April 2007 Archives

I have been watching the issues with both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray since their respective releases regarding features and firmware. It has made me question if both were released too soon and not allowed to mature sufficiently in development? I have an almost 10 year old Sony DVP-S7000 DVD player that still plays every DVD I have tried on it. This player was one of the first ones released and still works with discs with all the latest features. Sure it is missing progressive, DTS and upconverting but those weren't really in the original DVD spec as far as I know and aren't required to get discs to work.

With HD-DVD it seems the players were at least hardware feature complete on day one. However from a firmware and software feature standpoint the HD-DVD players still appear to be under development. The first gen Toshiba players are on the sixth firmware release it seems and the second gen on third or fourth. Some of the updates being bug / compatibility fixes and others adding / enabling features that seem to have been in the original spec and should have been in the players.

Blu-Ray is in an even worse position it seems. The first gen and even 1.5 gen players it now seems aren't even hardware complete. Missing features such as dual video decoders and Ethernet which appear to be part of the newer 2.0 Blu-Ray spec. Also as with HD-DVD there have been various firmware updates for most (all?) players to fix bugs and add features that were part of the spec but weren't in the shipping box. The whole confusion around BD-J seems to be a mess as well, such as when it is required and when it will be implemented in software.

What happened this time around? Were the specs not done? Did the manufacturers not properly implement the spec? Are the software producers making discs out of spec, possibly because they couldn't really find out what the spec is? Was it the race between the two camps to get out the door first?

I am sure some will point out that early DVD players had issues as well, especially first and second gen Toshiba. However the fact that some players from that era did work I tend to think it was Toshiba's fault in design / manufacturing.

I am also wondering when this will all be ironed out so those who don't read AVS (and those that do I guess) can feel safe in buying a player that fully supports the spec and won't need upgrading? I look forward to that day.

I currently have the HD-DVD drive for the Xbox 360 so I am already enjoying HD discs.  Also I am looking forward to seeing how the new Samsung UP-5000

The summer movie season, which is starting early this year with Spiderman 3 on May 4th, is jam packed with sequels.  I actually started looking and it is almost a sequel a week between now and September.  Between May 4th and September 21st there are 14 sequels coming out.   The links go to Rotten Tomatoes since that is where I got the info.  Check it out:

May

May 4th - Spiderman 3

May 11th - 28 Weeks Later

May 18th - Shrek the Third

May 25th - Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

June

June 8th - Ocean's Thirteen and Hostel: Part II

June 15th - The Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer

June 22nd - Evan Almighty

June 29th - Live Free or Die Hard

July

July 4th - Transformers (ok remake rather than sequel)

July 13th - Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

August

August 3rd - The Bourne Ultimatum

August 10th - Rush Hour 3

August 31st - Halloween (Again more remake than sequel)

September

September 21st - Resident Evil: Extinction

Last night Kelly and I went to the Blue Man Group's How to be a Megastar 2.0 Tour.  We were originally supposed to go with Karen and her friend as well and she actually got the tickets.  However she had other plans come up.  She actually ended up selling her pair on eBay and made a profit.  The people who bought her tickets missed the opening act and showed up just before the Blue Man came on.  We were just wondering if they were going to show.

I had gone to one of the previous tours called Complex but Kelly had never really seen or heard the Blue Man.  The previous time I saw them was in a smaller venue usually used for plays and symphony's.  This time it was at a 10,000 seat arena.  The arena was 80% full, the upper deck had some seats available but nothing in lower levels.

The opening act was Mike Kelm.  He was a audio/video dj.  He was scratching and mixing using video and audio.  It was a good warmup for the Blue Man and lasted maybe 20 minutes.

The Blue Man performance was probably about 50% of stuff that I had seen before on the complex tour.  The other stuff was a mix of the Megastar stuff and other new stuff.  I really enjoyed it, even the stuff I was seeing again.  There was a fair amount of audience interaction as well.

One thing that this show had that I don't remember as much was magic or feats of skill type stuff.  They did some tricks with throwing marshmallows to each other.  They also threw marshmallows into the crowd and I ended up with one.  Didn't eat since it had bounced around before getting to me.

It was a fun show and would highly recommend it if you can make it.  One other interesting note is the age range.  There was everything from 4 to 70+ there.  It was a little wider than I was expecting.  Oh and at this show the waving of cell phones with lit up screens replaced the old waving of lighters, never seen that before.

SP2 has some changes in the way SNMP is handling printer queues. It now does multiple SNMP threads for the printer queues instead of 1 round robin. To resolve this, check if your printer's SNMP is working properly.
To workaround, in the Printers and Faxes folder,
File > Server Properties Goto Ports Tab > Click the offline Port > Configure Port
Uncheck "SNMP Status Enable"
OK

This will turn off SNMP querying and set the printer to always Online.

This is essentially disabling the detection of printer state, but it will allow the printer to work. This only effected some of my Canon copiers not HP or Xerox printers.