Sony

Blu-ray price hike.


According to an article at the SMH, the price of Blu-ray players has gone up 5% since the announcement that Blu-ray won the format wars.

To be perfectly honest, I’m surprised it isn’t the discs themselves not only for royalties for other companies to make, but also for the movies they come out on (ie, hikes on two seperate fronts).

This hike in players isn’t surprising. No more competition from another format, so manufacturers can afford to charge more for the product now as they’re only competing against other manufacturers of the same format.

Source: SMH.

You can’t help but laugh.


Sony, infamous for their proprietry formats, DRM, rootkits, and coming down VERY hard on anyone who doesn’t use their products exactly the way they demand (including plugging a PS3 in to a powerboard), have been caught out as being the hypocrits you’d expect them to be.

PointDev, a French software company that makes Windows administration tools, received a call from a Sony BMG IT employee for support. After Sony BMG supplied a pirated license code for Ideal Migration, one of PointDev’s products, the software maker was able to mandate a seizure of Sony BMG’s assets. The subsequent raid revealed that software was illegally installed on four of Sony BMG’s servers. The Business Software Alliance, however, believes that up to 47 percent of the software installed on Sony BMG’s computers could be pirated.

Comedy gold I tells ya.

Source: Ars Technica.

Blu-ray made usable.


The next-gen DVD war was won unfortunately by sony, a company renowned for proprietary formats, not playing well with other products/companies, and rootkits.

Fortunately, the good people at SlySoft have worked their magic and made the Blu-ray format usable.

Richard Doherty of the Envisioneering Group will have to revise his statement from July, 2007 regarding BD+: “BD+, unlike AACS which suffered a partial hack last year, won’t likely be breached for 10 years”. It is worth mentioning that since he made that statement only eight months have gone by.

Source: BoingBoing.