Blu-ray is in a death spiral. 12 months from now Blu-ray will be a videophile niche, not a mass market product. With only a 4% share of US movie disc sales and HD download capability arriving, the Blu-ray disc Association (BDA) is still smoking dope. Even $150 Blu-ray players won’t save it. 16 months ago I called the HD war for Blu-ray. My bad. Who dreamed they could both lose? Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory Delusional Sony exec Rick Clancy needs to put the crack pipe down and really look at the market dynamics. In a nutshell: consumers drive the market and they don’t care about Blu-ray’s theoretical advantages. Especially during a world-wide recession. Remember Betamax? SACD? Minidisk? Laser Disk? Read further »

Sony on Tuesday outlined its restructuring plans amid a downturn in consumer electronics, bloated inventory and weak demand for its products. The larger question is whether Sony will ever get its unwieldy management structure right. First, the headlines. Sony is restructuring to boost profitability. As part of that move, Sony plans to eliminate 8,000 electronics jobs–out of 160,000. That sum equates to roughly 5 percent. If you toss in subcontractors Sony is cutting 16,000 positions. Sony’s goal is to revamp manufacturing sites–closing two in France–and save 100 billion yen by the fiscal year ending March 31, 2010. But like a lot of Read further »

There’s talk that Microsoft has signed off internally on the Beta 1 Windows 7 bits. Word is the build number of what goes out to testers will be 6.1.7000.0.081212-1400. What do all those digits mean? And when will testers actually get their hands on the code? Windows power users and long-time beta testers probably need no explanation, but the rest of us undoubtedly could stand some schooling. Here’s how it works: 6 = Major NT OS version number (Windows 7, as the Softies have said, is built on the Windows Vista kernel, which they call NT Version 6) 1 = Minor version number 7000 = Major build number 0 = Minor build number (if needed; otherwise Read further »

Remember that speech where Steve Ballmer quoted “iPhone is a loser” ? If no, checkout the video below. Just watch the way he laughs at the iPhone. Question: What is Microsoft? Answer: Something that bothers betrays and jeorpadizes consumers and industry. It aint Steve ballmer’s fault, its in Microsoft’s blood to be a loser all the time. Criticizing the best things and then following the same, thats what is called as “Microsoft”. And now see, what they are doing for the iPhone. Microsoft on Monday released its first application built specifically for Apple’s iPhone. Dubbed Seadragon, the application allows users to browse high-resolution images, according to information provided by Read further »

Many-core chips are the great hope for more performance but Sandia National Lab simulations show they are about to hit a memory wall. How bad is it? Some background Memory bandwidth is the limiting performance factor in CPUs. If you can’t feed the beast it stops working, simple as that. John von Neumann – your PC/Mac is a von Neumann architecture machine – made the point in his very technical First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC (pdf) . . . the main bottleneck, of an automatic very high speed computing device lies: At the memory. Here’s the ugly results of Sandia’s simulations: Read further »

Wind River’s Multicore Software Hypervisor solution permits multiple embedded OSes to run on a single device. Wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to actually choose between an iPhone, a BlackBerry, or a Google Android? What if all those device operating systems could run simultaneously on your handheld? Read further »