are disappointing. While information literacy is now embedded into the curriculum, "[a] careful look at the literature over the past 25 years finds no improvement (or deterioration) in young people’s information skills." Children may be swift at searching, but "the speed of young people’s web searching means that little time is spent in evaluating information, either for relevance, accuracy or authority." This may be because "young people have a poor understanding of their information needs and thus find it difficult to develop effective search strategies."

In other words, kids kind of suck at Google.

You can download the complete report in Adobe Acrobat format.

Mmmm ... You've got Chicago pizza!

Don't get me wrong.  I adore my friends in Chicago.  My only complaint is that they're not the speediest when it comes to paying off bets.  So, for this year's Super Bowl, Christine and I made a bet of our own.  If the New England Patriots won the Super Bowl, Christine would buy for me the Lou Malnati's pizza that Jeve and Shonnie [names have been changed to protect the innocent] said they would send me if USC beat Illinois in the 2008 Rose Bowl [USC won 49-17]. In the unlikely event that the New York football Giants won, I would buy Christine the Lou Malnati's pizza that Smike MmMichael [again, name changed to protect the innocent] had promised to send her if the Indianapolis Colts beat the Chicago Bears in last year's Super Bowl [the Colts won 29-17].

Of course, the Giants won this year's Super Bowl. I lost the bet.  Christine's pizza is on its way from Chicago as we speak.

On a happier note, Lou Malnati's pizzeria in Chicago delivers Chicago deep-dish pizza, ribs, Vienna Beef's or Portillo's hot dogs, italian beef, Eli's cheesecakes, and more to any address in the continental United States.  Check out TastesofChicago.com for more info.

Called it!

On Monday I wrote that

The final nail in the HD DVD format's coffin will be an announcement from Wal-Mart later this summer that the company will no longer sell HD DVD discs and players. If the movie industry doesn't put the HD DVD format out of its misery, the folks in Bentonville will. Soon.

This morning Wal-Mart announced that, by June, the company will exclusively stock Blu-ray products [source: c|net, Gizmodo].

My next prediction: Toshiba [the developer of the HD DVD format and its largest supporter] will very soon announce its exit from the HD-DVD market, followed by similar exits from Universal, Paramount, and Dreamworks.

As I said back on January 8th, "It's over. Blu-ray won."

Update [Saturday, February 16]: A source at Toshiba announced this morning that the company is pulling the plug on the HD DVD format.  That leaves only Universal, Paramount, and Dreamworks in the HD DVD camp. Let's see which studio jumps ship first.

Update [Monday, February 18]: It looks like Toshiba's source jumped the gun.  Toshiba's official announcement is that the company "has not made any announcement or decision. We are currently assessing our business strategies, but nothing has been decided at the moment."  So, while the HD DVD  format is technically dead, it is not officially dead. Yet.  For more information, check out Ars Technica's coverage.

Happy Valentine's day!

True story from the ed tech support line

Fresh on the heels of the instructor who yelled at me because my university had misspelled her name ... on ratemyprofessors.com ... comes the following.  Like most universities, we keep courses on our learning management system [LMS] for a set period of time and we then remove those courses to an offline archive.  Unlike most universities, however, our archive includes every course ever taught on on our LMS and faculty can request that we restore their old courses at any time. Requests to restore courses from 2001, 2002, and 2003 are not uncommon.

 

What is uncommon is the restore request I received last night.  A faculty member wanted me to restore three of his BeachBoard courses ... from the Fall 1980 semester.  No, that is not a typo.  Fall *1980*. He wanted his BeachBoard courses from the last semester in the Jimmy Carter administration.

 

Here is my [passive-agressive] reply:

Thank you for contacting BeachBoard Services.  We regret to inform you that are unable to restore your Fall 1980 courses to BeachBoard because the University did not use BeachBoard that semester.  In fact, neither the personal computer (introduced in 1981), nor the modern web browser (introduced in 1993), nor the Blackboard software (introduced in 1997) that powers BeachBoard (introduced in 2000) existed in 1980.
 
If you would like to see the grades that you received from the courses you took 28 years ago ...

Netflix takes sides in high-definition DVD war, chooses Blu-Ray

Back in January I wrote the HD DVD/Blu-ray format war is over and Blu-ray won. It looks like Netflix agrees. Netflix just announced that they will "move toward stocking high-def DVDs exclusively in the Blu-ray format."

I have two predictions:

1. HD DVD player prices will drop by 50% or more over the next few weeks as the HD DVD camp desperately tries to boost sales and breathe new life into their dead format.  Case in point: Microsoft's Xbox 360 HD DVD player was originally selling for $199.99.  The new price?  $129.99. That sounds like a great deal until you realize that you won't be able to play any new movies from 20th Century Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Sony, Walt Disney, or Warner Bros on it.
2. The final nail in the HD DVD format's coffin will be an announcement from Wal-Mart later this summer that the company will no longer sell HD DVD discs and players. If the movie industry doesn't put the HD DVD format out of its misery, the folks in Bentonville will. Soon.

Stay tuned.