Today has seen a swell of news that makes me think that Windows Mobile 7 won’t be a complete bust after all. MobileCrunch is reporting that Microsoft may debut the new mobile operating system, along with new hardware, at the Mobile World Congress on February 15. If not then, AllThingsD predicts that they could be revealed at the CTIA Wireless convention in March.

Regardless of when the details are actually announced, both sites seem to be running with the assumption that the new WinMo 7 phones will be released shortly afterwards. Not only does this mean that we could see the OS far ahead of its previous release timetable (we expected it towards the end of 2010), but both sites are also claiming from different sources that WinMo 7 will see aspects of the Zune HD’s user experience — which lends credence to all of the Project Pink phone rumors.

MobileCrunch’s tipster also laid down some potential details on WinMo 7 and the new hardware:

• It’s “essentially a copy of the Zune HD’s kernel”, and the UI is very much like the Zune HD
• Microsoft is regimenting screen size and RAM amount, and minimum processor speeds
• Expect no background processes, system resource access, and no threaded processes (very iPhone-like)
• It won’t run Windows Mobile 6 code
• They’re aiming for gaming and multimedia consumers with Xbox Live integration, instead of the business types
• There will be an MS app store with a simple approval process

Aside from the potential lack of multi-tasking, WinMo 7 looks to be falling in line with the predictions I made back in October. We haven’t heard much about what will be powering these potential new devices, but Microsoft will surely want to stick with nVidia’s Tegra technology which drives all the UI goodness in the Zune HD.

If MS had continued along with their end of 2010 release for WinMo 7, they likely wouldn’t have stood a chance in the mobile market. Now they could potentially build some buzz and release their new phones before Apple’s next iPhone revision, and be in a good place to compete with the rising Android threat. It’s a shame MS didn’t make these big announcements at CES, because they could have easily ruled that event much like Palm did last year. Most likely they didn’t have much to show at the time, and they’re probably burning the midnight oil to make a big splash at one of these upcoming events.

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Windows Mobile 7 with Zune Integration Coming Soon?

• What nVidia’s Tegra Means for Mobile Devices, and Why You Should Care
• Gamestop Dropping Zune, What Exactly is Microsoft’s Zune Strategy Now?
• The Android T-Mobile G1 is the Real Successor to the Helio Ocean
• My Thoughts on the Palm Pre
• Apple’s New Anti-Windows 7 Ads Hurt My Brain

The Archos 5 Android Tablet

Om Malik wrote up a great post today on the “Androidification of Everything” which served as a reminder that 2010 is truly going to be the year of the Android. I offered some predictions on what we’ll see from Android in 2010 over at Royal Pingdom, and Om’s post serves as an elaboration on one of my previous points. I wrote:

Part of the beauty of Android is that it’s not just limited to cellphones. Google has crafted a lightweight operating system that could do well on many other devices. We’ve already seen Android implemented on the Archos 5 portable media device, as well as the Barnes and Noble Nook eBook reader. In 2010 we can look forward to it showing up on netbooks (Acer already has one planned), and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it popping up on Internet tablet devices either.

Om mentions that both chip companies and semiconductor firms are excited about the possibilities for Android hardware. In terms of making Android ubiquitous, this is something that is possibly more important than Android phones eventually defeating the iPhone in marketshare. Smartphones are just one segment of Android’s importance. Android’s ubiquity among all mobile devices (e-book readers, tablets, netbooks, etc.) will be far more significant in the long run.

Read: The Androidification of Everything

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Looking Forward to the Android Takeover

• The iPhone 3G is a Call to Arms for Mobile Computing
• What nVidia’s Tegra Means for Mobile Devices, and Why You Should Care
• The Android T-Mobile G1 is the Real Successor to the Helio Ocean
• The Roku Netflix Player, The Shape of Things to Come
• Lamenting the Death of Helio, and How the iPhone Helped Kill It

Ars has a great post up on the 5 ways Ubuntu has made Linux more human in commemoration of the distro’s fifth birthday. They bring up some good points, including how being philosophically driven has helped Canonical drive development, its easy installation (which has gotten even simpler over the years) and setup process, and their focus on desktop usability. When using most other Linux distributions, I often feel that they’re developed by and for engineers–Ubuntu doesn’t feel like that at all.

I remember being gung-ho for Ubuntu in its early years–but that was long before I realized that the biggest problem with Linux desktop distributions is Linux. For all of Canonical’s attempts at making Ubuntu an easy-to-use environment, there are still situations where you need to bust out the command line, or hunt down and recompile an obscure package. It makes for a great operating system for non-techy users only after a Linux-head makes sure everything is up to par.

At this point I’m not sure if we’ll ever see a true mainstream Linux desktop environment. In practice, it still seems to work best in consumer devices (where users don’t care/don’t need to know what OS is being run). Until Linux distros can approach the ease of use and multimedia/device compatibility that Windows and Max OSX offer, the quest for Linux desktop domination seems excessively quixotic.

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Ubuntu’s Fiesty Fifth Birthday, And Linux As A Desktop Solution

• Dear Digsby, Where’s the Group Chat and In Line Text Formatting?!
• Windows Mobile 7 with Zune Integration Coming Soon?
• Apple’s New Anti-Windows 7 Ads Hurt My Brain
• Thoughts on the September 09 New York Tech Meetup
• Why The Magic Mouse is the Most Important Apple Announcement Today

Last night I attended my first session of the New York Tech Meetup, and it seems I’ve found exactly what I’ve been looking for in the city when it comes to a vibrant tech community. I recently moved to New York from Western Massachusetts to pursue a career writing about technology and film–after several years of IT work and dreaming about making the jump to writing full time. I had already gotten my taste of the film blogging world after covering Comic-Con and several press screenings for Slashfilm, but I had yet to get a full sense of what being in New York means for my tech interests until last night.

The first thing I noticed during the evening’s introduction (by NYTM organizer Nate Westheimer) was that New York techies seem to have a major complex towards the Silicon Valley and Boston tech communities. There’s a clear cultural difference between NY and the Valley, but as someone who spent their entire life halfway between New York and Boston (I grew up in Hartford, then went to college and worked for four years in Western Mass.), it never really occurred to me how the NY tech community was different than Boston. Westheimer mentioned one key difference (which he also wrote about on his blog)–that the NY community fails at connecting the university and commercial spaces.

Given the tech titans we’ve seen come out of MIT and Harvard, I think he may have a point. Culturally, Boston tends to focus on academia and intellectualism, so it’s no surprise that their higher educational institutions aren’t ignored when it comes to commercial tech ventures.  Westheimer went on to explain that the scheduled demos (two from Columbia, and two  from NYU) were examples of the innovation coming out of the university space, and that the commercial sector should take note.

Here’s a rundown of those demos:

Green Dot (NYU)

On their site, the Green Dot folks describe their work as “a research project that investigates motion capture, pattern recognition, and ‘Intrinsic Biometrics’ techniques to detect and analyze human movement signatures in video.” In short, their technology resembles the motion capturing we see today (wherein an actor’s movements are recorded via dots placed on their body), except without the need to wear anything. After a video feed is processed by their technology, the end result is a video with green dots tracking the movement in the source. Again, this looks very similar to footage you see from typical motion capturing techniques today.

They demoed some video footage of famous figures and pointed out some interesting factoids based on their visual signatures. The project is government funded, and you can definitely foresee some military uses of this technology once it’s perfected. They describe their current focus as “the analysis of national and international public figures while they are giving speeches, with future plans to investigate many other domains.” Read into that what you will.

On the consumer and professional levels, the technology could be really useful for bringing motion capturing to the masses. Imagine taking a video of your cat walking, and then applying that motion to a 3D figure.  If you’re an iPhone 3G or 3GS user and want to try it out for yourself, you can download their application from the app store, just search for “Dot Show Ian Spiro”.

CuZero (Columbia)

CuZero is an interesting attempt at changing the way we search for images. The presenter points out that image searching in its current fashion simply doesn’t work very well (anyone who has used the Google Images search for any length of time can attest to that). For the most part, image searching today relies on file names, the “alt” tag (which can be placed alongside the images on a website, but usually isn’t), and text surrounding the picture.

CuZero turns this paradigm on its head by allowing you to bring in text and image queries into a grid, and prioritize the different elements of your search in real time. You can also further filter your search results via a similar interactive method. It’s honestly hard to explain in words, so head over to their website and check out a video demo.

I got a very Minority Report vibe from the way they were able to interact with their queries, and the way their system also recognized buildings and other elements from pictures was also fascinating. This research certainly has the potential to change the way we search for images in the future.

Musically Intelligent Machines (Columbia)

Musically Intelligent Machines is a project that aims to automatically classify music–much in the same way Pandora works, except without the need for human intervention. The developers crawled through 15,000 mp3s to demo the service, and you can play with it on their site. The presenter mentioned that he was surprised the software could determine what constituted “British” music. Apparently it’s smart enough to determine British accents, and possibly even British styles of music.

Overall, the software works as advertised, and there is certainly a market for this sort of thing. I’d be interested to see how it would compete on a commercial scale against the likes of Last.FM and Pandora.

Teaching Robots to See (NYU)

At these sorts of events, there has to be at least one project that portends the impending robot uprising, and this project’s goal of creating robots that can see certainly brings Skynet to mind. NYU professor Yann LeCun demonstrated the research by showing how their software can recognize objects (he used a toy soldier, which was recognized as human, and a toy airplane that was recognized as an airplane). He also showed how they’ve trained robots to move autonomously and avoid objects using a dual camera system for eyes.

His work actually comes out of the same place that Green Dot calls home, the Vision Learning Graphics group at NYU. With their technologies combined, we could easily see some very important future developments emerging.

Dan Bricklin was also interviewed by the great NY blogger Anil Dash. Bricklin was both hilarious and insightful, and I now feel compelled to grab his new book at some point. There’s something about tech history stories that I find completely fascinating, and as creator of the spreadsheet (among many contributions), he must certainly have some good stories to tell.

Check out Dan’s interview, along with the rest of the event, at the NYTM video page.

More than 1,000 words later, I realize now that I could write about this Meetup for several more pages. I take that as a good sign. The NYTM makes me excited to be a techie in New York, and I’m proud to be the third person to RSVP for October’s event. If you’d like to join, simply sign up via their Meetup page. I would love to have some Meetup buddies!

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Thoughts on the September 09 New York Tech Meetup

• The iPhone 3G is a Call to Arms for Mobile Computing
• Cuil and The Trouble with Tech Blogging
• What nVidia’s Tegra Means for Mobile Devices, and Why You Should Care
• Apple’s New Anti-Windows 7 Ads Hurt My Brain
• Bing Adds Twitter and Facebook Posts to Search Results, Should Google Worry?

I’m about ready to give up on Digsby. I’ve been a faithful user for the past year and a half, and I’ve written about it positively as well, but it seems as if they have no desire to implement two of the biggest missing features since the beta: Group chat, and in-line text formatting (the ability to bold/italicize/etc. individual letters and words). Instead, they seem content to push forward with more complex social networking features (today, it’s URL shortening and better MySpace Newsfeed support), all the while ignoring what I consider basic features for any IM client.

I don’t think I’m being greedy by asking for these features. Group chat (and chat room) support was a part of AIM since the 90s, and it’s also a feature of every major IM platform that Digsby supports. It’s shocking to me that so long after Digsby’s release, I still need to open up another client or head to Meebo to participate in group chat.

Similarly, I have no idea what’s keeping them from implementing proper in-line text formatting. Currently, if you choose any formatting options in Digsby, it applies that formatting to the entire post. For example, writing a sentence like this would be impossible in Digsby because it would end up bolding, underlining, and italicizing the entire sentence. Somehow, this doesn’t seem like a feature that should be missing from any text-heavy program in the year 2009, let alone something focused on text communication.

This is what happened when I tried to format a single word in this post:

I initially started using Digsby as a replacement to Trillian Pro for aggregating all of my IM services (I was tired of waiting for Trillian Astra), and the fact that it also aggregated social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter was convenient at the time as well. Things are different today. I use TweetDeck to follow Twitter (and occasionally Facebook), and Trillian Astra is finally out in public beta. Trillian actually supports group chat and in-line formatting, and is aiming to compete with Digsby with social networking aggregation as well. And yes, I know about Miranda IM and Pidgin, but both are a bit too simple (not to mention fugly) for my tastes.

I can’t imagine I’m the only one annoyed by Digsby’s shortcomings, but I suppose most users are too dependent on its more advanced features to let these minor issues bother them. I honestly think the Digsby team has done great work on the client since beta as well, but that doesn’t excuse them from failing to implement two fairly basic features.

At this point, I’m going to switch over to Trillian Astra full time to see if it does everything else I need. After criticizing the Cerulean Studios team for so long on their delayed Astra release cycle, I owe them this much. If the Digsby team ever decides to fix these features, I may give it another shot.

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Dear Digsby, Where’s the Group Chat and In Line Text Formatting?!

• I’m a Firefox Extension Addict, and Why That’s Good for Mozilla
• Surprise? Bluray Adoption Slows, Upconverting DVD Players Find Success
• 1080p Xbox Movie Streaming Works as Advertised
• Thoughts on the September 09 New York Tech Meetup
• Ubuntu’s Fiesty Fifth Birthday, And Linux As A Desktop Solution

I realized then something I should have noticed long ago: I could never abandon Firefox. This isn’t out of some illogical fanboyism, or a naive belief in the almighty nature of open source code. No, I could never abandon Firefox because of one key feature that no other web browser can compete with: Extensions.

Yes folks, I’m a Firefox extension addict.

While I can certainly use other web browsers for light browsing while remaining clearheaded, when it comes to getting some actual work done I find myself going through some major extension withdrawal. My palms get sweaty when faced with the inefficiency of accomplishing certain tasks without extensions, not to mention when I remember that many things are impossible to do without extensions–like blocking an annoying flash ad, or completely integrating my del.icio.us bookmarks into Firefox.

Internet Explorer and Safari don’t have anything to compare, and Opera’s widgets serve another function entirely. While you could argue that Opera does a decent job of integrating many useful features into the browser itself, somewhat negating the need for added functionality via extensions, that still makes it incredibly difficult for Opera to cater to the needs of all users, not to mention the time it takes to add new features to the browser.

The modularity of extensions makes it easy for users to customize Firefox lego-like, and without much effort make the browser suit their needs. They’ve also spawned a massive user community who have created everything from generally useful extensions that appeal to many, to extensions that serve more esoteric niche functions. While niche extensions may not seem that important, it is somewhat heartening to know that whenever you run across an annoyance or missing feature in Firefox, there’s a good chance an extension exists that could help.

I know I’m not alone in my extension addiction–just look at all the Firefox users publicly complaining about extensions that don’t work in Firefox 3 yet. I just hope Mozilla realizes how effective extensions are at locking users into their browser. It’s an age old adage of marketing; create a special feature that your competitors don’t have to attract customers, and then lock them in by making them addicted to it.

Special editions of Firefox like their Campus Edition are a good way to ingratiate new and less tech-savvy Firefox users to extensions, but they honestly need to do much more publicity for these sorts of projects (and for extensions in general). I just learned about Campus Edition last week, and it would have been nice for me to hear about it when it was released last August seeing that I work in IT at a college. Unfortunately, it seems the Campus Edition has been discontinued as of Firefox 3’s release (though they may just working on upgrading it from Firefox 2).

Mozilla really needs to focus more on extensions if they intend to continue battling the browser wars against Internet Explorer, Opera, and yes, even Safari. They’ve practically saturated the techy market already, so now they need to work on grabbing general users away from other browsers. Extensions, being among the most visible and functional features Firefox has to offer, could certainly help them do that.

Update: I just ran across a review of Firefox 2 that I wrote in 2006, and found it a very interesting read now that Firefox 3 is out. I found this section in particular poignant, given that I think Mozilla needs to start marketing better to general users:

Given that many of the tweaks in Firefox 2 are under the hood, it probably won’t do much to encourage new users to move away from IE. Mozilla may have some new marketing in the works, but for now Firefox 2 seems to be a release made more for the loyal than anything else. We may even see fewer people jumping to Firefox with the release of IE7 because Microsoft’s new browser already sports many of Firefox’s trademark features. This latest browser war may end up being fought over subtleties rather than significant differences.

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I’m a Firefox Extension Addict, and Why That’s Good for Mozilla

• Dear Digsby, Where’s the Group Chat and In Line Text Formatting?!
• Do Verizon’s “iDon’t” Ads Miss the Point?
• Lamenting the Death of Helio, and How the iPhone Helped Kill It
• 1080p Xbox Movie Streaming Works as Advertised
• Gamestop Dropping Zune, What Exactly is Microsoft’s Zune Strategy Now?

This latest release for public beta adds Twitter support, something which I’m going to take serious advantage of, support for video/voice chat, and an inline spell checker. You can find the rest of the updates for this release here.

Since I’ve started using Digsby I find that the only thing I truly miss from Trillian was the plentiful skins available at Deviant Art and other sites. Digsby advertises skins on their front page, but I suppose that we haven’t seen any yet because the product was hidden away in private beta. Now that it’s out in the open I suspect the skinning community to have a field day.

Unfortunately, judging from the screenshots, it appears that Digsby sticks with a fairly standard UI throughout different skins. Skinning seems only to affect the colors used in the application and the background image on the buddy list. I hope this is something that is improved upon eventually. For now, I’ll enjoy their Adium-styled conversation themes–something which I’ve been dying for on the PC side.

I was hoping that Digsby’s release would spur on the Trillian Folks to bust out with a private or public beta, but alas it’s still languishing in alpha hell. I have nothing but love for those folks, and being a former Trillian user for 7 years, I would totally love it if Astra came out and totally showed these young Digsby whippersnappers a thing or two.

Oh well.

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Digsby Opens Up with Public Beta, Adds Twitter & Voice/Video Support

• Dear Digsby, Where’s the Group Chat and In Line Text Formatting?!
• Did You Hear? I Think Apple’s Releasing a Tablet!
• Thoughts on the September 09 New York Tech Meetup
• Surprise? Bluray Adoption Slows, Upconverting DVD Players Find Success
• I’m a Firefox Extension Addict, and Why That’s Good for Mozilla

I’ve been playing around with Digsby today by way of an invite from Ars Technica, and it has quickly become my new favorite IM client. The beauty of Digsby is that it combines the IM aggregation from the likes of Trillian and Pidgin with the social networking aggregation of 8Hands. Oh, and it lets you keep track of all your e-mail accounts as well. Simply put, it’s become my one stop for communicating online.

I’m running it in Vista and overall I’m finding it to be a much more enjoyable experience than Trillian 3 Pro. I’m not sure of the cause, but Trillian 3 has been overwhelmingly sluggish for me in Vista. I would see everything from increasingly long text input delays, to issues with Trillian having trouble with simple tasks like repainting the chat windows when switching between conversations. I’ve tried reinstalling and troubleshooting Trillian many times and nothing seems to have helped.

For me, Digsby certainly couldn’t have picked a better time to launch into beta. I’m tired of waiting for Trillian Astra, Cerulean Studio’s long-awaited upgrade to the Trillian platform which has been hyped up for its IM and social networking aggregation. Honestly, I’m tired of waiting because Astra’s development doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

We first caught word of Astra’s revamped interface and new social features back in November 2006, and its been in private alpha even prior to that announcement. Current word from the Cerulean Studio blog is that there is still no release date for Astra. And of course, the fact that they haven’t even gotten to beta yet is disheartening.

Currently, I’m using Digsby to connect to my AIM, Gtalk, Facebook, and multiple web mail accounts. I’ve been meaning to test it with my work IMAP account to double-check the error reported by Ars, but for some reason it won’t connect to that server. Otherwise, Digsby has been running stably for me and with far less slowdown and headache than Trillian. It doesn’t yet feature Twitter or video chat support, but I’m sure these will come in time.

Digsby also has one of the best auto-updating features of any Windows app I’ve seen. Just before I started writing this post, I launched Digsby and it instantly began fetching and installing an update without my intervention and then proceeded to sign me into my accounts as normal. It didn’t even require a restart of the app! I would describe the upgrade experience as thoroughly Mac-like in its simplicity–a trend Digsby carries over to some of its chat styles which seem to be lifted straight out of Adium.

Overall, I’m impressed with Digsby enough that I’m going to use it as my primary IM application. This marks a deviation from my 7+ year (!) devotion to Trillian. I’ll also start evangelizing it to all of my PC owning friends because, honestly, who wouldn’t want a single app to handle all of their web communication? There isn’t a Mac or Linux client yet, but they have a sign-up form up to let you know when they’ll be available. If you’d like to try Digsby, Ars Technica is sponsoring 5000 invites; just enter arstechnica as the invite code in their registration form.

I’m not sure what’s keeping Cerulean Studios from moving forward with Trillian Astra, but whatever it is I hope they get that sorted out soon. Digsby is here now and has already converted this Trillian devotee. I can only imagine how many more will follow…

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Digsby Gunning for Trillian Astra’s Social/IM Aggregation Throne

• Dear Digsby, Where’s the Group Chat and In Line Text Formatting?!
• Apple’s New Anti-Windows 7 Ads Hurt My Brain
• Gamestop Dropping Zune, What Exactly is Microsoft’s Zune Strategy Now?
• Asus Starts the USB 3.0 & SATA 6Gb Hype Train
• Lamenting the Death of Helio, and How the iPhone Helped Kill It

All this talk about the HD DVD and Blu-ray format war being over has reminded me of a similar situation involving two other competing media formats. Not many people realize that the current format war was not the first “high-definition” war between Toshiba and Sony. The battle for high-definition audio supremacy has actually been going on for some time now, long before we ever caught word of these new-fangled HD video formats.

Toshiba’s DVD-Audio format, along with Sony’s Super Audio CD, both fought to be the evolutionary high-definition standard from the now ubiquitous CD. Sporting support for higher resolution audio quality, surround sound, and a wealth of features that would make any audiophile woozy, they were both fitting contenders for the next great audio format.

But don’t be surprised if you’ve never heard of them.

The Contenders

First up is DVD-Audio (DVD-A), a standard that’s obviously connected to the DVD video discs we all know and love. Launched in 2000, DVD-A was developed by the DVD Forum, a group which includes Toshiba, Philips, Pioneer, and surprisingly enough, Sony. The discs hold up to 8.5GB of data, just like your average DVD. The format supports a bit depth of 24-bit, 5.1 audio tracks encoded up to 96kHz, and 2-channel stereo tracks up to 192kHz.

In comparison, CD Audio resolution is 16-bit at a sample rate of 44.1kHz. Even if you have no idea what the numbers mean, just trust that those higher numbers make DVD-A a significant leap beyond CDs.

Super Audio CD (SACD), on the other hand, comes from Sony and Philips, the two companies behind the audio CD. It appeared in 1999, also uses a standard DVD disc as its vehicle, and is available in stereo and surround sound configurations. SACD is stored in a format called Direct Stream Digital (DSD). Unfortunately, I think it may be nearly impossible to break down the technical specifications of DSD because the only explanations I can find sound like this:

DSD is 1-bit, has a sampling rate of 2.8224 MHz, and makes use of noise shaping quantization techniques in order to push 1-bit quantization noise up to inaudible ultrasonic frequencies. This gives the format a greater dynamic range and wider frequency response than the CD.

Source: Wikipedia

Given that sci-fi sounding explanation, I’m fairly certain it sounds significantly better than standard CDs.

Fans of these formats, myself included, praise them for their record-like warmth and incredible resolution and dynamic range. If you ever get a chance to demo one of these formats in an ideal listening environment, do so. It will instantly make sense of all the technical nonsense in this section.

Backwards Compatibility

Both formats take their earlier siblings into account and offer some level of backwards compatibility. Many DVD-A discs offer Dolby Digital and DTS tracks which are playable in standard DVD players. “Hybrid” SACDs, the most popular kind, include a CD audio track on one layer of the disc, while the high resolution SACD audio content sits on another.

I guess that sort of makes up for both formats being horribly incompatible with one another. Sort of.

DualDisc, another audio disc format, aimed to introduce the benefits of higher resolution audio to consumers gradually by offering a standard CD on one side of the disc with DVD content on another. The DVD content was never standardized, which led to confusion when marketing the discs. It could include documentaries and music videos, or, it could include a DVD-A version of the album. Interestingly enough, Sony is one of the labels putting out DualDisc albums, although they make sure not to step on the toes of SACD by never including full resolution DVD-A content on their DVD sides.

You Call This a War?

Is a war fought if nobody cares? That’s what we would have to ask ourselves when considering the epic battle between DVD-A and SACD. Released at a time when most people hadn’t yet realized the full surround sound audio potential of DVDs, these formats were the answer to a problem nobody noticed.

Consumers were more than satisfied with CDs, few had the speaker and audio receiver setup to utilize these formats to their full potential, and the formats were simply too expensive and confusing. A few years after their launch, the iPod was released and the face of music changed forever. The music-going public clamored for lower-quality portable music instead of “clunky” optical discs.

Subsequently, neither format truly took off. The format war is now at a stalemate as combo DVD-A/SACD players are becoming more common. The Creative Audigy 2 sound cards supported playback of DVD-A discs, and recent versions of Power DVD on PCs support it as well. There is currently no way to play SACDs on any sort of computer.

Sony also included SACD support in the Playstation 3, although it was removed from the recent 40GB version for cost-cutting reasons. PS3 owners take note: At this time, you can only listen to SACDs if you’re using an HDMI connection to your receiver.

Parallels with the HD DVD/Blu-ray war

In reading this article, I’m sure you’ve recognized some parallels between the DVD-A/SACD fiasco and the format war we’re facing today. Some similarities I’ve noticed include:

• Forcing of next-generation formats on an unwilling public
• Formats required many consumers to buy much more equipment than just the DVD-A/SACD players
• Lower-quality digital media formats (iTunes store, online video streaming) steal much of the thunder from the higher quality formats
• Hybrid-discs are released to ease adoption of the new format
• Draconian DRM worries make the formats more restrictive to consumers
• Combo-players bring the war to a stalemate and the formats co-exist happily ever after

I’ll dig into these and other similarities in a future post, but for now, I think it’s enough that we recognize they exist. It’s probably not that unusual that there are so many similarities, after all, we should probably expect this sort of technological samsara by now. After a point, the cycles of death and rebirth that our technological formats face will become all the more predictable.

Where to Go From Here

Obviously, neither DVD-A or SACD have been wildly successful, but I wouldn’t write them off just yet. Remember that the audio CD was originally launched in 1980 and it took about a decade for it to truly take off. When it comes to traditional audio formats, it can simply take a while for the public to accept it.

Now that more consumers are considering surround sound in their home theaters, they’re also unwittingly optimizing their setups for DVD-A and SACD. If these formats can cement themselves in more players, publicize their benefits, and make the discs cheaper and more readily available, consumer adoption is sure to follow.

Let’s just hope they accomplish this before a high-definition successor to MP3 appears.

Update 1:

Just an update for anyone interested in hearing me discuss this further: My friends and I will be covering this format war and its parallels to the HD DVD/Blu-ray mess on the second episode of our podcast, The Watchers. Check it out early next week if you’re interested in this post, or just film and television in general. I promise you’ll be entertained!

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The Forgotten Format War: Toshiba’s "DVD-Audio" vs Sony’s "Super Audio CD"

• Surprise? Bluray Adoption Slows, Upconverting DVD Players Find Success
• Finally, Netflix Streaming is Coming to the PS3
• Why Xbox Live Can’t Be Free… Yet
• The Lucid Hydra 200 Makes Multi-GPU Gaming Across Video Card Vendors a Reality
• Will Sony Ever Stop Playing Catch Up with the Playstation 3?

Since Daily Bits is a technology blog, most of the work that I would have normally published here will be going there. I don’t see the need to abandon this blog entirely yet though. There are still many topics that I’m interested in that don’t quite fit the Daily Bits mold, so you can expect to see those here. Those include topics like the consumer technologies, the Singularity, and video games.

Here’s what I have at Daily Bits so far:

• Coming to Terms with Windows Vista
• The Dangers of the Blogging Rumor Mill
• Inbox 2.0 = Netvibes?
• The Failure of a la Carte Cable is a Boon for New Media

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Changes on the Horizon

• Apple’s New Anti-Windows 7 Ads Hurt My Brain
• The iPhone 3G is a Call to Arms for Mobile Computing
• Thoughts on the September 09 New York Tech Meetup
• Did You Hear? I Think Apple’s Releasing a Tablet!
• Cuil and The Trouble with Tech Blogging

I thought it would be interesting to do a bit more with my random assortment of cool links, most of which are gathered from Reddit, friends, and a variety of other places online. To this end, I will start a series of posts where I share useful links and why I found them worthwhile.

• Getting Buried in Digg, Not as Bad as it Sounds: If you hadn’t noticed, my last post on Al Gore’s contributions to the start of the internet was unceremoniously buried when it approached 70 diggs. I’m sad that there are those on digg close-minded enough that they would seek to silence such an important story, because it could have easily made the front page and have been read by thousands more. This article goes analyzes digg traffic and shows that getting buried doesn’t necessarily kill the traffic coming to your post.
• Harry Knowles chooses HD-DVD: After remaining fairly quiet on the topic of HD discs, Harry Knowles, the founder of Aint It Cool News has officially thrown down the gauntlet and declared favor for HD-DVD over Bluray. This news is significant because Sony has been declaring that Bluray has won the HD-disc war for some time now. Personally, I still think HD-DVD is the more logical choice for the successor to DVD. You can read more about the war between Bluray and HD-DVD in this Amherst Bytes article.
• 17 Firefox Extensions to Make Blogging Easy: I’m really becoming fond of life hacking sites for great articles like this. To be honest, I had never heard of many of the extensions listed, but now I’m going to work to make them a part of my workflow.
• Speed Up File Copying with Teracopy: I often have to move large files around at work, and I find the single most annoying thing about file-copying in Windows is that it’s incredibly dumb when faced with a corrupted file. For example, if I’m moving 5GB of data and there happens to be a corrupted MP3 in there, Windows will throw an error and cancel the copy job. When this happens you have to sift through each individual folder and sub-folder among the files you want to copy, and figure out which files are actually salvageable. Teracopy prevents stupidity like this and also offers faster copying as well.

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Del.icio.us Link Stroll: Getting Buried is OK, Harry Chooses HD-DVD…

• Cuil and The Trouble with Tech Blogging
• Apple’s New Anti-Windows 7 Ads Hurt My Brain
• I’m a Firefox Extension Addict, and Why That’s Good for Mozilla
• Windows Mobile 7 with Zune Integration Coming Soon?
• Ubuntu’s Fiesty Fifth Birthday, And Linux As A Desktop Solution

It all started when I decided to do a clean installation of Windows XP. I was having an annoying issue that was preventing me from loading XP without using the “Last known config” option at startup, and multiple repair installations did nothing to solve the issue. Since that installation was nearly three years old, I decided it was worthwhile to just start from scratch. Luckily, I keep my XP installation in a separate 15GB partition just for this sort of occasion. With XP in its own space, I can just format that and leave all of my other data intact–at least that’s how it’s supposed to work.

I was in a heated “Gears of War” multiplayer match while casually stepping through the ugly first portion of the XP installation, and I would later realize this is where things went horribly wrong. While choosing the partition to install Windows on I received an unusual screen that I really should have paid more attention to. I was actually attempting to do a “soft” reinstallation at first, wherein only the C:\Windows directory is overwritten, when I got a message saying that Windows couldn’t be installed on that partition without reformatting. Since I didn’t mind losing the data on that partition anyway, I shrugged off the error and proceeded reformat.

Upon completing the Windows installation, I was shocked to realize that two of my most important partitions were missing. I quickly checked the status of my disks in the Disk Management utility and noted with horror that my Windows disk now only had one partition. I had trouble sleeping that night.

I’ve helped people through file recoveries before using various undelete software, but I’ve never had to restore entire lost partitions, so I considered myself royally screwed. Based on the advice of this ExtremeTech article, I procured a demo of Iolo’s Search and Recover 4. After a few hours of scanning with the software’s partition recovery function it couldn’t find a thing. All hope was lost.

In even further desperation, I came across SoftLogica’s Handy Recovery 3.0. Not expecting much, I let the software scan for the disk partitions for a few hours and tried to put the whole situation out of mind by numbing the pain with even more “Gears of War.” I know it’s partially to blame for this whole thing, but the game is too damned addictive to stay mad at ;) When I got back to my computer, I nearly fell out of my seat. Handy had successfully found all of the partitions I lost, and seemed eager to put my mind at rest. I whipped out my credit card, and the game was on.

The next day I received the serial number at work and quickly plugged it in when I got home. After a few hours of recovery, Handy had successfully restored nearly 60GB of data I previously had thought was lost. There isn’t much more to say about the product, all I know is that it saved me from near catastrophe, and I would recommend it to every PC user. It was only $40, which is actually on the low-end for disk recovery software. The UI is clean, the program is bug free from what I can tell, and it can perform miracles. What better praise can I give it?

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Hard Disk Catastrophe: How to Recover Data from a Formatted Hard Drive

• Finally, Netflix Streaming is Coming to the PS3
• Ubuntu’s Fiesty Fifth Birthday, And Linux As A Desktop Solution
• Apple’s New Anti-Windows 7 Ads Hurt My Brain
• Gamestop Dropping Zune, What Exactly is Microsoft’s Zune Strategy Now?
• My Thoughts on the Palm Pre