Now, when I say “doomed”, I don’t mean Blu-ray DVDs will be gone by 2010. I’m just predicting that by the time next January rolls around, it will be completely clear to everyone that Blu-ray DVDs are not going to achieve anything close to the success of their standard-definition brethren. In short, Blu-ray DVD’s are not a successor to normal DVDs, and 2010 is going to be the year of the movie download.

In The New York Times article, Blu-ray supporters are optimistic that the falling price of Blu-ray players (i.e. sub-$200) will finally prompt their widespread adoption. Unfortunately, said supporters don’t seem to understand that 2009 is also the year of a giant global recession, and back when we weren’t in the giant recession (like last holiday season), Blu-ray player’s still sold for $400 dollars. Even worse, up until one year ago, Blu-ray was still in the midst of an absurdly drawn out format war with HD DVDs (RIP), which further encouraged sharp-eyed buyers to hold off.

According to Nielsen, about 25% percent of households have a high-definition TV (I got me a big one!), but last November the Wall Street Journal reported that less than 2% of households have a standalone Blu-ray player. Since Playstation 3 also plays Blu-ray DVDs, the percentage of households with Blu-ray buyability is actually closer to 7%, but many of those don’t necessarily HDTVs. Finally, even though it looks like holiday Blu-ray sales were stronger than expected, the number of households with blu-ray players doesn’t appear to have increased by more than 1%.

Now consider the competition: Currently (and while you’re reading this even) you can go to itunes or amazon, download an HD movie, and proceed to watch that movie, in high-definition, on your already high-definition computer screen. You can also connect your computer to your (HD)TV for $25-$50. If you don’t much care for dealing with computers (and really who does), Netflix is more than happy to stream HD directly to your TV, as is vudu, or even the good folks at apple.

All this brings me to my real point: Blu-ray deserves to fail. Besides that irritating format war mentioned up above, Blu-ray is set on pushing antiquated technology. DVDs scratch, and they take up a lot of space, and are slow to start up, and in the case of Blu-ray, you can’t even play them on most computers (to quote Steve Jobs, “Blu-ray is just a bag of hurt”). Remarkably, all of these problems would fade away except for the absolute worst, most absurd, totally and completely shortsighted thing about DVDs: it’s ILLEGAL to copy your own DVDs onto your computer. This isn’t to say it can’t be done, you can easily find software that rips DVDs, but because it’s illegal, this extremely desirable feature can’t be built into easy-to-use, super-popular programs like iTunes or Windows Media Player.

Shortly after MP3’s appeared in the mid-90’s, computer hard drives smashed the 10 GB barrier. All of a sudden it became viable for people to keep music collections on their computers. For years, a digitally-inclined individual could continue to buy CDs, copy the songs to their computer, and not worry about investing in a dead format. CD sales, of course, continued to plummet, but at least their decline was graceful. Now that HDs are breaking the 1TB = 1000GB barrier, it would be completely reasonable to rip your newly purchased (Blu-ray) DVDs to a $100 hard drive, and then transfer those movies to your laptop/ipod/tv-media-thingy as needed. Regrettably, the DVD-gods will have none of it, so by 2011, they’ll be finished.

If you’re also part of the relatively small group of people that watch Summer Olympics, you probably noticed that they started yesterday. I noticed that too, and consequently I have little intention of leaving my house for the next 2 weeks (15 days actually).

As I noted one year ago, NBC anticipates generating 3600 hours of footage, which if recorded (and I think it’s safe to assume NBC is recording it) should last until 2010 olympics, provided you limit your daily olympic intake to 6 hours a day. As for me, I plan to watch it all in the next two weeks (step 1: rent 8 more TVs), then give y’all a heads regarding what to look out for.

With so many world class competitions taking place in parallel, there’s already plenty to blog about. I could, for instance, recount the Chinese weightlifter, and now gold medalist, Chen Xiexia’s (olympic) record-breaking clean-and-jerk, which I just witnessed. I could muse over Przemyslaw Wacha of Poland’s victory over Estonia’s Raul Must in olympic badminton (which I also just witnessed). I could hype up the US women’s sweep in saber fencing (don’t worry, you haven’t missed that one, it’ll be broadcast later today). Or I could just provide a helpful primer on team handball, which is getting a surprising amount of coverage here on day 1 (It’s like soccer, only miniaturized, indoors, and you can use your hands… AWESOME!).

Needless to say, they’ll be time for all that later though (especially that last one). For now, I’m just going to start things off with a clean slate and give a quick rundown of recent events which a more diligent person would have blogged about.

• As I already mention, I went to Canada. Since then I returned home. Toronto was lovely, but people there are absurdly inclined to obey don’t walk signs even when no traffic is coming. Jessica tells me she noticed a lot of that in Munich as well, but that’s neither here nor there.

  Also, in Canada, they spell center “centre”. I’m more of an “er” man myself (get it, because of my name! and my initials!), but I’d be willing to meet them half way and do away with the second “e” all together. Finally, while in Toronto, I had a hell of a meal at Colborne Lane. Our favorite dish was definitely the miso glazed cod, but the ice cream prepared table side via liquid nitrogen was also a highlight.

• I finally got an iPhone. It’s a fine piece of electronics, but buying it was a saga. For some silly reason Jessica and I decided to buy one the saturday after new version came out. The line at Apple’s 14th store didn’t actually seem that long, but since phones had to be activated in store, each Apple employee was basically only selling like 2 or 3 phones an hour.

  We had fun talking to the people standing next to us in line, and Apple did provide water and umbrellas (for the sun), but in the end it took us 4 hours to discover that, SURPRISE, Jessica could only update her pre-Cingular phone plan at an AT&T store. We would have had no problem waiting a week to get the phone, but trust me, if you wait online for something for 4 hours, and then fail to acquire said item, you’ll be emotionally distraught. As much as I love Apple, they did not handle this situation well. Certainly they could have at least given us a free t-shirt or something.
  

• I went to Florida! Jessica’s family is always a blast, but since I gave a comprehensive rundown of last year’s Flordia vacation, and this year’s trip followed a similar trajectory, there’s no need to go into that level of detail. I note, however, that my attempt to follow up last year’s Wii purchase with the acquisition of Wii Fit along was tragically thwarted by it’s lack of availability. Apparently buying it at the Nintendo World Store requires lining up before the store opens, and I’ve had quite enough of that sort of thing.
• On Columbia University’s campus, I saw a dude coax a pigeon onto his foot with some bread crumbs. It was a striking followup to June’s cat-on-hat spotting. I’ll admit, it wasn’t as remarkable as seeing someone walking down the street with a cat on their head, but it was certainly odd. You rarely see folks handling pigeons in NYC, since most folks, it seems, see them as somewhere between diseased squirrel and flying rat on the animal likability scale.

So far I’ve found the Macbook Air to be quite lovely. I’ll admit, it’s not the thriftiest purchase I’ve ever made, but it does fit my lifestyle very well. Before last week, I had a 12″ Powerbook that I carried everywhere. The Air fits beautifully in the same bag and is definitely more pleasant to carry. Its screen is also a huge improvement. It’s much brighter and sharper, and I like the extra width as well.

Before I bought this computer, I read a lot of comment threads filled with a bunch of people whining about its supposed shortcomings. So far these complaints have not bothered me one bit.

The DVD drive on my 12″ Powerbook had been broken for years, so I certainly don’t miss having one in my new machine. Also, in my three years owning the Powerbook, I almost never plugged in anything besides an external monitor, an ipod, and a digital camera, so having one USB port is fine by me. Finally, I’ve never carried around a spare laptop battery, so its hardly a sacrifice not to be able to do so now.

One final note: This Ars Technica review reported a very poor experience with the Macbook Air’s battery, but this does not match my own experience. I agree that getting a full five hours of battery life is unlikely, but 4+ is definitely possible depending on what your running (PowerPoint appears to be a bit of a hog). I’ll also note that the first day I got this computer it was running fairly hot and the battery was depleting rapidly. When I opened up Activity Monitor, I noticed that Dashboard had froze up and was using 99% of my CPU. Restarting fixed the problem.

Apple does not, in fact, own the New York Times. For the entire day, however, the Times website has featured an overly prominent Apple advertisement. Much like an earlier Apple ad that appeared on several and tech sites, this ad is comprised of two interacting panels. The side panel feature John Hodgman and Justin Long doing the whole Mac vs. PC thing, and the top panel features some stationary text. Near the end of the both ad, however, Apple blows your mind by having the characters from the side panel interact with the text in the top panel. This reveals that they are actually part of the same ad (in the first two-panel Apple ad, the panels weren’t even touching, so this revelation was a genuine surprise).

The problem big problem the New York Times ad is that the top panel text looks just like a full page headline. It’s in a serif font and it’s a quote from the Wall Street Journal. It reads just like actual news. Being Apple/Internet obsessed, I was already familiar with this style of Apple ad, I’m worried how the average person perceives the ad? If someone doesn’t bother to turn on the ad’s sound, and doesn’t spend 20+ seconds watching the entire ad, how are they even supposed to know that the quote/headline is part of the ad? When someone doesn’t figure this out, it’s basically like Apple paid the New York Times to put up a headline about how great their operating system is.

Would the New York Times ever do this sort of thing in print? I doubt it. Would they let Fidelity, for example, pay them to put up the headline “Fidelity’s Magellan Fund outperforms the S&P 500″? I seriously hope not. If they are letting Apple put up a headline on their website, it means one of two things. Either the New York Times is seriously desperate for cash (in which case I hope they made a fortune off this ad), or they view their website as being significantly less important than the print edition. I read the New York Times everyday, but like many people I know, I almost never read it in print. Come to think of it, I don’t even know where it’s sold in Providence.

According to Wikipedia, nytimes.com gets about 13 million unique visitors per month. The paper’s average daily circulation is about 1.2 million. For many people, it’s the website that matters most. The New York Times should acknowledge this by selecting its web advertisements more carefully. In the meantime, I hope I’m not the only blogger that encourages the Times’ to do so.