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Microsoft Fueling HD Wars For Own Benefit?
DaveyJJ writes "According to Transformers' director Michael Bay, in a story over on Electronista, Microsoft is deliberately feeding into the HD disc format wars to ensure that its own downloads succeed where physical copies fail, he says in a response to a question posed through his official forums. The producer contends that Microsoft is writing "$100 million dollar checks" to movie studios to ensure HD DVD exclusives that hurt the overall market regardless of the format's actual merit or its popularity, preventing any one format from gaining a clear upper hand."
Blu ray is NOT a Sony format, anymore than the CD is a Sony format. They are the dominant member of the industry consortium that developed Blu Ray, and one of the original developers. Microsoft would never have to license Blu Ray from Sony, they would license it from the consortium just as with the regular CD.
What Microsoft does NOT like about Blu Ray is that it requires a java VM.
I'm sorry, but at least, say, OOXML pretends to be open. Google for "OOXML Specification dowload" and the very first result has PDFs, linked to directly, not even so much as a free registration required.
I develop HD-DVD applications for a living. On my desk are four volumes of "DVD Specifications for High Definition VIDEO (HD DVD-Video)", totaling almost three inches thick. (I'd tell you how many pages, but the pages are not numbered.) There's probably another three and a half inches worth of updates, which someone else here has read and memorized, that I don't really look at.
We do not have these in electronic form. As far as I know, you cannot get them in electronic form, and they do not come with an index, which makes them a bitch to search until you start to memorize enough of it to have a vague idea of where to start randomly flipping through to find what you need.
This is because on every single page, at the bottom of the page, is the following notice:
"Open" and "public" my ass.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!