I did not have the time to watch the entire speech by Bill Gates, if your time is a premium like mine check out this 5 minute highlight!

A fascinating announcement by Warner Brothers should ensure the demise of the HD-DVD format and thereby allowing Sony to enjoy its first real format victory. In a move that seems to echo back the historical figure of Benedict Arnold, Warner Brothers has jumped ship from HD-DVD to Blu-Ray!

It was Warner Brothers support of an alternate form to Blu-Ray that started this whole thing in the first place:

In March 2002, the forum voted to approve a proposal endorsed by Warner Brothers. and other motion picture studios that involved compressing HD content onto dual-layer DVD-9 discs.

I must admit that my decision was made when Warner started distributing the Complete Matrix Trilogy in HD DVD format, together with Sony's propensity to lose format wars I thought Blu-Ray would lose for sure. When the triple layer (51Gb) out did the dual layer of the Blu-Ray (50Gb), with almost identical production costs I thought for sure that it was over.

Now that the Matrix will no longer be available on HD-DVD I am on the Blu-Ray band wagon!

I have been using Paint.NET for several years now it is a better than good for image and photo manipulation, and considering that it is free it becomes the obvious replacement for the native MSPaint.

I have been doing a bit of basic Windows programming recently and needed to create some icon files. I found this excellent add-in to Paint.NET that allows you to save files to directly to the icon format in Paint.NET.

The installation simply requires that you place the IcoCur.dll into C:\Program Files\Paint.NET\FileTypes folder!

Enjoy!

I was looking at the DataSet object the other day and realized that there is both a Copy and a Clone methods. They are designed to fulfil similar functions which the following code highlights.

The Clone method is designed to only copy the structure i.e. the schema, relations and constraints.

The Copy method is designed to replicate the structure and the associated data.

DataSet data1 = new DataSet();
DataSet data2 = new DataSet();

System.IO.FileStream fs = new System.IO.FileStream(@"C:\test\test.xml", System.IO.FileMode.Open);
data1.ReadXml(fs);

data2 = data1.Clone();
foreach (DataRow dr in data2.Tables[1].Rows)
{
    Console.WriteLine(dr[0].ToString()); // We called the Clone method
}

 

data2 = data1.Copy();
foreach (DataRow dr in data2.Tables[1].Rows)
{
    Console.WriteLine(dr[0].ToString());
}

I just noticed that Amazons MP3 beta program has received a much need endorsement from Warner Brothers (WB). They are now able to sell DRM free music from select artists in the WB catalogue.

So far this beta program allows you to purchase whole albums and some artists are available for individual MP3 downloads. I suspect WB has realized that the cash cow was escaping and people (or maybe just me) want a little flexibility, I simply do not want to by tied in to any one vendor and their DRM monopoly.

I would hope that sales of DRM free music gives life back to the idea that DRM, and specifically the contrasting methods of DRM, constitute the worst path the music industry can take. We will look back at multiple and non-compatible DRM formats with the same disdain we reserve for the MiniDisc.

I do wonder why Universal Music and now WB have decided to exclude the biggest digital music distributor (Apple) from the loop for its non-DRM music?!? Is this a collective show of strength from a weakening music industry? Or are they simply angling for a better deal with the 900lb gorilla?

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I just noticed that I am getting more space on my Gmail account (6 Gig) and while I am grateful I am wondering what percentage of the account totals people actually use. As you can see I am just about touching 4% and that is after several years of use.

Now if I could use my left over space in a SkyDrive like fashion i.e. being able upload files for storage, I believe that the additional space would be actually useful.

How much Gmail space are you using?