The Blu-Ray versus HD-DVD fight that has been going on over the past couple of years has had all the hallmarks of any good format war, mainly that they’re bad for business, and bad for consumers. Getting anybody to go out and invest in your new HD disc format is hard enough, especially when normal DVD’s are already so entrenched. But when there are two competing formats trying to do the same thing, most consumers decide it’s too risky to choose either, and nobody wins.
Thanks to the inclusion in the Playstation 3, along with strong studio support from the start (it helps when you own one yourself), Sony’s Blu-Ray has been seen as the market leader for a while now, although sales of each format weren’t too far apart thanks to HD-DVD players being significantly cheaper. But in the end, price just proved to not be enough, and with a number of announcements this year from people like Netflix, Best Buy and Walmart saying they would only be supporting Blu-Ray, the writing really did seem to be on the wall for HD-DVD.
And then, in a surprising twist, after hundreds of millions of dollars spent, Toshiba took HD-DVD round the back of the barn, and shot it dead. In a press release this week they announced that they would no longer be producing players, discs, or continuing to promote the format.
Wow.
Never before have I seen a company just admit defeat so readily. Formats normally die slowly as less and less people buy them, and stores fill up more and more with their competitors. Sony never pulled the gun on Betamax or Minidisc with quite the same ferocity, they just kept on going as VHS and the Compact Disc rolled over the top of them. But not Toshiba, they knew they were down and there wasn’t really any comeback, so they did the sensible thing both for their shareholders and potential HD format consumers everywhere and simply held up their hands, congratulated the victor, and moved on. And I think you have to applaud them for that.
Now does anybody want to buy a barely used Xbox 360 HD-DVD add-on?
At last. There is now one good Perl editor for OS X. Komodo Edit.
Komodo was promising a couple of years ago when it first came out for OS X, and I actually bought it at the time. But when the switch to Intel came, it was a while before Komodo followed, making it a bit slow and clunky to use. Quite recently I got an email from them saying a new version was out and that I should upgrade, but when I looked, the previously cheap personal edition was gone and it was now quite an expensive application. I didn’t follow up on it.
But then I found out today that the personal edition became Komodo Edit, which in turn became free. So I did what any OS X using Perl programmer would do and headed over there as quickly as I could and you know what, finally somebody gets it.
It has tabs. You can open them whenever you want, no project required (but yes, it has projects too). It has FTP opening and saving in a sensible FTP dialog, complete with bookmarks and the ability to type in your path. When you select a block and press tab, it indents, rather than replacing it with a tab. When you end a line with a brace and press enter, the next line is indented. When you put a brace on a line on it’s own which is already indented, it decreases the indent for you. These (and many more) are the absolute basics of what a code editor should have but which no other Mac text editor gets right. It’s been driving me crazy for years that not one developer has used Editplus or UltraEdit on the PC to see how this should be done and instead keep producing crap like Textmate and Textwrangler.
What’s extra special is the features it has which are the cream on top, like code-sensing for when you type a function name and it tells you the arguments it supports, even in your own custom modules, and there’s even function auto-completion too. And in the FTP functionality (SFTP and SCP too) when you save a file and the remote copy has changed since your version, it doesn’t just warn you, it lets you see a diff of the two of them also. Genius!
Up until now I’ve actually been running a copy of Windows 2000 in vmware, just so I could run Editplus. That’s the difference this is going to make, this is the kind of thing that allows me to throw away my Windows shackles for good and solely use the Mac. I’m just sad that it’s taken almost 10 years of being a Mac owner for somebody to get this right.
Remember when the Star Wars: Episode 1 teaser-trailer hit? Go and check it out now if you don’t remember it. Or the follow up full trailer. Quite simply, it’s fabulous. It is, on some levels, better than the movie that followed. The special effects work, the performances don’t look too bad, it sounds like Star Wars, the music fits, and the last 25 seconds blasts through shot after shot, synched up with the visuals and leaving you (remember, this is back before you actually saw the final product) crying out for more.
I pick Star Wars as a point of comparison, since they’re both Lucasfilm properties, and it would nice if the influence rubbed off. But instead what we’ve been given is like some sort of hack job, knocked together by an intern let loose on the editing software for the first time. The first 36 seconds is spent showing us parts of previous films. If you’ve seen the previous films you know exactly who Indy is and are already excited, and if you haven’t, then this isn’t going to change your mind. Then follows another minute and a half or so of badly paced cuts, questionable CG, bad wigs, bad acting, bad jokes, and musical sync up so bad that about 10 seconds before the end of the trailer the music actually has to start again because it’s run out, before hurriedly having to cut back out again. And do we really need a CG Indiana Jones logo to finish it all?
I had hoped that Spielberg and Lucas would realise that it was in their best interests to keep the effects and sets as practical as possible, and not resort to digitally creating quite so much, but alas this doesn’t seem to be the case. Nobody would say the previous films lacked scale, but at least when cars/tanks/trunks faced off against each other in those, it didn’t look like the drop off the cliff beside them was painted in by an ILM artist.
If you want to check it yourself, here are some hi-res direct links to the international version (which doesn’t have the guns painted out by the MPAA) - Small, Medium, Bigger than your screen.
I am Richard Smith, part time genius, full time procrastinator. I make my bed in Hamilton, Scotland, from where I cast my eye over the Internet like a king surveying his land.
