Quick update on yesterday's post: Toshiba officially declared HD-DVD dead today.
Gizmodo has a good post today about what this means for consumers.

When the HD-format wars started almost 3 years ago, it looked like both formats would co-exist for a long time. Each had the backing of major studios as well as computer software and hardware giants: Microsoft in the HDD-corner, Sony in the Blu-corner. The only problem was that as the two formats slugged it out in seemingly endless rounds, the consumer wasn't buying a ringside seat. Due to the confusion and risk about which format to bet your investment on, most people just waited it out. Fast forward 3 years and it looks like Blu-Ray is emerging as the clear winner.
I had predicted this a long time ago, but truth be told, I was biased. My PS3 came with a Blu-Ray drive, so I was the first kid on the block that could play 1080p movies.
A series of recent events seem to indicate that HD-DVD is falling by the waist-side:

• NetFlix dumps HD-DVD
• BestBuy announces they will stop carrying HD-DVD
• Microsoft slashes prices of HD players by 50% in hopes of boosting sales
  
• Wal-Mart says they'll only stock Blu-Ray
• Finally, Toshiba considers halting production of HD-DVD players

TOKYO (AP) — Toshiba may pull the plug on its HD DVD business, the Japanese electronics maker said Monday, in what would signal the almost certain defeat of its next-generation video format to rival Blu-ray technology.

Toshiba Corp. said that no decision has been made but acknowledged it had started a review of its HD DVD business strategy. The company statement was issued after weekend reports from Japanese media, including Kyodo News, that Toshiba is studying a possible withdrawal from HD DVD. -AP News Feb 17, 2008

What led to the 90% market penetration of Blu-Ray players vs. the measly 10-20% of HD-DVD? Could it possibly have been that every PS3 came standard with the ability to play Blu-Ray movies, while Xbox360 required the purchase of an add-on drive?

Now that we have the privilege of hindsight, I need to do some research and see if I can reverse engineer the answer. More soon.

I haven't had much time to post lately but I wanted to share a streaming music hack for fans of internet radio and social music sharing sites: Free Music Zilla is an one-click utility that lets you download streaming music. Simply load the program and then launch you're favorite music streaming site. When you start playing a song, you will see a link in the window with an option to download it. This works great with Pandora, Last.fm, and Imeem and other sites like MySpace too.

The current version only lets you download up to 10 songs per day, however you can use Orbit to download more if you're really hungry for tunes. Some people think that it is wrong to capture data that resides on your own pc. But how is this different from DVR'ing a tv show so that you can watch it later? The industry says that you are a bad person for doing this, for example -- The RIAA has stated that if you move data to your pc that you bought legally, that is stealing.

The industry's own Web site says that making a personal copy of a CD that you bought legitimately may not be a legal right, but it "won't usually raise concerns," as long as you don't give away the music or lend it to anyone.

-The Washington Post

When will these execs realize that this moral argument is based on a faulty premise. Is it stealing if you eat the candy that I put in your hand? What if I take a picture of a painting that's on display in my apartment, so that I can look at on my computer? They really need to read Walter Benjamin's essay that he wrote 70 years ago when photography became popular -- when people thought that mechanical reproduction would mean the end of art. History tends to repeat itself.