Tilly, in our apple tree, following the unexpected arrival of an energetic puppy.
Daily Archives: August 23, 2005
Farming today
Comberton, near Cambridge.
Spoon feeding
Photographed at a dinner in the Royal Society of Arts in July. Note the highly ornamental ceiling.
Betamax v. VHS, Round 2
History repeats itself, said Marx, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. There are two competing standards for the next generation of DVD disks. One, Blu-ray, developed by Sony, stores 25 GB on a disk. The other, HD DVD, created by a consortium led by Toshiba, stores 15 GB. Needless to say, they are incompatible.
The commercial madness of this is obvious to all concerned, but nobody wants to give way. And now, talks about a possible compromise have apparently been abandoned. Rational consumers will sit on their hands until a clear victor emerges — which could take a while. (At a time when sales of DVDs seem to be stagnating.) Sony’s Betamax was technically superior, but lost out to VHS. Blu-ray is technically superior to HD DVD….
More… And I’d forgotten about the daft DRM technologies proposed for the new formats. Fortunately, Ed Felten hasn’t.
Window shopping in Berne
Photographed by Dale in Berne, Switzerland.
Blair’s snortling location revealed
It turns out that he was in Barbados after all. I missed the coverage of Robin Cook’s funeral because we were on hols, but wondered why Blair didn’t attend. It seemed to me to be an error of judgement, not to mention a lapse of taste. And of course I laughed at John McCririck’s crack about the Prime Minister “snortling in his paid-for holiday home”. But according to the Belfast Telegraph, the Cook family asked Blair not to come because they didn’t want the funeral turning into a military and security circus. So it looks as though I was wrong — as indeed was McCririck. Nice word “snortling”, though. Must remember it.
Amazon shorts
Here’s an interesting development. According to The Register,
Amazon.com is to start selling electronic downloads of short stories, single chapters of books and even single scenes from novels as part of a new section called Amazon Shorts.
At the moment this looks like being a US-only deal, and each download will cost just 49 cents.
The idea is that readers will be able to sample new authors at very little cost, or buy updates to books they already own or to read alternative endings to favourite stories.
This is a great idea. No excessive DRM either.