I wrote about Windows Media Center TV Pack yesterday and how it looked like Microsoft was going to royally botch it up. At the time it was all hearsay, but not any more. It looks like Microsoft decided to move up the announcement date for the TV Pack from next month to today. This is a situation where nobody comes out a winner. Read more

You may have noticed that I regularly tout Media Center as one of my favorite features of Windows Vista. I have even been using/loving it as my sole DVR for about three months now. It should come as no surprise then that I have been following the next iteration codenamed Fiji quite closely. While the software sounds good for the most part, I can’t understand why it seems that Microsoft is trying to make sure Vista Media Center (VMC) never takes off. Read more

There is a story making the rounds on the interwebitubes bemoaning that “there’s no real regulation over high-definition picture quality at all” in the “lawless lands of broadcast television”. They are over complicating things by suggesting the need for regulatory oversight for something as peripheral to broadcast television as programming payload though. Here’s why… Read more

Ars is running a story on a new report by IDC (that was funded by Microsoft) that states/shows that $1 of piracy = $5.50 in “lost opportunities”. Cheng argues that just because “every single dollar that…has been ‘lost’ to copyright infringement [can’t] be turned around into a dollar worth of sales” that we should “take this report with about $5.50 of salt.” Should it really matter if each dollar of piracy would actually be a dollar of sales though?

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Soapbox is a regular feature where I sound off on various tech topics/products that I’m interested in (or hate). This is just my $.02, so consider yourself warned. This week’s subjects are World of Warcraft, Netflix and Microsoft, and Apple’s marketing are all on the hot seat. Read more