the.[ED]ition

With a press release today, Toshiba officially announced that they would no longer be producing anything HD-DVD, ending the format war with Sony’s Blu-Ray. They also said that they had no plans to produce Blu-Ray products for the time being and all HD-DVD production will cease in March. This is probably bad news for anyone who shelled out the cash for a HD-DVD player or Microsoft’s HD-DVD add-on for the Xbox 360. I admit, I was lured by the attractive price tag as well but now I’m glad I decided to wait awhile before going in either direction. I saw some HD-DVD players at local stores today going for $129. Of course, they’ll all be entirely useless as there won’t be any new titles on them.

Toshiba Corporation today announced that it has undertaken a thorough review of its overall strategy for HD DVD and has decided it will no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players and recorders. This decision has been made following recent major changes in the market. Toshiba will continue, however, to provide full product support and after-sales service for all owners of Toshiba HD DVD products.

This ends months of speculation as studio after studio jumped ship and ran to Sony but I think the real nail-in-the-coffin was the recent announcement that Wal-Mart would exclusively back Blu-Ray.

This is, however, good news for consumers (well, maybe not the consumers that shelled $600 for a HD-DVD player) since we now know what to buy and maybe prices will continue to fall. I, for one, will now be picking up a PS3…although I might wait for that cool white one to be released.

I say almost because it’s not finalized as far as I know but all parties have agreed on the deal and the freakin’ Writer’s Strike, which has deprived us of everything on TV for the last couple months, is finally all but over. Many believe that the upcoming Oscars and the canceled Golden Globes had a big impact on the decisions made but I really can’t see why. I know some people make a big fuss about awards shows but I can’t see why. Why watch four hours of boring speeches? I prefer to just read about them in the paper the next morning.

Anyways, let’s hope this means all our favorite shows like The Office, How I Met Your Mother and Heroes can return and we can all stop rotting our brains with all this god forsaken reality television and…ugh, Prison Break.

Not quite sure what the deal entails but the strike was over profit sharing on digital media such as…say…television show episodes downloaded off iTunes and the sort. Hopefully the cease-fire lasts so we never have to deal with this crap again.

Well, other than John McCain is the clear leader in the Republican primary.

The race has been extremely tight in the last couple weeks between Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton and yesterday did nothing but make it even closer. All major media outlets are reporting different figures with CNN projecting Clinton in the lead while MSNBC has Obama holding a slight edge. This is probably going to go down to the wire, folks.

We will probably see two affects of the tight Democratic primary race in the next few days. One, the longer this goes on, the more of an advantage Obama has. Seriously, Obama and his staff raised an absurd $32 million dollars in January and has the obvious money lead over Clinton right now.

Secondly, the split might give McCain a bit more steam as the indecisiveness of the Democrats increases. I’m sure the Republican camp is trying to push for this, although I think they’d rather have Clinton as an opponent than Obama.

Anyways, it’ll be interesting to see how this develops…even for Canadians like me. As much as I hate to admit it, this election has a serious global impact…especially after the debacle that we call the Bush administration.

I thought someone was joking when I first heard this but then I saw it pop up on some legitimate news outlets.

Seriously? Wow, this might go down as one of the bigger deals of our time if Yahoo accepts the $44.6 billion dollar offer Microsoft put in to purchase the search engine giant, which has been reporting decreased profits for some time, probably due to the fierce competition with Google. Stock prices have fallen 46% since reaching $34.08 in October. Jerry Yang announced earlier this week plans to lay off 1,000 members of the Yahoo staff in order to restructure the company.

Apparently, according to BBC, this deal has been talked about for awhile now but nothing has seriously happened til now. It’ll be interesting to see how this affects…well, the rest of the freakin’ world.

Prior to scoring a decisive victory in South Carolina, Barack Obama was asked in the Democratic Presidential Primary debate whether or not he believes Bill Clinton was, in fact, America’s first black president.

…seriously, who asks stuff like this?!

However, he whips out an impressive answer…especially at the end so be sure to catch the last 15 seconds or so. And is that Quincy Jones and Lando-frickin’-Calrissian I see in the audience?