Blu-Ray the winner, Microsoft fined $1.3 billion

By no means are the two related; Blu-Ray winning the format wars of 2007 (and a bit of 2008) has little to do with the E.U.’s judgement that Microsoft charged too much for interoperability.

Blu-Ray and HD-DVD have really been going at it, and with the withdrawal of their HD-DVD players from the market by Toshiba (the last manufacturer of HD-DVD players), HD-DVD is officially dead. There were so many benefits that I feel it had, but Sony had the PS3 with which they could BUNDLE another product.

By taking the risk and including a Blu-Ray drive in their PlayStation 3, Sony was able to push the Blu-Ray technology into more than a million homes in North America, and effectively leverage the appeal of one of their products (PlayStation) to introduce customers to another (Blu-Ray).

If this is sounding like what Microsoft did during the browser wars (after which they won), you’re right. There is the element of BUNDLING. But what Sony has done was not illegal under antitrust laws. (Until a lawyer can come along and prove me wrong by winning a lawsuit against Sony, I stand firmly behind that statement.) They do NOT have a monopoly in gaming consoles: Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft are all dominant players, with the Xbox sales at the highest, and the Wii in hyped demand.

Since Sony did not make use of a monopoly to try and gain a monopoly in another field, they cannot be held culpable under law.

However, they did gain a monopoly: since Blu-Ray is effectively the only remaining high definition, large storage disc medium, it will surely dominate the field.

In other news…

Microsoft has been ordered by the European Commission to pay $1.3 billion (USD equivalent) in fines for failing to comply with a 2004 ruling until October 2007. Microsoft was requested to open its software and protocol specifications to other developers, but they have charged large sums for any use of the documents.

Recently, Microsoft has claimed that it will make available the official file format specifications of previously proprietary formats like .doc, .xls, and .ppt. Many are doubting whether or not they will actually do what they have claimed they will do.

There is nothing but contempt between Microsoft and the European Union. It doesn’t seem to be improving, and hopefully the European Commission can put a stop to the Microsoft-Yahoo! deal.

Will the EU fine change Microsoft? by ZDNet’s Dana Blankenhorn — I think Microsoft needs to undertake some diplomacy that will put a final, definitive line under all this. But what would you do if the EU fined you?

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Just over 1 year

We’ve just passed our 1-year anniversary 11 days ago; the first post on this site was published on February 16, 2007.

I’m still recovering from a viral illness, and will be back in business — as they say — by tomorrow.

The Geekie.org domain was successfully renewed a few days ago, and I’m moving on to transfer FreddyWare.net and renew a few of the other domains we own.

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VeCommerce Speech Technologies

VeCommerce has come out with some incredible speech recognition software. In the modern day and age, we are seeing a change in user-computer interactions that moves away from the traditional keyboard & mouse model, and further towards touch and voice.

VeCommerce’s voice recognition software is targeted to businesses that offer telephone customer service, such as banking, order-out restaurants (like Pizza Hut). Their IVR (interactive voice response) solutions are great for every day applications, whether it’s accessing a bank account over the telephone, ordering pizza, or getting insurance quotes.

Complex IVR’s like those offered by VeCommerce can adapt easily and effectively to many different types of voices; a good speech recognition system should be able to adjust to and understand any customer. Additionally, the caller should be able to understand it; instead of offering long menu listings like “press 1 to order a Hawaiian, press 2 to customize your own toppings, press 3 to listen to our special offers…” these excellent solutions (particularly VeConnect) are great for building a brand, inspiring customer loyalty, and simply allowing them to feel comfortable interacting with a computer over the phone.

If your business is looking for these sorts of speech technologies, VeCommerce is the place to go. This Australian firm has been providing speech recognition software since 1997, and is a trustworthy company you can rely on for your business.

Brought to you from our friends at VeCommerce.

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Fantastic lunar eclipse yesterday night

Yesterday evening, I posted a post about the lunar eclipse, letting readers know that it was happening. I had taken a few pictures, but they’re not good enough to publish.

However, I’d like to direct your attention to some articles on Canadian news sites: CTV and newsdurhamregion.com.

One could also see a very bright Saturn to the left of the moon. Some on the West Coast reported also seeing the trail of the U.S. satellite (with secret technologies) that was shot down by the U.S. navy — read this Reuters article.

CTV.ca posted the following two images on their site; these are very much representative of the beautiful sight last night.

newsdurhamregion.com posted the following two shots:

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Lunar eclipse tonight

There will be a lunar eclipse tonight at about 20:43 EST, visible all across Canada, and parts of the U.S. It’s interesting, because I just looked out the window and I see a bright moon in a clear sky. It’s going to be a very entertaining — albeit slow — experience. (This isn’t very relevant to the blog’s major topics, though.)

Sources say that at 22:01 EST, the Earth’s shadow will completely block the moon. Reddish light from the sun will cause the moon to appear eerily irregular. The Globe and Mail has an informative article.

Stay tuned… I will strive to take pictures and post them tomorrow.

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Compressing JavaScript, CSS, and plain HTML using zlib.output_compression in PHP

Today, a newly-registered user “jcapshaw” noted (on an older blog post about using zlib for output compression in PHP) that he wanted to send JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files through PHP for gzip compression. Clearly, as I pointed out in that blog post, the PHP developers prefer zlib.output_compression over the ob_start(’ob_gzhandler’) method, even though the zlib.output_compression method takes more work to set up. Why shouldn’t we apply it to other text-based files as well?

On one of my developments, RHHSMusic.com, I use several optimization methods recommended by the Yahoo! Developer Network, including:

• CSS sprites (combining navigational images into one larger file and using CSS to show only part of the image)
• Expires header (telling the browser how long the file would be valid, and for how long it wouldn’t need to re-fetch the file)
• Gzipping components of the site, including normal PHP/XHTML documents, ALL CSS stylesheets, and most JavaScript files
• Placing stylesheets in the <head> section
• Placing JavaScript includes at the very bottom of the page, just before </body>
• Not including site-wide CSS & JS in the HTML page
• Using multiple hostnames (javascript.rhhsmusic.com and media.rhhsmusic.com) to encourage parallel downloading
• Using ETags to identify when a file has changed

The majority of the above are accomplished through PHP; whether it’s PHP includes, PHP classes, or using PHP to gzip CSS & JS.

This article discusses how that is accomplished.

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