Revenge, they say, is a dish best eaten cold. Well, Sony must be chewing fossils, because Toshiba has given up on HD DVD…

TOKYO – Toshiba’s decision to no longer develop, make or market high-definition HD DVD players and recorders will mean consumers can start feeling more confident about buying the victorious rival technology – a Blu-ray disc player.

Analysts say competition is expected to heat up among the manufacturers of Blu-ray players and recorders, which include Japanese makers Sony Corp., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. and Sharp Corp. as well as Samsung Electronics Co. of South Korea.

In making the announcement, Toshiba Corp. President Atsutoshi Nishida said he wanted to avoid confusion among consumers…

What’s wrong with modern Ireland, in a nutshell. Plus, of course, the sales figures for SUVs.

At last, some good news for civilisation.

ABC’s magazine circulation results for the second half of 2007, out last week, arrive full of blighted hopes and clouded futures. Are young men, oozing testosterone, the key to the future? Not when you see Loaded down 30 per cent in a year, Maxim 40 per cent, and Nuts and Zoo 8.9 per cent and 12.8 per cent off the pace respectively. Boobs and booty seem to be more of a turn-off than turn-on these days. And over in the celebrity gossip enclosure, too, Heat, Now and Closer are all down around 12 per cent (with 5.4 per cent saying Goodbye! to Hello!

Yippee!

The Economist has an interesting survey section on this.

Why is government unable to reap the same benefits as business, which uses technology to lower costs, please customers and raise profits? The three main reasons are lack of competitive pressure, a tendency to reinvent the wheel and a focus on technology rather than organisation.

Governments have few direct rivals. Amazon.com must outdo other online booksellers to win readers’ money. Google must beat Yahoo!. Unless every inch of such companies’ websites offers stellar clarity and convenience, customers go elsewhere. But if your country’s tax-collection online offering is slow, clunky or just plain dull, then tough. When Britain’s Inland Revenue website crashed on January 31st—the busiest day of its year—the authorities grudgingly gave taxpayers one day’s grace before imposing penalties. They did not offer the chance to pay tax in Sweden instead…

From Technology Review

Internet2, a nonprofit advanced networking consortium in the United States, is designing a new network intended to open up large amounts of dedicated bandwidth as needed. For example, a researcher wanting to test telesurgery technologies–for which a smooth, reliable Internet connection is essential–might use the network to temporarily create a dedicated path for the experiment. Called the dynamic circuit network, its immediate applications are academic, but its underlying technologies could one day filter into the commercial Internet, and it could be used, for example, to carry high-definition video to consumers…

This might be interesting as an academic experiment, but it’s nonsense on stilts in the context of the commercial internet. You cam imagine Hollywood and the multimedia companies slavering at the prospect of ‘premium’ Internet service “with a direct connection from our studios to your home”.

From Technology Review…

Research in Motion Ltd. said customers in the United States and Canada ”experienced intermittent delays” for about three hours Monday beginning about 3:30 p.m. EST. RIM said no messages were lost, and voice and text messaging services were unaffected.

”It is too early to determine root cause at this time, but RIM does have a team addressing this issue in order to define the problem and prevent it in the future,” the company said in a statement.

The BlackBerry service, which lets users check e-mail and access other data, has become a lifeline for many business executives and is increasingly popular among consumers with smart phones like the BlackBerry Pearl.

Outages have been rare in the BlackBerry’s nine-year history, but when they do hit, subscribers who have become addicted to the gadgets are quick to unleash their fury.

”I’m mad — it’s enough already,” said a frustrated Stuart Gold, who said he gets 1,000 e-mails a day as director of field marketing for Web analytics company Omniture Inc.

Gold, who worked most of Monday on a laptop while traveling, plans to ask his company to buy him a backup smart phone from a rival like Palm Inc., which makes the Treo, in case BlackBerry service goes on the blink again.

”I don’t know what happened, I don’t care what happened. They need to save their excuses for someone who cares,” Gold said…

I sometimes get emails from readers which begin, with a reproachful air, “Since you don’t allow comments on your blog I’m emailing…”. Which is fine by me. But a post on James Cridland’s blog made me stop and think: why no comments here?

Three main reasons. The first is time, shortage of. I’m busy enough as it is. If people took the trouble to comment, then I would feel obliged to reply properly to what they wrote. As a result, blogging would take up more time, and I would do less of it. That doesn’t mean, incidentally, that I don’t admire bloggers like Quentin or Ed Felten, who do allow comments and invariably respond fully and thoughtfully. I just wish I had their capacity for hard work.

Secondly, although it’s nice to have readers (and I have no idea how many there are, because I’ve never done any kind of tracking) and I’m glad that people find this stuff worth reading and linking to, fundamentally I keep a blog for myself. I started blogging in 1998, and for the first three years or so, my blog was private. It was a personal notebook in which I kept stuff that I thought was noteworthy or useful. Because it had a search engine, it meant I could always cheat my poor memory by retrieving stuff instantly. (This, incidentally, is what started Tim Berners-Lee on the path that led to the invention of the Web.) I knew that if I had blogged about something I would always be able to find it again. This philosophy survived the switch to public blogging which took place, I think, sometime after 9/11. It’s just now that my personal notebook is publicly available to anyone who wants it.

Thirdly, one reason I took to blogging was because of Dave Winer, someone I’ve always admired, and whose Userland software I used for years. Following a link from James Cridland, I alighted on Dave’s argument about why a commenting facility is not a sine qua non for a blog. Here’s the relevant passage:

Do comments make it a blog? Do the lack of comments make it not a blog? Well actually, my opinion is different from many, but it still is my opinion that it does not follow that a blog must have comments, in fact, to the extent that comments interfere with the natural expression of the unedited voice of an individual, comments may act to make something not a blog.

We already had mail lists before we had blogs. The whole notion that blogs should evolve to become mail lists seems to waste the blogs. Comments are very much mail-list-like things. A few voices can drown out all others. The cool thing about blogs is that while they may be quiet, and it may be hard to find what you’re looking for, at least you can say what you think without being shouted down. This makes it possible for unpopular ideas to be expressed. And if you know history, the most important ideas often are the unpopular ones.

Me, I like diversity of opinion. I learn from the extremes. You think evolution is a liberal plot? Okay, I disagree, but I think you should have the right to say it, and further you should have a place to say it. You think global warming is a lie? Speak your mind brother. You thought the war in Iraq was a bad idea? Thank god you had a place you could say that. That’s what’s important about blogs, not that people can comment on your ideas. As long as they can start their own blog, there will be no shortage of places to comment. What there is always a shortage of, however, is courage to say the exceptional thing, to be an individual, to stand up for your beliefs, even if they aren’t popular.

The advent (and exponential growth) of comment spam confirms the wisdom of being chary of allowing comments. I’m responsible for a couple of other blogs which do allow them, and one of my daily chores is weeding out the fake comments by pornographers and other online hoodlums which have got past the filter. Life’s too short for this.