HD-DVD pronounced dead; film at 11

The high-definition DVD format war is over.  The New York Times declared HD-DVD dead on Saturday after Wal-mart announced it would carry only Blu-Ray once its current stock of HD-DVD products is sold.  This morning, Toshiba, who developed HD-DVD, announced that Toshiba will cease production of HD-DVD equipment, and terminate all HD-DVD operastions by the end of March.

Though the latest development is a huge setback, Mr. Nishida said Toshiba was still committed to electronics and it planned to rethink its vision for the business.  In a hint of the direction the company might take, he said Toshiba might think about its role in the online video-downloading market more seriously.  Toshiba has no plans to start selling Blu-ray players, he said.

[...]

Though HD DVD's defeat will clear up much of the confusion over high-definition DVDs among consumers, analysts say consumer electronics makers will now have to convince consumers that the crisper images on Blu-ray players are worth upgrading to.  And companies like Sony and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., the maker of Panasonic products, which had joined together to fight HD DVD will now be competing in earnest with each other.

Emphasis on the last sentence mine.  Watch for a serious price war on Blu-Ray players and recorders, coming soon to electronics stores near you.

This is bad for Toshiba, but good for consumers.  Blu-Ray was clearly the superior format from the very start; many of the design decisions in HD-DVD were driven by the desire for the cheapest possible switchover from SD to HD disc mastering and pressing, rather than any actual technical superiority.

(WSJ article is restricted; full text appears below)

( "Toshiba Exits HD DVD Business, Ceding Market to Sony's Blu-ray" )

Because you suck, and eBay hates you.

(To paraphrase an oft-heard meme on guns.)

Apparently eBay is planning rules changes ... and the rules changes are good for eBay, good for a few major corporate sellers on eBay, good for rogue buyers who try to extort free items out of sellers by threatening negative feedback, but bad for everyone else.

Fifth, they instituted "Seller Rewards".  Essentially, if you meet certain criteria as a seller you can earn 15% credit on your account.  The catch is that you have to sell 1,000 dollars or more on your account every month and have to have a 4.8 rating on all your "stars".  I feel that these guidelines are impossible to reach and that they were designed to be impossible to reach on purpose so that Ebay, yet again, would not have to actually pay out the discounts.  To give you an example of how hard these are to reach, out of Ebay's top 500 Powersellers (These people are the creme [sic] of the crop on Ebay and make lilke $100,000 a month on Ebay) ... anyway out of the top 500 of them, only SEVEN qualify for the 15% discount.  SEVEN.

Included among other changes:  Sell 20 items in a month, get negative or even neutral feedback on one of them for any reason, and forget about any of your sales ever appearing in an eBay search listing again.  Also, if you're a seller, you will no longer be able to leave negative feedback for buyers — even for non-payment or negative-feedback extortion.

ebay.  Because we never said anything about not being evil.

"There is no dark side of the moon really."

"As a matter of fact, it's all dark."

Or it will be, tomorrow.  NASA has the details:  Total eclipse of the moon, February 20, 2008.  The eclipse will be visible from South America and most of North America (on Feb. 20) as well as Western Europe, Africa, and western Asia (on Feb. 21).  Here on the East Coast of the United States, totality will extend from 2201 to 2251 EST.  Follow the link to find timezone-specific visibility maps.

(I don't believe I scooped the astounding dr_nebula on this.)