Posts by Ian Underhill

London Stock Exchange floored, again

@Linus Torvalds Is Not a Brit

And GM never had any control at Volvo.

Now since Volvo were owned by Ford, the Ford bean counters may have had some influence.

Gov: High-tech engineering (car making) will save Blighty

No its not the problem, well not quite

@ AC

FYI I think if you do the research you will find that the British Car plants, Toyota, Nissan and Honda, are at the very top of the efficiency world wide and are therefore competitive. To say we need to get rid of the workers in place of robots and all will be well is simply nonsense.

Its only worth replacing a human with a robot if....

a) you can do the task with a robot (not always possible)

b) it is cost effective (vision systems required to match even the village idiots abilities are expensive and complex).

c) the resulting process is better, more repeatable or more reliable.

Its Return On Investment that counts. Unlike the muppets that run Ford, GM and Chrysler here in the States, the Jap's have a very good handle on ROI and overall costs, paying more and saving money is not mutually exclusive and the Jap's understand that.

Google and Yahoo! skewer anti-DoubleClick law

Self Regulation

Just a thought, but didn't the various financial organizations tha got us into this sub-prime mortgage mess say the same thing

New York subpoenas Comcast 'reasonable network management' records

Typical big business practices

I don't do much downloading, I don't use BitTorrent or anything similar so even as a Comcast customer the traffic shaping practices are not likely to affect me.

But as a company there business practices suck. For most of us in the States there isn't any real competition when it come to Broadband Internet access, Comcast is the only choice I can't get DSL in my area. And Comcast abuse this monoploy with over priced crap products and poor customer service, so I for one hope they get really hammered for this.

Trouble its unlikely to happen, big business in the States can pretty much do what they want as long as they keep funding the politicians, lobbists etc.

Obituary: HD DVD 2002-2008

Yes, it was collusion

To Danny

No the Market didn't decide it was decide by the businesses, Rental Store's, Electronics Stores, the Studios and the marketing types. Yes Tosh tried to advance HD-DVD by selling the cheap players but it was too little too late. Had the X-Box add-on been a more reasonably priced and had retailers like Target and Best Buy been less biased things might have been different. In particular Block Busters decision to side with BluRay is perhaps the most significant. It wasn't until there were significant numbers of movies to rent that DVD really started to kill off VHS for good. The same applied to HD. No one buys a new player and lots of discs, so the lack of any rental disc to make use of your shiny new HD-DVD player was the real killer and the consumer didn't get to make that decision.

And no I'm not a fan boy I knew one would win and I'm not bothered which. Sure I have a HD-DVD player and with the free disc's I got with it it was cheaper than a replacement standard DVD with free upscaling.

No real choice

The realy sad thing is that I don't think the consumer really made the choice. It was the business deals behind the scenes that really sealed the fate of HD-DVD. The decisions by Blockbuster, Target, Best Buy etc to favour BluRay is what real counted in the end. If the consumer had better access to the titles available, it might have been a different story.

To the average consumer there wasn't really a battle. When they visited the local rental store they saw lots of BluRay and no HD-DVD's. When they shopped at Best Buy or Target they would have noticed that the new release movies were frequently available on DVD and BluRay but only occasionally on HD-DVD. Try finding "The Brave One" or "Elizabeth- The golden age" on HD-DVD, then look for "Across the Universe" on BluRay

So its the businessmen, not the consumer that killed HD-DVD and thats sad.